Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

Randy and Amy had spent a full hour talking to Scott and Laura last night; they were the only people who made any effort to make Amy feel welcome. Randy hadn't the faintest idea what these people thought of him and what he had done, but he could sense right away that, essentially that was not the issue because even if they thought he had done something evil, they at least had a framework, a sort of procedure manual, for dealing with transgressions.

To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz, society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. -- Cryptonomicon, 1999

Rehashing the PC wars of the mid-90s has been a continual experience of deja vu combined with a fairly appalled horror at finding out how many of my peers fell for it twice.

It is a bit worse than that -- because these were largely people who did not fall for the religious-based Puritanism. D&D is Satanic. Now it is problematic.

It appears that people will fall for this Puritanism as long as the flavor packet that comes with it is to their taste.

I once had a conversation that went like this:

> Well that's problematic

How is it problematic?

> I don't know, it just is

Can you describe it without using the word problematic?

> No, it simply is problematic

Do you maybe mean you simply disagree with it?

> No, it's PROBLEMATIC

--

I've taken to ignoring any phrase with the word problematic, unless it's followed with a meaningful description of what is the problem.

I feel the same way about "processed" food.

Processed food is "problematic". The problems are well known and documented though

https://www.lhsfna.org/index.cfm/lifelines/may-2019/the-many...

Processed food includes both McDonalds cheeseburgers and wholegrain bagels.

It also describes the "processed" rack of ribs I slow cooked last night after cleaning and seasoning them (processing steps).

Is it frustrating going through life assuming a superficial understanding of words and phrases without considering how they are intended to be understood by the writer/speaker?

The article I linked clearly explained that "processed" is not a binary flag, but rather a continuum. And that the harm is done by processing that adds excessive sugar, salt, and fat (and even then only when you consume that type of processed food to the exclusion of all other food).

It was not a good word choice. Cooperative speaking means both sides have to be cooperative, and hijacking and loading well known terms is not cooperative.

> The article I linked clearly explained that "processed" is not a binary flag, but rather a continuum. And that the harm is done by processing that adds excessive sugar, salt, and fat (and even then only when you consume that type of processed food to the exclusion of all other food).

So then don't try to campaign againt "processed" food but against excessive sugar, salt and fat. If you use existing words with existing meanings then you can't expect people not to take those words literally.

Cooking food can be considered processing it. The problem is that the verb "processing" can mean nearly anything and isn't helpful for discussion. It often gets invoked as some kind of nonspecific boogeyman.

Problematic is often a weasel word for "causes difficult emotions"

That word is doing a lot of work. I think this explains the phenomenon well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSAWylw8dwQ

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about how, because it was founded by puritans, puritanism in general seems to have become part of the US' national/cultural character. You see it in many forms throughout the years in ways you just don't see in the UK, even though we otherwise share a great deal of cultural background.

It's more complicated than that, of course, though the point is taken:

- the US was equally well founded by irish and scots debtors who couldn't get shipped off to australia because we hadn't found that yet.

- ... or west africans in chains.

- ... or money-grubbing mercantilist businessmen who had to be legally compelled to farm things that weren't tobacco after the first lot all starved to death by failing to plant food.

- or by deists and quakers and catholics (who especially represent what passes for religious tolerance in the colonies, c.f. Maryland in particular)

Puritans, of course, also came from the UK (some by way of the mainland when they got kicked out for being too uptight)

I think a difference is: Cromwell lost, and the UK kept their Tories rather longer than we kept ours (and many subsequently left for Nova Scotia and the like), so the fallback position that wasn't puritanism in the UK was an explicitly theocratic state religion that had to be a denomination of compromise because everyone knew perfectly well what happened when it wasn't. (this motivation had a different effect in the US: IMO it almost completely explains the establishment clause)

The difference is that today there is an all-powerful AI that has managed to infiltrate every screen and mediate every digital interaction as a monetization opportunity with advertising. In other words, an endlessly profitable persuasion machine that dances to the tune of dollar bills and will happily push whatever narrative is most effective at widening and strengthening that conduit, i.e. maximizes engagement. It twists our preferences gradually, a little at a time, knowing full well that to risk it all with bold and obvious propaganda risks shattering the ruse and scaring you off.

> every screen

Not every screen. You know how to turn it away. Help your friends and family do the same.

I'm not even sure if it is PC wars of the mid 90s as much as a sort of flavor of puritanism like behavior where folks just substitute their cause / identity and go looking for whatever is wrong.

I fear it is human nature.

I love Randy's blunt social commentary.

its facinating to see a big problem solve little people

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