things that puff my jigglies
NOTE: this is not ordered by intensity but by when I thought to add each item to the list.
NOTE2: this list will never be "done"; it will end when I am able to stop being irritated by things, which is never. the last entry will always be blank to emphasize this point. however, if this gets entertaining or substantial enough — whichever comes first — it might become a book.
NOTE3: while I do obviously think I am Justified And Correct for many of these, I make no guarantees that they are rational.
—
1. people who paraphrase something poorly and end with "got it". the arrogance of this epistemology.
2. people who make jokes like "haha you know it's just all the meth I do" where it's supposed to be funny because they're so innocent and/or composed normally. in a way, you are saying "if this is the life you've lived, you are a punchline." I suppose the joke could be funny if you're understood to be "beyond" meth, but it still relies on you being better than someone.
3. people who attribute intentions and thoughts to their kids in some "oh aren't they quirky and knowing more beyond their years" way ("my daughter said chaos is in the box of crayons and she's not wrong!") no they're kids. everyone's been one. your kid is special to you, I understand that, but that is not special-to-everyone behevior. and, on this note, personification of pets/animals beyond the clearly joking (e.g. joe rogan), myth that dogs have "unconditional love", etc.
4. people who make ultimatums or demands in a cute voice (or with emojis or whatever) like they actually think making it in this cute flavor makes it less disrespectful.
5. parents who attribute general specialness to ordinary abilities of children.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/04/24/children-have-energy-levels-greater-endurance-athletes-scientists/?fbclid=IwAR3raSDrk6gVxlc1E4UzDMRG-KZGq7UyuYF8oMc5nqjPTESC8lvbefR5CiA "Perhaps, if you've spent time around today's youth, you've watched with a mixture of horror and fascination as a teen snaps dozens of selfies before publishing the most flattering one to Instagram, only to pull it down if it doesn't accumulate enough likes within the first hour. It’s another example of proof of work, or at least vigorous market research."
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service
6. statements where I'm obviously going to have to ask a followup question about what they mean but the person making the statement does not anticipate this or give me any leeway about it and makes my life generally more difficult. ("the fifth season of (tv show) addressed this question" "ok how" "by doing (thing)" as opposed to just saying "the fifth season of (tv show) addressed this question by (doing thing)" -- anticipating responses and integrating them into your initial statement is the best, fam.)
7. when people reply to a criticism by repeating the by-definition function of a thing.
e.g. (1) statement: "tipping is stupid." response: "tipping is a payment for someone's service." (yes, and that is stupid.)
e.g. (2) statement: "hedging is stupid." response: "hedging is acting in anticipation of negative consequences." (yes, and that is stupid.)
8. saying some cocky "lmao HAHAHAHA" online when I know you're not laughing whatsoever and would be passive aggressive irl
9. commenting about someone in third person who is obviously part of the same comment chain
10. people who have clearly gimmick personalities ("that celebrity is cool duuuude he saved my taquitoes, right on") -- that's not your real personality it's a party trick
11. cheap neologisms like "-ocracy" creations. dude there're so many powerpoints on word formation by professors teaching introductory linguistics how are you this unoriginal
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words/wordtypes.html
12. people who encounter a standard or way of being evaluated or judged they're not used to (e.g. the judgment implied by the word "pleonasm") and immediately look for some superficial hypocrisy to show the standard can't be followed, so that they can feel they've avoided being held to it ("see, pleonasm is itself a pleonasm! I don't have to care!")
13. stretches of your vocation to relate to other people, which distorts essential distinctions that make the activity what it is. "in a sense we're both artists, coding is art" this is a cute thing people say to relate to each other at parties when they're too drunk to care about details enough to correct them. similar things include "but isn't music a language?" (no, music is not a language; it does not have semantics or many essential features of languages.) it's not a thing that, upon serious reflection, any rational person can consider true.
14. people who associate disgust terms with morality (i.e. "you're gross")
15. words like "micro$uck" where a person isn't confident in tone to convey disapproval and/or can't be fucked to just say the normal goddamn word, especially "obungo" / "obunga", "madcow" instead of "maddow", etc; not only do I not know what they're talking about if I don't get their reference, this instantly lowers my opinion of a person
16. degree-minimizing. "society isn't always meritocratic" like this isn't immensely obvious, as if degrees of meritocracy don't exist. clearly if we can say one society is more democratic than another, we can say one society is more meritocratic than another even if no society is purely democratic or purely meritocratic.
17. when people assume universality of nice/jerk/mean/asshole/kind/etc in their "don't be a jerk" mantra
18. the vagueness of "treat me like a person" (for most of human history, people treated others in ways that would be by today's standards brutal or amoral. most of the ways that people today conceptualize "being human" on social media is a recent idea; it's certainly unique to the time period after the industrial revolution, which led to advances in technology that could ensure human rights. when someone says "treat me like a person" this is closer to "treat me like a citizen in a 21st-century 1st-world country", which is far less sexy to say. I hate the abuse of "human" to use whatever people want it to mean; it's dishonest.)
19. when someone's defensiveness over word choice is motivated more by "don't u dare edit me"ism than any sort of concern for accuracy. for example:
A: you can't say that someone is 'slutty' in a positive way, it's an insult, the insult is baked into the meaning
B: the word 'nice' used to mean 'stupid', words change. it doesn't have to be inherently insulting
A: uh I said the insult was BAKED INTO THE MEANING not that it was 'inherently insulting' please get my words right
B: 'inherently insulting' is closer to what you're getting at, also, I'm named after a letter and filling out forms is either easy or infuriating
20. when superhero movies do this whole "haha, even they do normie thing! haha! their problems are just like mine! I'm basically them! he's just like me fr"
21. people who are obstinate about pronouncing foreign words outside of the most blunt features of their accent. for example, you've probably heard people say "pokeeman" or "gayng-nam style". you've no doubt heard these word pronounced as they should be, multiple times in your life. there is a person who (1) has heard e.g. "gangnam" pronounced as "gongnam" (2) knows this doesn't involve a foreign sound in english like a trilled R (3) knows it is supposed to be pronounced more like "gongnam" than "gayngnam" (4) still, in the face of all of this, imposes their odd vowels on the word and says "gayngnam" anyway, like a person who must be dragged kicking and screaming to make the most minor behavioral modification.
22. narrowing your view on something to such a degree that your opinion is completely uncontroversial and easymode, yet acting cocky about it as if you're taking a hard stance on something, e.g. "if you support murdering puppies we can't be friends" and variations of this
23. "no one asked" writing:
"But what most money-worshiping, billionaire idolizing, “I wannabe like Buffett!” fanboys don’t understand is that first and foremost, Mr. Buffett is a SALESMAN.
Yes, a salesman!
As in “Oh shucks, golly gee whiz, I just live in the same house I bought when I first got married and only drink Cherry Coke and eat Egg McMuffins and play the ukulele but I’m a multi billionaire because I work hard and I’m pretty darn good with numbers.”"
this sort of thing is the prose equivalent of clickbait -- when the writer will answer an imaginary question in their head, or give reassurances that are superfluous. it tells me they have a very specific expectation of how they think they're going to be read.
24. this is more cringe than puff, but: "we are this group" or "haha this is us" kind of shit, like the "what is love" meme. essentially you're getting off to group self-insert.
25. people who do something blatantly self-absorbed and impeding to other people but who try to pass it off as quirky awkwardness. see: people at the toronto airport trying to spin cutting in line as "haha I'm so silly this is nuts right XD"
no
get back in line
26. this hierarchy-avoidant thing where someone paints universally good traits as quirks of your personality, because if your good traits are quirks of your personality then they're things specific to you and other people don't suck for not having them
e.g. "we all know how much susan likes being early!" as if this is just her quirky preference and not something employers universally appreciate
27. schrodinger's joke: "if my observation is accepted then I'll own up to the intention and say it's funny because it's true, but if it doesn't work then I'm just joking and it's not that deep man"
28. presumptuous use of definite articles ("the"). these have an extremely annoying 1950s "everyone else must be like me or everyone I know" air to them. for example: "you can use this back at the office" presumes you have an office job; "you can use this at an office" doesn't carry this presumptuousness.
29. when you cannot avoid verbalizing your sense of pattern-matching, i.e. yes this is #69, no you do not have to point it out, and this applies with #420, #1337, #666, #888, #3000, >#9000, and any other "my brain recognized the pattern" number. pattern recognition is not in and of itself significant.
30. when I use a term that has negative stigma such as 'how dumb" to stress understanding of the negative rather than positive factors of something and someone thinks I am calling that thing the baseline word for that adjective, such as "how dumb was einstein anyway" --> "einstein was dumb"
31. loophole-goblining every time someone asks a poll that depends on a hypothetical. this is evasion of the discomfort of responding to the core of the issue, and it has made me add to every poll "apply the standard principle of "no loophole-searching / getting-around-the-question hacking / actually addressing some side-concern in answering the question""
32. whynotboth-ing a question that is clearly asking you which should be prioritized when you cannot choose both. time is not infinite and neither is attention.
33. people who have no "this no doubt has been done/thought by a ton of people before" sense.
at some point I thought of a detective making a joke about the "fresh prints of bel air". immediately after that I had the sense of "okay, this joke is too obvious - and not only has the joke certainly been done to death, I'm actually annoyed that I know in advance that so many people have run this obvious joke into the ground."
34. any objection along the lines of "I don't want to see that" or "this disgusts me" or "that's gross" or "I am disturbed by x" is an aesthetic objection. all aesthetic objections are arbitrary, because there is nothing to make your aesthetic objection take priority over mine. you're disgusted by, say, public nudity? well, there are a lot of ways people present themselves in public that I want to outlaw, so why does your disgust take priority over mine? likewise with "disturbed" or anything else. there is no methodology to establish which aesthetic preference takes priority in a non-arbitrary way, ie you might as well flip a coin. because of this, either all aesthetic objections are valid or none of them are - and we can't have all of them, so the correct position is obvious here.
35. but speaking of preferences, an infuriating fallacy that's way too common is preferentializing / preference-norm distinction denialism -- another way of framing this is "haters" (as opposed to "critics"). a claim of "x is wrong" is rephrased as "you don't like x", a person who is a critic of x is called a "hater" to frame the criticism in terms of emotion. replies along the lines of "don't like x? don't use x" or "views you don't like" (rather than "think x is backward?" or "views you think are wrong") are distortions. they are distortions because it's inaccurate to say someone "doesn't like" violence or theft or arson in the way they "dislike" the flavor of bananas. it's egregiously misleading to say I "don't like" someone mocking a victim of revenge porn in the way that I "don't like" emo music. it's heinously wrong to say I "don't like" fruitcake in the way that someone will say I "don't like" the ISIS practices of forced sex slavery and videotaped beheading performed by twelve year olds. don't be obtuse either; we can continue example-generation like this until I find one you agree is absurd. yet people persist with this framing because they know it's rhetorically powerful. they don't actually believe these things are equally preferential and they know deep down it's a glib and false comparison but "views you don't like" is a dialogic Old Reliable. it has a punch to it; a truthiness. nonetheless, advancing this framing in lieu of knowing this is dishonest. there are bad reasons to continue using it and better reasons to discontinue it. (for whatever reason, this rhetorical tactic is annoyingly common among people with libertarian-adjacent politics.)
