- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yes, but the sensible response to this is not to tell depressed people (or people who might plausibly be depressed) that they're just being lazy and useless.@Simon_Jester
"Unfortunately there is no real perceptible difference between genuinely clueless but willing to learn, and clueless and unwilling to learn troll arguing in bad faith, people just run out of patience eventually."
"unfortunately there is no real perceptible difference between someone who is genuinely too depressed to do things, and someone who is just unmotivated, people run out of patience eventually."
I would never place myself, or anyone else not doing so in professional capacity, to try to see the difference in the later two because that is not only too heavy a burden to lay on a random person, but also a recipy for disaster, this should be left to healthcare professionals, and most definitely not individuals over the internet.
My point here is that treating people who actually have a problem, and who are trying to cope with it, as if they are indistinguishable from bad people... Is pretty despicable when done aggressively, and still problematic even when not done very hard.
The thing is, the rationalist community isn't just a phalanx of people demanding that these issues be explained to them over and over.
For example, the present discussion isn't about how rationalists are politically deplorable at all. It's about rationalist fiction tastes, and about the idea that explicitly explaining the ideas behind good writing technique, or ideas that parallel those ideas, is somehow just a case of rationalists laboriously reinventing the wheel.
This entire subject has nothing to do with the common behaviors we identify as "alt-right JAQ brigades" or whatever you want to call them. There may, in other cases, be members of the rationalist community who do behave that way, but it's not at issue at the moment.
And to be sure, your reserves of time and patience are still finite. But my point remains. It's not fair to other people, or to society at large, to start assuming that ANY group which is conspicuously out of line with the social expectations of your mainstream culture is inherently OK to mock. If they're not hurting anyone, sneering at them is wrong, and may involve sneering at people who have real problems and disabilities, which is unethical.
See, that's the thing.
If I can't call people out for bullying nerds who are predisposed to analytical overthinking and social awkwardness, because some fraction of the people who get shouted at are probably alt-right trolls... something has gone wrong.
Because we don't normally approve of that kind of behavior when it's some other group being targeted, and "nerds are unpopular and annoying" isn't a good enough reason to change that.
In some cases, bullying the nerds or criticizing them for engaging with ideas differently IS ableism, because it denigrates the efforts of (for instance) people on the autism spectrum to engage with their world. In other cases, there's no measurable disability... but you still have people with real life problems that they can't just willpower away, and which make it much more productive for them to engage with ideas in their style rather than yours.
