Oliver said:
Well, in my example, Einstein didn't indicate that he disagreed, nor did
he give a rebuttal to being called an idiot.
In your *first* example maybe. In your *second* he did.
Actually, I think it does. Notice how a lot of people on this thread are
calling you a troll, for example. That's the USENET parallel with the entire
crowd getting upset and asking the person to leave.
You've got that completely backwards -- that would be like the crowd
asking *Einstein* to leave because a jerk called him an idiot, rather
than asking the *jerk* to leave.
Perhaps, but the more important question you should ask yourself is: If
Einstein had stayed at that podium, arguing with the crowd that, no, he is
not an idiot, would that have "corrected" the perception that he was an
idiot?
Not in the minds of the die-hards, but he may have swayed moderates
that had started leaning toward the position of the extremists, lacking
until then any other outside force influencing them.
What if the goal of the game was seeing who would refuse to continue the
game first?
There is no such game.
I think a couple of people have achieved this, demonstrating that it
actually is possible.
You then proceeded to snip the reason why it is impossible, but I will
reiterate: to be invulnerable to insults means that they must be
incapable of harming me. But if they are believed by third parties, who
then treat me worse than they would have otherwise, I have clearly been
harmed, regardless of whether hearing the insult directly bothers me or
not. It follows that to be invulnerable I'd have to control the minds
of everyone who might come into contact with the insult, at least to
the extent of being able to make them ignore it, fail to perceive it,
or scoff at it automatically, or some mixture of those. Without that
capability, I am clearly capable of being harmed by the insult,
therefore not invulnerable; and therefore to behave as if I were would
be irrational.
The "couple of people" you mention either don't exist or became
celebrities with reputations too rock-solid to be shaken. That clearly
isn't a useful example for the rest of us, the vast majority of whom
can never aspire to the level of fame required to be shielded in such a
manner. Not to mention that most people of significant fame are
constantly the subject of vile rumors and dirt-digging by the tabloids
and others anyway; they may be relatively shielded, but they're also
bigger targets, and the effects probably approximately cancel out.
Yes, it makes assumptions on everybody else's behaviour, but no more
than your strategy 1 (in which everybody believes the insults) or your
strategy 2 (in which everybody is swayed by your arguments). If my strategy
is invalid due the lack of control over everybody, I suggest so are your
strategies 1 and 2.
Not true. In strategy 1, we assume not that "everybody" believes the
insults but that a credulous subset of "swayable people" do, whose size
must be assumed greater than zero. In strategy 2, that subset will be
swayed each way and the effects cancel, since precisely the same people
are susceptible when the insult is said and later when the rebuttal is
said (given a short enough elapsed time between those events, anyway).
In your broken strategy, you assume the affected subset is of size
zero, or else hope blindly that it is. This is an unsafe strategy in
the same manner as pressing an attack in a chess game where your
opponent has a forced mate if you do, in the unreliable hope that your
opponent doesn't see it. In fact, you're betting that in six billion
rolls of the dice none will come up snake-eyes, which is a really,
really poor bet!
In actual practise, my observations indicate that the "credulous
subset" is actually either everybody after all, or at least the vast
majority of people, so you'd lose that bet 100% of the time. Somebody
would be swayed, and you would be harmed.
No. I'm not a monk, and I didn't give up all my worldly possessions or
my computer. I don't know how you inferred that from what I wrote.
I didn't say you were, just that you were suggesting it as something I
should do.
So don't choose a religion. You don't need to do so to pray, let alone
to meditate...
All beside the point that I don't think self-delusion is anything but a
cop-out anyway you slice it.
I'm responsible for some people. So I go to work and earn money and
spend it on their (and thus my) survival. See next paragraph.
Fascinating, but hardly a rational way to go about doing things. Our
emotions, including less pleasant ones, serve important
survival-oriented functions, and we suppress or ignore them at our
peril.
Great! You've got the pets already, so now you won't allow yourself to
slowly die of euphoria. Now the only part that's missing is actually
becoming happy.
