16 ms·

I hesitate to criticize this person, because they're presumably writing for an audience that already knows them, and probably are following for this style of wr

• alanbernstein 7y ago
  I suppose you could have shortened your comment here to "Why is this article so long?". Why all the extra words?
  • kick 7y ago
    Funny! Though the News Guidelines would prevent me from saying that. A better reduction of the comment that loses less meaning might be: "This article is pointless, and intentionally obscuring that it's repeating universal knowledge. Why?"
  • claudiawerner 7y ago
    My personal gripe with articles like this one is that they invent their own terms to frame the discussion in a particular way, perhaps in the hope that some time in the future, people will really start talking about "Internet beefs" or "beefy conversations" or something equally silly. The issue isn't the length - after all, use as many words necessary - the issue is with the relative paucity of research into whether this topic has been addressed in the relevant fields (sociology, psychology, media studies). Does the concept already exist in the literature? Are there any similar concepts? Let me have a go at it. I call this "the hacker blogger mindset", in which relevant literature in the field is passed over or simply ignored (assuming due diligence has been taken to research the topic, which it often hasn't been) in favour of a kind of NIH-syndrome thinking in which every concept the author thinks of is novel, it has not been noticed before by lay people or the academic community, and of course it hasn't been written up into a snazzy article with nice jargon that makes us sound clever like "mook manorialism". We'll throw a reference to Francis Fukuyama or Weber in there to convince the more skeptical that this is more than an unsubstantiated blog post. A famous guardian of the hacker blogger mindset is Scott Alexander[0] (and to a lesser extent Paul Graham and the LessWrong community), but it's nice to see new contestants who want to try their hand at sociological analysis without referencing any sociology. I hope I'm not being too crude when I say that essays like this are a kind of poor man's academy. You don't have to learn about standing objections to the theory (or the theory's assumptions) made by experts, because I called my theory "internet beef", and the remarkably similar academic theory that already exists isn't called "internet beef" - so none of your objections are valid against my internet beef! The optimist inside me wants to think that this topic hasn't been covered before, and that the essay addresses a problem that hasn't been addressed before. If that were the case, however, I would have expected the author to at least state as such - that after reading tens of papers on discourse analysis and Internet sociology, nothing similar to "Internet beef" showed up. Maybe I'm wrong and being unfair to the author - in which case, fair enough. Unfortunately, it doesn't negate all the other times I've seen this. [0] Scott wrote a whole post on his blog about a particular German philosopher. As it turns out, he hadn't read any of the philosopher's works, but only Peter Singer's much-criticized entry in the Short Introductions series. This was sufficient. Likewise, the author of this blog post doesn't seem to have read up on Internet discourse analysis, a topic which a search on Google Scholar throws up hundreds of papers.
  • Dylan16807 7y ago
    Explaining yourself is good. That two-paragraph comment explains itself. Get off your strawman horse.
    • engineeringwoke 7y ago
      You're doing the thing from the article
      • Dylan16807 7y ago
        By trying to stop someone else from making a hostile and nonproductive comment? Taking a comment, cranking what it says to 1000%, then applying it to itself as a 'gotcha' is not good discourse. So what do you suggest I do instead? And I am absolutely not fighting for any ideological position.
• creaghpatr 7y ago
  You're probably right about the first part as it's pretty tangential to usual topics of discussion at Ribbonfarm.
• quacker 7y ago
  Agree. Out of context, this takes a ton of effort to understand. Some examples - Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird - underground Internet that I’ve previously called the CozyWeb - unflattened Hobbesian honor-society conflict - Mookcoins are mined by knights through acts of senpai-notice-me - retreat into what I call waldenponding or to the CozyWeb Several of these link to other essays which, in turn, use ever more jargon whose definitions are found in yet other source material.
  • Lammy 7y ago
    I understand how it might seem obtuse and undecipherable, but it makes it so much more genuine and heartfelt to me. You can’t fake the experience of somebody who can channel that style of deep 2000s Internet zeitgeist.
  • twic 7y ago
    It reads LessWrong's cooler brother.
    • kick 7y ago
      Cooler? It reads like LessWrong's twin that decided to play D&D for an afternoon instead of Shadowrun.
    • piaste 7y ago
      More heavily watered down than cooler, I suspect. The only other Ribbonfarm article I've read was the "premium mediocre" one, in which they described themselves as a premium mediocre blog, adding "the actual upper-class readers read SSC or Marginal Revolution". On the limited basis of these two articles, I am leaning towards the idea that it was an accurate assessment.
