![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
More comments I've posted elsewhere:
To![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
supergee, who was discussing materialism and what he dislikes about it:
I'm not convinced that whatrysmiel is talking about--which is at least similar to my own view, that everything is emergent from the universe as it is [1]--means that we are "creating" value rather than finding it. Whether materialism is true or false (or incomplete, imprecise, or meaningless), does not change the value of, say, a good novel or a good song, nor the source of that value: it's in the creator of the work, and in the person who is enjoying it, not in the book as a paper artifact nor yet floating somewhere in the universe separate from writer, reader, and text.
[1] I don't begin to claim that I know all about the universe as it is: rather, it seems to me that, almost by definition, that's all there is. It might--though I see no reason to believe this--include souls or energy fields or something beyond mind as emergent activity of brains, but if they exist, they are part of the universe.
On![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
polyamory, peaceofpie wrote "I have mixed feelings about the ethics of cheating and punishment for cheating, though, since I'm generally opposed to grading. Ideally, you should only be cheating yourself if you cheat, and I don't think toohighly of teaching styles that have students graded against each other."
In reply, I talked about the different uses of grades and tests, and why cheating is still wrong:
Grades, as far as I can tell, serve (at least) three purposes. One is for self-evaluation: if I take, say, a self-paced online course, and come to a quiz, the point is for me to find out whether I've learned that material. If not, I should review it, possibly using a different textbook or set of lessons.
The second is to enable someone who wasn't actually teaching me to figure out whether I know some material well enough for a given purpose: that can be arithmetic, accounting, or how to fly an airplane.
The third is to compare people's work against each other's. That's the only one of the three that your objection applies to.
No sensible person would cheat in the first context given: they'd stumble when they tried to use the material, or in the next set of lessons. A remarkable number of people do try to cheat in the second context--they don't understand that failing a driving test means they need more practice before it's safe for them to be operating that heavy machinery, or don't care that they'd be defrauding an employer by claiming to be qualified nurses or accountants. Lots of people cheat in the third, or think it's okay to do so--and not only are they also cheating themselves out of learning, to the extent that the resulting grades are used for other purposes, they're changing the evaluation from "who has done the work/learned the material" to "who can afford to buy a term paper/has the most friends who know things." Far too many things in our culture are already skewed in favor of the richer and more popular people.
If you don't believe in grades, enroll in a course of study that doesn't use them. Or do the work as well as you can or care to, and ignore your grades. Being a socialist doesn't entitle me to rob banks.
In response to a post bypnh complaining that LJ posters will offer reassuring comments to almost anything, wild_irises said some interesting things about reassurance and the difficulty and potential value of emotionally safe spaces. I wrote:
I said some of this to Patrick, but I'd like to elaborate.
There are different kinds of reassurance. Most notably, there's a real difference between "I agree with you about $political_issue" and "I'm sorry that happened, and no, you aren't crazy." The latter is, I think, an emotional transaction that LJ is better at than Usenet.
There are people to whom my reaction would be "You really are crazy," but I generally have better things to do than read their writing, whether on LJ, Usenet, the rest of the Web, or printed on paper. I'd better clarify that--I don't mean friends or acquaintances who are dealing with specific mental problems, I mean people who want to convince me that the Jews are conspiring with space aliens to take over the world, or the CIA has implanted a radio in their heads.
It also seems relevant that when the emotional transaction on Patrick and Teresa's Weblog goes to the sort of attack that Patrick might seem to be implying LJ would be better for having, Teresa does her best to squelch it by disemvowelling the offending posts. LJ doesn't have that feature--I can't edit a comment, only hide or remove it, and optionally ban the commenter. (OK, I suppose I could copy the comment, disemvowel it, repost it under my own name as "here is X's comment disemvowelled," and remove the original. But I'm not going to, in part because it would be labeled as my writing.)
I tend not to respond to requests for hugs either--but I do include them in comments to certain people whom I regularly hug in person, if it seems appropriate. And I have made a note of one person who explicitly does not want virtual hugs, and offer her tea instead.
