Disinformation. More and more difficult to have conversations rooted in truth and objectiveness.
Identity politics that infiltrates into how we view events without nuance, sophistication and offer blind support/hatred. It’s a daily struggle to fight the mainstream media narratives and frankly, quite exhausting.
The people on my personal circle I like the most don’t know basic math and are not interested in learning anything about it.
I can’t talk with relatives about optimizing anything, because mostly they don’t allow me to talk. When I do talk, they don’t listen anything. For them, the game is just about status. Or politics. Trash talk all the time. Nothing objective. As time goes on, I talk less and less with them. I don’t see any solution for this, and I feel guilty for thinking on giving up on trying to express my thoughts for them.
I feel bad about realizing I killed animals and ate their corpses my whole life. And this is considered the norm, and my family can make me feel bad for even considering not murdering more non-human animals. I feel bad the most of the world don’t care about non-human animals.
I feel bad for not being able to buy for my mom a house that does not flood every rain that has been happening daily.
None. I think this is partly a function of age. I have as many complaints about the world as I did 10 or 20 years ago, but the extent to which I take these things personally or feel personally threatened by them, and the intensity of my emotions about them, have gone way down.
I’m somewhat scared to check my email inbox in the morning because every week or two there’s something in there that existentially threatens my company, like our app not getting approved in the app store or most recently Facebook inexplicably blocking our ads.
to see younger people disregard the elderly. I witnessed once a 20-something year old and an (older than) 80- year old in a situation. The elder was pulling out of a garage on a hill and his car rolled back and tapped the younger persons car. She was so irate without giving regard to the fact that she could have given him him a fateful fright.
Ever since then, it’s stood out to me whenever it happens.
War… used to, but now that we have less of it in the news, it’s not on daily basis anymore. They just batch the statistics for larger chunks of time.
These months it’s rather the expected shifts in our education system which is planned to move online to some extent. Nobody knows what exactly it means, everybody expects everybody “to defect”. E. g., low quality textbooks and especially the online framework (including lack of Internet connection in some places); overall lack of motivation; even lower standards of (self) grading… it gets to me because my kid will be in his third year, I will have to somehow teach him despite everything and work, too. The problem is not that this is a temporary solution to the corona-crisis, the problem is that it’s going to stay afterwards.
I now think about it all like a Gift from the Gods. A charmed chalice, a ring of Power, you name it: something not “fatal” itself, but inexorably and ungovernably causing ripples in the world. Something everybody wants to use himself, and knows everybody does. Something that cannot be mislaid, in our legendary times.
Not just the argument itself. One asshole I could deal with. The fact that people upvoted them...
Like, there’s nothing that particularly stands out to me about /r/programming readers. As far as I know they’re generally fairly normal humans. And a bunch of generally fairly normal humans apparently thought that those comments were good?
I think the direct reason for your disappointment is simply that the people that would have upvoted you just didn’t find the conversation interesting enough to follow. Or to put it differently, they’re mistake theorists and didn’t see anything there to learn or fix. The other guys don’t have to be worse people or less intelligent—just more conflict theorists, which I think they probably are. Ergo more upvotes, even deeper in conversation.
As an example: I realized I didn’t even upvote you. I agreed with you, thought your points were perfectly sensible, enjoyed the occasional inadvertent humour … and closed the window. It didn’t even occur to me to “help” your side in the conflict… because I wasn’t there to fight a fight. (Took me a year off reddit and on SSC to get to this point, and I’m still more combative than I’d like to be).
Conflict theorists, cashed out as something like “people who saw the article as an attempted power grab and so upvoted the person attacking it” feels like it fits, but… I dunno, I try to be hesitant to use conflict theory as an explanation, because it’s so easy to make it fit. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
I appreciated your words more than I would have done upvotes; thank you.
Perhaps, but… I honestly can’t tell what opinion that would be.
Like, a thing I appreciate about the commenter is that they’re admirably straightforward. They say what they think and don’t try to weasel out of it later. I don’t love that they’re deliberately trying to hurt me (seemingly without checking if they could accomplish their goals some other way), but at least they’re upfront about it. It seems to me that there’s unusually little room for misinterpretation here.
