by alterom | 2025-04-02 19:38:47+00:00
>I even agree with a lot of the stuff you're saying about teachers! But your tone in these comments leaves a lot to be desired.

OK, so we agree on the substance. Excellent.

As for the tone (and discussing it) - we're getting into discussing the emotional response you're having to my writing.

And I firmly posit that most of that emotional response comes from your internal state, rather than my writing. To give a specific example:

>over-emphasizing parts of your sentences as if I'm a middle-schooler who is first encountering your fancy words

Here, you're ascribing intent and attitude to formatting; specifically, you are reading condescension in it.

There are more reasons to italicize words in sentences other than being mean to people.

One good reason is making this text more accessible to neurodivergent people¹.

It has nothing to do with you; such formatting makes people with ADHD have an easier time reading the text - and makes it easier for everyone else to scan the long passages of text fast by providing visual anchors for the key words.

Saying this as both someone with ADHD and a neurodivergence advocate². The formatting makes it easer for me to read (and re-read / proof-read) my own writing.

I'm also autistic.

My words aren't "fancy", and aren't chosen to intimidate - they are simply the words I find most precisely expressing the thoughts I want to communicate.

I assume you know them, otherwise I wouldn't be using them (or would provide an explanation).

Speaking in this manner is a very common autistic trait³, and - most importantly - has nothing to do with you. Yet you perceive an attitude (and/or emotions) towards you in that manner of speech alone.

>claiming that I'm being emotional while you're just a beacon of logic.

I've claimed neither. Can you quote the specific instance?

We all have emotions, as we've established. My point was that I am not basing my arguments on appeal to emotion, nor I am driven by emotions you described when writing this.

Passion for teaching (my special interest) - absolutely; joy of writing - you bet. Those are emotions.

They lead me to producing solid arguments, however (we do agree on the substance, right?). And if there are flaws in the points I'm making, I'm all ears.

And I am not claiming that you are emotional. I am pointing out that when you comment on my tone, and on my tone only, what you are doing is discussing your own emotional response (reaction to how I say things) rather than the content of my argument.

Note the difference between "you are emotional" and "what you are doing here is emotional".

>You're sprinkling in rhetorical questions implying I can't read the comment I replied to

The questions aren't rhetorical.

You went ahead and pointed out that my comment had multiple instances of "holier-than-thou" (where there were none, as I argued above) while saying nothing of the ones I the comment I was responding to.

What gives? I assume you are being fair, which implies you missed them. But I don't want to assume, so I ask.

Other than that - I don't imply that you "can't read" when I ask you to re-read what I wrote with a different lens.

I have provided more context in my response, and I believe my previous comments - which I don't expect anyone to remember! - would come out in a different light with the extra context.

Hence - please re-read them, bearing in mind what I say here.

By the way, this is another instance where you are reading an implication where there's none.

As I said already, I'm autistic, and I don't speak in implications.

Reading with the assumption that nothing is implied is another lens worth trying to see my writing with.

Looping back to the ADHD side of neurodivergence: I read and re-read everything I respond to multiple times because I assume that I'll miss something if I don't, and get myself in a pickle.

I am not asking you to do anything I am not doing myself.

>But your tone in these comments leaves a lot to be desired.

What we are both experiencing now is an example of the so-called Double Empathy problem.⁴

One one side, we have me and /user/ninetyninenine - I clearly have no issue with what they wrote; particularly - I don't have the issue that others have here. I see them as empathic.

The people who respond to them see /user/ninetyninenine as angry, and my defense of them as condescending.

This is a known phenomenon, and I'm sorry, but I am not going to go out of the way and adjust my writing style to protect the feelings of people who refuse to follow a simple request of taking my words literally, not ascribing emotions to me, and distinguish their emotional response from the content of my arguments.

Doing so has a cost⁵ to me that I can't afford to incur.

Again, this:

>I even agree with a lot of the stuff you're saying about teachers!

...this is the important part, to me.

That means I have communicated the ideas I wanted to bring to your attention.

Which I am not taking for granted - attention is a limited resource.

>I've had many experts explain stuff to me without doing any of that.

Kudos to them. To each their own.

>on a semi-obscure technology forum

An influential technology forum. And not obscure by far, judging by the traffic it brings to pages linked in either posts or discussions (including my website).

That aside, I simply enjoy writing. And the cool thing about copy-paste technology is that I can re-use this writing in another argument or a publication elsewhere.

To quote a meme: the IBM Model M keyboard goes brrrrrrrrrr.

>you've got some emotions and passion involved. Which is totally fine! Humans aren't meant to be completely devoid of emotion.

Sure, and I did say that. I am passionate about teaching, and I am interested in these discussions.

>>But nobody - including you - is actually holy

>It's a saying, I wasn't being literal.

See, this is a patronizing and a condescending thing to say.

Which also implies you have not actually read what I wrote, because I specifically went over what I believe are examples of "holier-than-thou" in the comment I was responding to.

What I wrote very clearly, beyond shadow of doubt, indicates that I am more than familiar with that saying.

I wrote that sentence that way because it's attention-grabbing, and it appears to have worked.

Sadly, it also appears that you glossed over entirety of the text that preceded it.

So, may I ask you to go back and re-read it, while keeping in mind the extra context I have provided in this comment?

Asking sincerely, because I think it would be great for both of us to bridge the evident communication gap.

I'll be eagerly waiting for your feedback - thank you in advance.

______

¹ https://medium.com/@katerinegeraa/5-tips-for-writing-neurodi...

² https://romankogan.net/adhd

³ https://www.reddit.com/r/autism/comments/hc174z/why_do_peopl...

⁴ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem

⁵ https://tcf.org/content/commentary/the-economic-and-emotiona...