Jonathan Blow explains the problem with internet communities. Clipped from a stream recorded on November 15, 2020. Tip me: ko-fi.com/blowfan Jon's Twitch: / j_blow
From the urban dictionary: "Circlejerk - a group discussion or activity between like-minded individuals that validates mutual biases or goals in a non-confrontational environment". Perfectly describes the activities of an online group that spins around a single topic.
Yeah, it's almost like dividing the world into "engineers" and "not engineers," and thinking that everyone who doesn't believe your enlightened philosophy is a philistine. As if he's not just artificially creating the engineering "team." He's so clueless he doesn't even recognize he's guilty of the exact thing that he's criticizing.
Quality is irrelevant of how loud or frequent you post. It's just that most intelligent people dont post because theyre driven away by the stupid people. Not just the loud stupid people. All stupid people. And the lack of other intelligent persons.
If you spend most of your time on forums then you can't spend most of your time getting better and building stuff. So those two groups have little overlap.
I have noticed increase in my productivity as I've began browsing forums and social media less. There's something about them that tricks you into thinking you're learning something useful or important, but mostly you're just arguing with other clueless people. Once you build expertise in anything, these places become almost unbearably useless and aggravating to you, so you just leave. I'm happy to occassionally interact with another artist or programmer, but there is no reason to visit any forums anymore for hours like I used to.
Some of a person's views are for social cohesion and the rest are for actually dealing with reality. To the extent that your viewpoint isn't banged up against reality on a regular basis, and with vivid and obvious consequences, it's free to flail about and be whatever you like.
Often I think there is a subconscious sense of "yes, but why are you bringing this up? I don't spend my time caring about it" which is the motivation behind unhelpful replies in online communities. Something else I've hypothesized is that people like to reply in disagreement as a way of disagreeing with popularity or relevance (subconsciously they just disagree with the level of popularity, not the unreasonableness of the content). In the extreme case you might have a video with a million views, possessing an interesting title and thumbnail, and prominently appearing as a suggested video. All these signifiers of popularity/relevance encourage viewers to leave replies when they don't agree with the video. On other platforms, a visible number of upvotes and likes are analogous signifiers of popularity, and whether something makes it into your feed is an analogous signifier of social relevance & algorithmic relevance to you.
The unfortunate truth is that most people just dont have the means to pursue their own path. People want to survive and be safe, if they don't feel they're strong enough to have that in the bank and swim 'upstream', theyre going to choose downstream every time. The stories we are telling to eachother about ourselves and what are our values, in most cases those are a cover up to, again, feel safer.
I feel like this video is much deeper than it's title (no shade -- you do great work!) You could even maker a smaller video from this called... well the title would be hard but something like "Ego and alternative motivations." Idk. It's something about insecurity. Something worth thinking on... thanks for this.
Yes, and that is exactly everything that's wrong about politics. In an ideal system, you can choose among multiple parties and candidates knowing that your vote will have some firm of representation. Nobody is "married" nor has to defend either of the two big parties nor anyone cares whether any one politician is photogenic, or an asshole, or a Mormon, or anything remotely related to their personal life because they are just there to do a job and not be a celebrity.
That was me messaging Jon on twitch chat. The community was just some people on discord for a twitch streamer. It was a comp sci sub group in the server. I don’t do internet communities and was shocked by the aggressiveness and idiocy of the people. They defend everything from llvm to chrome and hate low level programmers cuz they have an inferiority complex and value themselves by how much money their job makes. Really strange experience. Just stay away. A community i would recommend is the Odin discord, very nice language and great people to talk with, and most importantly, not internet people.
Your first mistake was joining a regular discord server and talking about computer science. If you want to talk about computer science with reasonable people you have to find smaller computer science specific servers. You also have to make sure whatever server you join doesn't have LGBT stuff plastered all over it. Those hold some of the most annoying people you'll ever meet. Not because they're gay or whatever, but because they make being gay their personality which makes them really insecure, rude and have no personality or have nothing valuable to add to a conversation. You'll know a reasonable person when they give zero fucks what color you are, gender, sexuality, etc. Most reasonable comp Sci people only care about your work and ideas (if they add value to the conversation).
To be clear, Jonathan Blow acts EXACTLY like what he is describing. The reality is not about being on a sports team. The reality is that people have convinced themselves that they are right about something, they are working very hard to make the thing they know they are right about into a reality. And they become very frustrated that other people don't understand it the way they do and aren't doing what they know needs to be done to make things better.
yes, but an ego that insistent is necessary to will things into the world. being 'reasonable' or 'doing a thing for its own sake' as JBlow ignorantly puts it; has no frame of reference to relate itself. just an infinite series of redundant diagnosis' by the collective other to do things there way.
