That strikes me as a bad idea.
Silence = implicit approval. Don't implicitly approve Wolfram's narcissism. Just don't.
Silence = implicit approval. Don't implicitly approve Wolfram's narcissism. Just don't.
Am I approving of Wolfram'a narcissism if I read an article of his but don't make a comment discussing his narcissism? What if I upvote an article but don't comment about it? What if I comment, but not about his narcissism? Where's the line?
Where does my obligation begin and end? If I choose to abstain from commenting on someone's narcissism, does that mean I have to boycott their work? Do I have to boycott talking about their work with other people?
If you don't respond to this comment of mine, am I to read your silence as implicit agreement? If not, why is that idea any less flippant than yours?
I'm not going to conspicuously trot out a meme about Wolfram's narcissism every time he comes up. It doesn't add any new information to the discussion, whereas he frequently writes interesting things. It also won't make Wolfram any less narcissistic, it will just be obsessive and futile. He's not harming anyone.
To give an example, what you're suggesting is the reason why (for the most part) the only people who find Stallman bearable are people who share his ideology. If you have a pet crusade you launch whenever a topic comes up, you'll quickly find your comments marginalized by everyone who frankly doesn't care about it as much as you. It's just not a productive use of time and doesn't effect the change you think it will. It's a poor hill to die on.
Mentioning and disapproving of Wolfram's narcissism is hardly akin to dying on a hill, and nobody is even asking you to do it, but Phemist is asking people to not actively disapprove of Wolfram's narcissism and I find that odd.
It may not have been your conscious intent, but your previous comment was in fact in the imperative:
>Don't implicitly approve Wolfram's narcissism. Just don't.
Silence can also mean dismissal. Wolfram is hardly at a level of cultural influence where he is rallying up support for a narcissistic lifestyle.
In the course many years we moved from an honour culture where tolerance was a weakness and misbehaviour was something to strongly react to toward a dignity culture where we try to lead by example and where (in polite conversation) criticism needs to be more nuanced.
Moreover by that logic I am silently approving of many things all the time, when talking about Obama and medicare I often omit drone bombing as a topic.
There are so many more interesting things to discuss than the author's personal traits.
As Eric Weinstein put it, we are standing on shoulders of jerks[1] (I wouldn't put Stephen in this particular category). We do need people like Wolfram and we need them to be themselves.
It’s never OK to be a jerk.
But that doesn’t mean jerks have nothing of value to add to the world. No human being is perfect. If we disregarded the successes and breakthroughs of anyone who did anything bad in their lives we’d still be living in the Stone Age.
I'm not saying Wolfram is in their league, but I think the same principle applies. You salute the ideas, not the man.
If you want to criticize the person, then keep that separate.
I don't suppose you feel like engaging with my suggestion with something more than this blunt, unsupported rejection?
If you merely mean that when discussing such a piece we can remain generally calm and give room in the discussion for things other than the author's arrogance, then I agree.
I was serious that I can separate the person, so that's an existence proof.
Those of us who are mere mortals can't reliably predict ourselves to achieve perfection on complex, subjective tasks like this.
You find your own self-confidence to be highly convincing to the point of mathematical proof. Please have another think about that. And about making "clever" four-word dismissals of other people's comments.
> Those of us who are mere mortals can't reliably predict ourselves to achieve perfection on complex, subjective tasks like this.
I was able to separate the two as well without much of a problem, so...I guess I must be some sort of god too. :)
That's fair, but I'm not sure that a comment thread on HN is going to change him. He might be stuck in his ways at this point and may not even care about what some of the posts here say about his narcissism. I'm also not sure that we need to convince anyone here that he is a narcissist, as that part doesn't seem contentious. So maybe focusing on the other areas is better.
Irrespective of that, I'd say that shaming someone isn't great whatever, but there's no denying that this kind of thing is disruptive - people persevere with his writing because he's often got valuable points to communicate, but you'd have to be thick skinned to say it wasn't intensely annoying.
Even if Stephen can't control it, it seems like he's functional enough that he would be aware of the way he comes across and simply ask someone to edit out the OTT aspects brefore he posts. Knowing his eagerness for efficiency, perhaps he could even automate the text processing with the Wolfram Language.