36. using a temporal epistemology when it doesn't apply. the most common example of this is on a website like facebook where edit histories are available, and a person will make an essentially cosmetic/grammatical correction that does not affect the thesis or substance of the argument, and someone will (in an argument, where else) say "oh, you edited your post" as if arguments work like some kind of trivia golf where the objective is to say as few wrong things as possible rather than to substantiate a claim. other irritations of this kind are people who think a claim's truth is time-bound — "lol that argument was two days ago" might apply to a discussion about ongoing legislation, such as if a law was overturned, but obviously does not matter in an argument about, say, the science of weight loss. one more category of this is people who focus on excessively precise timestamps, as if updates not specifying the hour are dishonest or as if you are attempting to hide something by otherwise not having a "finalized" version; that is not how knowledge works, most published scholarship cites only the *year* and revisions happen and are happening constantly.
37. SayTheLining — if I say "One thing," and your brain starts to say "I don't know why, it doesn't even matter how (etc)", good for you, so does everyone else's who knows this song. choosing to vocalize this this is SayTheLine-ism, which is just vocalizing that your brain has functional pattern recognition. this is a thing people can do to believe they're interacting with others when in fact they're saying nothing; they're not actually having a conversation.
to put this into context, you could say "hey, did you know I really like dried prunes?" and this would be infinitely more information than if you completed a lyric pattern -- and I mean literally infinite, because the amount I have learned from knowing your brain can complete patterns is zero (everyone's can) but the amount I've learned from knowing you enjoy dried prunes tells me that you like prunes as a category, and also are open to dried fruit, and might have other uncommon food preferences as prunes are not a typical fruit choice.
(your brain, maybe: "but I do this a lot and like doing it" — you have the choice to not do this; some people have tics they can't control and wish they had your level of choice. but yes, there are lots of bad conversational habits people have that they insist on doing until they die. you can choose to never develop yourself if you insist. this is one of several deep ADHD habits I used to do that I don't anymore. other habits include interrupting people / cutting people off in conversation and having no standards of conversational relevance. there are probably more, but those come up immediately. you are not entitled to be excused from this because you have ADHD. many of us with ADHD undo these behaviors; they are not inevitabilities.)
38. the belief that someone needs complete certainty or proof beyond any doubt to make judgments of others. this requires denial of major social realities and handicaps your ability to understand others.
there is a certain kind of person, and you either know them or don't, who will respond to social and pragmatic inferences about them with a sentence like "you're making a lot of assumptions right now." (note that this is never "you're wrong", and note that in an employment context, far more judgments are made about prospective employees with much less information and this seems fine.)
there are many scenarios where you can make social inferences with high accuracy, including about the motives of people, and you can even deny their lived experience. when I was growing up, it was common to hear a certain kind of nerd say "yeah I swear in japanese when I'm angry lol". a white teenage girl, who never spoke a word of japanese in her life and has only learned phrases from anime, does not "swear in japanese when she gets angry." I don't care what she says; this is not a real habit. you may not be able to know a person's motivations with certainty, but courts of law manage well enough, and more to the point it's much easier to know when someone's motives are false.
this applies to sizing up people in various ways, too. unless they're ESL or below 24, a person who asks "what does salient mean" doesn't know a lot of things I know because if they cared about the things I care about they'd know what it means. a person who does not look at all like they can bench 500lb will, 9 times out of 10, not be able to bench 500lb. a judgment made on extremely high probability is not an "assumption", it's an inference, and we (yes, we) do it all the time.
39. people who summarize their experience with people/places in a city as if talking to a singular person, e.g. "you were the best, Berlin"
this is deliberately distorting royal-weing bullshit propagated by rich kids and/or influencers who think it's posh to characterize a limited number of individuals as a geographic entity. stop using falsely collectivist language. I immediately want to 1990s nickelodeon slime anyone who talks this way.
40. the kind of weasely corporatespeak that royal-we's something directed at you as a group action, e.g. "let's make sure we're taking care of that" instead of "make sure you're taking care of that." there is no group involvement here. this is deliberately indirect. speak directly. (example:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/ChSsywSpyik/)
41. this construction that's oddly popular among... a certain kind of person — let's say weebs and theater nerds — where you refer to someone with an indefinite article, as if they're a Pokémon or a kind of species. e.g. "it's an Alfred!"
the first-impression loss of face someone does not know they realize they've suffered from doing this around me is comparable to someone saying "did you know that 'rawr' is 'hello' in dinosaur? XD" or, if that too is unfamiliar to you, everything in this video:
https://youtu.be/85y-N5GJa9g
42. the term “opsec” when used to mean “how much you let people know about you”, which is covered by the everyday words “transparency” and “opacity” and is the intellectual equivalent of navy seal LARPing. there is no 'operation' to 'secure’, you are performing zero operations, you have never performed an operation in your life. an operation is the coordination of actions by an organizational body, usually a military group but at minimum a group. there is no such thing as a single-person operation; even if an operation were performed by a single person it would still be delegated by another person. you, as Just A Person, do not have "operations", you have tasks. this is neglecting the fact that people use the term "operational security" interchangeably with "informational security", where the latter of which is usually what they’re talking about, because operational security requires there to be... operations... that are performed... and you aren’t doing that.
43. Procedurally Oblivious People. this is a kind-of-person who, as the name suggests, are oblivious to when something is a standard procedure and think every action is a deliberate bespoke choice. so, for example, I've seen SO MANY PATIENTS at hospitals get mad at nurses for doing what is obviously a routine procedure that they are not allowed to vary from.
this, of course, applies to any industry, and when I worked customer support and had to read from a script I would say out loud "and I'm sorry but I'm required to read from a script here" to make it known to the customer that these procedures can't be exempted. the number of customers this placated was outrageous; it should not have been as effective as it was. but it was.
procedurally oblivious people are an enigma to me. my kneejerk reaction is to categorize them as hierarchically lower human beings, but I occasionally wonder if there's something more than that going on in their brains. (only occasionally though, they're definitely dumb.)
44. when you make a distinction (or ask for a distinction) that is extremely important if not essential in one domain and this is casually handwaved as "pedantic" by someone unaware that this distinction is a major issue in years if not decades of scholarly exchange, so you're forced to either (1) spend the labor 101ing the lore of this field to them to convince them that, yes, this is actually something their brain needs to think about for a few god damn minutes, or (2) dismiss them as an unrigorous epistemic thot
45. when you ask for a definition and someone defines the word in terms of another word that needs defining ("e.g. Q: what is hobnugget? A: it is a form of voidringer Q: what is a voidringer A: it is a person who nyarmangs")
46. even puffier jiggly: when you ask for a definition and someone defines the term by analogy or metaphor. ("Q: what is political extremism A: it's letting politics be the mind killer." correct answer: an ideology that is considered to be far outside the mainstream attitudes of society)
47. When people act as if a belief is something you have for fun, like when someone will say "it must feel sad to think like that" or "well you're a party pooper aren't you" — this isn't a contextual issue either, i.e. like a person bringing up the history of auschwitz at a rave. Some people sincerely think beliefs are just things that you choose to have to make you feel a certain way, as opposed to unignorable truths about the world you can't not-think.
Yes, some people are so capable of deluding themselves that they can pick and choose if water is wet — these people are either actors, woo practitioners, the type of people who go to Burning Man, or just insane. Society should not tolerate even the implication of casual belief-picking like you're just shopping for beliefs at a grocery store. Your relationship with the truth should be such that you have no choice BUT TO believe it.
48. Unnecessarily (and confusingly) metaphoric phrases like "I put on my sociologist hat". I hate this phrasing a uniquely large amount because there is no meaningful difference between "I use a sociology framework" and it's two steps removed from that. This is inconsiderate to anyone not a native speaker of English who understands that "hat" = "role", rather than "clothing that is protection from sun/rain/other", which requires a further step to connect "role" to "framework" rather than "a professional manner of acting or behaving." It's a concise way to say "I'm a cultural hick and my worldview is limited" in four words.
49. People who think that microblogging didn't always suck. Microblogging as a hedge will just delay the inevitable fact that you need to pay attention: you will create a floor on how dumb someone can be at the expense of how wrong they can be. When you are wrong, it will take more text to explain why you are wrong than it will be to assert you are right.
No matter how much you constrain length limits on social media websites, knowledge is a house of cards that relies on at least one person with comprehensive understanding. EVERY remotely successful social media platform has grown to accommodate two things: length and monetization. Repeat that to yourself until it becomes factual and you’ve accepted it. A simplified and short understanding only works if some people take one for the team; everyone cannot have a simplified understanding, because then you cannot decode the simplification when necessary. You've lost your Rosetta stone.
Forced-microblogging, whether it's Vine or Tumblr or Twitter or Bluesky or Mastodon, are just kids going "I DON'T WANNA" and hoping they can use tech to constrain yet another aspect of human communication in a social experiment to delay having to exercise willpower. Sure, bend the internet to your demand; it will, like rubber, unbend against your will to its core state. You can't keep bending it forever. And if you think you can bend it forever and wiggle your way out of it by becoming rich or powerful enough to demand everyone around you conform to your attention span, that's already been tried by many (many (many)) presidents and monarchs, including recently the Bush and Trump administrations. It tends to be disastrous! But you're different, I'm sure.
There aren't any shortcuts to substance and won't ever be, because to get what you want usually requires a sacrifice of something more essential. No amount of delusion, by the self or as a group, can make these shortcuts the default state — for as much as they resist and try. It's like people who want a magic weightloss pill without the literal-death-risks of DNP pills, or cardiovascular benefits without exercise, except in this case it's certainty without reading and opinions without knowledge. You must eventually Do The Thing: in this case read the bible, the manual, the article, the whatever, or just a 350-word paragraph you adult diaper.
Epistemology just doesn't work like that. Reinventing CliffsNotes and insisting it'll be different this time is something every generation has tried since 1958 and inevitably grows out of. TikTok isn't different; and there will be another TikTok, and another stupid microblogging platform after Bluesky that insists they're different too. The persistently sexy view is that Things Are Getting Shorter And More Concise. This was the appeal of Twitter, and Tumblr, and Instagram, and Vine. The new Vine is obviously at-present TikTok, and the ADHD Zoomer Kid fantasy is that zoomers will force the world to be shorter because they’re all using TikTok.
Except millennials all used Instagram, which was also short and designed for the attention-starved, and most of us still grew up to actually read things; the insistence on keeping Twitter’s character limit became a liability and the unfortunate reality of “thread readers” was a thing. Platforms, inevitably, get longer to accommodate complexity as they realize simplicity is unsustainable. TikTok now allows videos up to ten minutes and Instagram up to fifteen. D’Angelo Wallace makes zoomer longform video essays and has, as of this post, 1.5 million subscribers. There are more ways to consume long material than ever before; complexity is unavoidable.
50. using food as a thought terminating agreeability-reboot. for example, "at least we can get pizza and tacos haha!" -- this, probably, contributes to obesity.
51. adopting a temporary pseudo-deontological viewpoint as way to discredit some moral position
example --
A: "ads should try to be as honest as possible. here is an ad from soylent that is fairly transparent."