      • claudiawerner 7y ago
        To learn about the link with SSC, it does not at all surprise me that Riboonfarm shows the same aspect of someone talking about various topics (in particular sensitive and sociological ones) without showing any evidence of reading any established research on them. It's perplexing how similar essays on natural world, not taking into account any research on physics in the last 100 years or more, would not be nearly as appreciated. If it's not acceptable in physics, why do we accept it when it comes to sociology or media studies?
• jslabovitz 7y ago
  I enjoy and appreciate Venkatesh’s Ribbonfarm writings, and other writings like his. While the cultural situations he’s writing about may be obvious, I appreciate his discovery and naming (‘jargon’) of the patterns he finds. You could look at it as developing an intellectual framework. I consider it a sort of contemporary philosophy, which tries to be both conceptual and actionable. Some of his essays have made me rethink major outlooks on my own life, and make important decisions. I think it’s important writing for our time. Often his essays are essentially experiments in structures and definitions, a kind of ‘what if we looked at things this way?’ methodology. In answer to your question of jargon/jokes, yes, that’s his methodology. There’s a lot of serious stuff in there too, but he likes to have fun with the ideas, as well as try to integrate his words into modern (online) culture in useful ways. Venkatesh wrote a related article a couple of years ago: ‘A Quick (Battle) Field Guide to the New Culture Wars’ (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/06/a-quick-battle-field-guide-to-the-new-culture-wars/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/06/a-quick-battle-field-g...). He essentially proposes that the only way to understand the the culture wars is to see them as actual wars, fought using the logic of warfare, not of, say, diplomacy or social rationalism. This essay has been extraordinarily useful to me, and has helped me develop very different political stances and associated actions. As this article itself suggests, I enjoy an information diet in moderation — some short, some medium, some long. Ribbonfarm is part of the medium/long diet, and I feel much better having read there. EDIT: removed unnecessary criticism of parent]
• itronitron 7y ago
  the jokes are there to build a bond with the reader through identification of shared knowledge ... specifically, if the reader 'gets' the joke then they feel a sparkle knowing they have a special shared insight with the author. I got the permaweird joke but the rest went over my head, naturally I stopped reading about a third of the way through as it is long-winded.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• mc3 7y ago
  My initial thoughts when reading were cynical - along the lines of "this person is trying to look clever and sell freakonomic / pop-science type books, but are the statements and conclusions based in fact, likely to be correct or are they useful to me?". Since I can't answer I didn't read on.
  • kick 7y ago
    They do seem to sell freakonomic/pop-sci books. Nice eye!
  • nostrademons 7y ago
    Venkatesh has a very playful and idiosyncratic writing style - you see that in his other posts, like the Gervais Principle or the series or "premium mediocrity": https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-life-of-maya-millennial/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l... It's just his personality - I don't think it's a particular affection to try to sell more, although I do think a number of his readers are there because they like the idiosyncracy. I also think that for posts like this, "are they based in fact and likely to be correct?" is the wrong question to ask. Posts about culture, worldview, systems thinking, etc are too broad to actually be "correct" - one way to see if this is the case in a domain is to ask yourself whether two different observers could observe the same facts, pick a different set to focus on, and draw entirely different conclusions (an exercise that Venkatesh frequently does on his blog). Rather, you read material like this for perspective. It's a way of training your brain to look at the same set of observations in an entirely different way. Then when you're faced with actual facts in your own life, you can apply the lens you just read about to it and see what the meaning of those facts is, and ideally shift rapidly between different perspectives to triangulate something approaching reality.
    • esfandia 7y ago
      > Rather, you read material like this for perspective. It's a way of training your brain to look at the same set of observations in an entirely different way. Then when you're faced with actual facts in your own life, you can apply the lens you just read about to it and see what the meaning of those facts is, and ideally shift rapidly between different perspectives to triangulate something approaching reality. Wow, I think this last paragraph of yours manages to capture exactly what a philosophy or an ideology is for: perspectives to help create meaning. My follow-up question then is: what makes for a "good" perspective? Can you judge it, to get back to the topic of this thread, by the number of mooks it enrolls?
• jbrukh 7y ago
  Well, the simple answer is that it is a cultural work. It is literature, not a documentation.
• DoreenMichele 7y ago
  I only was willing to look at the article because it was Ribbon Farm and the series on the Gervais Principle was really good. I know a lot already about social stuff. I don't often get big epiphanies from reading things. People sometimes make up terminology because they are trying to communicate ideas for which there really aren't popular terms. I struggle with this myself. I get accused of being idiosyncratic, using words to mean something they don't to other people, etc. New ideas require new terminology. It's part of why living languages grow, change, add new vocabulary, etc.