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Comment by kick | Hacker News Reader

I hesitate to criticize this person, because they're presumably writing for an audience that already knows them, and probably are following for this style of writing, but I have to ask: What is it with think-pieces that state obvious and widespread conclusions while using jargon and jokes to obscure how basic of conclusions they really are?

I can't fault people who do this because they're paid by the word and taking 5,000 of them to describe the color of the sky brings them a nice amount, but I don't see why it's done here, where that doesn't seem to be a consideration.

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I enjoy and appreciate Venkatesh’s Ribbonfarm writings, and other writings like his. While the cultural situations he’s writing about may be obvious, I appreciate his discovery and naming (‘jargon’) of the patterns he finds. You could look at it as developing an intellectual framework. I consider it a sort of contemporary philosophy, which tries to be both conceptual and actionable. Some of his essays have made me rethink major outlooks on my own life, and make important decisions. I think it’s important writing for our time.

Often his essays are essentially experiments in structures and definitions, a kind of ‘what if we looked at things this way?’ methodology. In answer to your question of jargon/jokes, yes, that’s his methodology. There’s a lot of serious stuff in there too, but he likes to have fun with the ideas, as well as try to integrate his words into modern (online) culture in useful ways.

Venkatesh wrote a related article a couple of years ago: ‘A Quick (Battle) Field Guide to the New Culture Wars’ (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/06/a-quick-battle-field-g...). He essentially proposes that the only way to understand the the culture wars is to see them as actual wars, fought using the logic of warfare, not of, say, diplomacy or social rationalism. This essay has been extraordinarily useful to me, and has helped me develop very different political stances and associated actions.

As this article itself suggests, I enjoy an information diet in moderation — some short, some medium, some long. Ribbonfarm is part of the medium/long diet, and I feel much better having read there.

EDIT: removed unnecessary criticism of parent]

My initial thoughts when reading were cynical - along the lines of "this person is trying to look clever and sell freakonomic / pop-science type books, but are the statements and conclusions based in fact, likely to be correct or are they useful to me?". Since I can't answer I didn't read on.

They do seem to sell freakonomic/pop-sci books. Nice eye!

Venkatesh has a very playful and idiosyncratic writing style - you see that in his other posts, like the Gervais Principle or the series or "premium mediocrity":

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l...

It's just his personality - I don't think it's a particular affection to try to sell more, although I do think a number of his readers are there because they like the idiosyncracy.

I also think that for posts like this, "are they based in fact and likely to be correct?" is the wrong question to ask. Posts about culture, worldview, systems thinking, etc are too broad to actually be "correct" - one way to see if this is the case in a domain is to ask yourself whether two different observers could observe the same facts, pick a different set to focus on, and draw entirely different conclusions (an exercise that Venkatesh frequently does on his blog). Rather, you read material like this for perspective. It's a way of training your brain to look at the same set of observations in an entirely different way. Then when you're faced with actual facts in your own life, you can apply the lens you just read about to it and see what the meaning of those facts is, and ideally shift rapidly between different perspectives to triangulate something approaching reality.

> Rather, you read material like this for perspective. It's a way of training your brain to look at the same set of observations in an entirely different way. Then when you're faced with actual facts in your own life, you can apply the lens you just read about to it and see what the meaning of those facts is, and ideally shift rapidly between different perspectives to triangulate something approaching reality.

Wow, I think this last paragraph of yours manages to capture exactly what a philosophy or an ideology is for: perspectives to help create meaning.

My follow-up question then is: what makes for a "good" perspective? Can you judge it, to get back to the topic of this thread, by the number of mooks it enrolls?

Agree. Out of context, this takes a ton of effort to understand.

Some examples

- Great Weirding morphs into the Permaweird

- underground Internet that I’ve previously called the CozyWeb

- unflattened Hobbesian honor-society conflict

- Mookcoins are mined by knights through acts of senpai-notice-me

- retreat into what I call waldenponding or to the CozyWeb

Several of these link to other essays which, in turn, use ever more jargon whose definitions are found in yet other source material.

