Open Thread April 4 - April 10, 2016

Elo

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

Ok. Assume, for a moment, that Lumifer is judicious about when to be snarkily dismissive - that is, he is snarkily dismissive when he thinks it is the appropriate response.

In that case, would it be fair to say that the issue you take is not necessarily with his snarky dismissiveness, but rather his skipping the intermediate mental steps in explaining why somebody is wrong? That is, he is making leaps of logic that the audience can't necessarily follow? (This might explain some of the upvotes, as well; they're not upvoting his snarkiness, but his dismissal of something they also dismiss for similar reasons which nobody ever conveys to those who don't know what those reasons are.)

In that case, instead of engaging him on a tone argument, it might be more productive to suggest he is losing some of his audience, who he could otherwise convince, by dismissing things without apparent cause.

There's probably a competing needs access issue here; Lumifer's commentary might be useful to a subset of people, while harmful (or at least non-useful) to another subset of people. The goal shouldn't be to eliminate the usefulness of his commentary to the subset of people to whom his commentary is helpful, but rather to expand the usefulness of his commentary to those who don't already know what his objections imply/what his true objections are.

(As for making predictions of people - you don't improve your models of other people by never making predictions.)

In that case, would it be fair to say that the issue you take is [...] he is making leaps of logic that the audience can't necessarily follow?

Maybe that's part of the problem sometimes. But no, I don't think it's the main problem. In my own interactions with Lumifer, I am much more often annoyed by rudeness than by incomprehension. And my impression of his interaction with others is that they're mostly the same.

(I do from time to time find Lumifer's comments unhelpfully terse and seek clarification. But I don't find those annoying in the same way as I d... (read more)