B: "lmao they're still full of themselves here, wow so much for 'honesty' in ads, give it up"
this is basically spectrum denial, i.e. disregarding (or willfully ignorant of) the idea that a moral scenario can still be flawed but much better than another moral scenario
52. this genre of cultural criticism where someone who just Does Not Go Outside has a moment with some typical adversity and has an "I get it now" relatable everyman experience so then they generalize from this single experience some observation that is systemic and wide-reaching when in fact they just used a check cashing store. "after being put on hold to settle a health insurance claim, I finally understand what Americans mean when they vent their frustrations with its medical industry"
53. thinking about a serious/weighty course of action in a shallow way, and then presenting it to another person with real intent to change their mind or persuade them (or at least indifference if they are persuaded). example:
A: I’m thinking about going into politics.
B: Ooh, that’s a great idea! Think about how many places you’d travel. And you’d be able to go to so many classy dinners! You should do it!
54. the extreme overconnections to nefarious causes, e.g. the conspiracy theorist "they", white supremacy, russian bots, the deep state -- no matter how ridiculous the connection is, people will think a cat cafe is harboring the illuminati.
55. certain kinds of families will dedicate serious amounts of time to planning around what corporate sit-down restaurant they want to eat at in the evening. like half an hour or more. I've been part of this process before, with a variety of different people, and every time I hate it beyond a mere pet peeve. like, I hate it so much that I sweat. I'd unironically rather go under anesthesia and wake up when it's over. why not eat a nice meal at home as a bonding opportunity -- no, disposable-income conflict we foisted on ourselves is preferable.
56. People who haven't internalized this lesson: Something I consider thoroughly part of adult life is completing a task when your emotion is radically different than the emotion you'd think best represents that task. For example, teenagers often have this idea that if someone is writing a sad song that they're sad the whole time writing it, or if someone is writing an argument to someone else they're mad the whole time, and so on. A lot of projects young people think are laden with a single emotion -- from takedowns to comedy skits to Christmas cards -- are usually completed while feeling a muddled mix of whatever you feel when you're brushing your teeth, doing laundry or going to the bathroom.
57. anyone who types "lol" at the start of a confrontational or critical statement, as if casualness hides the intention.
58. people who respond to just about any remark with "no, you are!" in either a positive or negative sense. think about the sustainability of this tactic even briefly.
59. ubiquitous internet disclaimers of "not medical advice" or "not financial advice". whatever you think this does, it doesn't do that.
60. discord channels around a youtube channel or podcast, or for that matter fandoms around information sources that should not have fandoms. for example, andrew huberman discord channels. it is weird and culty to start a whole community around a guy reading science summaries.
61. when someone acts like it's a big deal, or novel, or whatever to use a word in multiple senses. "hahaha an instrumental use of instruments"
62. If you say you "already know" something, there's a high probability you're already wrong. this is because the idea of "already knowing" is based on some assumed level of confidence in your knowledge, and knowledge isn't some dichotomy of know/not-know; it's more like weak/medium/strong levels of knowledge. This is why I have a massive pet peeve when I link someone to an article or concept or whatever -- when the reason I'm linking it in the first place is because they've failed to understand it adequately -- and I'm met with some glib reply like "I've already read this". (Clearly that's not a final answer; you obviously don't remember everything in every textbook you've ever read.)
63. there is a phenomenon where someone invents a standard that doesn't need to exist so that they need to be relied on to fix it, such as an etiquette coach who teaches graces that ought not exist or a spouse who invents luxury chores. this itself is irritating, but what elevates it to infuriating is when someone can't understand that they might be doing that and doesn't care if they are.
64. seeing JD Vance use "litigate" as one of his in-words (ingroup jargon words) and crutch words (a word that refers to too many things) when speaking to Zelenskyy. Vance means something like "contest", "challenge", or "adjudicate" when he says "litigate" but a foreigner with no knowledge of his idiolect probably does not know what "litigate" means, and Vance is either not understanding the significance of what he's doing or its impact or is speaking to his ingroup and thinking that's enough.
65. reflexively typing "lol" or "haha" at the front of a contentious statement, like "lol you’re fundamentally misunderstanding Keynesian multipliers." this is a posture: "I can attack you but my emoji armor means you can’t retaliate."
66. Another Worst Person To Dialogue With is "people who respond to arguments by just responding to an example in support of it." If you don’t immediately understand why this is backward -- and I don’t just mean wrong, I mean the opposite of the correct way to look at things -- remember what any given discussion is: idea/premise --> development of idea through reasons/elaboration --> conclusion/insight/whatever --> repeat.
Examples are not reasons. Examples are supplementary. They are bonus content. They are extra. They are optional. They are not required for something to be true.
“A: people are not inherently good. Many atrocities throughout history are direct evidence against inherent goodness. Take the rape of nanking for example.
B: The atrocities at nanking aren’t a good example because the japanese were practically brainwashed.”
The support for claim “people are not inherently good” is “many atrocities throughout history exist.” Attacking the example is dense on several levels:
• There are more atrocities in history besides the nanking massacre.
• If the rape of nanking example fails, you can easily replace it with any other atrocity of this kind.
• Unless B objects to *all* atrocities as examples, it’s socially brain-dead to think A can’t/won’t cycle through atrocities until an acceptable example is found, making the objection a waste of time due to this obvious inevitability.
• The truth or falsehood of “people are not inherently good because of the atrocities throughout history” will be unaffected by whether or not A thinks to mention any of these atrocities.
• The claim does not require *any* atrocity to be mentioned to be true; nanking is given just to make this easier to visualize.
• On a dialogic level, it’s as if B thinks that A failing to mention an acceptable example somehow alters the truth or falsehood of the “people are not inherently good” claim -- as if whatever exists to B and A’s discussion right now is all there is in reality, and sweeping things under the rug changes that reality. This is not far off from “if I can’t see it / think about it, it doesn’t exist” and is just about the opposite of truthseeking.
Finally, and most importantly:
• This approaches arguments in the opposite order of priority. Going after examples is going after the most optional and discardable aspect of an argument; you should go after the most essential elements of an argument (see: premises and reasons in support of those premises, also see Graham’s hierarchy of disagreement).
• Essentially, this way of replying is so irritating because it’s so fundamentally wrong. I don’t mean in a moral sense, I mean in the sense that it’s the opposite of where a person’s attention should be.
Someone who dialogues this way immediately tells me that they never learned how to think and read -- even if they went to college, or grad school. If they reply this way, their thought process is still a blob of clay that never got molded into anything.
67. Face Elevating Words or FEWs.
This is a word that is chosen instead of a more accurate word to make you seem like you’re doing more than you actually are, or are more competent than you actually are or whatever.
An example: "I determined that he was wrong" sounds much more authoritative than "I decided that he was wrong". A "determination" makes us think of a judgment that occurred after an inquiry or process, not just something you thought of.
Another example that you’ve probably heard is "this matter" instead of "this issue" or "this topic".
Another example is the overuse of "model" to mean "think of" or "imagine", ie "how are you modeling me" is functionally identical to "how are you imagining me" and "your model of me" is likewise interchangeable with "your concept of me". Another is calling any sort of information-protecting social media behavior "opsec" which is short for "operational security". It’s highly unlikely that you as a social media user have "operations" that you are "conducting".
When you combine many FEWs there is a cumulative effect, eg "what model of him did you use to come to a determination on this matter".
Addenda:
1. Note that the term is face 'elevation' and not face 'saving' because loss of face might not be a risk; the person writing or speaking this way is not necessarily on the defensive.
2. Note also these are not jargon words, and this is different than using jargon excessively. Face elevating words tend to be normal words that people use to make themselves seem more competent; they’re not rare words or "big words", they’re words that when mashed together give people a vibe of thoroughness or precision or rigor or competence that they wouldn’t necessarily have otherwise.
68. Analogy literalists are another massive pet peeve, or "people who object to analogies on the literal/superficial aspects of things being compared." e.g.:
1 --
A: If you're going to subject yourself to wearing a corset, that's not much different than foot binding.
B: What?Tthey're totally different! Corsets are for your upper body and foot binding screws up your walking.
2 --
A: World War I was torture to a civilian, because airplanes were new. it must have felt like being invaded by UFOs.
B: That makes no sense! UFOs don't exist.
3 --
A: Are you getting sick of being around me?
B: Well, do you want to eat at the same restaurant every day?
A: Are you seriously comparing me to a restaurant?!
4 --
A: Another half-measure politician. Joe Biden is like Mitt Romney all over again.
B: What?! Romney is a republican and Biden is a democrat.
69. Dialogic forbearance, another massive pet peeve.
Person, A has some issue, and they frame their issue in terms of a manifestation of it. Another person, B, knows what their issue is, but deliberately responds to parts of the complaint that are not A's issue because discussing the actual issue is frustrating, difficult, uncomfortable, or something in this zone.
A: I am sick of having to download apps through the company App store. Just let me download the app directly, you spammy jerks!
B: You can disable that though.
A: That's not the point.
B: But it works for me?
A: They are trying to force a monopoly through forcing software on people by default. That's pushy and annoying.
B: Well, it's their right to do that.
Everything between "you can disable that though" and "that's pushy and annoying" is excess here, because B was sweeping the actual issue under the rug until it became inevitable. The discussion should have proceeded like this:
A: I am sick of having to download apps through the company App store. Just let me download the app directly, you spammy jerks!
B: Well, it's their right to spam you.
In a sense, B is trying to forbear the inevitable point where A and B discuss the real locus of disagreement between themselves, which is in this case how much leeway corporations should have to push products on the consumer.
This pattern is a waste of focus and we should have the cultural vocabulary to rid ourselves of it.
70. political views that people seem to *want* to make into an ingroup identity, as if they are checking boxes. if your political views can be neatly encapsulated by an ingroup identity, they aren't nuanced enough, the ability to feel good about your "side", to the extent you have a side, has an inverse relationship with nuance. but more than that, the person doing this doesn't seem to care that they are box-checking and holding these ideas as in-beliefs.
71. Framing some failure of action as an innate quality of yourself, so that if you criticize the behavior you're criticizing some permanent, unchangeable part of a person's identity.
"I'm a do-things-now kinda guy."
"I'm not much of a planner."
"I'm not a love-routine person."
72. am I the only one who finds it a little weird, epistemically, that it's socially acceptable to assert a truth but viewed as antagonistic to put it into question? e.g. I can say "tomatoes cause cancer" but if you dispute this, you're being argumentative, even though I'm the one who put that falsehood out in the universe anyway.
73. music that involves
1. self-insertion
2. "it me"-ism or anything that involves asserting who think you are to the world
3. flexing and/or mating ritual horseshit
4. broadly: anything where the primary purpose is to make you feel cool
5. men who specify what category of girl they like, as if anyone cares
74. When someone seems more focused on finding shallow (and probably misconstrued) instances of inconsistency from a moral source, rather than determining how legitimate the moral claims themselves are, this has a good chance of being a last ditch effort to accept the claims.
For example -- Peter Singer’s 1971 essay has a paragraph where he mentions that buying nice clothes is probably not just unnecessary but morally bad. It’s easy to get hung up on this and think "but I know I’m not a bad person, and who does this Singer guy think he is anyway, I bet he doesn’t even really do that" (etc) -- so then the next time this person encounters Singer, they’ll hit him with cheap remarks like "Dr. Singer, your clothes sure are looking nice today 😉" because in their minds, if Singer can’t follow these moral arguments then they’re not worth considering and might as well be impossible.
But that’s fallacious. Imagine if a doctor recommended that an obese patient lose weight for health reasons. It’s entirely possible that the doctor themself has failed at weight loss. Nonetheless, there are plenty of people who have succeeded from that advice; the doctor's personal success doesn't make the advice untrue.
