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This bit is so insightful: Purity always goes wrong. [...] . It doesn’t work to be too pure, because people deny their own negative stuff and then they start p

by narag 6y ago

This bit is so insightful: Purity always goes wrong. [...] . It doesn’t work to be too pure, because people deny their own negative stuff and then they start projecting it onto other people.

ericmcer 6y ago
Yeah this definitely resonated with me, it is just part of human nature to see the bad things we work on in our lives reflected in others. I focus on eating less meat? Now it is more off-putting when I see someone putting away a 20oz steak. I always make sure my car is parked courteously? Now someone who takes up two spots is even more abhorrent. It goes on and on.
- narag 6y ago
  That's a part of it. But there is more. Sometimes you fail to see how your behaviour is wrong because, hey, you're pure. If there's something wrong in the world, it is others' fault. There are two main obvious variants of this. One is blindness to some aspect of your behaviour that causes harm to others but it is not in your creed, like you're courteous and think of the common good, but you're a jerk or a violent person. Time ago someone said here in a comment that he almost punched a man in his face for throwing a cigarette butt on the street. The other is when your ideas are just wrong or the means to achieve them. Some persons think that sex and drugs are evil. Others think that repression is worse. In general, every idea of purity tends to create the image of an impossible world that just generates frustration. I suspect every idea that seems to expand into minutiae obsesively.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
I'm reminded of a vaguely relevant 'pro-purity' quote from Simon Peyton Jones et al, discussing Haskell, on the virtue of its purity as a functional language: > In retrospect, therefore, perhaps the biggest single benefit of laziness is not laziness per se, but rather that laziness kept us pure, and thereby motivated a great deal of productive work on monads and encapsulated state. [PDF] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/history.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... See also https://stackoverflow.com/a/31478674/ https://stackoverflow.com/a/31478674/

by narag 6y ago

This bit is so insightful: Purity always goes wrong. [...] . It doesn’t work to be too pure, because people deny their own negative stuff and then they start projecting it onto other people.

ericmcer 6y ago

Yeah this definitely resonated with me, it is just part of human nature to see the bad things we work on in our lives reflected in others. I focus on eating less meat? Now it is more off-putting when I see someone putting away a 20oz steak. I always make sure my car is parked courteously? Now someone who takes up two spots is even more abhorrent. It goes on and on.

narag 6y ago
That's a part of it. But there is more. Sometimes you fail to see how your behaviour is wrong because, hey, you're pure. If there's something wrong in the world, it is others' fault. There are two main obvious variants of this. One is blindness to some aspect of your behaviour that causes harm to others but it is not in your creed, like you're courteous and think of the common good, but you're a jerk or a violent person. Time ago someone said here in a comment that he almost punched a man in his face for throwing a cigarette butt on the street. The other is when your ideas are just wrong or the means to achieve them. Some persons think that sex and drugs are evil. Others think that repression is worse. In general, every idea of purity tends to create the image of an impossible world that just generates frustration. I suspect every idea that seems to expand into minutiae obsesively.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

I'm reminded of a vaguely relevant 'pro-purity' quote from Simon Peyton Jones et al, discussing Haskell, on the virtue of its purity as a functional language: > In retrospect, therefore, perhaps the biggest single benefit of laziness is not laziness per se, but rather that laziness kept us pure, and thereby motivated a great deal of productive work on monads and encapsulated state. [PDF] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/history.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... See also https://stackoverflow.com/a/31478674/ https://stackoverflow.com/a/31478674/