I'm porting an old project to llvm 11 (allegedly stable) and it hangs during compiling on a single 2000 LOC file paging 76Gb of virtual memory in ad out. The file compiles perfectly fine with GCC, Intel, pgi and every other compiler I've tried.
Indeed. That is why I don't consider myself a part of Jon's 'community'. Just watch his streams or watch clips like this from time to time to pick his brain and learn from his insight.
Very true. I think Socrates would love to question everyone here. Yet at some point I need to pick a direction and follow the path for a while, else I’ll never have moved. And if that gets me more results than other paths I’ve tried, it’s what I want. I am definitely working on games in the capacity I’ve always wanted to, thanks to Jon.
Is some video where him say something about nim? I'd like to watch it, because it looks to me, that nim delivers most features that jai propose and it is available now.
with apple fanboys, its mainly pride that drives that behavior. you wouldnt believe the response i got from saying i cant buy apple mini or studio because they dont support 3 monitor outputs without dongles upon dongles. tbh it was also kind of an experiment, but it was truly enlightening to see how far they have fallen 😅 the gnome community on linux is the only community i have found the match the apple fanboy communities idiotic behavior, but ur right, every community has this sort of "sports team" behavior. it's pathetic. logic and reason just completely vanishes from their mind and leaves me questioning how they even manage to keep themselves alive. this herd mentality has been going on everywhere since i was born, not just the internet. i think the "less evolved" still follow the herd in a sense. idk if its fear or just pride or what, but it is definitely a destructive behavior that prohibits advancements in all fields of study and should be frowned upon.
If people only do things for their own egos, how do you explain genuine bona fide wildcards like Ramanujan or Diogenes? Or Buddha? Or even yourself? Why does Jonathan Blow want to be a good engineer? I guess the message here is that it's better to be a purer engineer and accept potential failings than to sit in a camp supporting a cause for the sake of social unity, but I feel like doing things exclusively for the ego is a bit constructed Say you're not a psychopath, and you see someone on the street have a heart attack and you're the only one nearby. You don't help them for the sake of your own ego (you might if you were a nurse or doctor), you help them out of a sense of basic human empathy. I guess empathy is a social effect, but it's nothing to do with your sense of self It's a bit of an edge case but I think it follows through into other decisions - the ego isn't the only deciding factor here for everything
narrow exceptions don't disprove a thesis; only enhance the validity of the theory itself. unless you're religious, there is no frame of reference to even begin from to achieve such impossibilities. everything is performed from ego. to say otherwise is to either have a reductive perspective of what the ego constitutes; or have some perverse ideological stance that tempers behavior. at the end of this clip, JBlow preaches contradictory nonsense. he has already shown egregious ignorance to subjects out of his knowledge base in the past -- not holding that against him in this post tho. the ultimate purpose of any ideology/creed/ethos/etc is to contort itself into dogma; as no one theory/practice/etc can constitute all things. which isn't to say that JBlow's or anyone's aims are pointless; or failed to start due to the very nature of regression into dogma; quite the opposite really. this is how we gleam new insight into just about anything.
Another thing I would add as a consideration: if someone freaks out and is offended by the criticism, consider that it might also be the way in which you criticize that should be changed. Because really there are three scenarios: either you were out of line, or they were out of line, or you were both out of line to some degree. I think it's important to consider all of the possibilities.
Sorry I don't understand what you talk about but I am 26 now... and I did started to play World of Warcraft when I was 12 years old... As I was 23 years old I guess... I met the best online WoW Community(on a private Server) I have ever been to... there maybe only were 120 people online on a faction per side... But man... we did so good together...we did some dungeons... had a talk... no rush... we just enjoyed everything... Maybe it gives some people a think about... that there is some light at the end of the tunnel... I hope for greater times and can just advise... stay away from toxic people! :)
I think intent matters with criticism. If someone says 'you mom's stupid', I'll just ignore that. On the other hand, if they say 'your mom kept silently undermining your father and that impacted your life negatively', I will probably consider that carefully.
@@htpkey Many of us do this to some degree. My favorite example is people citing Dunning-Kruger as a put down for others as if they're a polar bear or something. No, you're human too. Combined with the delicious irony that everyone gets Dunning-Kruger very wrong when citing it. The actual data in the paper is much more monotonic.
