Do you understand, as I’ve said, that not every detail of an analogy has to match up 1:1 isomorphically?
Of course. But it’s completely dishonest to use “screaming invective” as an analogy to comment of “edit a text file”. You’re (again) ignoring that point of my reply.
You could say “Hey, as an analogy, if someone punches me in the face, I fight back”. And then spend a dozen or more messages wondering why I don’t agree that the analogy is in any way relevant to the comment at hand.
This doesn’t sound like someone who was misinterpreted and never meant to say that you should tailor your CV and cover letter to “pretend” you “genuinely” want a job you don’t “genuinely” want.
Let me be perfectly clear: When I say “when you’re applying for a job, you should edit your CV to make yourself look good”, it is simply not possible to rationally conclude that what I really meant was that people should “pretend” to that you “genuinely” want a job you don’t “genuinely” want.
Your entire argument is based on reading things into my comments.
Conclusion: what you did was analogous to what the guy in the video game analogy did.
Absolutely not. No reasonable person would conclude that “edit a CV” was in any way analogous to “screaming invective”. That analogy is false, disingenuous, and lying.
The point of that part of the analogy is that both words were misinterpreted. The guy in the analogy wasn’t making a real threat.
The analogy was that screaming invective was interpreted honestly by the listener, and that the listener was rightly shocked and horrified by the screaming invective. And then only after finding out the real cause of the issue, the listener understood that the screaming invective wasn’t real.
That analogy is utterly irrelevant to the real case here. There is simply no possible way for anyone rational to read what I wrote, and be shocked and horrified by it.
The reading of my comments as intending “self harm”, or that people should “pretending” to want a job, or (bizarrely) that people should apply to a job they don’t “genuinely” want are not supported by any facts, logic, or reason.
And you haven’t explained. How do you get from my post to someone “pretending”? Or that I was advocating that people should apply to a job that they don’t want.
The only explanation you’ve given is an analogy which paints me in a very bad light. But honestly (wink wink) you didn’t really intend to paint me in a bad light. The analogy of me screaming like a lunatic is intended only to show how you respond to lunatics, and has nothing whatsoever to do with my statements.
And he responds to it the same way you did, by adopting the stance that he was misinterpreted as having taken.
To go with your analogy, if you heard that screaming invective from the video game player, and you then asked him “Why are you screaming the N word?”, he would respond that no, he wasn’t saying that, and no reasonable person would conclude that from what he said.
You could say “Hey, as an analogy, if someone punches me in the face, I fight back”. And then spend a dozen or more messages wondering why I don’t agree that the analogy is in any way relevant to the comment at hand.
No idea what you’re saying.
Let me be perfectly clear: When I say “when you’re applying for a job, you should edit your CV to make yourself look good”, it is simply not possible to rationally conclude that what I really meant was that people should “pretend” to that you “genuinely” want a job you don’t “genuinely” want.
So why, when @hjvt said that “tailoring a CV and a cover letter to pretend otherwise [i.e. to pretend you want a job you don’t want] is both an act of self-harm and a lie” did you call that deeply cynical, fatalistic, extremist, and negative?
You’ll keep dancing in circles to avoid ever engaging with that point.
And why do you even now insist on standing behind your words and refuse to admit that you could have possibly misspoke?
By the way, don’t think it’s escaped my notice that you’ve not even been quoting yourself accurately this whole time. You said, “I tried to send a message of OMG, my entire life I’ve been working towards getting this job!”, which is far more fairly summarised or rephrased as, “I tried to send a message of intense desire for the job”, rather than “I tried to make myself look good”.
The only reason I’ve not focused on that is because you’ll continue to insist that our interpretation was so uncharitable. Something you cannot escape is the fact that, when @hjvt said lying is bad, you called that a cynical worldview.
Conclusion: what you did was analogous to what the guy in the video game analogy did.
Absolutely not. No reasonable person would conclude that “edit a CV” was in any way analogous to “screaming invective”. That analogy is false, disingenuous, and lying.
The only disingenuity here is your repeated insistence on taking parts of an analogy in isolation when I’ve repeatedly pointed out that not every detail in an analogy is isomorphic to what’s being analogised.
You have zero comeback to that. You know it’s true, but you insist on gaslighting so you can avoid the gotcha you’re caught in to act like you’ve got me in a gotcha instead, when I’ve already addressed your point a dozen times. I say X, you respond Y, I respond Z, and you repeat Y as if it’s a comeback to Z. What the hell are you doing?
To repeat the clear example that demonstrates my point: I’m not saying that playing video games and browsing lobte.rs is analogous either. You have zero comeback to that, either. My prediction is that, rather than address this, you’ll continue to act as if I hadn’t said it… for the dozenth time.
