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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3920 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 23, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Why block users? I have never blocked a single user on any platform. I cannot imagine getting so asschapped that I need to signal just how upset some guy on the internet made me (and I used to get into some heated arguments in spaces with no rules on decorum). The user in question may even say something interesting later, or I may want to participate in a thread that he parented.

If it's actual spam usually admins or moderators step in.

Some posters are so consistently low-value that it is a waste of time to read anything they write (and usually the discussions the provoke). Gotta protect my time!

That being said, blocks on the motte (as far as I can recall) result in very disjointed threads and so I no longer attempt to block anyone here.

From a different perspective, I get why people would block me here and have blocked me on various forums over the last couple of decades: I’m kind of a huge asshole, and I used to drink and hang out on forums for hours just going back and forth with people constantly.

I used to post on mma.tv (close to 100k posts) and several posters there blocked me on and off over the years. Although now I’m on a discord with several of them and have met up with a few of them over the years. A couple are even close friends.

I found themotte way way back because I found a post by Scott and I started following him because he was so new and interesting, a double rarity for a forum junkie. I had zero idea what a rationalist was. Also I’m not as eloquent or intelligent as a lot of posters here. I just have my thoughts, feelings, and perspectives and they come from a much different place than a lot of people here.

Also, like someone else added, sometimes you need a break from a poster and opinion that you know will start a several hour long ‘ debate ‘ .

I block scammers on steam. I've been tempted to block users on reddit, but usually I keep them unblocked so I can downvote their posts out of spite.

There are some users whose comments asschap me a whole lot. But I can't live with acting on it and blocking them. Not there yet in terms of achieving true nirvanna where I don't get asschapped in the first place, maybe one day.

FWIW, it's not exactly their opinions, as someone mentioned downstream, some posters just have really annoying writing styles. I recall reading a post where some guy almost literally hedged every single statement he made. Motherfucker, just commit to it! Its's not like we can't fill in the "it seems like"'s or "I think"'s using our imagination.

I've also been blocked by 4 different users, 3 of them, never even responded to. I'm quite the asschapper myself (mostly unintentionally?).

I blame my hedging on having read Pact/Pale and getting into the habit of not speaking direct lies or opening myself up to be called on a mistake.

Like urquan and some others here, I also tend to hedge my comments most of the time. In my case, it’s something I started to do in middle school, following the advice of Benjamin Franklin:

While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English grammar . . ., at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procur’d Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charm’d with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter. . . . I continu’d this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions, and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engag’d in promoting; and, as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning, sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat every one of those purposes for which speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving information or pleasure. For, if you would inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention. If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fix’d in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error. And by such a manner, you can seldom hope to recommend yourself in pleasing your hearers, or to persuade those whose concurrence you desire.

This method also saves embarrassment, as I think Franklin pointed out elsewhere in his autobiography, on those occasions when what you thought to be so, isn’t.

In this place, people tend to speak more dogmatically and forthrightly, but at least for me, having gotten so used to hedging my words in such a way, it would take a conscience effort for me not to.

This was probably me.

I see my use of the motte less as an attempt to argue and more as an attempt to find common ground with other posters.

I hate argument -- always have -- but love discussion. The difference between those is that the first requires a sort of overconfidence and seeks to win, while the second requires humility and seeks to understand. My goal on the motte is to state my personal experience and views and to find common ground with other people, not to assert that my perspective is universal or try to win an argument. I find arguments infuriating and soul-destroying, not energizing or engaging.

By using phrases like "I think" or "it seems to me" or "my feeling is" or "in my experience", my goal is to demonstrate that what I'm saying isn't something I believe is universal or without exception, but something that is directionally true, an opener for discussion rather than a closed epistemic case.

But I also know, just philosophically, I have a high bar for confidence in claims. The sort of evidence that would convice someone else to make a strong claim often only convinces me to make a weak one. This isn't due to a lack of intellectual confidence -- people who know me IRL would agree to that -- but due to my high degree of skepticism of grand claims. When someone makes a claim with a great deal of rhetorical confidence, the first thing that comes to mind isn't how insightful I think the claim is, but all of the myriad possible exceptions to the claim.

I myself find more argumentative or assertive conversation styles to be grating -- it sometimes demonstrates a brash overconfidence out of bounds of what the speaker actually has reason to believe. My impression of such styles is that they alienate rather than invite exceptions and alternative perspectives; they shut down friendly discussion and perpetuate unfriendly debate.

You notice I wrote "sometimes" there; I had a draft where I simply stated "it demonstrates a brash overconfidence..." and I found that to be itself overconfident. This is precisely because there are some times where such rhetorical strength in what one says is warranted; the "sometimes" doesn't hedge the claim (reflecting a lack of confidence in the claim) so much as demonstrate my belief that this is not a universal truth but one that is true only in a subset of situations.

When I wrote essays in college there would be a section of argument but then a much longer section where I walked through all the objections and exceptions. This got me a lot of points for being thorough. Obviously I put more rhetorical emphasis, as my claims were based on evidence or deductive argument. But it also reflected my view that the world is incredibly complex, and when we make claims about social processes or the human experience or the state of other people's minds, we're almost certainly mostly wrong, even if our point lands for a subset of experiences.

It's not that I'm not commited to what I'm saying, it's that I believe the claim is true insofar as my personal experience reveals, and even then for only a subset of things. I tend to use these phrases where I'm making claims about other people's mental states, the situations in far-off places, and broad social trends: precisely the areas where the evidence-to-supposition ratio leans the most towards supposition and speculation. And since I don't have omnipotence, I express a limited or perspectival claim because that's all I'm actually able to speak to.

The point is to express epistemic uncertainty and openness to alternative perspectives.

But I understand it can be grating as a writing style if it's done too often, so I'll work on moderating that.

I think I do the same, not infrequently—I don't want to give the impression that I'm more confident than I am when I'm not entirely sure, so I'll try to qualify things to convey the right level of confidence.

I like both discussions and arguments, if they're productive.

It wasn't you. I don't exactly recall finding your posts grating to read. They are often long and could use some getting to the point, but are smooth to read. The grating ones have a sprinkling of off statements or stylisms that are plain jarring.

On the flip side. I'm a big believe in brevity. Which often reads as overconfidence and argumentative. But I truly do believe that just like code that is too long has a smell, so does text. Preciseness and efficiency with resources is a skill (if not virtue).

I auto append hedging qualifiers to any non factual statement anyways. The sky is blue, but is the state of modern political discourse grim? Of course not, I have already prepended nothing to the first statement and "I think that" to the second statement. No one ever could make an absolute assertion about the state of modern political discourse, by DEFAULT it's a "i think" statement. If you feel the need to spell that out, I think you ought to trust the reader (and yourself) more.

I wonder if this is a product of the type of writing you've trained yourself to do. Coding trains you to be clean and efficient, jettisoning words and phrases that are insufficiently information-dense. I imagine journalists who had the fortune of coming up back when newspapers still had editors have been similarly trained to cut out the fat in service of the almighty column-inch. As a lawyer, it was beaten into me by harsh editors that those kinds of qualifiers are "weasel words" undermining my credibility to the court, so I tend to assume any grammatically qualified statement to be a bad-faith attempt to imply something they don't have the facts to back up if called out on (if you had the goods, you wouldn't bother qualifying the statement and would have simply stated it as unalloyed fact). It's often hard for me to turn this instinct off and remember that most people do not have formal training in argumentative writing.

But for someone with more of a creative writing background, who is trying to write neither efficiently nor persuasively, the connotative difference between a "thought," a "feeling," and a "fact" may often be really important. While a scientist writing for academic journals needs to be careful not to overstate their conclusions, and so will see qualifiers like "I think" as nothing less than honesty and good form.

EDIT: re-reading this comment, I may have disproved my own theory. Unnecessary qualifiers were clearly not beaten out of me: I literally started this comment with a qualified "I wonder if" in order to insulate myself from pushback stemming from the fact I hadn't put all that much thought into the idea...

While a scientist writing for academic journals needs to be careful not to overstate their conclusions, and so will see qualifiers like "I think" as nothing less than honesty and good form.

You would think, but you’d be wrong. Scientific writing has an immensely irritating (to me) convention of pretending that the writer doesn’t exist as a human being.

You can see lots of ‘it may be observed that’ and ‘it is apparent that’ and sometimes a ‘we conclude’ but never ever ‘I think’ or ‘I can’t be sure but’. It’s a combination of lingering Enlightenmeny pretensions of objectivity plus a desire to deflect professional criticism.