I understand how it might seem obtuse and undecipherable, but it makes it so much more genuine and heartfelt to me. You can’t fake the experience of somebody who can channel that style of deep 2000s Internet zeitgeist.

It reads LessWrong's cooler brother.

Cooler? It reads like LessWrong's twin that decided to play D&D for an afternoon instead of Shadowrun.

More heavily watered down than cooler, I suspect.

The only other Ribbonfarm article I've read was the "premium mediocre" one, in which they described themselves as a premium mediocre blog, adding "the actual upper-class readers read SSC or Marginal Revolution". On the limited basis of these two articles, I am leaning towards the idea that it was an accurate assessment.

To learn about the link with SSC, it does not at all surprise me that Riboonfarm shows the same aspect of someone talking about various topics (in particular sensitive and sociological ones) without showing any evidence of reading any established research on them.

It's perplexing how similar essays on natural world, not taking into account any research on physics in the last 100 years or more, would not be nearly as appreciated. If it's not acceptable in physics, why do we accept it when it comes to sociology or media studies?

> It's perplexing how similar essays on natural world, not taking into account any research on physics in the last 100 years or more, would not be nearly as appreciated.

I mean there's the "sequences" on Quantum Mechanics at LW. Or the uncritical embrace of Bayesian statistics as metaphysical panacea in this circle of the Internet.

Why is it perplexing? People put more trust in fields where researchers follow (or are expected to follow, at least) the scientific method.

I work in what may be called a "soft" science field, I don't complain when people don't view our output as authoritative as that of hard science. I'm proud of my work, but I don't claim to have any monopoly on truth (or even a better grasp of truth, for that matter) just because I have a list of academic publications. It's the nature of the field.

You don't have to put trust in a field to do an overview of the existing literature and show how and where it is wrong. Neither philosophy or mathematics, for example, don't follow the "scientific method" (let's assume the Anglophone conception as opposed to Wissenschaft for the sake of arument), yet I would hope that people would rightly call out a post on utilitarianism that doesn't take into account arguments from the last twenty years, or an argument against metaphysics that stops at Hume, and they'd be skeptical of a proof of the Riemann hypothesis expressed in all but the terms of mathematicians.

If you're more convinced by my mathematics example than my philosophy one, it just shows that this isn't about the scientific method at all, but standards of rigor in argumentation, which soft sciences are perfectly capable of, at least internally within frameworks. In that case, all it would take is for the author to mention which framework they believe has the most explanatory power, and why.

Lastly, I fail to see why this would be such an issue in the first place; as an example, take a claim like "viewing pornography is associated with misogynistic attitudes", or even more strongly, that pornograhy causes such attitudes. The fact that it is a broad claim, that relies on population samples and indirect measurement, does not make the research into the topic (both in support and in denial of the claim) any less valid to be ignorant about, if you're writing an essay on whether porn should be censored or not.

Different epistemic standards are not an excuse for ignorance. "Not as authoritive" is not the same as "no authority at all", and it's especially not the same when the essay in question itself is engaging in that topic.

The public doesn’t owe anything to academics; whether or not they decide to pay attention to literature of a certain field, it is their choice. I was merely stating my observation that while many seem to consider it worthwhile to pay some level of respect to physics or mathematics, fewer appear to do so with regards to sociology or media studies. Are such attitudes justified? Perhaps so, perhaps not - but either way I find nothing perplexing that the public does not respect all fields of inquiry equally.

We're not talking about "the public" generally, we're talking about someone who has thought about a topic and possesses enough interest to write about it. One would think that in the interest of intellecutal honesty they would investigate previous work. If they haven't, it's a valid point of criticism of the work, and I have criticized the work on that basis, just as I would criticize someone writing on space-time who hasn't bothered to look into Einstein, or someone writing on electronics as if they're discovering Kirchoff's law for the first time.

I thought it was very clever and got my brain to try to stretch to figure out what he was saying. This beats a lot of the content out there that's dumbed down.

A good test of jargon is whether a full translation of it makes the written work too laborious to read. These terms do not have brief, complete definitions in English.

