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comment by veen
veen  ·  2323 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Why driverless cars will be the next battlefield in the culture war

    my disagreeing with you isn't me being dismissive of your experience, my disagreeing with you is my seeing things differently and wanting to talk to you to get your perspective.

I'm not insulted or frustrated! Mildly bugged at most. It's just that it comes off as disrespectful when I carefully build my argument and then you say "Nope!" without saying why you disagree. A discussion is a two way street, IMO. Not that that should stop you from buggin' me, but it might make more sense to ask more, like what you want me to opine about. :)

    Edit: Also, I use Wikipedia a lot. It's a crutch of mine. Sorry.

Protip: read more nonfiction! Makes you sound smart as hell.





user-inactivated  ·  2323 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Want a bit of a different discussion? You're gonna love this, cause it's meta as shit.

    Mildly bugged at most. It's just that it comes off as disrespectful when I carefully build my argument and then you say "Nope!" without saying why you disagree.

In order for me to explain why I disagree I'd first have to know why I disagree myself and that's just not how I roll bro.

Firstly, I'm not a very smart man. Like, at all. Which is fine by me because A) that makes absolutely everything I expose myself to the most fascinating shit in the world and B) when I do figure shit out, it's exciting as balls.

Secondly, you gotta understand that my discussion style compared you, kleinbl00, and pretty much half the people on Hubski is very different. When you guys all talk, it's all FACTS! FIGURES! CHARTS! CITATION! CROSS REFERENCES! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Stick that shit in your debate pipe and smoke it! Which, don't get me wrong, is awesome as shit. You guys have the memory retention of lore masters and the Google-Fu of fucking cyber ninjas and that's amazing.

My discussion style? It's nothing like that. It's all, personal experiences, emotional recollection, anecdotes, general observation, inquiry. I'm less facts, facts, facts, and more general idea. I'm not stepping up to the debate podium and throwing down with you guys, cause unless we're debating philosophics, I'm not gonna have a leg to stand on because I don't even know where the legs are let alone what foundation is beneath them. (And on the occasions when I do step up to the podium, I'm all like "Mother fuckers, come fact check me.") Not that I'd want that anyway because that's contentious and disharmonious and honestly, more often than not, the more people actually debate shit the more people tend to not get along. Which, don't get me wrong, cause it's fun in the short term, but honestly? My relationship with some users gets strained from time to time because we debate shit.

So don't think of me as a debate opponent, think of me as the guy who invites you to sit on my back patio to listen to the summer cicadas with me while I ask you to talk about what you find fascinating.

That said, when I say "I disagree blah blah blah blah" what I'm actually doing is saying "please, continue" but just responding "please continue" is A) rude and B) doesn't give you much to go on. Where if I throw anything that I think is remotely relevent out there, you can be all "I'm glad you brought that up cause check the magic shit I'm about to tell you now!"

    Protip: read more nonfiction! Makes you sound smart as hell.

Wikipedia is my non-fiction. I'm literally addicted. :(

veen  ·  2321 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    My discussion style? It's nothing like that.

That's fine 'n'all and it's duly noted. All I want to say is that when you want to achieve this:

    what I'm actually doing is saying "please, continue" but just responding "please continue" is A) rude and B) doesn't give you much to go on. Where if I throw anything that I think is remotely relevent out there, you can be all "I'm glad you brought that up cause check the magic shit I'm about to tell you now!"

that there is a better way that doesn't raise anyone's ruffles. If you say 'well I disagree because X', then my only response can be to rebut your X or agree with your X. It puts me or goob in a defensive position: we'll put our shields up and rebut. My point is: it doesn't leave a lot of room to talk about anything else.

