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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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How to Win Friends and Influence People: the Rationalist Edition

My reaction at this point:

At this point, reading an article a comment like this one, you already know what the next “narrative beat” has to be.

The fact that this has to be the next narrative beat in an article like this should raise red flags. Another way of phrasing “this has to be the next narrative beat” is that it’s something we would believe / want to believe / insert at this place in our discourse whether it was true or not. That means we need to be on extra special good epistemic behavior when we try to consider whether it’s true in this individual case, understanding that we’ll have a strong bias towards assuming “yes” that needs to be counteracted.

So I checked your points against both the latest 7 top-levels in the thread 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and my memory of popular comments.

Extreme (emotional) Decoupling.

Not true of any of the top-levels. Some popular comments are like this but some are also earnest presentations of a situation that doesnt fit any mayor narrative, or being vocally angry at the outgroup.

Long, internally consistent logical chains based on premises with monstrous error bars/uncertainty

Not true of any top-levels nor of popular comments. Long arguments tend to make their points in more detail rather than make more points. Including multible examples for something. Adding visceral details to a situation youre asking people to consider. Countering first-order objections. Even just repeating yourself in different words. Very long comments mostly invest in parallel rather than serial argumentation.

Literature references.

Not true of any of the top-levels. Occasionally in popular comments.

Write like a high-schooler who just discovered the wonders of a thesaurus.

True of one of the top-levels, and I would guess a similar rate for popular comments. I think the author of that one top-level is ESL and that probably contributes. Then again so am I, so maybe comments that dont seem pretentious to me (or my own) do seem that way to natives.

Why post a succinct list with references when you can write a 30,000 character multipost that is a struggle to get through?

Not true of any of the top-levels. Popular comments are sometimes very long and a struggle to get through, but its not clear that they could be effectively shortened into a list of references. The last multipost I remember is this, if you want to try at compression. Its also built around a literature reference and has a pretty decoupled premise, but its doesnt seem bad to me.

...respond to people with a half dozen links to your corpus of 10,000 word posts amounting to a small novella for them to read!

OK I think at this point there are two people doing this and only one of them where you actually find it annoying.

Complain about the normies in academia, MSM, HR, government, your life, etc vocally and frequently. This communicates that you're smarter than them, and remember, criticism is always easier than defending a thesis or building something worthwhile and thus disproportionately easier for gaining status.

Depending on how you count it, up to 4 of the top-levels. Id say one of them is mainly about that. It seems hard to avoid criticising academia, MSM, HR, or government in CW posts, and "normies" doesnt restrict the description very much. I think this is actually a bit less common/intense in popular comments.

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