Our world would seem mundane to us no matter what was in it. Maybe it’s actually wildly unrealistic that many people keep cats as pets. Maybe dandelions are some kind of Easter egg. Maybe our so-called natural languages are ludicrously simple and regular compared to the monstrosities real people with real history speak.
Alicorn
Karma: 30,392
I like this enough that I’m considering picking a screenshot of the Goddess of Everything Else and replacing my twelve year old standard avatar with it.
“what is your fantasy partner/complement organization?”
I love this question and would never have thought of it on my own.
Our younger kiddo went through a period of calling his big sister “gago” because he couldn’t pronounce her name. Her opinion of this was a long-suffering sigh and “I’ll be whatever he can say.”
I kind of doubt you care at all, but here for interested bystanders is more information on my stance.
I suspect you of brigading-type behavior wrt conflicts you get into. Even if you make out like it’s a “get out the vote” campaign where the fact that rides to the polls don’t require avowing that you’re a Demoblican is important to your reception, when you’re the sort who’ll tell all your friends someone is being mean to you and then the karma swings around wildly I make some updates. This social power with your clique of admirers in combination with your contagious lens on the world that they pick up from you is what unnerves me.
I experience a lot of your word choices (e.g. “gossiping behind [your] back”) as squirrelly[1] , manipulative, and more rhetoric than content. I would not have had this experience in this particular case if, for example, you’d said “criticizing [me] to an unsympathetic audience”. Gossip behind one’s back is a social move for a social relationship. One doesn’t clutch one’s pearls about random people gossiping about Kim Kardashian behind her back. We have never met. I’d stand a better chance of recognizing Ms. Kardashian in the grocery store than you. I have met some people who know some people who you hang out with, but it’s disingenuous to suggest that I had any affordances to instead gossip to your face, or that it’s mean to dislike your public blog posts and then talk about disliking them with my friends[2].
Further, it’s rhetorically interesting that you said “Apparently the only dynamic you found acceptable was “I say mean stuff and Duncan just takes it.”″ You didn’t try a lot of different dynamics! I said I was favorably impressed when you didn’t respond. If someone is nervous about you, holding very still and not making any hostile moves is a great way to help them feel safe, and when you tried that (or… looked like you were trying it) it worked. The only other thing you tried was, uh, this, which, as I’m explaining here, I do not find impressive. However, scientists have discovered that there are often more than two possible approaches to social conflict. You could have tried something else! Maybe you could have dug up a mutual friend who’d mediate, or asked a neutral curious question about whether there was something I could point to that would help you understand why you were coming off badly, instead of unloading a dump truck of sneaky nasty connotations on my lap. Maybe you believe every one of those connotations in your heart of hearts. This does not imbue your words with magic soothing power, any more than my intentions successfully accompanied my analogy about weird bugs. You still seem sneaky and nasty to me.
- ^
I maintain that I sincerely like squirrels; I am using a colloquial definition which, of definitions I found on the internet, most closely matches the Urban Dictionary cluster.
- ^
The “I talk about things with my friends, you brigade” conjugation is not lost on me but I wish to point out in my defense that, as I said in my original comment, I did not intend to touch this situation where it could possibly affect you until it seemed like it was also affecting Said, of whom I am fond.
Oh, no, it’s absolutely negative. I don’t like you. I just don’t specifically think that you are disgusting, and it’s that bit of the reaction to the analogy that caught me by surprise.
“Oh, I’m going to impute malice with the phrase ‘gossiping behind my back’ about someone I have never personally interacted with before who talked about my public blog posts with her friends, when she’s specifically remarked that she’s worried about fallout from letting me know that she doesn’t care for me!” is also kind of a take, and a pretty good example of why I don’t like you. I retract the tentative positive update I made when your only reaction to my comment had been radio silence; I’d found that really encouraging wrt it being safe to have opinions about you where you might see them, but no longer.
Welp, guess I shouldn’t pick up frogs. Not what I expected to be the main takeaway from this thread but still good to know.
I think most poisonous frogs look it and would accordingly pick up a frog that wasn’t very brightly colored if I otherwise wanted to pick up this frog, whereas bugs may look drab while being dangerous.
I’m sorry! I’m sincerely not trying to indicate that. Duncan fascinates and unnerves me but he does not revolt me. I think that “weird bug” made sense to my metaphor generator instead of “weird plant” or “weird bird” or something is that bugs have extremely widely varying danger levels—an unfamiliar bug may have all kinds of surprises in the mobility, chemical weapons, aggressiveness, etc. department, whereas plants reliably don’t jump on you and birds are basically all just WYSIWYG; but many weird bugs are completely harmless, and I simply do not know what will happen to me if I poke Duncan.
I wasn’t sure if I should include the analogy. I came up with it weeks ago when I was remarking to people in my server about how suspicious I find things Duncan writes, and it was popular there; I guess people here are less universally delighted by metaphors about weird bugs than people on my server, whoops! For what it’s worth I think the world is enriched by the presence of weird bugs. The other day someone remarked that they’d found a weird caterpillar on the sidewalk near my house and half my dinner guests got up to go look at it and I almost did myself. I just don’t want to touch weird bugs, and am nervous in a similar way about making it publicly knowable that I have an opinion about Duncan.
