I've noticed that when people reduce some random thesis to a level of brevity beyond the minimum to actually express it coherently -- but do so succinctly and perhaps a bit archly -- the audience enjoys the illusion of effective communication, and fills in the intellectual voids on their own, affirmatively.
As if they've gotten a bargain, or been saved some time.
I mainly noticed this when so many people stopped writing awesome long-form blog posts, and supplanted it with tweeting. I seldom found value in the tweets, even from people whose blogs I prized. But many people did! And the tweeters were encouraged.
I see the same thing here. I mainly know the OP from his essays, which are overall quite good (IMHO). I subscribed to the RSS feed of them. I think I've read them all, even.
But it's hard to imagine a version of this tweet as a full essay (even a short one) that didn't end up repudiating the core idea entirely.
Because once you had to add even a bit more detail -- such as examples of it happening in the wild -- you'd end up realizing that people don't generally get mocked for changing their minds. That changing your mind is actually encouraged and praised by various books, corporate 'leadership principles', philosophers, etc... and in most cases, derision and animosity aimed at opinion-changers tends to be aimed at the ones who are obviously self-serving hypocrites, not those who've genuinely reconsidered things and come to a better conclusion.
So even though you still could, no dooubt, come up with some examples, through the process of writing the essay (or blog post), you'd... realize it was bullshit.
And then, you wouldn't publish the essay.
This has often struck me as one of the worst things about Twitter (i.e., that everyone tries to have conversations about serious stuff on a platform that's not conducive to long/detailed/nuanced posts), but it looks like PG's paying for Twitter's little paid subscription service, which, iirc, does let you write lontform tweets to your heart's content. So that's a little ironic, maybe.
Though either way, he would have access to the features of it, so your main point stands.
It's a disregard for context and nuance that I don't find specific to twitter.
I could not agree more. Tweeting and similar have been pretty bad for real intelligent and honest discourse.
You also hit on another terrible side-effect of extremely short-form discussion: the process of writing is also the process of analysis, at least when done right. To accomplish a good piece of essay-writing, you need to really think things through, do a bit of research in order to support for your thesis, etc.
The form itself requires a process that is more likely to force you to really think your thesis through, anticipate objections, etc. A short sentence requires none of that, and so doesn't encourage critical thought.
We have a word for this, it's "tweeting".
Ok, then you should know that your response was also tweeting, given that definition.
We have a name for it. It's "twitter post."
I don't think his essays aren't all that strong either. Just stronger than a twitter post and can survive a quick once-over. "Dabblers And Blowhards" is a good blogpost to disabuse you of the notion and show you the trick in his writing style.
So brevity is part of it, but I think a lot of people just prefer to engage in abstract philosophizing. It's more fun I guess, harder to argue with.
And weakness must always be punished.
I have no idea where PG puts himself on that spectrum. But SV culture is notorious for being convinced of its own awesomeness. So it's possible that if someone is being mocked it's not because of a change of mind, but for other reasons.
True, this is something that devs who are outside of SV are very often mocking SV devs for. That low-hanging fruit is too ripe to ignore.
The only part I would disagree with is this:
>So even though you still could, no doubt, come up with some examples, through the process of writing the essay (or blog post), you'd... realize it was bullshit.
>And then, you wouldn't publish the essay.
Alas, I feel you have some very optimistic assumptions about the level of self-awareness of someone who would otherwise indulge in "fallacious pithiness", the essence of which is condensing a narrative down to a quirky soundbite.
The pithiness doesn't come for free; the process of reduction is even more laborious than the one of expanding on a thought.
That road goes both ways: the same false narrative can be beefed up with numerous examples and arguments that support it, all while leaving the author immensely satisfied with the result.
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Side note: as an autistic person, I used to make the same mistake, namely, thinking that fallacious argument of the sort we see here are the undesired result of carelessness that could be avoided if only the processes were improved.
Alas, such results, more often than not, are the outcome of a lack of the desire to find and express something that one feels confident is true. Such desire, however, is an autistic trait[1].
Most people find it not only acceptable, but desirable and enjoyable to construct narratives that look good, regardless of their veracity in the actual world we live in.
The laws of physics allow for a society in which PG's narrative would be true; and our society allows for enough outlier examples to cherry-pick for it. (I have experienced criticism for changing my opinion in a long discussion, the change stemming from being convinced that the other side has a good point - but that was an isolated incident). Without an urge to fact-check oneself (is what I say really true?), entertaining these thought experiments and turning them into words for others to read is a pleasant pastime.
