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Yes. PG is using a straw man as he often does. People are derided when they change their mind constantly, because it's (justly) considered hypocritical. But it

by bambax 3y ago

Yes. PG is using a straw man as he often does. People are derided when they change their mind constantly, because it's (justly) considered hypocritical. 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.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
I don't think PG is using a straw man. Rather, he's talking about "politics and other performatively dishonest arenas", which GP excluded, as outside of those areas, mockery is kind of... stupid.
- Retric 3y ago
  That’s what a strawman argument is. He’s attempting to artificially narrow the discussion. “I think people are generally honest.” (Strawman) “Politicians and con men make a career out of dishonesty, how can you suggest they are honest.”
- jahnu 3y ago
  He doesn't qualify who he is talking about and in which situations. This conveniently leaves room for charitable interpretations. Which is really close to a form of sophistry, in my opinion. Reminds me of this classic Limmy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z-a5hy7QO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z-a5hy7QO8
  - nkozyra 3y ago
    > He doesn't qualify who he is talking about and in which situations. 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.
lordkirchner 3y ago
I don’t think it’s uncommon to believe the person who started with the right answer is smarter, or wiser than the person who had to work to get there. However, many people land in the right answer right away by chance. If we valued finding the truth over being right, people would more often admit they had the right answer by simply guessing or because they followed their tribe.
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  One example is merely being born into the right answer, like a morally superior practice. You might never do the work to arrive at that moral position yourself so you might not actually hold the belief as strongly or as internally consistently as someone who reasoned themself into the position.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Yes. What makes people smarter or wiser is precisely that they work to get to the positions they hold (even if those positions are mistaken), and never stop questioning themselves or evaluating information that could change their position. 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.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    > Discovering you're wrong is far more valuable and is worthy of celebration. Sure, but if in the course of being convinced of the wrong thing they have caused harm it should cause guilt and embarrassment.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      Hmmm, an interesting thought. 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.
veidr 3y ago
He's also doing this thing we need a name for, something like "fallacious pithiness". 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.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  > ...when people reduce some random thesis to a level of brevity beyond the minimum to actually express it coherently... 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 bit ironic, maybe.
  - delecti 3y ago
    Minor nit: many high profile accounts (supposedly all accounts with more than 1m followers) have had Twitter Blue imposed on them. It's impossible to say whether he paid, or whether it was given to him because of his fame. Though either way, he would have access to the features of it, so your main point stands.
yowzadave 3y ago
Is there a subtext to the comment he is making? I.e., a specific individual that he is referencing with this tweet?
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  It souds very much like a subtweet, but of what is very far from clear. (As is often the case if you aren’t in near identical Twitter bubbles.)
- hombre_fatal 3y ago
  Maybe this triggered it, but Yesterday people were trashing this woman for being against horse racing now even though they could dig up a tweet of hers from 11 years ago where she was excited about an ascot race: https://twitter.com/imlucywatson/status/1673050143027781632 https://twitter.com/imlucywatson/status/1673050143027781632
mr_00ff00 3y ago
I don’t think that’s really what being hypocritical is. 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.
- Chris2048 3y ago
  Just to expand the conversation. 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.
- credit_guy 3y ago
  I disagree with your example. 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.
pessimizer 3y ago
> 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. 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.
hinkley 3y ago
Unless you’re in politics, and then they ask you why you changed your mind 15 years ago like it makes you a bad person instead of a growing human.
smitty1e 3y ago
> But it's rare to mock someone for having a true intellectual journey I'm not sure. Consider those who are de-transitioning. The effect seems akin to departing some flavor of cult.

by bambax 3y ago

TeMPOraL 3y ago

I don't think PG is using a straw man. Rather, he's talking about "politics and other performatively dishonest arenas", which GP excluded, as outside of those areas, mockery is kind of... stupid.

Retric 3y ago
That’s what a strawman argument is. He’s attempting to artificially narrow the discussion. “I think people are generally honest.” (Strawman) “Politicians and con men make a career out of dishonesty, how can you suggest they are honest.”
jahnu 3y ago
He doesn't qualify who he is talking about and in which situations. This conveniently leaves room for charitable interpretations. Which is really close to a form of sophistry, in my opinion. Reminds me of this classic Limmy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z-a5hy7QO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z-a5hy7QO8
- nkozyra 3y ago
  > He doesn't qualify who he is talking about and in which situations. 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.

lordkirchner 3y ago

I don’t think it’s uncommon to believe the person who started with the right answer is smarter, or wiser than the person who had to work to get there. However, many people land in the right answer right away by chance. If we valued finding the truth over being right, people would more often admit they had the right answer by simply guessing or because they followed their tribe.

hombre_fatal 3y ago
One example is merely being born into the right answer, like a morally superior practice. You might never do the work to arrive at that moral position yourself so you might not actually hold the belief as strongly or as internally consistently as someone who reasoned themself into the position.
JohnFen 3y ago
Yes. What makes people smarter or wiser is precisely that they work to get to the positions they hold (even if those positions are mistaken), and never stop questioning themselves or evaluating information that could change their position. 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.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > Discovering you're wrong is far more valuable and is worthy of celebration. Sure, but if in the course of being convinced of the wrong thing they have caused harm it should cause guilt and embarrassment.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Hmmm, an interesting thought. 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.

veidr 3y ago

He's also doing this thing we need a name for, something like "fallacious pithiness". 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.

spondylosaurus 3y ago
> ...when people reduce some random thesis to a level of brevity beyond the minimum to actually express it coherently... 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 bit ironic, maybe.
- delecti 3y ago
  Minor nit: many high profile accounts (supposedly all accounts with more than 1m followers) have had Twitter Blue imposed on them. It's impossible to say whether he paid, or whether it was given to him because of his fame. Though either way, he would have access to the features of it, so your main point stands.

yowzadave 3y ago

Is there a subtext to the comment he is making? I.e., a specific individual that he is referencing with this tweet?

dragonwriter 3y ago
It souds very much like a subtweet, but of what is very far from clear. (As is often the case if you aren’t in near identical Twitter bubbles.)
hombre_fatal 3y ago
Maybe this triggered it, but Yesterday people were trashing this woman for being against horse racing now even though they could dig up a tweet of hers from 11 years ago where she was excited about an ascot race: https://twitter.com/imlucywatson/status/1673050143027781632 https://twitter.com/imlucywatson/status/1673050143027781632

mr_00ff00 3y ago

I don’t think that’s really what being hypocritical is. 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.

Chris2048 3y ago
Just to expand the conversation. 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.
credit_guy 3y ago
I disagree with your example. 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.

pessimizer 3y ago

> 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. 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.

hinkley 3y ago

Unless you’re in politics, and then they ask you why you changed your mind 15 years ago like it makes you a bad person instead of a growing human.

smitty1e 3y ago

> But it's rare to mock someone for having a true intellectual journey I'm not sure. Consider those who are de-transitioning. The effect seems akin to departing some flavor of cult.