Response to a friends-locked post from someone who had been in the habit of explaining and defending whichever side of a disagreement seemed not to be understood in a given conversation, and stopped doing so in liberal fannish contexts because she had some (unspecified) unpleasant experiences doing so:
In my experience, if someone defends a position outside formal school-type debate, they're going to be assumed to mean what they say. If you--or someone--were to say "well, my relatives support Bush because thus-and-such," it would produce a different reaction than "Bush is good because thus-and-such." The latter is likely to get me saying things ranging from "do you really believe that?" to "that's been debunked." With the former, I wouldn't assume it was what you believed, so I wouldn't be as likely to be trying to convince you otherwise.
And some of those right-wing perspectives feel threatening to me and people like me: it's hard to be calm about people who not only think that my bisexuality will send me to hell, but want to punish me for it here on earth.
In a discussion inwild_irises's journal, polydad elaborated on his comments about some fat strangers whom he found unattractive:
In addition to obese, the women were also described as "having no sense of self."
I'll stipulate that your description is basically accurate, to the extent possible (since nobody could be walking around with no muscle at all to support bones, fat, and internal organs): that those women's clothes didn't fit well and weren't designed to look good on their bodies, and that they selected their own clothes from a selection broader than "you can have this one style in either dark gray or navy blue," and that they didn't take good care of themselves.
What interests me is that you're equating "didn't make an effort to look attractive" with "have no sense of self." I'm far from an advocate of mind-body dualism, but it's a very common attitude in this culture. It's well within cultural norms for someone to have a sense of her or himself that is in terms of being a lawyer, truck driver, or construction worker; a mother; a college graduate; a Christian; a Chicagoan; a person of a particular ethnicity; or any number of things that don't have much to do with the body, and in particular with the person's physical appearance at a specific time. Someone who identifies strongly as a parent, or with a race or ethnicity, may connect that with physicality--but it may have more to do with "I bore three children" than with her current weight or muscle tone.
To
supergee, who was discussing materialism and what he dislikes about it:I'm not convinced that what
rysmiel is talking about--which is at least similar to my own view, that everything is emergent from the universe as it is [1]--means that we are "creating" value rather than finding it. Whether materialism is true or false (or incomplete, imprecise, or meaningless), does not change the value of, say, a good novel or a good song, nor the source of that value: it's in the creator of the work, and in the person who is enjoying it, not in the book as a paper artifact nor yet floating somewhere in the universe separate from writer, reader, and text.[1] I don't begin to claim that I know all about the universe as it is: rather, it seems to me that, almost by definition, that's all there is. It might--though I see no reason to believe this--include souls or energy fields or something beyond mind as emergent activity of brains, but if they exist, they are part of the universe.
On
polyamory, peaceofpie wrote "I have mixed feelings about the ethics of cheating and punishment for cheating, though, since I'm generally opposed to grading. Ideally, you should only be cheating yourself if you cheat, and I don't think toohighly of teaching styles that have students graded against each other."In reply, I talked about the different uses of grades and tests, and why cheating is still wrong:
Grades, as far as I can tell, serve (at least) three purposes. One is for self-evaluation: if I take, say, a self-paced online course, and come to a quiz, the point is for me to find out whether I've learned that material. If not, I should review it, possibly using a different textbook or set of lessons.
The second is to enable someone who wasn't actually teaching me to figure out whether I know some material well enough for a given purpose: that can be arithmetic, accounting, or how to fly an airplane.
The third is to compare people's work against each other's. That's the only one of the three that your objection applies to.
No sensible person would cheat in the first context given: they'd stumble when they tried to use the material, or in the next set of lessons. A remarkable number of people do try to cheat in the second context--they don't understand that failing a driving test means they need more practice before it's safe for them to be operating that heavy machinery, or don't care that they'd be defrauding an employer by claiming to be qualified nurses or accountants. Lots of people cheat in the third, or think it's okay to do so--and not only are they also cheating themselves out of learning, to the extent that the resulting grades are used for other purposes, they're changing the evaluation from "who has done the work/learned the material" to "who can afford to buy a term paper/has the most friends who know things." Far too many things in our culture are already skewed in favor of the richer and more popular people.