It's the prose equivalent of vapid poetry, with pithiness being the constraint instead of rhyme. And it hits just the same.
[1] https://www.employmentautism.org.uk/blog/autism-and-honesty
People seriously overvalue "being right". Discovering you're wrong is far more valuable and is worthy of celebration. It means you learned something, and are just a little less ignorant as a result.
Sure, but if in the course of being convinced of the wrong thing they have caused harm it should cause guilt and embarrassment.
I think that regardless of whether or not someone's belief is correct, causing harm to unconsenting others should always cause some amount of guilt or embarrassment.
But if I hold a belief that is leading me to cause harm to people, and then I discover that I'm wrong, is that not a reason for even greater celebration? It means that I have become a less harmful person.
That said, sometimes one needs to declare a position without be absolutely sure and it is wise in that scenario to declare the fact that you are unsure.
Reminds me of this classic Limmy sketch:
Yeah this sort of grand, vague postering is the kind of thing that tech personalities do and it's because they get the kind of blind positive reinforcement from followers who have their own agenda.
Someone in his position can write something like "Not everything is knowing" and get a bunch of adulatory responses and just think they're providing some deep philosophical fodder.
“I think people are generally honest.” (Strawman) “Politicians and con men make a career out of dishonesty, how can you suggest they are honest.”
Changing your mind doesn’t make you a hypocrite. Hypocrites are people that claim to have certain morals, but act differently. That’s not people that change opinions.
Example of a hypocrite:
“The Bible says homosexuality is wrong and everything in the Bible is right, sorry I have to be against gay rights” * proceeds to have affairs, use the lord’s name in vain, and does many other things the Bible considers wrong*
This person isn’t a hypocrite if they change their minds about gay rights, or even went back and forth.
They are a hypocrite because they claim their actions are guided by the Bible, yet clearly they aren’t because they conveniently choose what to follow.
Few Americans follow the bible just because (fundamentalism).
Most do it for cultural reasons, and those cultural norms also dictate picking-and-choosing what to follow, while claiming the religious authority of the bible. It's not the individual that is hypocritical, it's the culture.
The reason I mention this is that hypocriticism requires some kind of logic to track consistency (or lack of) and yet faith is blindly illogical (believe this just because). No one is analysing why someone has (or chooses to have) a faith in something in the first place.
I also think there is a definition of hypocrite that goes something like: being a proponent of some universal moral rule, while excepting oneself from it.
I know it's only tangential to the topic being discussed, but it's quite important, so I'll elaborate.
I used to be anti-gay. So, in PG's words, ~P (why did he choose "~" instead of "!"? ~ is bitwise not in c++, while ! is boolean not. It's going to remain one of the mysteries of life). Now I'm not only pro-gay, pro-trans, etc, but thankful that I live in a country that is free, and gay and trans people, and all people, can decide for themselves what life they want to live, and to consider that they don't need approval from the rest of the society, or actually, that the rest of the society owes them an approval for their life choices.
But why was I anti-gay? Because that is what I learned as a kid. Kids learn from adults. Especially during teenage years, they are rebellious, but in reality, they still take their value clues from adults. And once you are an adult, and hold some values, it's difficult to think that they values you've held all your life were wrong. So you come up with excuses. Like the Bible thing. I grew in an atheist society, so that was not my excuse. My excuse was simply that I was raised thinking that it's wrong to be gay. That was it. In time I changed my argument into "Gay people want to get marriage benefits from the government", but someone pointed to me that gay people pay taxes too. So, after a while I realized that whatever arguments I had were hallow. But most people don't go through what PG call the journey from ~P to P. Their brain doesn't allow them too.
Find a way to help them.
In fact, those people generally get more attention and praise than the people who have had the beliefs all along. Movements seem to generally be lead by born-agains. Every other media liberal has their conversion from a sheltered conservatism story, and conservatives constantly talk about how they were dumb liberals until they saw the world.
A lot of people are aggressively impervious to all reasoning or evidence until the opinions of people who they rely on for friendship or money change, then they suddenly change opinion without any new argument or evidence being introduced. That type of flocking behavior is what is seen as hypocrisy.
I'm not sure. Consider those who are de-transitioning. The effect seems akin to departing some flavor of cult.
But it's rare to mock someone for having a true intellectual journey: starting in one place, working hard, gathering more evidence, and arriving in another.