I hated writing like that, it felt deceptive and weaselly.

That's fair. I appreciate the advice. I struggle terribly with limiting my length, which has a lot to do with the thing about pointing out exceptions that I noted above. I also think almost exclusively in text so when I express a view it's usually the culmination of a lot of actual words floating around in my head. When I write a short text it feels... unfinished, like I've left something important out. But, with effort, I'm able to do it, so informal activity like the motte gets the long bois and actual essays or professional writing gets edited-down stuff.

I cannot imagine getting so asschapped that I need to signal just how upset some guy on the internet made me

How is blocking someone a signal that someone on the internet upset you? Is there even a way to tell who's been blocked by someone?

ETA: Apparently there is. Huh.

There are regular posters on some fora with writing styles (or the equivalent of verbal tics) that just grate on me and I got tired of seeing them.

For example, on the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang comment section, there's one guy (who, thankfully, doesn't post every day) who begins every single damn post with a hideous guffaw, "BARHARHARHARHAR!!!"

Unfortunately the Post doesn't have a block feature that I can find, so I have to just wince whenever I see that excrescence at the top of his posts.

Inside the motte: maybe this is small of me, but it chagrines me every time I make it two paragraphs into a post and hit the pivot to antisemitic apologism or whatever, and only then realize I forgot to check the poster. I steadfastly don't care about any of that conversation, and it's the same conversation every time, so it's a few minutes wasted. I already know I'm going to ignore the post; blocking the single-issue poster would just cut to the chase, and would make me feel a little less dumb, on average once every week or two. That said, my blocklist is empty - it's such a minor nuisance, and feeling dumb once in a while builds character.

Outside of the motte (a selective, filtered, moderated community): to a first order approximation, the entire internet is spam, ads, and tribalism. See also: Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People. My attention, patience, and cognitive filtering capacity is finite, and the internet is an infinite noise generator that evolves (read: gets louder and more annoying) by consuming my finite resources. If there are mods, they're usually crazier than the users.

I used to have a Tumblr. I blocked every significant nexus word related to politics, most of the fandoms topics, anyone who posted anything even slightly porny, and any specific person who found a novel way to annoy me. It was great!

I basically don't use Twitter, but I know a guy who blocksany person the instant they make a questionable post. His feed is a near-perfectly-curated niche technical community who go to the same conferences and share entertaining or interesting industry stories and papers. It seems pretty great!

Blocking is a crude tool, but it's one of the few scalable solutions to autonomously build a community or interest feed on top of a dumpster-fire social media platform.

Nice flair btw.

Many people have mentioned Twitter, and I have to concede it seems like it would be necessary on that site. I never had a Twitter, so I've had the privilege of never experiencing how necessary it may be.

Nice flair btw.

Likewise!

Beats me. I never block, and I tentatively opine that blocking shouldn't even be a feature on the Motte.

I think being able to block one or two users- say, a pedo apologist, or those single issue text wall posters- is pretty reasonable. But mass-blocking everyone ought to be a banning offense.

It absolutely should not be a bannable offense, that's bonkers. If Zorba ever really feels strongly that blocking users is degrading the health of the community, then fine disable the feature. But a policy of "we will ban you if you use the feature more than we think you should" is some bullshit.

Yeah, agreed on this as well. If it's not meant to be used, it shouldn't be a feature. I mean, I hope that our code mechanics have enough control over the whole thing to be able to disable things that explicitely aren't meant to be used.

I blocked single person here who posts a lot and blocked a lot of people including me.

I am considering blocking our resident SS-man nazi apologist but he is kind of interesting and fascinating, in the same way as Pakistan International Airlines flight 8303 was interesting.

As others have said, I block when the posts of the person in general annoy the shit out of me and make me want to respond in a hostile fashion to no real purpose. Rather than go there, I just block them, problem solved. I expect I've been blocked aplenty for various reasons. Anyway blocking doesn't really signal, since the user never knows you've blocked them unless they are DMing you or subtweeting you or whatever and you just don't respond, and even then they may just think you're taking that dark road and ignoring them.

I can easily imagine blocking the hell out of dozens of people if I were a female. The amount of thirsty horndogs online who figure Why not when considering whether to message a woman probably outnumbers the grains of sand on the beach.

Edit: I do not currently block anyone here. I just double-checked.

Anyway blocking doesn't really signal, since the user never knows you've blocked them

Trust me, you are not blocked by anyone, else you would know that the motte sends you a large beaming red notification about the user who blocked you.

What's the rationale in that choice?

If it's a holdover from the rdrama website code (which Zorba took and repurposed for our site iirc), probably just because it would troll the blocked user.

I can easily imagine blocking the hell out of dozens of people if I were a female. The amount of thirsty horndogs online who figure Why not when considering whether to message a woman probably outnumbers the grains of sand on the beach.

I doubt the Motte, specifically, suffers from this problem. It does suffer from some posters with a very antagonistic and negative interpretation of women as a class, more lately than in the past as far as I can tell.

Women and Jews really get it here, and yet one of our most prolific and well-loved posters is a Jewish woman.

It does suffer from some posters with a very antagonistic and negative interpretation of women as a class, more lately than in the past

It's hard to convey "hate the sin, love the sinner" (or "hate the behavior that is correlated with group membership, love the individual") through text.

And being that I'm not writing in [something akin to] Old Entish, where you actually can cut an accurate line between the individual and the group if you write the entire history of humanity through the initial conditions of reality and all of the grievances that made words mean what they mean before saying a single word (and sure, I could do that but I have other things to do and only a 500,000 character limit; usernames and reputations should be enough for this but they don't work that way in practice as they're not discoverable even to existing users let alone new ones) I'm limited to "women in aggregate do work this way, and that has led to negative consequences X and Y, and costed W lives and destroyed $Z wealth", despite in my personal life being blessed enough to not have to meaningfully interact with a single woman who works that way.

Ultimately, the whole conversation (and every time it comes up) feels like I'm describing marriage counseling proceedings between the statistically average man and the statistically average woman. There's another poster that uses this language between Blue and Red areas of the US but I think it's a far larger problem than that; I think said average woman hates said average man (which is how woman secures resources and power over man), said average man hates the external enemy [either nature or human] (which is how man secures resources and power over women), but there is no external enemy any more (freedom from need has been largely achieved in the West) so only said average woman is able to leverage that hatred effectively (which is why she teaches man to hate himself, and then chooses the bear anyway). That's going to continue unchecked, and the household will be unable to prevent getting wrecked as a consequence, and nobody's going to learn a damn thing about how to prevent that in the future.

I agree on both counts. I have been tempted to counter some of these occasions (e.g. when it is suggested, to upvotes, that the western world go full Afghanistan and deny women education because reasons) but I either have considered it pointless to engage, been too incredulous to respond, or assumed one of the women here would take up the banner (though of course they may disengage for similar reasons).

As has been pointed out may times by myself, Scotty and a half dozen or more others in the this space, a forum or online gathering spot that doesn't explicitly ban witches will eventually be filled only with witches, that is what we are watching slowly happen. No offense to my current and future online wiccan brothers and sisters, it will still be fun while it lasts.

Anyway blocking doesn't really signal, since the user never knows you've blocked them

motte interface prominently shows that someone blocked you, on every single of their posts

Today I learned.

I blocked a user for a while because he was writing dozens of extremely negative blackpill comments a day for weeks at the time. He is still very negative, but sometimes has interesting things to say and not quite so constant, so I unblocked.

He is still very negative

huh

I blocked an array of Democrat politicians on Twitter and stopped getting paid promotions to donate to them.

I block liberally on Twitter, but I never tweet so it's less "guy replying and annoying me" and more "this post was incredibly fucking stupid and I see no reason to give them another chance."

Yeah, on Twitter it's necessary to cut down on the garbage.

The internet isn't like real life where disowning a person means you lose all benefits you'd get from associating with them. Blocking a below-average quality user is simply a straightforward improvement when it gets replaced by somebody of average quality from the endless pool.

I don't technically block anybody, because I usually cycle through accounts rapidly and don't bother logging in when browsing without replying, but here at the motte I entirely skip two categories of users by the names I recognize: people with irreconcilably opposing viewpoints, to keep my blood pressure in check, and people who wrote too many things I consider dumb, also because I don't want to risk my blood pressure.

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