But if instead you were to ask questions or to build upon what goobster or kleinbl00 or I write in our wall'o'texts, the conversation can go all different places! You can get a lot more and different responses if you go "hey, what do you mean by this part?", "how does X and Y relate?", "oh! that reminds me of the time I...", etc., etc. Think of it this way: "please continue!" is never rude if it's formulated as a question. Does that make sense? :)

kleinbl00  ·  2321 days ago  ·  link  ·  

An observation, since I've been shouted out like three times here:

goobster, rd95, veen but directed entirely at rd95:

- You may be fascinated by all this and use it as a means to knowledge, but if your counterpart isn't enjoying it, you lose. When your style of discussion revolves around "here's a counterargument to what you just said" the conversation will necessarily focus on shutting down, not opening up.

- You may browse Wikipedia to find answers but the people you're talking to just know shit. So while you getting an argument countermanded reads as "I guess I didn't understand the argument" to you, to your counterparts it reads as "you don't know shit, here let me pull something tangential off of Wikipedia to shut you down."

- You may think that "please continue" is rude but "I'm going to attempt to close off other avenues of discussion" is ruder.

This discussion is likely relevant to your interests. Veen and I get along really well and damn near came to blows over the concept of "mapping." This is due because he's neck-deep into the theory of mapping and my experience has been with the practice of mapping and we were talking across each other for entirely too long. Here's a great highlight:

    The "arrogant" engineers are the ones that know they know more than you and are sick of having to explain it. They're the ones whose knowledge is called into question because somebody just did a study somewhere. They're the ones being forced to (temporarily) rewrite their entire code of behavior because some expert somewhere in another unrelated field has better PR.

NASA scientist sick of debunking Planet X doomsday theories

Word to the wise: when you start to suspect that you're talking to an expert, start to respect the expert's expertise. It isn't just you and Wikipedia making conversation, it's "how can I continue this discussion without being one of those assholes that drives expertise off the internet." Wanna see what it looks like when a skunk raises its tail?

    This is not true at any scale.

    I work for Continental Corporation, and Daimler Trucks North America.

That's a cat with it's hair up, a pufferfish puffed, a dog growling around a hambone. The Internet think that it's the "appeal to authority fallacy" because Reddit et. al. have created a world where having expertise is somehow a losing proposition but in the non-internet world, knowing shit still counts for something.

And I know you didn't mean to discount the knowledge of the people you were talking to. That's totally not you. But it doesn't take much. Everybody I know who knows audio avoids the shit out of gearslutz... and they'd perish the thought of visiting Reddit. I among them.

It's no fun being told you're full of shit by someone who is clearly, plainly, demonstrably full of shit. And if you're the expert and they're not, they know you're full of shit long before you do.

user-inactivated  ·  2320 days ago  ·  link  ·  

goobster, veen, for some reason I let myself get dogged on this and I chose the worse time to be dogged on something because my head is fuzzy and it obviously shows and while that's a reason it's not a good excuse because this all turned into a big mess and I can't help but feel guilty for making you guys angry and so I'm really, really sorry.

kleinbl00, sorry for shouting out to you if you thought I was trying to drag you into this. I wasn't. I just always use the "@" symbol when mentioning a specific user on here because I don't want people to think I'm talking about them behind their back.

I really and truly feel bad about getting out of hand and I feel really childish and I'm incredibly embarrassed and I respect the hell out of the three of you and I'm honestly so truly sorry and if there's anything I can do to make it up to any of you just let me know and I'll see what I can figure.

Edit: And sorry to Hubski as a whole for making a shit show to witness to begin with.

kleinbl00  ·  2320 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Hush, kid. Ain't nobody mad. Veen shouted me out at least once. Don't sweat it.

Merely chiming in in the interests of furthering communication next time, yo. Chillax. It's Sunday.

goobster  ·  2320 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Hey man... THANK YOU. That's a truly generous thing to say, and I appreciate it.

I haven't logged into Hubski all weekend because I was fully expecting to be either blocked (again), or have some real nastiness to address when I got here. I didn't want to argue any more, and didn't know how to unwind where we had gotten to...

Thanks for getting BOTH of us out of this unpleasantness, with grace and style. I really appreciate it.