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I was talking about an off-site interaction, not a downvote on here.
In a world where everyone without fail, even the wonderful cream-of-the-crop rationalists, sacrifices honor for PR at the expense of A, can you blame A for championing PR?
If lsusr is well-calibrated in their judgment, I can only find out by hearing their operationalizing (careful reasoning (precision)), otherwise I can expect they make the same errors I typically see people making who rely heavily on judging things as toxic.
And it's a good cry for freedom. I focused on the one thing about this post I didn't like, but over all it's a good post in my opinion. I should have been more positive; I'll try to keep in mind my negativity bias in the future.
Why not? You want to let people start using words with very negative connotation to refer to whatever they want? In practice, that's how "toxic" is used; whatever people want it to mean, typically when the thing in question seems socially inconvenient for them.
Imagine you acted in accordance with your own logic and best judgment of probabilities in the way you normally do, in a way that you see as nuanced with respect to the moral culture you have lived through and continue to live through, and suddenly someone wants to paint it as "fascist" without understanding the basis at all. Do YOU think your behavior is fascist? Probably not. Words should not have such power without robust moral reasoning driving them, otherwise it is bound to bring dogmatic irrationality to situations that robust moral reasoning would have something to say about.
It is possible that OP has an unusually operationalized usage prepared for "toxic," but when I made my first comment on this post, I should bet against it.
Related: The Anti-Jerk Law by Bryan Caplan
Setting out to define people as toxic and then cut them out of your life is the most toxic mentality you can have. Allowing buzzwords like "toxic" to control you without a fair operationalization is toxic. On average, the person who cuts people out of their life because they're considered toxic are really cutting people out of their life for making honest mistakes or reasonable disagreements; it's either disproportionate or highly conducive to epistemic injustice.
Scott and Abram? Who? Do they have any books I can read to familiarize myself with this discourse?
If I drop this ball, it will bounce back up to me. Is that 'if' in the territory? I feel like the potential to bounce when dropped is extrapolable from the physical properties of the ball. Like there's a mathematics of correct hypothetical situations to be discovered, which is part of the territory as much as e.g. Godel's theorem is.
This is exactly the kind of sensationalism that would have convinced me to embrace school. It says nothing of its character to have oily skin and a hollow skull devoid of moisture. I would be offended that the author tried to use such gimmicks on me.
In fact, if the author *really* wanted to make me think, they shouldn't even portray the enemy as shiny like Ra (https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/ra/). They would portray the enemy as normal. Relatable, in fact; someone you could be best friends with. It is of the greatest importance to this person not to be annoying; not to "cause problems for the sake of causing problems" (i.e. to invite debate about why things are the way they are). This is extremely persuasive to most people; they don't want to be That Guy, whose badness is just to be taken for granted. Anyone with common sense understands. Be Skeet and not Jimmy.
There's no way a newb could know better. It's impossible that exposure and involvement could mislead a person.
It's not evil or toxic or mean to get angry; why would it be? It's a matter of how the anger is expressed and the context; it's not automatically evil/toxic/mean. If you use it wrong, it's mean. But anger is an appropriate response to bullying, at which point it's just kinda Angry Neutral/Good rather than Angry Evil. You can get angry and manage self-control simultaneously. You can have conflicted feelings of love and hate for a person while also caring for them completely. Anger is just anger.
Upvoted, and: Why new year's predictions? Why not new day's predictions, or new week's predictions? Months? Seasons? Book pages? TV episodes? That's not a critique of this post specifically. I just don't see very much of it.
Also, why limit yourself to existing fields and "miscellaneous"? Can we construct topic areas around which to ask weirder questions / make weirder bets and predictions? What are some of the strangest topic areas we can invent? What about topic areas whose most accurate description would lose a lot of information if it were condensed into any existing English word?
(Also, unlike book page or tv episode predictions, the predictions in this post are typically about large-scale processes rather than immediate concrete realities, e.g. like those of your "personal" category. What if, instead of 'everywhere' and 'right here' predictions, we had 'over there' predictions as well?)
I'm not suggesting the topics would need entire sentences, but even just the combination of three or four words might give you access to strange topic spaces. Psycheconomics predictions, anyone? "Psychenomics" doesn't mean anything to me in advance, but maybe with a bit of experience searching we can categorize information to "psychenomics" semi-arbitrarily and get a kinesthetic feel for a previously unseen territory.
The demarcation of our disciplines, I'm assuming, is not a feature of the world; in alternate timelines, we do not distinguish between psychology and neurology, or history and anthropology, or computer science and mathematics. Those seem related, so it may be intuitive to treat them the same, but why not have categories for crossdisciplinary or discipline-queer questions/bets/predictions?
What is the best proportion of personal/over-there/everywhere predictions? How long did it take you to write these predictions? When you write one, how deep is your thinking behind it? How often do you make predictions like these? Only once a year? Couldn't you do better? Should you carry notebooks with you everywhere all the time, prepared to write predictions? Should you use an interval timer to force you to make a prediction whenever it rings? Should I limit how much time in the day that I spend on writing predictions? Could all the questions I'm asking related to prediction writing be its own field of study?
If you don't make the world perfect by the judgment of every person in existence at this very moment, you are a hypocrite.
If you don't internalize the best character traits of every human role model in history that you have and donate a billion dollars to every effective charity, you're a hypocrite.
Look, I don't know what your reward function is, but if you do not max it out right now, you're a hypocrite.
What's stopping you from mastering everything perfectly right now? Could it be that you don't understand perfection? What's stopping you from understanding perfection? Could it be that it's complicated? Why would you be so conflicted? To feel conflicted must be some kind of hypocrisy or something.
Here's an easy task for an AI: make everyone smile. How noble of the AI to be so certain in his sense of right and wrong.
Ah crap, I'm being a belligerent. I'm sorry I overreacted to your post. Consider my attack valid on a kind of person who argues your point who is not you; someone who can't operationalize in more agreeable terms. Maybe you can operationalize your point in a more agreeable way. If you can, I have done you injustice by being so harsh. If you can't, I still shouldn't discourage you so harshly from making an attempt to make sense of things.
In the course of speaking honestly, you might not be speaking with everything you know and identify with present in mind. Maybe your working memory can't easily reconcile everything known at once. To take one instance of honest expression and deem it decisively representative of a person's entire potential honesty, as if you had never confronted a complex dilemma and spoke based on formative impressions, is an act of bad faith, or just very naive.
Listeners might have misconceptions about the required implications of the spoken words as well.
We can accept all of:
A. The spoken words tell us something about the person's mindset
B. The spoken words don't tell us everything about the person's mindset
C. The background assumptions with which we make inferences about the person's mindset given their spoken words might be flawed
D. The speaker might not mean all of the connotations perceived by the listeners
E. Listeners are predisposed to hearing things in extremely simplistic terms, especially on certain topics, and are irrationally unprepared to even entertain background information from which the speaker makes sense
F. The speaker is being honest with respect to the information they are biologically capable of thinking about at one time, which may not be all the information they can notice, and future versions of themselves could readily disavow old positions once this information is recalled; "future" being as soon as during the course of the same conversation, awkward though it may be to reveal your imperfection.