Even if Singer were unable to follow what he says is morally best, this doesn’t mean it’s not morally best. (Whether it actually is, by the way, I’m not concerned with here.)
People who steal often agree that stealing is wrong. Most of society agrees that stealing is wrong, too. People who steal often believe that they’ve made a mistake and acted subideally. (In fact, nearly all of us have acted subideally and the shallow hypocrisy-grabbing that expects Singer to have acted ideally all the time ignores this, perhaps deliberately.) So a thief isn’t wrong about stealing being wrong when they say "you shouldn’t steal" -- they’re bad at following their moral proclamations, but that’s not the same thing.
Yet this is exactly what very shallow readers do when they read someone like Singer and are threatened by what this might mean for their self concept. If a doctor says that a patient should lose weight for health reasons, most of us would think it’s suspicious if the patient started to talk about the doctor eating chips between visitations -- as in, we’d recognize that this was grabbing for an excuse or easy dismissal or avenue to keep doing the same thing.
But with moral claims this kind of lazy hypocrisy-seeking mostly happens when someone thinks the moral claim is a threat to them. No one reads antinatalist writing and thinks "haha I bet Benatar would have kids if he could", they just think "wow, that’s really dumb." They’re secure in how dumb they think antinatalism is. Only when they’re insecure do they snipe for inconsistencies, and I really think that’s what’s going on when people eg look for instances of vegans eating meat occasionally or whatever. (I am not vegan, and the existence of people who require clarification on this gives me anxiety.)
So in different words, lots of innocuous behaviors arise from non-obvious intentions that may undermine their stated purpose. I don’t think a person looking for moral gotchas is actually engaging in moral dialogue. I don’t think they should be taken at face value. I think what they’re doing is a kind of rationalization, specifically to avoid thinking about how an argument might be true and apply to them.
75. The reason is because the opinion/fact distinction is only something people make a deal out of on the internet or in informal settings where they aren’t used to rigorously backing up claims -- no academic, ever, in just about any serious field, would write something like "You're stating your opinion as fact" as criticism of another paper. This just doesn’t happen. It’s understood that any claim has some degree of evidence in support of it, and the evidence is what determines how true the claim is, so claims aren’t separated into opinion/fact but weak/strong (based on strength of evidence) or sometimes true/false, but usually weak/strong. No one uses "in my opinion" in scholarly writing for this reason.
76. if any of your views on phenomena (UFOs, conspiracy theories, whatever) amount to "yeah, but there's a chance it COULD be true" this is indirectly admitting you're gullible enough to play the lottery. almost all events have a probability. pick an estimated one. if you are arguing for <0.1% probability events you are at minimum wasting your time. if you are saying extraordinary events are >1% probability you don't know what you're actually saying or what 1/100 means.
75. boundaries meta-boundaries around what kinds of discussion we will and won't participate in are probably genuinely harmful for the pace of cultural discourse and slow our ability to get to issues we should have gotten to way earlier. INSPIRATION: "no one should need to convince you to go beyond a partial understanding before giving your opinion. If you want to engage seriously, I'm not saying you need to read or engage fully, but I should have a ready answer to "why shouldn't I delete this comment" when I don't think you've been good faith. It doesn't help that I gain nothing from knowing you are putting up a meta-boundary around understanding, and are prioritizing responding over that. I and others obviously will read beyond you, so you're at most marking your own exclusion from the discourse. this kind of response is like if I said "come to the book club tonight to let me know what you think" and you showed up saying "sorry I'm late, traffic was awful, but I'm here! Anyway I read it. That was a lot, wow. It took a lot to get here." It's more respectful, norm-wise, to keep the warm-up as a private thought and show up when you can be in-conversation."
77. (not sure about this one) people who lean on describing behaviors as "nice" or "mean" are subtly indicating a poor understanding of social dynamics, for the same reason that someone probably doesn't have a developed palate if they're always describing food as "yummy" or "tasty". people with a more developed understanding of social dynamics tend to describe the intentions behind behaviors as well as the functions. "thoughtful" for example describes a very specific kind of action, whereas "nice" can just describe someone who is superficially pleasant. you don't know if their response is impressionistic, and often it is. (people like this tend to be easily manipulated, too, unfortunately.)
78. the literal response is not always the direct response.
there is this kind of subtext abuse where someone will say something in conjunction with what they want to be true five or six inferences down the line, and they aren't upfront about what they want, so in responding literally to them you're in some ways not even really addressing the point.
e.g. "physicists say the multiverse must exist"
literal response: "yes, the evidence suggests that"
direct response: "no, this does not mean an afterlife exists where you're meeting your grandma after you die."
---
in-the-wild example, from youtube: there is a video about romanian rocks that evidently grow and move like plants. (one commenter called this "land coral" -- whether that's accurate idk.)
the youtube narrator uses a tone of voice that suggests an air of mystery, like "this is just a theory" and "what scientists can't comprehend is why they are able to breathe". someone surely knows this appeals to the kind of viewer who will take this as evidence of something supernatural, or of alien life, or of whatever.
what viewers get from that, which a commenter says directly: "many scientists believe silicon life forms are very possible"
and what viewers get from that, which commenters mentioned: "like in star trek!!"
and the subtext of *that*: "aliens exist"
so in fact the very direct thing to say in the growing rock video scenario is something like "no, this doesn't mean whatever you want this to mean -- be that about aliens or intelligent life or how ✨everything is connected✨ or whatever"
---
another example I just made up:
question: "so it's possible for a weight loss pill that just burns off fat to exist?"
literal reply: "yes"
more direct reply: "yes, but it would behave like 2,4,-dinitrophenol and have have an unacceptably high probability of killing you"
most direct reply: "stop trying to find ways to not diet and not work out. you're still probably going to have to work out or diet or both."
---
many people synonymize "literal" with "direct".
the literal reply is not necessary the direct reply.
79. lying to yourself about what body language means that you've received because you want to believe a certain kind of narrative or delusion. for example, "the worker didn't smile enough" can mean "the worker didn't lie to me enough in a way that I find believable" the smile in other words wasn't 'real' enough for the customer to delude themselves. this is not said explicitly however, but gestured at.
80. finding a nice or impressive sounding way to brand/label something doesn't necessarily mean the thing is good or impressive or whatever. it could just mean you've gotten away with duping people about it.
81. when someone is extremely apologetic over something you never asked for or cared about as a way to compensate for the fact that they're stubborn and unapologetic about the real issues you do care about. this makes them feel like they've admitted fault and acquired some amount of points they can use against you later, even though your actual issue was never addressed and the unnecessary apology was at most missing the point.
e.g.:
- Person A gives a shit about how well Person B listens in conversations
- Person B instead profusely apologizes for using too many napkins at dinner, with no attention or acknowledgement given to the listening issue (because that issue is actually difficult)
82. this kind of public-facing hypocrisy:
the government: everyone's health is important
the government: actually, nevermind
me: since you don't care about public health anymore, can I buy HEB brand LSD tablets
the government: no
me: but that only harms me
the government: don't care
me: fine but can I buy Walmart brand steroids?
the government: no
me: what about penis pills
the government: no
me: y tho
83. This kind of Elevated Tech Support register: "TCF7L2, it turns out, is a core activator of the entire insulin signaling pathway. In fact, if you turn TCF7L2 off, the insulin receptor itself is turned down, directly limiting the cells uptake of glucose. If this happens, your pancreas can release all the insulin it wants but your tissues will leave the glucose in the blood. This is diabetes in a nutshell." The phrasing "if you turn it off" puts the reader in the cockpit and manipulatively (?) sneaks them in by elevating their status and making them think they'd be making decisions about turning hormones off and on, essentially giving them LARPy equivalence to scientists. It makes readers feel engaged by making them feel cool, and distracts them from the science. The verbiage should be "if TCF7L2 is turned off" because it can be turned off without the intervention of "you".
larger gripe: inword supremacism
in tech, there seems to be a persistent failure of generalizing what's true for one's ingroup to all of American society, often to one's detriment. (in this case, underestimating how different the perception of this will be outside of one's own social circles.) everyone does it to some extent, but tech is especially bad about it.
if you compare this to other fields it's extreme. like, lawyers know extremely well how they're perceived outside of the legal profession and they rarely import their group norms to other situations; if anything, they're often apologizing for odd lawyer norms. tech culture is unapologetically supremacist about its cultural quirks and doesn't even bother to learn when it's operating from an ingroup mindset; it's subculturally redneckish, and its the lack of apology is due to inconsideration and xenophobia not correctly placed guilt.
I guess tech people feel entitled to be that way because they think what they've built is the infrastructure for modern society, but "we built this" reasoning only goes so far. tech is one aspect of infrastructure, no matter what percent you try to arbitrage it as it's still a fraction of why things are what they are; construction workers don't do that, and lawyers don't either. imagine if lawyers were like "we made the constitution and legal frameworks so we built America" -- some do but they're rightly seen as weird within lawyers.
84. A significant portion of modern rhetoric is navigating around the person who will say "I KNEW IT" or "GOT IT" and walk away with a read-the-first-sentence conclusion, even if the second sentence corrects the misconception the first sentence just provided.
85. Article: "This [one thing that could be avoided with cursory research] causes [negative effect]."
Person in reply: "Ah yes, this is why I avoid [entire category of things]."
e.g.
Article: "High intake of undercooked meat associated with [detrimental health effect]."
Person in reply: "THIS IS WHY I DON'T EAT MEAT!!"
86. starting sentences with "Good / No / Exactly" -- this has a toxic effect on interaction and is call-response culture
87. when someone asks a question to their friends knowing full well they're going to get a bullshit/rose-colored response. like, when one of your cutest friends is like "I'm worried I'm a bad person... 😓" -- are you serious? no one is going to tell you anything but reassurance.
88. people on rationality groups, or on groups like that, who answer my "what is x" questions with an analogy rather than a direct explanation. I want that in the form of "x is..." not "x is like y", my inability to make it into a direct declarative is why I'm asking in the first place. understanding by analogy isn't actually understanding, it's a supplement to understanding.
89. the motives of the "everyone is motivated by status" crowd: even if it is impossible to be truly indifferent to status and if this unfalsifiable idea that signaling must undergird every social interaction was true, there's a canyon between Kendall Jenner and Diogenes or Thomas Aquinas.
this is a common thought pattern generalizable to all vices (and please remember 'vice' can be a behavior, like staying up too late or procrastination):
1. I do (thing), which is bad
2. but everyone else also does (thing)
3. so everyone else is bad
4. therefore we are all bad, so it doesn't matter
here's an easy example. assume this person eats a cake a day:
1. I eat sweets a lot, which is bad
2. but everyone else also eats sweets
3. so everyone else is bad
4. therefore we are all bad, so it doesn't matter
there are at least five and maybe dozens of things wrong with thinking this way, but I'm just going to say the most important one.
the missing step between (2) and (3) is "to the same degree", so
the correct version would be:
1. I eat a cake a day, which is bad
2. but everyone else also eats sweets
3. but not even close to as much as me
4. so I am much worse about this than everyone else
5. therefore this matters
once you are able to notice this you will see it everywhere. it is an EXTREMELY common rationalization, probably one of the most common.
and to tie this back:
clout chasers / social status vampires / "everything is signaling" people are doing this with social status because they are clout chasers in denial and not honest with themselves about it —
— except what makes them much more annoying than blatant alcoholics is that they have Ted Talks and actually powerful people taking them seriously, because of course they do: what powerful person WOULDN'T want to hear "actually you're doing nothing wrong! you're just doing it better than most people."
so if you actually think it is impossible to be vastly more indifferent to social status and that everyone is trying equally hard to play the rat race, please refer to the above and just admit you've been in denial.