I don’t keep track of people’s posting styles and correlate them with their names very well. Most people who post on LW, even if they do it a lot, I have negligible associations beyond “that person sounds vaguely familiar” or “are they [other person] or am I mixing them up?”.
I have persistent impressions of both Said and Duncan, though.
I am limited in my ability to look up any specific Said comment or things I’ve said elsewhere about him because his name tragically shares a spelling with a common English word, but my model of him is strongly positive. I don’t think I’ve ever read a Said comment and thought it was a waste of time, or personally bothersome to me, or sneaky or pushy or anything.
Meanwhile I find Duncan vaguely fascinating like he is a very weird bug which has not, yet, sprayed me personally with defensive bug juice or bitten me with its weird bug pincers. Normally I watch him from a safe distance and marvel at how high a ratio of “incredibly suspicious and hackle-raising” to “not often literally facially wrong in any identifiable ways” he maintains when he writes things. It’s not against any rules to be incredibly suspicious and hackle-raising in a public place, of course, it just means that I don’t invite him to where I’m at. But if he’s coming into conflict with, not just Said, but Said’s presence on LW, I fear I must venture closer to the weird bug.
I’m a big believer in social incompatibility. Some people just don’t click! It’s probably not inherently impossible to navigate but it’s almost never worth the trouble. Duncan shouldn’t have to interact with Said if he doesn’t want to.
Also, being the kind of person who has any social conflicts like that, let alone someone as prone as Duncan is, to my mind fundamentally disqualifies them from claiming to be objective, taking on public-facing moderator-like roles, etc. I myself am not qualified for these roles! I run a walled garden Discord server that only has people I am chill with and don’t pretend to be fair about it. But I also don’t write LW posts about how people I don’t like are unsuited for polite society. I support the notion of simply not allowing authoritative posturing about norms like Duncan often does on LW.
Nope, Bay Area.
It’s probably not helping that ours looks a fair bit younger than she is (or so I’m told, she looks six to me in the sense that she is larger than she was when she was five, but she’s the oldest and the smallest kid in her little school). I sometimes have to point at her and make a facial expression for the benefit of supervising neighbors when I’m walking her, especially if she runs ahead.
We had our 6yo walking the two and a half blocks to school by herself. But she wasn’t willing to talk to concerned strangers, and it turns out that this is a de facto legal requirement for small people walking alone in a way it is not for adults walking alone—they couldn’t figure out where she was going or if she was okay so they called the cops. Now we have to accompany her when none of us like this at all. It doesn’t seem like a general factor of independence though… she won’t get ready for bed alone.
I appreciate this timeline! My emergency plan if I unexpectedly have a deaf baby one day is to find someone fluent in sign language to move in with us and do, if necessary, hardcore sign immersion, and 3-5 months is quick enough that I would not need to worry about the baby acquiring brain damage.
I watched one of the videos and it was clearly a great example of the category. And yet. I think ease of learning varies with language and also with learner. ASL in particular seems likely to be very interpersonally variable—I definitely found it harder than making equivalent progress in French, Chinese, or Japanese, and those last two are famously considered difficult for English-natives. It requires manual dexterity! If you get confused in the middle of a sign language sentence you’re going to poke yourself in the ear or tangle your elbows together or something. You have to look at people’s facial expressions, they have grammatical import—you have to look at those and at their hands. There’s no good way to take notes because it has no written form or transliteration; I wound up, in my class, writing down things like “quotey eyes” (I don’t even remember what that word was) and trying to hang muscle memory on the resemblance between “sorry” and “Canada”. I’m glad you find it easy and exciting! But I believe you’re overgeneralizing.
A few years ago most of the people who lived in my house at the time all signed up for an ASL class together. I mostly retain the alphabet, though not very quickly or fluidly, but most of the others don’t, even though I stopped going halfway through because I was too pregnant and nobody else had that problem. I have never encountered an opportunity to use any signs “in the wild” since this occasion, even opportunities that weren’t usable at my level but would have been if I were more conversational. Once, before I’d ever studied ASL, I encountered a deaf customer at my summer job; I printed off some blank receipt tape so we could write to each other and that worked fine. I’m theoretically on board with baby sign as a concept but no one has ever been able to actionably explain to me how you are supposed to sign at a baby: my experience with babies is that they require your arms for other tasks on a basically constant basis and are seldom naturalistically at an angle where they could watch a sign. ASL is difficult to study compared with any language with an alphabet or orthographic transliteration, because you have to absorb information at the speed of conversation, not at the speed of reading; illustrations are lossy and the technical side of managing video or gif playback and visual attention thereto is much more awkward than reading static pinyin or kana or what have you.
I don’t want to totally take the wind out of your sails! ASL is cool and I agree it would be a great offering at schools. Minimum viable sign vocabularies could, given critical mass, be a convenient subcultural toolkit, and learning the language entire is certainly at least as worthwhile a hobby as learning any other language. But I don’t think its value proposition is quite as overwhelming as you describe.
I liked this story enough to still remember it, separately from the original Sort By Controversial story. Trade across moral divide is a useful concept to have handles for.
This one was fun to play with and it was nice to feel like I was helping.
“Anyone who resists? Why, I’ll simply mulch them,” said Tyranicca. Many, many people resisted, and Tyrannica prepared her mulching machine.
Her workers did the rest. 0.15%
I mean, sure, it looks like that when people who sound credible to you are checking.