Conversation

By my secret formula, the optimal amount of work time for me to spend in culture-war beefing is about 12%. Strikes the right balance among various considerations. The range of the formula is between 4% to about 80%. Below 4% is psychotic escapism, above 80% is terminal PTSD.
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It takes either more money than god, or extreme naivete to conclude that 0% is the right level of investment. It takes suicidal lack of self-preservation instincts to go over 80% consistently (spiking past 80% under direct personal threat is of course different)
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In an earlier life, in a different culture war, I once used to spar regularly with a communications prof (humanities, not engineering) who was relentlessly hostile and adversarial, and "my side" used to joke that for a communications expert he was bad at it
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We were the naive ones then, uncritically assuming that the purpose of communications expertise was to foster harmonious, civil communications. That's like assuming cooks should only learn to cook sweet things, not savory.
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I was 20 years younger than, and it took me a few rounds to figure out that duh, playing nice and playing well are not the same thing. And that playing well and playing dirty are not the same thing. Like it or not, principled aggression is a regime of skilled communication.
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I think that's where my be-slightly-evil stance was born, and though much of that playbook as I've written about it rests on what you might call "Jesuit tactics" that are superficially civil and nice, there's definitely room in it for being tactically obnoxious etc.
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One reason I haven't retreated from the fray in 3 years marked by a widespread retreat into waldenponding is that I think it's a mistake even for pacifists to let aggro instincts atrophy too much. "If you want peace, prepare for war, if you want war, prepare for peace" etc.
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I'm definitely nowhere near as aggro or beefy as say Taleb, but I'm definitely not in a zone of zen retreat either.
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