90. a thing I've grown to hate a lot — not merely a pet peeve — is watching someone frame something they were going to do anyway (or something they couldn't do) as a deliberate choice. there is not a word for this, but I wish there was so that I didn't have to coin words for every disingenuous thing.
some examples:
▪️ person A "lives frugally" while making $25,000/year
▪️ person B spends about $20,000 on luxuries while making $100,000/year
—> person A has no choice BUT to live frugally; it becomes a deliberate choice once they are at, say, $40,000-70,000/year or more (depending on regional cost of living)
▪️ person A is restricting calories
▪️ person B is "enjoying themselves"
—> yes, enjoying yourself is what people do without thinking about it. restricting calories takes effort. maybe you are in fact enjoying yourself, but how do you know? have you successfully dieted before? can you do so sustainably and without mental health issues? if not, then it's probably not a real decision.
▪️ person A tries to keep a selective social circle
▪️ person B says they're "going with the flow"
—> going with the flow is the human default. it will take more effort and awkwardness to be selective about who you are friends with. no one wants to have to tell friends why you're not being friends with them anymore. some people do in fact make this choice deliberately, but how do you know that's what you're doing? can you say you've been selective before? how much? (you should have some way to determine this.)
essentially, this is infuriating because it indicates delusion about when you've actually made a decision. you should be aware of when you are really making decisions, because that is how accountability starts.
91. when I am invited to something to give a "(cultural background) perspective on (thing)" like my narrative experiences determine what I think. this is ultimately identity-centric epistemology acting like it's being fair when it isn't. methodology determines what I think, not experience; experience just gives me information.
92. people who have no "this no doubt has been done/thought by a ton of people before" sense. at some point I thought of a detective making a joke about the "fresh prints of bel air". immediately after that I had the sense of "okay, this joke is too obvious - and not only has the joke certainly been done to death, I'm actually annoyed that I know in advance that so many people have run this obvious joke into the ground." but, some people don't feel this. ever. they should! the world would be less repetitive.
93. step-constrained listeners
you're explaining something complex step by step, and as part of explaining something complex in steps you must say something obvious.
an example would be "the body must use energy to survive" as one step in an explanation of weight loss metabolism. the person you're explaining this to reacts bitterly like "ugh I KNOW THAT" when you're not even remotely done with the explanation, but due to their preemptive impulses, fragile ego and narrow listening they've thought this sentence-level — as opposed to thesis-level — step was a sufficient amount of listening to make a complaint.
94. when someone cannot bring themselves to refer to something by its actual name, so they refer to it by a belittling childized name ("the hedgies" to refer to hedge fund traders, "the cissies" to refer to cisgendered people, "the preppies" which is mostly outdated). this is a subcategory of voldemorting — there's probably a formal term for this, but it's what I use to refer to people who always refer to a name in a derisive version ("micro$uck" instead of Microsoft, "amerikkka" instead of America, "democraps" instead of democrats)
95. when I'm in an argument and someone thinks I'm calling them dumb, but they stop caring when they realize I'm calling them lazy or sloppy or both. "haha yeah I'm lazy lol" -- being lazy/sloppy is profoundly worse than being stupid. a stupid person can be useful. a lazy+sloppy person is never useful, except accidentally. yet certain kinds of chucklefuck would rather get off to the idea that they're special for having the *potential* to do things. I need to impress upon everyone that this is pathetic.
96. pet peeve: "I'm really good at [thing]", and person has no idea what the percentile ranking / competitive standards for [thing] is
"I'm really good at super smash bros" *person has played exclusively with friends and never with competitive players* / "I'm really good at cooking" *person has never been held to culinary standards*
my term for this is "Plato's Percentiles." sort of like plato's cave except instead of a bunch of guys sitting around not knowing what the outside world is like they're a bunch of guys sitting around not knowing where at all they'd place on any percentile ranking or leaderboard that isn't exclusively made up of their friends
97. thing that goes beyond a pet-peeve, that I still have quite a bit of animosity about:
a subset of people don't so much as describe themselves as spin their identity. for example, "I'm not a serious person and I argue with people online for the laughs." this is effectively never true -- most people are partially serious, and arguments are an extremely bland form of humor. however, a person will use this to obscure their actual motivation from themselves, because their actual motivation is something like "I argue with people online to feel smart, because I feel dumb and unspecial in my day-to-day activity." they most likely won't ever know they feel this way about themselves.
a similar kind of identity-spin is "I'm an asshole but I'm honest" or "I'm a dick but I tell the truth" and so on. a huge component of society thinks the act of merely TELLING THE TRUTH, due solely to the temporary emotional discomfort it causes, is inconsiderate -- this is ignoring the long term harm of being lied to, of severed trust, and so on. so, because this is seen as inconsiderate a lot of people have found it easier to give up and accept the dick/asshole/jerk label than to argue that what they're doing (being honest) is fundamentally a good thing.
in other words, it's as if they're saying "we disagree about telling the truth, but I'll accept your stigmatizing label so that we can meet halfway about it."
this is horrible, and I did that. I hate it. your self-concept is too important to negotiate, because it sets the terms by which you can evaluate many other things. no one ever told me there was an alternative, ethically or conceptually. only by -- I don't know -- my mid-20s did I find an alternative framing to present myself with, once a psychiatrist I hooked up with saw me from a much different point of view.
don't accept moral frameworks for yourself that others have imposed on you. don't accept their labels for you, no matter how much you get along with other people by doing this, or how much easier social interactions seem. this is conceptual prison labor. you are the product of someone else when you do this, and you will only be able to see with their terminology.
describe yourself like how you think and feel *you* are, uncompromisingly and aggressively, while being as accurate as you can be. the only constraint you should have is if it's true or not.
98. "who is your favorite philosopher"
philosophy isn't like/dislike. there are people I think are correct and people I think are wrong. this is like asking "which do you like more, 3+3=6 or 5+5=11?". thomas aquinas is someone whose personal conduct I admire a lot and who I would respect greatly if he were alive today, but whose philosophy I think is wrong about basically everything. conversely, I align with eliezer yudkowsky (yes I know he's not a philosopher) on an enormous amount of positions yet I can't stand him as a person. further, nietzsche is at times extremely entertaining and also extremely wrong. the idea of "favorite" does not map to philosophy at all and it's a pet peeve because I cannot reasonably expect people to know this in advance.
99. very specific:
* a person does something you suspect is kind of two-faced
* but so as to be charitable, you don't call that out right away and still engage in conversation
* however, you see someone else talk to them in a way that confirms your suspicions
example:
A: I met Christian Bale when I was working on the set of fhjsklfhujkl the other month.
B: What's he like?
A: Oh, he's great.
A: Hey! I met Christian Bale when I was working on the set of fhjsklfhujkl the other month.
C: OH MY GOD YOU MET CHRISTIAN BALE?
A: I KNOW
C: THAT'S AMAZING, WOW, I'M SO JEALOUS
A: *beams*
in this scenario, "B" is the more down-to-earth response, but "C" is the response that "A" actually wants. you want to think they're not being self-absorbed, so you ask questions to advance the conversation, but in fact they just want to be flattered -- which is annoying, and you only find this out via some other person's interaction with them.
100. when someone's defensiveness over word choice is motivated more by "don't u dare edit my word"ism than any sort of concern for accuracy. for example:
A: you can't say that someone is 'dumb' in a positive way, it's an insult, the insult is baked into the meaning
B: the word 'nice' used to mean 'stupid', words change. it doesn't have to be inherently insulting
A: uh I said the insult was BAKED INTO THE MEANING not that it was 'inherently insulting' please get my words right
B: 'inherently insulting' is closer to what you're getting at, also, I'm named after a letter and filling out forms is either easy or infuriating
101. online conversational peeves:
* applying timeframes to discussions when online discussions by their nature do not have a time constraint ("this discussion is over" -- if you can comment on it, no it isn't)
* expecting norms of private settings to carry to public settings (i.e. getting mad over someone commenting on a post you set to 'public')
* assuming spatial boundaries apply to online discussion environments (i.e. a group of 3 people talking together is obviously a group but in online discussion this is not the case, yet some people erroneously believe these ingroup/outgroup divisions to carry to online discussions)
the time one really gets me, I suspect this is the kind of thing that leads people to exit themselves from conversations or feel a need of closure that doesn't exist with online discussions since these conversations never really 'close'
102. when someone is extremely apologetic over something you never asked for or cared about as a way to compensate for the fact that they're stubborn and unapologetic about the real issues you do care about. this makes them feel like they've admitted fault and acquired some amount of points they can use against you later, even though your actual issue was never addressed and the unnecessary apology was at most missing the point.
103. pet when I need to repeat myself not because someone didn't hear me, but because they thought I didn't mean what I said or they didn't get a sense for just how precise and final my words actually are. this is not the trial edition of what I mean.
e.g.
person: "X, Y, Z"
me: "if you say X again I'm going to tase you"
person: "but as I was saying, X..."
-- tase --
person: "WHAT THE HELL MAN I JUST X"
-- tase --
person: "I'M JUST SAYING X"
-- tase --
person: "OKAY OKAY"
104. words like "subjective", "opinion", "valid", "point", "pedantic" and "semantic" are not annoying on their own, but the kind of forum-mod intj comment written with all of these at once is a headache
105. when an idiom is forced and inauthentically adopted from progressive culture or corporate culture or both. the tell is that they won't use the full range of its grammaticality. this would be fine if they weren't adopting an idiom from a culture they largely resent or deride in private, like "y'all"
106. being deliberately difficult in a conversation, such that time is repeatedly wasted on meta-discussion to resolve the difficulty this person created, then saying "this conversation has gone on long enough"
107. this:
me: "you don't normally do [thing] in that way, is something wrong"
person: "I am doing [thing]."
... I know, that wasn't the question.
108. the cultural trope of girls who think they're being funnily quirky about "hobos"
yeah girl, squalor is hilarious
109. answering a hypothetical by disputing the likelihood of some circumstance (or saying how to dodge that circumstance), rather than just answering as if that circumstance was true.
110. not being aware of or caring about one's class indicators. for example, using the gerund "onboarding" voluntarily is a slam-dunk class indicator.
111. Enormous, enormous pet peeve: when people end their sentences with "so..." and expect you to fill in the implication.
112. person A spells or pronounces a word wrong consistently enough for me to realize that's how they think it's actually spelled or pronounced. so, "definately" instead of "definitely", or "gayngnam style" instead of "gongnam style".
person A is corrected, and can clearly execute the correction (ie no funky tricks from other languages are involved)
person A, despite being told how to spell/say these things and being able on top of that, barely registers this correction as a real event and continues to make the same mistake and refuses to update their brain in any capacity.
huge segments of the population are this way. but this is such a fundamental part of being an informed person that I can't imagine how you even live your life if you don't/can't do this.
