It seems like there was a time when these Long Now dates would prompt curiosity here on HN, without so much hostility as now. I don't care about the dates, but the aggressively conventional are something else.
It's useful for flushing the unthinking conformists out of the underbrush. That way we know who would have cheered on the court's sentence on Turing or Galileo before it matters.
> It's useful for flushing the unthinking conformists out of the underbrush.
you know how its annoying asfuck to reed shit without punctuatuin and capitals and possible misspeeled and those fuckers who never use the shift period or comma keys get read a lot less than they might just because its too much drudgery to shlep through their texts? your abit like that and i dont think thats what your going for
One would think you write to be read; to inform, argue, hopefully convince (and possibly even entertain?). This silly affectation is jarring; it breaks up the reading flow and often makes at least me give up. I may be more sensitive than most to sh...tuff like this, but surely I can't be all alone in it.
So what you're doing is just robbing yourself of an audience. Is that really what you want?
OK, maybe it is: We're "unthinking conformists". So... Why do you use correct spelling, punctuation, and capitalization? The nitwits my first paragraph imitates all say that's the real, you know, sign that you're, like, square. Are you perhaps more of an "unthinking conformist" than you'd care to admit -- above all, to yourself?
I can sympathize with a sensitivity to things that others take in stride: for example, TVs in public spaces, jumping and cutting frenetically, impossible to really ignore.
But here's another example: in the 80s there was still a live issue of the convention that 'he' could cover both genders, and so on. I'd been reading long enough, with enough older writing, that I can remember how attempts at nonsexist writing could be jarring and awkward -- arresting the reader full stop for the sake of a cultural-politics position completely irrelevant to the point being written about. (Especially since those newer conventions had to evolve.) For people to come over to the newer way took time (and I wasn't won over instantly myself) -- maybe it's useless to say this, but the Right Answer to How We Should All Talk is not divinely revealed.
"But this isn't for liberation! It's dumb!" Maybe. The point is that in a dynamic free culture you get comfortable with genuine differences and you learn it's pointless to make a fuss over such a harmless eccentricity. And a dynamic free culture is the type that can learn to get better over time. I think seeing so many complaints, so consistently, about this eccentricity, is a real (albeit trivial) signal of a cultural problem. (Admittedly I dunno, maybe it's just that HN has a lot more commenters and the fraction who do this is a big enough number now. But it's part of a broader pattern.)
I hope this helps you see my point of view, starting this thread. Can't speak for Kragen.
> in the 80s there was still a live issue of the convention that 'he' could cover both genders, and so on.
Still is, AFAICS. And I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the traditional view that it can.
> I'd been reading long enough, with enough older writing, that I can remember how attempts at nonsexist writing could be jarring and awkward
Still are, sometimes.
> For people to come over to the newer way took time (and I wasn't won over instantly myself)
Long before me, it seems.
> the Right Answer to How We Should All Talk is not divinely revealed.
Kind of isn't -- and kind of is: It's informed by lots of things, like prevailing usage, history, social upheaval, fleeting fashions, and... Simple logic. From a single speaker's perspective, most of those are pretty much "divine revelation"; none of us can single-handedly change these phenomena.
Especially for numbers, which more than most other aspects of language are governed by mathematical logic, which less than all the other governing phenomena changes over time.
> "But this isn't for liberation! It's dumb!" Maybe.
No "maybe" about it; it just plain simply is dumb. That's not how numbers work. Also, to the extent that Kragen wants to promote a "long now" perspective: Why just one prefix zero? Bah, that's still practically the day after tomorrow! That should be at least three zeros! Or, heck, why not six -- or fifteen?
See where that gets us in the end? Yeah, exactly: Nowhere. It's just ridiculous.
> I think seeing so many complaints, so consistently, about this eccentricity, is a real (albeit trivial) signal of a cultural problem.
Yup. And when one person persists in being "a cultural problem" that is sometimes a sign that something is wrong with the culture... And far, far more often a sign that something is wrong with that person. Shaving this situation with the oldest(?) of the philosophical Razors, I'm leaning towards Kragen's affectation.
> (Admittedly I dunno, maybe it's just that HN has a lot more commenters and the fraction who do this is a big enough number now. But it's part of a broader pattern.)
I think it's just simply that the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented, and therefore tends to get annoyed at illiterate -- and innumerate! -- writing more than you might be likely to see elsewhere on the Net.
> I hope this helps you see my point of view, starting this thread.
Well, I don't feel like I got through, so maybe Kragen in dropping this had the right idea.
We are all of us more wrong than we can imagine. I believe cultures that tolerate weird ideas (and there's a difference between tolerating and embracing them) learn faster than conformist cultures. My 80s anecdote was about how an idea I now see as good appeared at first as pointless convention-breaking of negative value, and how you can't tell the difference at first. Such changes generally don't happen by conspiracy, but by someone having an idea and doing it, and others running with it or not. The policy you seem to be pushing instead is that ideas to be tolerated must come with social proof. ("none of us can single-handedly change these phenomena. ... one person ... something is wrong with that person.") In putting it that way I'm probably exaggerating what you really think, but directionally this does seem to be our difference.
> [zeros are dumb]
As I said, I don't care about this at the object level. In my native culture we shrug and move on.
If Long Now dates end up materially helping to make our culture more farsighted, it wouldn't even be all that surprising. For instance, if it caught the attention of one particular nonconformist and inspired them towards some project that set off another cascade which you didn't see as silly.
> the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented
> I believe cultures that tolerate weird ideas (and there's a difference between tolerating and embracing them) learn faster than conformist cultures. [...] Such changes generally don't happen by conspiracy, but by someone having an idea and doing it, and others running with it or not. The policy you seem to be pushing instead is that ideas to be tolerated must come with social proof.
Maybe something in that direction, but OTOH maybe not quite: I just think it's counterproductive if by running with one's idea, one also actively antagonizes people with it. And Kragen's way of advocating the "Long Now" perspective comes off, at least to me (and apparently at least a few other posters), as equally disrupting to fluent reading as people advocating for other new perspectives while demonstrating their "non-conformist" creds by writing in lower-case-only, skipping punctuation, ignoring (or, likely, more often just not knowing...) the rules of grammar or spelling. (Admittedly, not equally as bad as the arseholes doing all of those at once; just in that direction.) That feels likely to put as many or more people off one's message as it wins converts, so recommending them to drop it was really just honest advice for the good of their own cause. (At least originally, before they apparently confessed to not actually having a cause but just be trolling.)
IOW, TL;DR: Not so much "must come with social proof" as that this seems in practice to be disproving / having disproved itself; while not necessarily as to the validity of the concept itself, but as an effective method of advocacy.
> > the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented
> That hasn't changed in this interval.
Yeah, I was only speculating about why a quirky way to write numbers, specifically, comes off as innumerate and might therefore be seen as (approaching-)equally annoying here as bad spelling / grammar / punctuation / capitalisation is elsewhere, in other below-average-illiterate corners of the 'Net.
It may be right to say that in HN-like circles nowadays you should keep to a smaller weirdness budget if you don't want to alienate other hackers. I think that's sad, though. Feeling tempted to start following Kragen on this point just out of orneriness.