And yet, so much of what they’re saying is completely out there, and I just don’t believe that most people agree with it.
I could believe that most people agree, at least unreflexively and perhaps after consideration, with “OSS maintainers have no responsibility”. (And possibly even with “no responsibility at all without consent”.) But I think most of them would not bite the bullets that this user does.
Like, I could see someone saying “they don’t have a responsibility here, but they still shouldn’t deliberately introduce bugs to brick people’s OSes, and it’s totally reasonable for people to complain if they do”. And then there’s a conversation about what does responsibility even mean, and maybe it turns out we don’t mean the same thing by it and don’t really disagree that much, or maybe we actually do have some important disagreements. But that’s not at all where the conversation went.
I don’t believe most people agree with “If someone deliberately bricks a bunch of people’s OSes, and then stops doing that, you call them generous”. I don’t even believe most people agree with the earlier bit about deliberately bricking OSes not being something to complain about.
I could believe that most people agree, at least unreflexively and perhaps after consideration, that I’m being too demanding. I included a list of quotes to say “no, really, I’m demanding very little”, but I could see someone thinking I’m demanding more than I realize, or thinking I’m being dishonest about how much I’m demanding, or something. But that’s not where the conversation went either. That user doesn’t obviously think either of those. They call me a narcissist, but not a liar. They don’t say that the opt-outs I offer are burdensome.
I don’t believe that most people agree with the thing about “if I have a habit of offering to vacuum for people and not showing up, no one has the right to ask me why”.
So to the extent those comments express an opinion held by /r/programming at large, I think they also express much more extreme opinions that /r/programming doesn’t hold.
(I could be missing something, of course. I don’t trust myself to see clearly here.)
Disinformation. More and more difficult to have conversations rooted in truth and objectiveness.
Identity politics that infiltrates into how we view events without nuance, sophistication and offer blind support/hatred. It’s a daily struggle to fight the mainstream media narratives and frankly, quite exhausting.
The people on my personal circle I like the most don’t know basic math and are not interested in learning anything about it.
I can’t talk with relatives about optimizing anything, because mostly they don’t allow me to talk. When I do talk, they don’t listen anything. For them, the game is just about status. Or politics. Trash talk all the time. Nothing objective. As time goes on, I talk less and less with them. I don’t see any solution for this, and I feel guilty for thinking on giving up on trying to express my thoughts for them.
I feel bad about realizing I killed animals and ate their corpses my whole life. And this is considered the norm, and my family can make me feel bad for even considering not murdering more non-human animals. I feel bad the most of the world don’t care about non-human animals.
I feel bad for not being able to buy for my mom a house that does not flood every rain that has been happening daily.
None. I think this is partly a function of age. I have as many complaints about the world as I did 10 or 20 years ago, but the extent to which I take these things personally or feel personally threatened by them, and the intensity of my emotions about them, have gone way down.
I’m somewhat scared to check my email inbox in the morning because every week or two there’s something in there that existentially threatens my company, like our app not getting approved in the app store or most recently Facebook inexplicably blocking our ads.
The huge amount of unnecessary pesticides around me and the paucity of insect life compared to my childhood. This is a disaster and won’t end well.
Patterns desperate to reproduce themselves will ally themselves with cancer because they don’t have better options.
can you elaborate? I feel like I might be missing what the metaphor is referring to
In social reality, referring to a group as desperate is an attack on their status, even if it’s true. So I prefer not to discuss object level.
bad norms on organizing information
forgetting my dreams
to see younger people disregard the elderly. I witnessed once a 20-something year old and an (older than) 80- year old in a situation. The elder was pulling out of a garage on a hill and his car rolled back and tapped the younger persons car. She was so irate without giving regard to the fact that she could have given him him a fateful fright.
Ever since then, it’s stood out to me whenever it happens.
War… used to, but now that we have less of it in the news, it’s not on daily basis anymore. They just batch the statistics for larger chunks of time.