113. when you ask for a definition and someone defines the word in terms of another word that needs defining ("e.g. Q: what is hobnugget? A: it is a form of voidringer Q: what is a voidringer A: it is a person who nyarmangs")
even bigger pet peeve: when you ask for a definition and someone defines the term by analogy or metaphor. ("Q: what is political extremism A: it's letting politics be the mind killer." correct answer: an ideology that is considered to be far outside the mainstream attitudes of society)
114. when people working on a project that will release to the public get so wrapped up in their ingroup-thought that they don't anticipate what the actual public response is, e.g. people working on horrible movies who don't anticipate larger society hating it because in their filter bubble of the movie production they're all friends and like each other so therefore they have no other external sense of criticism to use
115. people who think pejoratives are inherently derisive of the content comprising the pejorative
e.g. "soyboy." this is a pejorative. sometimes it describes a kind of person so well that it's the best word to use. however, I also like soy. I eat some amount of tofu every day and it's about 20% of my total protein, with the bulk coming from dairy/fish/chicken in that order. I also love soy sauce, and think soy milk tastes good. obviously I don't dislike soy. yet a type of person INSISTS - regardless of the realities of social context - that language MUST function the same way all the time even though we have tangible evidence it doesn't.
116. when people can't predict audience response, ie they can't imagine what they do judged by disinterested neutral observers
ex: whenever a couple or a group of friends or whatever does something stupid that sounds good to each other and they're blindsided by the media response or responses of people at large (eg on Facebook), I'm instantly annoyed.
ever since I was 15 I've tried to look at my behavior from the perspective of a universal and neutral audience who doesn't care about me. even if I disagree with what a media response is going to be, I'm almost always able to know what it would be if a spotlight were on me. the idea that you could just go your entire life without working on this skill is enraging; it's being willfully blind to so much of the world and not seeing this as a problem at all.
117. when a person's primary contribution to a discussion is their ability to show familiarity with the ideas under discussion. this is vague, so here's an example.
post caption: "harvey weinstein has tried to take down this photo, but the internet isn't going to let that happen."
reply, in the style that I hate: "Streisand effect."
not only is the caption *clearly getting at* the streisand effect, making pointing this out needless and redundant, the only this kind of reply does is exhibit this schoolboy gameshow trivia attitude, as if one is saying "look at how current / informed I am." it does not actually contribute anything, at all.
now. if you think this pet peeve is oddly specific -- it is.
however, the sort of person who does this will do it often. I was once in a class with a woman who did this every day, at least once, for an entire semester. it was infuriating, and I'm acutely aware of it now.
118. there is this statistical fallacy some people make - there's probably a name for it but since I don't know what that is let's go with the Averages As Essences Fallacy in lieu of one. this where someone infers that because something is on average bad, the thing carries a necessary harm.
to illustrate why this a fallacy in an obvious way, imagine a study on accidentally walking into a traffic pole. getting hit in the head because you weren't looking in front you and walked into a traffic pole can't possibly be good for you, so on balance it will average to "bad for you" and all related literature on getting beaned by a traffic pole would say that, but in practice it's harmless.
quantitatively, if you rate harm or risk or whatever from -10 (most harmful) to completely neutral (0) to completely beneficial (+10), something that gives no benefit will be at most 0. and if the spread of numbers is like -0.02, -0.01, -0.05, -0.12 and so on this will average to a number that is "harmful", ie worse than zero and so it's technically true to say "(thing) is harmful", but it's misleading (ie leads to falsehoods) because people will infer that "(thing) is harmful" means more than it does.
119. observation: sometimes a more abstract version of a common phrase works better because the common phrase -- *due to* its commonality and how much people *think* they already know the intended meaning -- has emotional baggage that actually distorts the meaning
e.g. "stop drawing interpretations that don't follow" or "stop making non-following interpretations" are favorable to "stop reading into things" because a huge portion of people take "reading into things" to mean you are accusing them of being neurotic or overemotional
120. this confusion.
assumption: something that must be taken to be true for something else to occur
presumption: an inference that skips at least one step / a conclusion that skips at least one premise
assumption: "it's assumed that every harvard student has graduated high school"
assumption: "we will assume for this class that everyone has an internet connection."
presumption: a"you like diet soda? can I presume you also care about calorie intake?" (reasoning to necessarily get to this conclusion has been skipped)
presumption: a"since this movie is all about the hero, I'm going to presume he doesn't die unless it's at the end."
121. hearing someone say "why didn't anyone tell me that?!" when you know absolutely well many-ones told them that
122. "see I know the thing"-ism
person A: it's a snake that eats itself
person B: ouroboros.
at the very least its plausible if not probable that A knows this term. this is essentially pattern matching to satisfy oneself.
123. people who, during argument, think "go research [this thing]" is effective; are you actually going to expect me to exert more effort in learning why I am wrong than you are in telling me?
125. unnecessarily referring to people as their occupation, vocation, income stream, hobby or "thing" as opposed to the more defining traits of who they are. "he was held up by a barber wielding a shotgun" -- how relevant is the barbering? is it because it happened in the course of barbering or did you just want to mention he was a barber as some kind of fun roleplay?
126. "this is basically everything" / "I love this" / "obsessed with this energy"
comments like these cannot possibly be real. there is no way someone is obsessed with the vibe of your photo. that's not how obsessions work and most people can barely maintain a thought for more than five seconds. you are a blip. so what this really means is something more like "I think this is pretty cool", which carries several implications:
1. some people are so used to communicating in hyperbole that they have no idea what they really think.
2. the disparity between "this is neat" and "this is everything I'm obsessed with this energy" is the extent to which someone's real thoughts are inaccessible to them.
3. not only do people do this, people who do this don't have the slightest idea that (1) and (2) are what's going on.
4. a huge demographic of humans are used to this being their normal.
127. people who say comedy is about "punching up" are describing what they wish comedy did, not what makes things funny. the power relations of comedy might be irrelevant to how funny a joke is. one of the funniest parts of ken jeong's standup is when he rebuffs stalkers by giving the name of his gated community as a challenge. and if punching up becomes some sort of comedic requirement, making fun of the idea of punching up will be funnier than punching up itself.
it's an e-libertarian fantasy that if you restrict something people will want to do that thing more. sometimes that is true. often, though, people just go along with the restriction because it's the low effort thing. it's also a memelord fantasy that comedy will win out in the end. there have been many regimes that have successfully suppressed the use of comedy. it's also possible for a regime to weaponize comedy as propaganda, a la Waldo in black mirror. but *what is* funny is a descriptive question, and unnecessary restrictions almost always end up being successful objects of mockery. any sort of restriction placed on comedy that isn't extremely reasonable will be comedic material on its own. I never stop being surprised at how poorly this principle is understood.
128. engagement bait images that are a series of choices where every option is luxurious and fantastic and all I learn is what consoomer choices my social media friends would make in situations of comical financial excess. "oh wow you'd pick the house with the pool over the house with the water WOW bro I feel like I know you. bro you'd take a million dollars to spend two weeks in a house without air freshener? 😱 bro wat if... u had to pick between... 🤔 lambo...... 👀 or 🤔🤔🤔 ferrari? 😳 omg ferrari too? bro........"
129. it'd be easier to take the "social media is overrated anyway" crowd seriously if they wrote letters. not literally, but they're typically not people who email or text often. and if you're not going to email or text, you've forgone the modern equivalent to letters, which was the pre-internet way to stay in someone's thoughts, and if you're not able to stay in someone's thoughts, you only exist when they're in front of you. saying you're not into social media without implementing any other form of long distance communication is a creative way of rationalizing your inability to maintain relationships with people who aren't forced in your face by life.
130. attaching "post" to anything does not mean it's actually beyond the thing "post" is attached to. adoption of this term does not mean something better has come along, or that the thing "post" was attached to has been refuted.
calling yourself 'post-science' does not mean you are beyond science.
calling yourself 'post-logic' does not mean you are beyond logic.
and so on for whatever you can come up with.
in a lot of usages this will be the Begging the Question fallacy in the form of a word, since it's not established that the term is actually beyond whatever the "post" prefix is attached to, but you're supposed to accept the word at face value as beyond this thing by using it that way. and even if the word doesn't actually make a beg the question argument, the marketing for the word might direct a lot of people into that reasoning process.
we know the authors of terms like these are often making these errors because they could have labeled these terms something like "science-skepticism" or "logic-skepticism" whatever, which suggests a critical look at science. instead, attaching "post-" jumps to treating the -ism as true right out the gate.
I cannot convince people who make these terms to stop doing it; they will always do it as long as it works. but I can at least let you know that this is what's going on, so that you can at least identify the fallacious (implied) reasoning process when you see it.
131. I will never legitimize "we won" BIRGing in sports. if the spurs win, that means duncan and ginobili and tony won. not you. you sat down eating nachos and maybe got a little winded after moving out of your arena seat.
132. There is a bizarre trend that’s been going on for the last five or ten years where influencers co-opt AAVE, but at the level of intonation or pragmatics with plausible deniability. It’s a kind of pseudo-AAVE used by influencers, often on Twitch or YouTube or Twitter. It’s not AAVE, and it’s not a full code-switch, but it’s just enough AAVE to fly under the radar. The people doing this the most are, oddly or perhaps not-so-oddly, left-wing progressives. I call it “fauxbonics” because it’s not-quite-ebonics but not-quite-*not*-ebonics, and it’s adopted by decisively non-hood demographics of people for flair purposes.
examples:
"IT'S YA [BOY/GIRL]"
"YOOOO" (as an exclamation, not a greeting)
"I see you!"
"miss me with that [thing]”
“[boy/girl], I gotchu”
maybe “MAH MAN”, but the “mah” is risky so it’s usually “my”
and of course:
“y’all”, but fortified with the southern sass that accompanies a black person saying it, like “I KNOW y’all didn’t just [action] in my [thing]” — you can feel their urge to z-snap through the screen
Note that it's not a full AAVE code switch. They’ll say “y’all motherfuckers are crazy” but not “y’all motherfuckers is crazy.” They’ll strategically avoid saying "my homeboy" or "dis foo", because those have actual class connotations. They won’t say "oh LAWD" or "anything that screams “white person imitating black people”, even if it’s something someone who grew up speaking AAVE would; it must not be obvious. Dropping a full “YOU GET ON WIT ‘CHO BAD SELF" is too obvious. It must be a subtle, tonal adoption of the attitude and sass and not much else. It’s less culture and more a kind of clothing; it’s appropriation at the level of verbal aesthetics. I’ll try my best to give some examples.
At the beginning of an otherwise impeccable cover of High Hopes, Caleb Hyles does this Jason DeRulo-like “YO! WE HERE! PANIC!” (referring to the band, not a command to panic). The lyrics themselves are a little fauxbonics; white people who aren’t from the deep south don’t start sentences with “mama said” or “my mother said”, and this certainly wasn’t a mannerism the singer had during the “I chime in” days. (The song itself was written by a team of white people: Jake Sinclair, Jonas Jeberg, Brendon Urie, Jenny Owen Youngs, Lauren Pritchard, Sam Hollander, William Lobban-Bean, Taylor Parks, and Ilsey Juber with “additional production by Jonny Coffer.”)
Here’s what fauxbonics is not: Eminem. Eminem is just AAVE; he grew up speaking that way, and he black-passed, or at least vocally. Dr. Dre, who is about as good a judge of the blackness of a rapper as anyone could be, did not know he was white when he first heard him. Eminem’s accent is a class marker; he can’t turn it off. If he imitates a typical white American he’s imitating an accent other than his.