If that is accepted, the question becomes whether the audience understands the jargon. Ribbonfarm readers do or are willing to learn what they might mean.

And the first essay linked, about crash-only, screwed up the analogy so badly...

I only was willing to look at the article because it was Ribbon Farm and the series on the Gervais Principle was really good. I know a lot already about social stuff. I don't often get big epiphanies from reading things.

People sometimes make up terminology because they are trying to communicate ideas for which there really aren't popular terms. I struggle with this myself. I get accused of being idiosyncratic, using words to mean something they don't to other people, etc.

New ideas require new terminology. It's part of why living languages grow, change, add new vocabulary, etc.

I suppose you could have shortened your comment here to "Why is this article so long?". Why all the extra words?

Funny! Though the News Guidelines would prevent me from saying that.

A better reduction of the comment that loses less meaning might be: "This article is pointless, and intentionally obscuring that it's repeating universal knowledge. Why?"

My personal gripe with articles like this one is that they invent their own terms to frame the discussion in a particular way, perhaps in the hope that some time in the future, people will really start talking about "Internet beefs" or "beefy conversations" or something equally silly. The issue isn't the length - after all, use as many words necessary - the issue is with the relative paucity of research into whether this topic has been addressed in the relevant fields (sociology, psychology, media studies).

Does the concept already exist in the literature? Are there any similar concepts?

Let me have a go at it. I call this "the hacker blogger mindset", in which relevant literature in the field is passed over or simply ignored (assuming due diligence has been taken to research the topic, which it often hasn't been) in favour of a kind of NIH-syndrome thinking in which every concept the author thinks of is novel, it has not been noticed before by lay people or the academic community, and of course it hasn't been written up into a snazzy article with nice jargon that makes us sound clever like "mook manorialism". We'll throw a reference to Francis Fukuyama or Weber in there to convince the more skeptical that this is more than an unsubstantiated blog post.

A famous guardian of the hacker blogger mindset is Scott Alexander[0] (and to a lesser extent Paul Graham and the LessWrong community), but it's nice to see new contestants who want to try their hand at sociological analysis without referencing any sociology. I hope I'm not being too crude when I say that essays like this are a kind of poor man's academy. You don't have to learn about standing objections to the theory (or the theory's assumptions) made by experts, because I called my theory "internet beef", and the remarkably similar academic theory that already exists isn't called "internet beef" - so none of your objections are valid against my internet beef!

The optimist inside me wants to think that this topic hasn't been covered before, and that the essay addresses a problem that hasn't been addressed before. If that were the case, however, I would have expected the author to at least state as such - that after reading tens of papers on discourse analysis and Internet sociology, nothing similar to "Internet beef" showed up. Maybe I'm wrong and being unfair to the author - in which case, fair enough. Unfortunately, it doesn't negate all the other times I've seen this.

[0] Scott wrote a whole post on his blog about a particular German philosopher. As it turns out, he hadn't read any of the philosopher's works, but only Peter Singer's much-criticized entry in the Short Introductions series. This was sufficient. Likewise, the author of this blog post doesn't seem to have read up on Internet discourse analysis, a topic which a search on Google Scholar throws up hundreds of papers.

Explaining yourself is good. That two-paragraph comment explains itself. Get off your strawman horse.

You're doing the thing from the article

By trying to stop someone else from making a hostile and nonproductive comment? Taking a comment, cranking what it says to 1000%, then applying it to itself as a 'gotcha' is not good discourse.

So what do you suggest I do instead?

And I am absolutely not fighting for any ideological position.

the jokes are there to build a bond with the reader through identification of shared knowledge ... specifically, if the reader 'gets' the joke then they feel a sparkle knowing they have a special shared insight with the author.

I got the permaweird joke but the rest went over my head, naturally I stopped reading about a third of the way through as it is long-winded.

You're probably right about the first part as it's pretty tangential to usual topics of discussion at Ribbonfarm.

Well, the simple answer is that it is a cultural work. It is literature, not a documentation.

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