Yes, but I prefer to do so by bettering my circumstances rather than by
cheating, tyvm.
Could it be that the large number of people developing poor opinions of
you is *due* to your "rebutting" the attacks?
That is completely irrational. The rebuttals have been a damn sight
more civil than many of the attacks, and that's just for starters.
Regardless, it makes no sense for e.g. "I am not a bad person" to
*increase* the listener's credence in the hypothesis that the speaker
is a bad person. It should decrease it or have no effect, to an extent
depending on the strength of evidence provided and the listener's
tendency to be credulous (effectively determining their standard of
evidence). Only in the case of one of those mythical island dwellers
that always lies would it make sense for the reverse to occur.
Note that a lot of people have
been complaining about your rebuttals. What if you stopped doing it? What
have you got to lose (since you say they're already developing poor opinions
of you anyway)?
Sure, the attackers have entrenched poor opinions of me, but it's the
opinions of whoever is just lurking that both sides are playing for
here, in case you'd forgotten. Or else the attacking side isn't, but is
just being a bunch of moronic jerks, and their side's effects on the
audience are just side effects, but ones that I still have to counter,
as they are damaging to me.
Each person who is said to speak English actually speaks their own
personal variant of English. Broadly speaking, most people agree on the
meanings of most words, however each personal might have emotional or
personal connotations associated with specific words that other people
don't. For example, I associate the concept of "tooth-ache" with the term
"ice", and probably a lot of people don't. So when someone says "ice", I
have to "translate" that into my own variant of English, perhaps to "frozen
water" (which doesn't have this "tooth-ache" connotation in my language).
That's just weird.
That said, if people on this newsgroup seem to be able to understand
each other and get along just fine, but none of them seem to understand you,
then perhaps your variant of English is sufficiently different from variants
spoken by the other people here.
Doubtful. My understanding of English is if anything particularly sharp
and close to the canon established by e.g. dictionaries. It follows
that any unusual concentration of misunderstandings is the result of
one of two things:
* A sampling bias, where only those who misunderstand butt in with a
rude remark, and so dominate a thread; or
* Wilful misunderstanding rather than accidental.
It happens both way, because of all those hidden connotations I
mentioned above. It usually happens subconciously too, so it's not like
people are misreading you on purpose.
The connotations that I don't actually put into most of what I write,
you mean?
You're mistaken. You *can* change the rules.
This is ridiculous. I've already told you the plain facts. One of those
was that some people *are* swayed by the kind of trash-talking that's
been going on, and another is that those people *will* sometimes
subsequently treat me worse. The rules therefore *must* include
considering an insult to be taking damage in some form. It then follows
that any such attack must either be mitigated or retaliated; the former
would undo the damage whereas the latter would deter any further
damaging attacks. Doing nothing encourages the attackers to continue
until the damage becomes arbitrarily severe, which obviously cannot be
permitted.
The "rules" of the "game" follow by crystal-clear logic from facts that
are beyond my capability to alter. As long as you persist in believing
otherwise, we are at an impasse and further discussion is clearly
useless.
You can change the rules without mind-controlling others. Not everybody has to play the
same game you're playing.
You advocate solipsism here then -- that I go off into a dream world of
my own where (regardless of my actual physical circumstances)
everything is a fantastic paradise and nothing can hurt me.
There's a clinical term for that, but I don't recall it at the moment.
It's been observed in some victims of repeated, chronic abuse, and
extremely rarely otherwise; similar to the circumstances that produce
multiple-personality disorder.
It is emphatically not a healthy mental state.
There are other ways: Get out of this losing "game" you're stuck in, and
start playing a game you can win.
But this isn't just some game I can forget about afterward. If I leave
it with a negative score, that will affect me for a long time to come,
similarly to a bad credit rating or something of that sort. I know,
BECAUSE IT DID BEFORE. I learned my lesson then, and I will NOT just
sit back and let it happen again, no matter how much effort you put
into trying to trick me into doing so.