Fauxbonics is something like this music producer reviewing KDA's "Pop Stars". You can tell that this is forced, because every sentence has a hand movement or some kind of flair. He never does anything mundane. He goes out of his way to use buzzwords or slang or some kind of gesture at this flavor of swagger. And, occasionally, his accent reverts to General American; this isn’t a deliberate code switch, it’s a clue that it’s affected.
Contrast that with this clip of an exercise trainer, who clearly just grew up talking this way: Phil Daru talks with a street accent, but at no point in this video does he make a show of his accent. He does not gesture. His accent is there when he’s talking about the mundane details of exercise movements. I suppose a person could affect an accent like this, but the linguistic patterns here are enough evidence for me to presume it’s not and run with that.
There are a lot of dumb political takes you could make about this phenomenon, but I think it’s much easier and more Occam’s Razor to say that fauxbonics is just white comfort class liberals trying to be cool by co-opting the maximum amount of blackness they feel like they can get away with, which is a phenomenon going back decades. BTS’s “Mic Drop” makes pretty clear that this isn’t just a white phenomenon.
But if you’re at all skeptical that fauxbonics isn’t centrally a “white people wanting to act black” phenomenon, just do a karaoke night where white people perform black rap songs. There’s a reluctance to fully lean into the manner and delivery, so they’ll go 60% and hedge with ironic rap gestures. White people and especially white liberals have had a complicated relationship with black culture, as many white liberals clearly want to act black but don’t feel like they are “allowed” to. Fauxbonics is an irritating manifestation of this desire, insofar as acting black is clearly the goal but can’t be stated as the goal. If pressed, they would act as if they don’t know what you’re talking about. We do, and you do, and the whole thing is ridiculous.
133. “zoinks, scoob”
assumption 1: you have a voice in your head that reads words, and your voice probably read that in the voice of shaggy from scooby doo.
“ZOINKS SCOOB”
assumption 2: your head voice probably read that as “louder” than last time.
“ＺＯＩＮＫＳ ＳＣＯＯＢ”
assumption 3: your head voice probably read that as “louder” than last time.
speculation 1: people have different levels of “loudness” of their head voice. so, if I write:
“the american economy is facing unusually high levels of inflation”
this may be read in a voice that’s maybe at 30–40% volume, relative to the loudest version of “zoinks scoob” earlier. however, some people may read that same “american economy” sentence, in all lowercase, and hear in their head what for me would be this:
“ＴＨＥ ＡＭＥＲＩＣＡＮ ＥＣＯＮＯＭＹ ＩＳ ＦＡＣＩＮＧ ＵＮＵＳＵＡＬＬＹ ＨＩＧＨ ＬＥＶＥＬＳ ＯＦ ＩＮＦＬＡＴＩＯＮ”
in other words, I am saying that one person’s lowercase may be another person’s yelling, and I am also saying that this occurs inside their head, in a way that’s very difficult to measure and perhaps impossible to measure accurately.
speculation 2: even though my actual-voice is somewhat loud, or can be, my head voice is relatively quiet. I am frequently drowned out by the ADHD tendency of songs replaying in my head. right now it is the “d-do you looove meee” line from Paula Abdul’s “straight up”, mostly just repeating itself.
observation 1: audiobooks are easier to pay attention to because they are “louder”, i.e. I can turn the volume up and make them louder than my head voice.
speculation 3, and the conclusion of this: both (1) ADHD thought-patterns and (2) the ability to focus on text in general may be influenced by how “loud” your default head voice is, and how much the loudness of this can override the loudness of other intrusive thoughts.
134. the kind of guy who thinks being technically correct means actually correct, who thinks that intentions don't exist and if you deny your motivations no one can truly know them. or, as one friend called it, Team Never Admit Things.
"why are you upset"
"I'm not upset."
"okay, why do you look upset?"
"I don't look upset. This is how I look normally."
"okay, but you don't look like that normally."
"No I don't."
135. for a lot of people, most of life is subtle avoidance patterns -- excuses, rationalizations, copes, not paying attention to things you should but decide not to, suppressing thoughts on purpose, deliberately allowing yourself to forget important but uncomfortable information, and so on. there are many arguments that go along the lines of "what do you mean, I am so much better off by not thinking about things that make me uncomfortable." this is widely accepted. there are very few arguments that go along the lines of "I am happier by doing -- and thinking about -- difficult things." put more directly: people are happy to tell you that their lives are better by engaging in acts that amount to delusion or rationalization, but they draw the line at *calling these things* delusions or rationalizations. admitting that their happiness comes from dishonesty or falsehoods is unacceptable. this tells me that people want to deceive themselves but only if they can believe they're honest people too.
136. comments that just state that they misread something because they think this in and of itself is funny enough to be off-topic. "I misread height as high lol" okay, and?
137. any time you hear good advice, just imagine how someone on the internet who is corner-cutty, halfassy, avoidant, glib, lazy — just, shitty — will read it example: "no surplus words or unnecessary actions" (marcus aurelius) -- the average loitering guy is going to take this as justification to post "tldr" on every article or post he can't be fucked to read, believing there to be some kind of moral basis behind his underdeveloped reading habits.
138. referring to something as 'classy' when you think wealth disparities are bad. for that matter, compliments that betray your values.
139. the boomer cringe of cheekily calling anything that you're doing a "university" that isn't actually a university as some kind of jab to the university system -- e.g.: prager university, renegade university, singularity university. this defensive mockery to try to erode an institution because you personally feel slighted that you might be evaluated for lacking it.
140. polar opposite takes -- if there is a take that is +10, they will go polar opposite and say -10, rather than 0. also contrarian is not the right word. it's more like meta-contrarian/intellectual hipsterism; if the contrarian take is "seed oils are bad" and the reasonable position is "seed oils are fine" the polar opposite position is "CANOLA OIL IS GREAT *BEGINS GARGLING* ORBGHLBLRGHLRBHL (gargling sounds)"
141. when someone asks "does anyone have an issue with it" knowing that their position of power makes people less likely to say anything bad, especially in the context of performance reviews, internal company reports, or situations where they themselves have created an echo chamber. it's even worse when they seem to believe their own echo and don't realize it.
142. people who respond with "not all" to a generalization, not realizing that the very idea of a generalization (a "most" claim) precudes "all"
143. attempts to infer monocausality in all phenomena because it explains some phenomena. for example, “A” in this interaction --
A: “Is ADHD environmental, genetic, or something else?”
B: "monocausality is usually wrong"
A: "except with scurvy, rabies, road traffic accidents, type 1 diabetes, HIV, malaria ...."
B: "and even in road rage incidents you're working to establish monocausality -- the other examples you mentioned have in common that they're biological phenomena where one-cause mechanistic inferences are possible. you should assume multicausality as a matter of rigor; given the base rate of multicausal:monocausal, multicausal should be your default especially in behavioral explanations without an overriding principle to make you think it's an exception."
144. there is a kind of person who is disproportionately affected by what they see as mischaracterizations about them. you can cripple someone's composure and ability to argue with you by merely describing them in ways they don't agree with, and this is usually epistemically immature. most people who care about the truth have to prioritize what kinds of falsehoods they care about. at some point it should occur to you that if trivia about you is indeed trivial, misinformation about you is too. so, in a purely informational sense it mostly doesn't matter if someone describes you incorrectly.
145. one of the bigger tells that someone has never been to a decent college is how a person discusses topics. usually, people who have had some writing courses have some sense of what The Point of discussion at any given time is.
I'm not saying that if you miss the point you haven't been to college, or if you haven't been to college you'll miss the point. I'm saying that it is a tendency college corrects to a degree that is frustrating. people who never learned how to write argumentative papers -- i.e. people who never figured out thesis statements -- will meander, tangent off of stuff that Isn't The Point, miss the point all together, or hyperfocus on details that don't impinge on the point. if you consider yourself someone who is autodidactic and value the act of teaching yourself, getting good at discussions/thesis statements and untraining the behaviors above should be a priority.
146. attacking a group that has no coherent ideology behind their observed behavior, acting as if they've been hypocrites. for example "oh of course the cops wearing masks are okay with masks NOW" (they could've been okay wearing masks this whole time, they're not necessarily the anti-mask segment from covid)
147.
(less conflict) ------------------------- (more conflict)
<------------------------------------------------------>
disagree | argue | yell | hit | fight | injure | kill
I feel like most people perceive conflict like this, with "argue" and "disagree" on some kind of gradient of conflict. intuitively, this makes sense to me, because this is how I grew up thinking of it also.
but the more I think about it, the more I think we're wired to think about this in the wrong way. what exactly are disagreements conflicts about, anyway? most conflicts through human history have been resource conflicts, with one side forcing their will over someone's resources. but... in an argument you're in a dispute over the truth. the truth isn't *yours*. no matter who 'wins', you win, because you both know the truth of the matter. assuming, you know, none of you punch each other.
and that's another issue. punching, hitting, etc are functionally about the farthest thing from arguing. arguments refine your beliefs and help you update them to be more in correspondence with reality, while violence may damage or even permanently sever (via death) your connection with reality.
I don't even know if it's possible for most people to see arguments differently on a wide scale, because we seem extremely predisposed to view them a certain way, but a civilization that *didn't* view argumentation as conflict would probably be way ahead of us.
148.
a very specific social problem is Successful Flakes
normally, flakes cannot have most jobs or be socially successful. but certain jobs are a very rare combination of hyperflexibility and high income, and this allows flakes to prosper far longer than they should be able to. (From a friend: "This is one of the biggest problems of academia. Many departments have a good number of professors who can't be relied on to do any of the service tasks, and so the other people have to do all of them.")
154. stating an immediate obligation like this is unique to them or that everyone else doesn't have something similarly pressing -- e.g. "hurry up, I need to get to WORK!". bro you WORK? no one else has this life pressure WOW that changes everything. go ahead sir. my deepest apologies for speaking poorly of the only human with a job, your employedness.
155. when people make a list of "most evil people", it's usually serial killers or dictators.
however, when people make lists of "worst things humans have done to other humans", it's something that large numbers of regular people did to other regular people. genocides don't happen because 100,000 jeffrey dahmers got together and decided to go on a killing spree -- they happen because normal people are convinced that evil is reasonable or acceptable.
a common factor to most if not nearly all of these "worst things" events is mob mentality and groupthink. mob psychology is an entire area that psychologists study because of how important, destructive, and different it is from normal thought. the loss of individuality and responsibility from mob mentality is one of the most backward and harmful attitudes / thinking styles -- if not *the most* harmful -- that humans can let themselves regress to.
being part of a mob doesn't make you evil. however, everyone needs to understand the severity of what is happening when they let their brains do that, because even though mob-think isn't inherently evil, it plays roughly as much of a role in "the worst things we've done as a species" as sugar does in the obesity epidemic.
156. it concerns me that academics can use and demand extremely precise and stringent language from colleagues for concern that they may advance falsehoods, then go on twitter and retweet sloppy and neurotic ideologues who view accuracy as a burden and the idea of charitability as a threat; your burden of getting what you say right increases when more people see what you say, as that is more avenues for people to get things wrong. the idea that you have a burden of rigor to only some small segment of colleagues has the sense of obligation backward
157. dialogue habit people have from not realizing that discussions aren't about them
person A: here's a social problem
person B: well thank god this doesn't apply to *me*
example
person A: student loan debt is currently at 10 gazillion dollars
person B: good thing I didn't take out any loans to go to college, heh!
this is unproductive because you aren't actually advancing the discussion whatsoever, you're just patting yourself on the back because you don't fall into the thing-being-criticized. discussions about social problems aren't appraisals of you. they aren't *about* you. you aren't the point. talk about the issue, not yourself.
158. a lot of people seem to only give a shit about empathy once they feel some person or group has been victimized or unfairly treated. there are memes about this. empathy in this context gives you a feeling like you've done a good deed, but in fact this is easy and unimproving.
while understandable, selective empathy for the victimized strikes me as the equivalent of advocating charity only when you're stuck on the side of the road. just like how roadside charity won't actually make anyone a charitable or giving person, an exercise of empathy when you have "poor them" feels doesn't bring you any closer to understanding most of the people around you.
what I am saying is that no one wants to empathize with annoying salespeople, or guys with trucknuts, or "I want to speak to your manager" moms, or people who voted against their preferred politician, or whatever. but there are vast and highly populated segments of humanity who aren't rewarding to empathize with, who don't give you any good deed feeling -- who are simply aggravating -- yet if you actually want to understand human beings you should try to understand why they are the way they are too.
159. broadly, cartoon badness.
people who are "bad people" in a colloquial sense don't frequently worry about being that way or interrogate themselves on any real level. they either automatically believe they're "good" or don't care at all; by even worrying about it, you are doing better than you think.
but, also, "they're just motivated by hate". no one is motivated "by hate". they're motivated by the reason they hate something. that is like saying "the broken couple got back together because they're motivated by sadness", a couple was sad because they were apart.
160. this kind of deliberate point-missing, as if a failure to convince you in the most explicit and literal modality means it's wrong or you've identified some error: "(context: woman is walking backwards in a park to music, caption says "addiction looks like this too") Walking backwards to a lame song on the internet is what addiction looks like?"
161. The idea of a unified responsibility transition narrative.
Inspiration by Venkatesh Rao (heavily paraphrased): "The pernicious myth of the "unified responsibility transition narrative." This deeply flawed concept posits a singular, overarching moment or process by which individuals magically shed their "childish" ways and embrace an amorphous state of "adulthood" and generalized competence. It's an ineffective and wishful extension of specific, domain-bound accountabilities onto the vast, messy canvas of human experience. You can spot its influence when non-adherents visibly humor those who believe in it, instinctively curbing their behavior around them. This is a crucial defense, as nothing is more dangerous than someone operating under the delusion of a generalized "unified responsibility" in situations that demand specific, nuanced expertise, not broad, unearned confidence. Most who subscribe to this narrative are blissfully unaware of their adherence, perhaps because their core belief is that everyone else is stuck in a state of immaturity, while they, having undergone this fabled "transition," are now the enlightened "adults" indulging the world's lingering childishness.
This helps explain the enduring appeal of figures who credibly dismantle the notion of a sweeping "responsibility transition" that suddenly bestows universal wisdom. There are, without a doubt, vital and specific moments of increased accountability—like becoming a parent or mastering a complex skill. But the delusion that stepping into one such specialized role equates to crossing a threshold into a generally more "responsible" class of human is, ironically, among the most profoundly immature beliefs one can harbor.
The "unified responsibility transition narrative" carries seriously damaging consequences when it is applied to consequential decision-making situations that bear no resemblance to its supposed origin points (e.g., parenting). In this, it's akin to home ownership; both distort incentives and anchor individuals to specific narratives in powerful ways. Yet, while people are generally aware of how home ownership can skew their thinking, those who buy into the "unified responsibility transition narrative" fondly imagine their thinking is the least distorted. They see themselves as the most "real" people, and it's no wonder they often constitute the traditional middle class—the societal demographic most protected from large-scale risks and disturbing truths, essentially society's "child" class, kept away from certain domains for its own perceived good. The irony is staggering.
Ultimately, there is no such thing as a unified responsibility transition. There are only myriad specialized and domain-specific patterns of skilled risk-management behaviors and accumulated knowledge. We all pick up a few of these, and outside those particular areas, we remain, in essence, novices, operating under conditions of blissful moral hazard—and this, often, is a good thing. Perhaps the only truly comprehensive act of responsibility is to embrace the conclusion that a singular, unified responsibility transition narrative is a comforting fiction."
162. there is a phenomenon where it's more difficult to find neutrally-worded descriptions of someone's positions than it is to find distorted or biased ones. this happens when a public figure is not everywhere enough to be described often by major academics or the most neutral media outlets, but still well known enough to have wikipedia pages and coverage by journalists and fringe academics. since wikipedia's citation and notability policies defer to what is written, they will be parrots of existing media — so if most of what's written about them is biased that's most of what will be sourced for the wikipedia page. this enormously distorts what is taken as true about the person, and it takes either death of the person or a massive cultural attitude change to reverse the state of written media on that person. (any YouTube commentator type figure is prime-this, whatever this is)
163. a lot of people default to explaining behavior with events (trauma etc), but lack of events explain behavior also, and not nearly enough people think about this. example: "who hurt you" instead of "who didn't talk to you"
164. there is a huge difference between believing something is true and internalizing something is true.
claim 1: air conditioning is a wonderful invention.
someone who has never not had air conditioning might say this is true, and believe it, but they will have internalized this much differently than someone who has been without AC for a year.
claim 2: people do dumb things.
you can get most people to agree with this simply by talking about their commute. however -- court judges, police officers, front desk workers, divorce lawyers, boot camp instructors, and various kinds of psychologists and demographers and educational assessment professionals will know this is true much more than a normal person knows this is true. (this is why I used "internalize" over "appreciate"; unless you're malicious for no reason, "people do dumb things" is something you probably wish weren't true.)
claim 3: you have access to all of human knowledge at your fingertips
in my experience, this is something people appreciate much more if Wikipedia / Library Genesis / SciHub didn't exist in their childhood. when I was a kid, certain kind of books were books I "should" read, and this made them unappealing in ways I find hard to articulate. I can imagine that zoomers who grew up being told that wikipedia is something they "should" do might have been resistant to this. but, as a result, the scope of this truth may be lost on them.
165. being charitable is important, but there is a sense where being charitable is prolonging an epistemic bandaid-rip.
eg:
person A: if you work hard and keep at it you won't be poor
person B: yeah being lazy makes you more likely to have problems
person A: exactly
two things are immediately bad about this interaction. person A needs to hear that scarcity is primarily what determines economic success, not degree of effort, because that's by far the more accurate thing. second, because they said "exactly", we know they've just turned their brain off and have rubber stamped this as Things I Can Be Sure About or #Facts or whatever, so by being charitable we've missed the window to give them the more centrally important correction that will align their belief to what's actually going on.
166. ad hominem is a logical fallacy that a lot of people think they understand and don't. ad hominem is not "fuck you." it's not "you're dumb." it's when you focus on aspects of a person's character OR CIRCUMSTANCES to take their argument to be less true. "2+2=4 because (insert proof), also, fuck you, you're a moron" is not an ad hominem argument. "we can't take this person's 2+2=4 argument to be true because he's never taken math" is an ad hominem argument. digs at motive are digs at circumstances -- so it's also ad hominem to say "well, this person is a banker, so obviously they want 2+2=4 to be true. let's not buy it." something like "you're black, so 2+2=4 can't be true" is clearly false. something like "you're white, so 2+2=4 can't be true" is also false. a lot of dialogue about privilege and standpoints and whatever else amounts to ad hominem, but that's not the point of this post.
much like how "recovery" when describing unjust prison sentences is a good-sounding way to describe a bad thing, "representation" is often a way to describe ad hominem in reverse. in scholarship, anyway, there is this idea that you should cite people of demographic x, or include people of demographic y in your best-of lists, or specifically make lists like "best nonfiction books by [demographic]."
instead of dismissing the truth of someone's argument by circumstances, this style of representation is affirming the truth of an argument by circumstances. the idea that there should be some kind of burden to ignore the normal reasons you'd cite someone (or add them to your "best of" books list), and instead fixate on the most superficial aspects of a person at the expense of the substance of what they're doing.
if it's fallacious to reject someone's work because of their race -- and it clearly is -- it's also fallacious to affirm someone's work due to their race. the situations where this won't be the case deal with very specific subject matter and claims. it's important that this mindset is squashed at some point if you give a shit whatsoever about preventing misinformation and bullshit from perpetuating.
167. things that immediately demote what someone says to the edges of my attention: citing the dictionary as a prescriptive rather than descriptive entity. this is one of those "you don't understand how knowledge works or what dictionaries do" things. it's especially revealing when someone cites the dictionary about specialist terms, like "justice" or "assault".
not sure what else, but this is something I always learn mid-argument, and it's one of those "okay, had I known you were a Doesn't Understand Dictionaries person, I wouldn't have engaged you at all". as in, if we could walk around with little The Sims crystals hanging over our heads and I somehow knew a way to separate the "understands descriptivism vs. prescriptivism and how lexicographers think" people from the "thinks dictionaries are final words in debates" people, I'd be immensely happier.
168. there is no place for trust in truthseeking. any process that is not independently verifiable cannot be treated as factual. a government's word that someone died in their cell is an allegation, not a determination. human beings are inherently not trustworthy, and technology is more reliable than human beings. STOP treating official information as determined truth. it isn't. it's hearsay that happens to be reliable more often than it isn't, but this is no less hearsay than if a person who happens to be reliable more often than they aren't says so.
there are so many errors in official information that this should be transparently a mistake to anyone who even bothers to reflect for longer than a fart. my 'official' address, to multiple hospitals, is typoed to the degree that "ferret street" is a typo of "fierce street." I've corrected this enough times to count on two hands and it persists. this is to say nothing about what we know about how much data collection quality varies on a country-by-country basis, to the extent that calling what third world countries collect "data" amounts to aggrandizement -- or how we know that governments and reliability vary depending on who is the president, prime minister, secretary of whatever, head legal whatever, head prosecutorial whatever, chief of whatever and so on, which can all of course vary by jurisdiction.
any department that cannot make a publicly and independently provable case can be at most believed. if you must trust information closed off to you, this is not truth. this may be good-enough for everyday operations and it may be good-enough to not disturb your day, but it is NOT a process of getting to the truth. OFFICIAL INFORMATION DOES NOT CARRY A SPECIAL EPISTEMIC STATUS OR QUALITY MERELY BY BEING OFFICIAL. many of you should know better.
so:
- we should be agnostic about what organizations say by default, just as we would be agnostic to any other person, because organizations are not inherently more reliable than the individuals who occupy them. in other words I am saying we should not auto-believe the claim "mcafee dies by suicide" but we should also *not* auto-believe the claim "mcafee didn't kill himself."
- we need to have some process by which we can scrutinize potentially scrubbed suicides and give higher evidential value to "I'm not going to kill myself" kind of information. there is a prior assumption here that the word of law enforcement authorities should override an individual's. my contention is that I don't think it should, esp. with "I'm not gonna do it" kind of tweets and get-a-tattoo-of-it level insistence.
- we should not give by-default credibility to the eyewitness report of institutions merely because they're institutions, because the same vulnerabilities that exist in eyewitness testimony exist for testimony made by multiple people. no amount of testimony, collectively, should prove anything, lest we start believing in UFOs and bigfoot merely because thousands insist they have in unison.
- to reiterate: our judgments should be evidence-based both ways, and the word of institutions is just as much hearsay as an individual's word.
169.
- June, 2025