The analogy was that screaming invective was interpreted honestly by the listener, and that the listener was rightly shocked and horrified by the screaming invective. And then only after finding out the real cause of the issue, the listener understood that the screaming invective wasn’t real.
We’re not going to agree on whether our original interpretations were reasonable or done with honesty (and I guess you’re now okay with making claims about other people’s mental states).
Whether the statement itself was or wasn’t extreme or negative is immaterial to the actual point that I’m trying to make with the analogy; either way, in reality and in the analogy, the original statement could have been interpreted in a negative or a non-negative way.
You’ve brought this point up before, and I’ve told you that all the analogy requires is that there are multiple possible interpretations. Even if we amended the analogy so the initial interpretation was completely unreasonable, it wouldn’t change a thing, because again, the point of the analogy is not in the initial interpretation, it’s in the response to the misinterpretation.
But even worse, I specifically made the initial interpretation of the guy in the analogy at least possibly uncharitable (though not so bizarrely unreasonable as your analogy).
When I was rereading the analogy to myself before posting it, I specifically left it as a video game, because it’s usually pretty obvious when someone is playing a video game vs. shouting genuine threats from the tone of voice. So the player could make a case to say the listener should have been able to tell they were playing a video game and it wasn’t a real threat and they shouldn’t even have to clarify, i.e. they have a case against the listener for being uncharitable.
Yet you’re not even happy with that, and you insist on an analogy where the misinterpretation is so extreme that only deliberate lying could explain it, whether to troll, to character assassinate, or for some even more sinister motive (and yet you rail against my analogy making you out to be screaming invective and so on; just another example of your ‘standards for thee, but not for me’ attitude).
But let’s go with that, just to close off the final avenue for your petty complaints and see if you can finally respond to the point of the analogy. Let’s rebase my analogy on top of yours. As a reminder, you said:
Here’s a more on-point analogy: You’re talking to a friend, and say Wow, I love my job. Your friend expresses great shock and horror, and says Why are you saying that you want to crawl under your bosses desk and service him? You’re happily married! You love your wife!
Now, try this instead:
You’re talking to a friend, and say Wow, I love my job. Your friend expresses great shock and horror, and says Why are you saying that you want to crawl under your bosses desk and service him? You’re happily married! You love your wife! Cheating is wrong! You retort with Cheating is wrong? That’s a deeply cynical and fatalistic world view. I’m sorry you have such an extremist and negative views about the world.
Don’t forget, you quoted specifically the part where @hjvt said that pretending to genuinely want a job you don’t want is a lie and an act of self-harm, and you said that was a fatalistic and cynical worldview. You said:
[original context: Jobs one genuinely wants are extremely rare, and] tailoring a CV and a cover letter to pretend otherwise is both an act of self-harm and a lie.
That is a deeply cynical and fatalistic world view. I’m sorry you have such an extremist and negative views about the world.
Essentially saying that it’s cynical and fatalistic to think that pretending to want a job you don’t genuinely want is a lie and self-harm. So, yeah…
Such a negative interpretation of a positive comment is at best, bizarre.
Yeah, it’s so bizarre that you agreed with it and attacked his criticism of pretending as extreme instead of saying you never said to pretend.
You continued after your ‘more apt’ analogy, by attempting to summarise how you think the conversation went:
So we’re left with this, at least from my side:
Me: Edit the resume to make yourself look good.
Response: You’re really saying that people should self-harm by submitting to abuse from interviewers.
Me: You should apply for jobs you want
Response: You’re really saying that people should lie, by submitting resumes to jobs you don’t want.
Me: No, I don’t mean that at all!
Response: You’re really saying that you actually do mean that!
Forget rebasing this one, it needs a complete overhaul, because it’s entirely inaccurate. Here’s a much more accurate retelling:
You: Edit the resume to send a message of intense desire for the job.
[Bear in mind at this point, the respondent here reasonably assumes that most people do not have such intense desire for any job they even apply to, let alone work — i.e. they wouldn’t work it if they didn’t need the money — and lives in a world where lying on your CV is not uncommon advice]
Response: Lying on your resume is self-harm.
You: Lying is self-harm? That’s a deeply cynical and fatalistic world view. [This is where you should have said, “I never said to lie”.]
Response: You’re really saying that people should self-harm?
You: No, I don’t mean that at all!
This is seems to be either trolling, or evidence of unordered thinking.
There is definitely unordered thinking, except it’s in you and not everyone else.
