Venkatesh Rao

Any job you could lose over a tweet like this is probably not worth having. I’d expect more critical context in an essay-length review of the paper but this is fine for a tweet.https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1265998625836019712 …

This is Shor’s apology tweet, but he lost the job anyway. If you look at the replies to both tweets, what people think is necessary context amounts to an impossible tweet. Forget 280, even 2800 characters would be a tight squeeze for an average writer. https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1266448606321664004?s=21 …https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1266448606321664004 …

I’m starting to converge on an odd diagnosis of Woke’s basic problem: trying to solve with language problems that are fundamentally not about language. Reality has an enormous amount of detail. There will also be vastly more tgatvremain unsaid than can be said about anything.

The challenge of using words well is to direct the benefit of doubt around what remains unsaid in ways that keep the conversation going. But this makes demands on the listener as much as the speaker. I’d like to see people get called out and canceled for “bad listening.”

If you want to distort the shape of the space of the unsaid around what’s said to hurt the speaker, it is *always* possible to do so. There’s always a hostile context you could assume. That somebody might do that is a risk you always take on in speaking at all.

But it takes a bad listener to materialize that risk. Here, I don’t actually blame the person who called Shor out, or the employer for firing him. They’ve made their choices. I’m saying the caller-outer is not worth accommodating in good faith and the job not worth having.

I’ve been saying this in private for a couple of years now — any institution vulnerable to Woke takeover should probably be abandoned to it. Salvage is not possible. Build alternatives anew. Bad Listener destruction is a power-trip drug that resists de-addiction.

I think that gives this whole moment in history too much credit. If it's mostly just Marxists doing what they've always done for the reasons they always do it, there can't be that many of them.