7 ms·

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 bre

by 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.
  - spondylosaurus 3y ago
    That's true, I forgot Muskie "gifted" the subscription to a chosen few!
- libraryatnight 3y ago
  I don't see this as just a twitter problem. It's in "memes" (people love an image with one or two lines that seemingly obliterates an opposing view), facebook posts, and bleeds into meatspace (facebook/twitter/reddit > family gathering) It's a disregard for context and nuance that I don't find specific to twitter.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    I think that the special thing about Twitter (and other short-form services) is that it's actually impossible to include context and nuance even if you want to.
JohnFen 3y ago
> I mainly noticed this when so many people stopped writing awesome long-form blog posts, and supplanted it with tweeting 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.
kibwen 3y ago
> He's also doing this thing we need a name for, something like "fallacious pithiness". We have a word for this, it's "tweeting".
- meepmorp 3y ago
  > We have a word for this, it's "tweeting". Ok, then you should know that your response was also tweeting, given that definition.
  - Chris2048 3y ago
    I think it was humour, but the issue is that it's easy to conflate.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    It was a second order observation, so doesn't need to also include itself.
    - meepmorp 3y ago
      It was the same kind of silly pseudo-pithiness, though.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        Perhaps, but in this case it was also true.
- sambalbadjak 3y ago
  haha exactly
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
TillE 3y ago
A friend of mine recently observed how the NYT and other big papers, in their straight reporting, will rush directly to cover the "controversy" of any given issue while barely covering the details of the actual facts at hand. 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.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  In that case, it's more that they want to spread an opinion that they don't want to associate with the paper, because they'd have to defend or prove it. On the other hand, instead of publishing negative news about things they support, they'll publish indignant reactions to the spread of the negative news story. Doing this pushes the actual specifics of the story to the tenth paragraph of the first article they've covered it in.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
People absolutely are mocked for changing their minds. Public debate is a on spectrum from (rare) good faith discussion with good intentions to (more common) playground posturing where changing your mind is seen as a form of weakness. 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.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > But SV culture is notorious for being convinced of its own awesomeness. 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.
romwell 3y ago
Well, thank you for writing this comment in a length that allows sufficient precision to express your thought and provide examples. 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. ---- 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 https://www.employmentautism.org.uk/blog/autism-and-honesty

by veidr 3y ago

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.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  That's true, I forgot Muskie "gifted" the subscription to a chosen few!
libraryatnight 3y ago
I don't see this as just a twitter problem. It's in "memes" (people love an image with one or two lines that seemingly obliterates an opposing view), facebook posts, and bleeds into meatspace (facebook/twitter/reddit > family gathering) It's a disregard for context and nuance that I don't find specific to twitter.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I think that the special thing about Twitter (and other short-form services) is that it's actually impossible to include context and nuance even if you want to.

JohnFen 3y ago

> I mainly noticed this when so many people stopped writing awesome long-form blog posts, and supplanted it with tweeting 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.

kibwen 3y ago

> He's also doing this thing we need a name for, something like "fallacious pithiness". We have a word for this, it's "tweeting".

meepmorp 3y ago
> We have a word for this, it's "tweeting". Ok, then you should know that your response was also tweeting, given that definition.
- Chris2048 3y ago
  I think it was humour, but the issue is that it's easy to conflate.
- coldtea 3y ago
  It was a second order observation, so doesn't need to also include itself.
  - meepmorp 3y ago
    It was the same kind of silly pseudo-pithiness, though.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      Perhaps, but in this case it was also true.
sambalbadjak 3y ago
haha exactly

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

TillE 3y ago

A friend of mine recently observed how the NYT and other big papers, in their straight reporting, will rush directly to cover the "controversy" of any given issue while barely covering the details of the actual facts at hand. 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.

pessimizer 3y ago
In that case, it's more that they want to spread an opinion that they don't want to associate with the paper, because they'd have to defend or prove it. On the other hand, instead of publishing negative news about things they support, they'll publish indignant reactions to the spread of the negative news story. Doing this pushes the actual specifics of the story to the tenth paragraph of the first article they've covered it in.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

People absolutely are mocked for changing their minds. Public debate is a on spectrum from (rare) good faith discussion with good intentions to (more common) playground posturing where changing your mind is seen as a form of weakness. 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.

JohnFen 3y ago
> But SV culture is notorious for being convinced of its own awesomeness. 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.

romwell 3y ago

Well, thank you for writing this comment in a length that allows sufficient precision to express your thought and provide examples. 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. ---- 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 https://www.employmentautism.org.uk/blog/autism-and-honesty