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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 p

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?
    - danharaj 7y ago
      > 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. I mean there's the "sequences" on Quantum Mechanics at LW. Or the uncritical embrace of Bayesian statistics as metaphysical panacea in this circle of the Internet.
    - scottishcow 7y ago
      Why is it perplexing? People put more trust in fields where researchers follow (or are expected to follow, at least) the scientific method. I work in what may be called a "soft" science field, I don't complain when people don't view our output as authoritative as that of hard science. I'm proud of my work, but I don't claim to have any monopoly on truth (or even a better grasp of truth, for that matter) just because I have a list of academic publications. It's the nature of the field.
      - claudiawerner 7y ago
        You don't have to put trust in a field to do an overview of the existing literature and show how and where it is wrong. Neither philosophy or mathematics, for example, don't follow the "scientific method" (let's assume the Anglophone conception as opposed to Wissenschaft for the sake of arument), yet I would hope that people would rightly call out a post on utilitarianism that doesn't take into account arguments from the last twenty years, or an argument against metaphysics that stops at Hume, and they'd be skeptical of a proof of the Riemann hypothesis expressed in all but the terms of mathematicians. If you're more convinced by my mathematics example than my philosophy one, it just shows that this isn't about the scientific method at all, but standards of rigor in argumentation, which soft sciences are perfectly capable of, at least internally within frameworks. In that case, all it would take is for the author to mention which framework they believe has the most explanatory power, and why. Lastly, I fail to see why this would be such an issue in the first place; as an example, take a claim like "viewing pornography is associated with misogynistic attitudes", or even more strongly, that pornograhy causes such attitudes. The fact that it is a broad claim, that relies on population samples and indirect measurement, does not make the research into the topic (both in support and in denial of the claim) any less valid to be ignorant about, if you're writing an essay on whether porn should be censored or not. Different epistemic standards are not an excuse for ignorance. "Not as authoritive" is not the same as "no authority at all", and it's especially not the same when the essay in question itself is engaging in that topic.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Yhippa 7y ago
I thought it was very clever and got my brain to try to stretch to figure out what he was saying. This beats a lot of the content out there that's dumbed down.
1123581321 7y ago
A good test of jargon is whether a full translation of it makes the written work too laborious to read. These terms do not have brief, complete definitions in English. If that is accepted, the question becomes whether the audience understands the jargon. Ribbonfarm readers do or are willing to learn what they might mean.
Dylan16807 7y ago
And the first essay linked, about crash-only, screwed up the analogy so badly...

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?
  - danharaj 7y ago
    > 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. I mean there's the "sequences" on Quantum Mechanics at LW. Or the uncritical embrace of Bayesian statistics as metaphysical panacea in this circle of the Internet.
  - scottishcow 7y ago
    Why is it perplexing? People put more trust in fields where researchers follow (or are expected to follow, at least) the scientific method. I work in what may be called a "soft" science field, I don't complain when people don't view our output as authoritative as that of hard science. I'm proud of my work, but I don't claim to have any monopoly on truth (or even a better grasp of truth, for that matter) just because I have a list of academic publications. It's the nature of the field.
    - claudiawerner 7y ago
      You don't have to put trust in a field to do an overview of the existing literature and show how and where it is wrong. Neither philosophy or mathematics, for example, don't follow the "scientific method" (let's assume the Anglophone conception as opposed to Wissenschaft for the sake of arument), yet I would hope that people would rightly call out a post on utilitarianism that doesn't take into account arguments from the last twenty years, or an argument against metaphysics that stops at Hume, and they'd be skeptical of a proof of the Riemann hypothesis expressed in all but the terms of mathematicians. If you're more convinced by my mathematics example than my philosophy one, it just shows that this isn't about the scientific method at all, but standards of rigor in argumentation, which soft sciences are perfectly capable of, at least internally within frameworks. In that case, all it would take is for the author to mention which framework they believe has the most explanatory power, and why. Lastly, I fail to see why this would be such an issue in the first place; as an example, take a claim like "viewing pornography is associated with misogynistic attitudes", or even more strongly, that pornograhy causes such attitudes. The fact that it is a broad claim, that relies on population samples and indirect measurement, does not make the research into the topic (both in support and in denial of the claim) any less valid to be ignorant about, if you're writing an essay on whether porn should be censored or not. Different epistemic standards are not an excuse for ignorance. "Not as authoritive" is not the same as "no authority at all", and it's especially not the same when the essay in question itself is engaging in that topic.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

Yhippa 7y ago

I thought it was very clever and got my brain to try to stretch to figure out what he was saying. This beats a lot of the content out there that's dumbed down.

1123581321 7y ago

A good test of jargon is whether a full translation of it makes the written work too laborious to read. These terms do not have brief, complete definitions in English. If that is accepted, the question becomes whether the audience understands the jargon. Ribbonfarm readers do or are willing to learn what they might mean.

Dylan16807 7y ago

And the first essay linked, about crash-only, screwed up the analogy so badly...