These months it’s rather the expected shifts in our education system which is planned to move online to some extent. Nobody knows what exactly it means, everybody expects everybody “to defect”. E. g., low quality textbooks and especially the online framework (including lack of Internet connection in some places); overall lack of motivation; even lower standards of (self) grading… it gets to me because my kid will be in his third year, I will have to somehow teach him despite everything and work, too. The problem is not that this is a temporary solution to the corona-crisis, the problem is that it’s going to stay afterwards.
I now think about it all like a Gift from the Gods. A charmed chalice, a ring of Power, you name it: something not “fatal” itself, but inexorably and ungovernably causing ripples in the world. Something everybody wants to use himself, and knows everybody does. Something that cannot be mislaid, in our legendary times.
Lately it’s a reddit argument I had recently.
Not just the argument itself. One asshole I could deal with. The fact that people upvoted them...
Like, there’s nothing that particularly stands out to me about /r/programming readers. As far as I know they’re generally fairly normal humans. And a bunch of generally fairly normal humans apparently thought that those comments were good?
:(
That was instructive.
I think the direct reason for your disappointment is simply that the people that would have upvoted you just didn’t find the conversation interesting enough to follow. Or to put it differently, they’re mistake theorists and didn’t see anything there to learn or fix. The other guys don’t have to be worse people or less intelligent—just more conflict theorists, which I think they probably are. Ergo more upvotes, even deeper in conversation.
As an example: I realized I didn’t even upvote you. I agreed with you, thought your points were perfectly sensible, enjoyed the occasional inadvertent humour … and closed the window. It didn’t even occur to me to “help” your side in the conflict… because I wasn’t there to fight a fight. (Took me a year off reddit and on SSC to get to this point, and I’m still more combative than I’d like to be).
Conflict theorists, cashed out as something like “people who saw the article as an attempted power grab and so upvoted the person attacking it” feels like it fits, but… I dunno, I try to be hesitant to use conflict theory as an explanation, because it’s so easy to make it fit. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
I appreciated your words more than I would have done upvotes; thank you.
They’re not good comments. But maybe they express an opinion held by r/programming.*
*The members that read that post. (It’s a shame that the number of people who voted isn’t available there, just the sum.)
Perhaps, but… I honestly can’t tell what opinion that would be.
Like, a thing I appreciate about the commenter is that they’re admirably straightforward. They say what they think and don’t try to weasel out of it later. I don’t love that they’re deliberately trying to hurt me (seemingly without checking if they could accomplish their goals some other way), but at least they’re upfront about it. It seems to me that there’s unusually little room for misinterpretation here.
And yet, so much of what they’re saying is completely out there, and I just don’t believe that most people agree with it.
I could believe that most people agree, at least unreflexively and perhaps after consideration, with “OSS maintainers have no responsibility”. (And possibly even with “no responsibility at all without consent”.) But I think most of them would not bite the bullets that this user does.
Like, I could see someone saying “they don’t have a responsibility here, but they still shouldn’t deliberately introduce bugs to brick people’s OSes, and it’s totally reasonable for people to complain if they do”. And then there’s a conversation about what does responsibility even mean, and maybe it turns out we don’t mean the same thing by it and don’t really disagree that much, or maybe we actually do have some important disagreements. But that’s not at all where the conversation went.
I don’t believe most people agree with “If someone deliberately bricks a bunch of people’s OSes, and then stops doing that, you call them generous”. I don’t even believe most people agree with the earlier bit about deliberately bricking OSes not being something to complain about.
I could believe that most people agree, at least unreflexively and perhaps after consideration, that I’m being too demanding. I included a list of quotes to say “no, really, I’m demanding very little”, but I could see someone thinking I’m demanding more than I realize, or thinking I’m being dishonest about how much I’m demanding, or something. But that’s not where the conversation went either. That user doesn’t obviously think either of those. They call me a narcissist, but not a liar. They don’t say that the opt-outs I offer are burdensome.
I don’t believe that most people agree with the thing about “if I have a habit of offering to vacuum for people and not showing up, no one has the right to ask me why”.
So to the extent those comments express an opinion held by /r/programming at large, I think they also express much more extreme opinions that /r/programming doesn’t hold.
(I could be missing something, of course. I don’t trust myself to see clearly here.)