If you don't believe in grades, enroll in a course of study that doesn't use them. Or do the work as well as you can or care to, and ignore your grades. Being a socialist doesn't entitle me to rob banks.
In response to a post by
pnh complaining that LJ posters will offer reassuring comments to almost anything, wild_irises said some interesting things about reassurance and the difficulty and potential value of emotionally safe spaces. I wrote:I said some of this to Patrick, but I'd like to elaborate.
There are different kinds of reassurance. Most notably, there's a real difference between "I agree with you about $political_issue" and "I'm sorry that happened, and no, you aren't crazy." The latter is, I think, an emotional transaction that LJ is better at than Usenet.
There are people to whom my reaction would be "You really are crazy," but I generally have better things to do than read their writing, whether on LJ, Usenet, the rest of the Web, or printed on paper. I'd better clarify that--I don't mean friends or acquaintances who are dealing with specific mental problems, I mean people who want to convince me that the Jews are conspiring with space aliens to take over the world, or the CIA has implanted a radio in their heads.
It also seems relevant that when the emotional transaction on Patrick and Teresa's Weblog goes to the sort of attack that Patrick might seem to be implying LJ would be better for having, Teresa does her best to squelch it by disemvowelling the offending posts. LJ doesn't have that feature--I can't edit a comment, only hide or remove it, and optionally ban the commenter. (OK, I suppose I could copy the comment, disemvowel it, repost it under my own name as "here is X's comment disemvowelled," and remove the original. But I'm not going to, in part because it would be labeled as my writing.)
I tend not to respond to requests for hugs either--but I do include them in comments to certain people whom I regularly hug in person, if it seems appropriate. And I have made a note of one person who explicitly does not want virtual hugs, and offer her tea instead.
Response to a friends-locked post from someone who had been in the habit of explaining and defending whichever side of a disagreement seemed not to be understood in a given conversation, and stopped doing so in liberal fannish contexts because she had some (unspecified) unpleasant experiences doing so:
In my experience, if someone defends a position outside formal school-type debate, they're going to be assumed to mean what they say. If you--or someone--were to say "well, my relatives support Bush because thus-and-such," it would produce a different reaction than "Bush is good because thus-and-such." The latter is likely to get me saying things ranging from "do you really believe that?" to "that's been debunked." With the former, I wouldn't assume it was what you believed, so I wouldn't be as likely to be trying to convince you otherwise.
And some of those right-wing perspectives feel threatening to me and people like me: it's hard to be calm about people who not only think that my bisexuality will send me to hell, but want to punish me for it here on earth.
In a discussion in
wild_irises's journal, polydad elaborated on his comments about some fat strangers whom he found unattractive:In addition to obese, the women were also described as "having no sense of self."
I'll stipulate that your description is basically accurate, to the extent possible (since nobody could be walking around with no muscle at all to support bones, fat, and internal organs): that those women's clothes didn't fit well and weren't designed to look good on their bodies, and that they selected their own clothes from a selection broader than "you can have this one style in either dark gray or navy blue," and that they didn't take good care of themselves.
What interests me is that you're equating "didn't make an effort to look attractive" with "have no sense of self." I'm far from an advocate of mind-body dualism, but it's a very common attitude in this culture. It's well within cultural norms for someone to have a sense of her or himself that is in terms of being a lawyer, truck driver, or construction worker; a mother; a college graduate; a Christian; a Chicagoan; a person of a particular ethnicity; or any number of things that don't have much to do with the body, and in particular with the person's physical appearance at a specific time. Someone who identifies strongly as a parent, or with a race or ethnicity, may connect that with physicality--but it may have more to do with "I bore three children" than with her current weight or muscle tone.
Tags: