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kerrrrr-rikey
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feh. barbelith's strict plaintext warps communication by reducing available signals/signification: i can't hide or shrinkify this post.
in terms of on-topic paying-attention-to, if this post is the sound of the other boot dropping, the following post is a thunderclap. if you're interested in the topic: same as last time: please skip over this post to the following one.
but in the interests of public (ie, on-thread) fairness:
(in reverse order)
wombat:
cheers and hi and great name and see below.
nina:
> > this thread for me is very secondarily a bit of a test thread, helping me assess whether barbelith's stated goals are actually achievable with barbelith's current environment.
> They're not so I should give up that ghost now.
...
> In short: the standards are higher than most places in that we generally require an explanation for personal opinions rather than letting them float. Something that you have generally been perceived as objecting to in this thread.
thanks. i don't agree with the general population's interpretation, but thanks for being clear. hopefully this post will address at least aspects of the divergence between the general perception and mine.
ganesh:
as per nina, synchronicitically (er?). and thanks for the on-topic addition.
boboss:
> "Salt, if you want people to take you seriously, mate, you're really going to have to stop accusing Haus of trolling. "
thanks. intent understood and point taken.
but... please observe that i've mentioned trolling precisely twice: once vaguely, and once while addressing haus's behaviour.
not exactly a tourette's situation.
whereas, if i was playing haus's games and read this: "stop accusing Haus of trolling. We've heard it before, we've heard it 1000 fucking times"; i'd post "There's no smoke without fire..." then surf the wave of everyone's default reaction of "well, yeah, everyone knows that, that's true, to an extent".
and in that single line, i summarise a GREAT deal.
> "*some* of your posts are spectacularly inarticulate (your lack of sensible capitalisation really isn't helping, neither are the bullet points)."
yeah, sorry, i type a lot and quickly and have over the years gradually arrived at now tending for chat-style/conversation-style semi-interactive typing to just type, only touching capitals to indicate emphasis. it allows me pretty much dictation-speed typing.
but the result occasionally bothers some people hugely.
it usually helps to simply read it as though you were hearing someone read it aloud.
just for a short while at least, can i ask that you allow me some slack re typing style? i get a lot of benefit from being able to concentrate on the thoughts rather than the format. if you find it too strongly irritates you, please let me know and i will try to adjust my format.
i'm a little bit confused re your bullet points point: how would you prefer to see a list of items?
i've gone back over the posts on this thread but can't see any obvious inarticulatoriness. *wry self-mocking eyebrow-arch intended* ("WSMEAI"?) if you'd like to point me at them and explain why you regarded them as inarticulate, i'd be interested. if i need to change how i present things in order for this particular audience to most easily consider them, then any advice is welcome. however, in the interests of de-linkrotting, could you maybe PM them to me? if you'd like that fact explicitly recorded in-public on-thread, a minimally-linkrotting "[have PMed salt examples of his previous inarticulate posts]" would be great.
alternatively, if you'd prefer to keep it ALL public while de-rotting this thread, maybe create a separate thread and link to it. (previously asked of haus, for the record).
i'm easy either way.
kit-cat club:
>"Basically it's hard (for me) to see why you feel so aggrieved in this instance... you haven't really addressed any of the points that were made about the phrasing of yuor examples, which (as I said above) I think were not as self-evident as you considered them to be"
ref the first point: well put. and i think it's an important point, and others said the same. please see the end of this post.
ref the last point and taking on board what others have now posted: i agree with you (and the others who've now said this), with the caveats that:
• it WAS self-evident for some, who simply responded. but it was not self-evident for ALL. it looks as though about half the posters grokked how the examples related to the point and/or grokked the point directly, and the other half didn't. it's not clear how many non-posters grokked it.
• of the posters who DIDN'T get it, a couple of key players did not simply say so in a discussion-progressing manner, e.g. "i don't see how the examples fit the thread's stated goal -- could you please expand/improve/etc?", which is what you'd expect from anyone genuinely interested in the point of the discussion. rather, they appeared to attempt to reconstruct the thread around various possible extrapolations of the examples. as i said before: "these were not the actions of people genuinely seeking to contribute to a discussion."
but talking more generally to EVERYONE's Example-directed points: as i said before: "If people are genuinely interested in this, i ask that they look to the first post THEN the examples, choosing to see the examples as examples within what was said, rather than choosing to see the examples as a complete discarding of what was said.
And then, importantly, consider how the examples INTERSECT, rather than extrapolating from the irrelevances necessarily attached to any example."
Gumbitch!!!111oneoneonejuanjuan:
> "bloody hell. salty mate, welcome and everything but just relax would you? "
 fair point, well made.
and a real pleasure to read your phrasings. please read this subset of my typing in similar tone.
> "maybe, instead of this one, starting a 'what's your favourite tv show' thread might've been a better idea?"
ah, but i have any number of venues for trivial interaction, and barbelith declares itself an exemplar of rational discussion in an experimental context "where the standard of conversation, discussion and debate is higher than anywhere else online" and does not "celebrate any specific approach to the world".
if a man's trying to sell you a lamborghini, you don't ask how much shopping you can get in the boot.
you take it round the block on two wheels to see how it handles.
i am extremely interested in the stated purpose of this topic. it's not something i thought up for barbelith. it was something i hoped barbelith could improve.
> "toksik said the other day 'what if an anti haus arrived?' or words to roughly that effect - salty reads this and is all 'as soon as my application is confirmed...hah! you will see! seeeee!' except we haven't."
sorry, nothing relative to recent prior history was intended. i have lurked barbelith for periods a couple of times over the last couple of years, based on the cal-tom connection, but only applied to the site on trying to add to a discussion i now have no memory of. months later an Approval pops up in the post effectively out of the blue and i dipped back in with write privileges.
> "sorry all for rotting this thread even more, but imvvvvvho, it's a load of old bollocks anyway."
in all seriousness: That's the Spirit!
this thread ['s original purpose, excluding rot] is, in a very real sense, "Pure Science" relative to Anthropology and/or Ethnography. just as there is no obvious benefit to studying snails' teeth, this thread is a load of bollocks.
on the other hand, if we knew how snails were able to make those insanely hard yet tough ceramics, we'd be able to pour concrete aeroplanes.
and europe now gets a substantial proportion of its entire population's power needs from the result of some people pouring huge amounts of their own effort and other people's resources into fiddling with high voltages to try to work out how atoms were made.
and on the other hand, you have different fingers.
so short term: yeah: absolute bollocks.
but... you never know... if we can find a sound low-level framework for what drives humans' grouping mechanism, there might be benefits for someone one day in odd ways we hadn't thought of right now.
it's still worth saying you think it's bollocks, though. because unless any benefit comes from it, it IS.
haus:
> ">if you know of a better or a barbelith-preferred way to handle such problems, i would greatly appreciate knowing it.
> No, no. Defecating in your hand and throwing it is about par for the course. You're doing fine. "
monkey see, monkey do.
this monkey bows, master. i did not realise it was a secret sk(wirr)ill only for master monkies.
theme common to several posters:
boils down to: "you had a disproportionate reaction to something i saw as reasonable."
expressed probably most concisely as:
> What I do see is a poster who has responded almost hysterically to honest criticism.
i will point out first in insufficient amelioration that other criticisms were simply responded to.
but....
but i must admit on rereading just this thread that, based on just this thread, my response to a couple of posts is easily interpretable as disproportionate.
and in a brief meta-explication note i'll mention i just laughed out loud on chasing through the various ways of explaining the how&why i interpreted a core few's posts as trolls. this will hopefully make sense in a couple of paras, but "hoist on your own petard, you nong" springs immediately to mind.
see, i've spent a lot of time online, on news, lists, and forums, at various places along the spectrum from poster to creator. and i've had VAST amounts of time flushed over the years by trolltypes. VAST amounts of time attempting to hose down conflagrations or sort out problems or ensure everyone ACTUALLY understands what's been said, while giving the problem-creators the benefit of the doubt. and eventually starting to get a feel for what the dangerflags are, and which dangerflags imply what. and after a while as your own experience grows, your own doubt diminishes. and in the same way an intensively trained spam filter picks WAY less emails as spam but is that much more immediately certain about the ones it identifies as spam, so i am that much more immediately certain about behaviour i identify as trolltype.
so when i see a small nexus apparently taking a win/lose (zero-sum) attitude to discussions, using strictly passive-aggressive language and camper tactics --using tactics at all, for that matter-- combined with conforming strictly to external-culturally-laudable memes while not only conforming to but emphasising internal memes, playing logic/sophist games, choosing to belittle difference rather than to encourage closer conformity, i have nearly every alarm bell going off, screaming "troll!"
but (to my mind, hilarious and embarrassing in equal measure) this is itself a example of precisely the syndrome underpinning this very thread:
"most people will reinterpret events or people as being iterations of a similar meme, rather than view the event or person baldly."
i mean, jesus, come on. how much more can i exemplify the syndrome i'm asking people to discuss?
just because i'm trying to work out the rules doesn't mean i'm not standing on the pitch.
i remember for years in england thinking that people in england saying "bless..." were being nice, not nasty; and similarly for years being startled by the occasional english person who regarded any swearword as an orrific attack on the very nature of civilisation and, particularly, them.
in a new subculture, your learned signals are suspect at best, wrong at worst.
haus et al may well be the nicest people in the world.
but after running over a few dozen of their posts --those on this thread and those previously directed to me, then alertedly those sitting in a huge range of threads in the barbelith archives-- all i could see was Troll.
i had taken my previous experience and applied its rules to a new environment.
and since my personal experience is unlikely to match barbelith-normal, my reaction is therefore disproportionate in context.
you are absolutely right, barbeloids. if i wanted to react that way, it would have been more appropriate for me to make explicit the steps in my reasoning. ex-ante, i viewed that as pointless time wasting. ex-post, i've cost myself at least that much time or more just trying to get this thread back on topic. and, rather more painfully, have probably cost this thread the participation/interest of most of the barbeloids i was hoping to interest in the discussion.
i reacted to haus et al as though they were "iterations of a similar meme, rather than viewing the event or person baldly."
hoist (along with others on this thread but this time rather more poignantly) on my own petard.
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