Conversation

Replying to
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.
Quote Tweet
While I strongly admire @owasow ‘s work, it’s clear that I have not been, due to both my background and words, an effective messenger of his findings about the power of non-violent protest. I regret starting this conversation and will be much more careful moving forward. twitter.com/davidshor/stat…
2
24
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.
7
77
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.”
1
66
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.
1
50
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.
2
28
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.
4
42
Replying to
I think "having people treat you nicely and having a good reputation" is now just a 50% harder skill. Social presence is simply another class of institutions to which the principle applies. I see more people who manage to thread that needle well today than 3-4 years ago.
Replying to and
I feel like part of the problem is that you need to build a social presence that is (pardon my Taleb) antifragile: It's very easy to have people treat you nicely and have a good reputation by people pleasing and that works great until it suddenly very majorly doesn't.
1
4