So why, when @hjvt said that “tailoring a CV and a cover letter to pretend otherwise [i.e. to pretend you want a job you don’t want] is both an act of self-harm and a lie” did you call that deeply cynical, fatalistic, extremist, and negative?
Because there is no rational way for anyone to read my original comment, and conclude that I was advocating that people “pretend” to want a job they don’t actually want. This is the point you keep missing.
You’ll keep dancing in circles to avoid ever engaging with that point.
Nonsense. I’ve addressed it repeatedly.
And why do you even now insist on standing behind your words and refuse to admit that you could have possibly misspoke?
Because I didn’t.
Look, the problem here is very simple. You had a strong / visceral reaction to my post. Your explanation as to why you had that reaction involves two main things:
reading things into it which I never said
making analogies which paint me in a negative light.
I fully agree that if I had said insane things like “apply for a job you don’t want”, then a natural reaction is to have a strong reaction to that. However, the part you’re not getting is that you’re reacting to things in your head. Not to anything I said.
I fully understand your position, and that you think your position is based on a reasonable interpretation of what I wrote. But it’s not.
Because there is no rational way for anyone to read my original comment, and conclude that I was advocating that people “pretend” to want a job they don’t actually want. This is the point you keep missing.
Well, that’s the literal reading of your original comment, so I guess the rational thing is to assume nobody means what they say and read between lines?
To repeat the clear example that demonstrates my point: I’m not saying that playing video games and browsing lobte.rs is analogous either. You have zero comeback to that, either. My prediction is that, rather than address this, you’ll continue to act as if I hadn’t said it… for the dozenth time.
Huh, what do you know, I was right.
Yes, you clearly don’t understand analogies.
What is the point you’re trying to make with that analogy? Because if it’s that my analogy was unconnected to what actually happened, it does nothing to prove that.
Analogies aren’t wojak memes where you can make your opponent look as incompetent or evil or unhinged as possible whatever you like; you need to actually be able to point out the relevant symmetry between the analogy and the real scenario if asked.
And if the relevant symmetry is simply, ‘the guy in the analogy is as unreasonable as you are’, you’ve failed; no one needs an analogy to understand that, you can just say that. The analogy should make obvious the specific flaw in the chain of reasoning used by the characters of the analogy in a way that the individual being analogised can understand, or you should at least be able to explain the symmetry to them if they don’t immediately get it.
I explained several times what the point of my analogy was. There is a similarity in that the response to the uncharitable interpretation validated the interpretation. Again, you refuse to engage with that, talking about anything and everything under the sun but that.
Because there is no rational way for anyone to read my original comment, and conclude that I was advocating that people “pretend” to want a job they don’t actually want. This is the point you keep missing.
No, this is the point you keep asserting yet failing to prove. But I even granted you the charity of saying let’s agree with that for the sake of my argument, and you still couldn’t respond to my point.
Again:
You’re talking to a friend, and say Wow, I love my job. Your friend expresses great shock and horror, and says Why are you saying that you want to crawl under your bosses desk and service him? You’re happily married! You love your wife! Cheating is wrong! You retort with Cheating is wrong? That’s a deeply cynical and fatalistic world view. I’m sorry you have such an extremist and negative views about the world.
This new analogy takes into consideration your entire gripe with my original analogy and modifies it to make the initial interpretation ridiculous, while still making my point that you responded by accepting the interpretation yet criticising the person for being against pretending instead of telling them they misinterpreted you and that you never meant pretending.
But. You. Still. Can’t. Engage. You simply want to shove your point into the conversation without responding to mine.
I’ve explained why I thought the initial interpretation was reasonable:
[Bear in mind at this point, the respondent here reasonably assumes that most people do not have such intense desire for any job they even apply to, let alone work — i.e. they wouldn’t work it if they didn’t need the money — and lives in a world where lying on your CV is not uncommon advice]
And I’ve explained why you validated that interpretation even after amending my analogy to one where you don’t use invective and we simply interpreted you in an absurd way. I literally used a slight modification of your analogy — which makes us look crazy AND your initial statement look so innocuous, COMPLETELY GRANTING the fact that you were misinterpreted to such an extreme degree that boggles the mind — and you still couldn’t respond to it!
You’re a gaslighter! Nothing will ever satisfy you!
So why, when @hjvt said that “tailoring a CV and a cover letter to pretend otherwise [i.e. to pretend you want a job you don’t want] is both an act of self-harm and a lie” did you call that deeply cynical, fatalistic, extremist, and negative?
You’ll keep dancing in circles to avoid ever engaging with that point.
Nonsense. I’ve addressed it repeatedly.
Okay, then quote two places where you did!
And why do you even now insist on standing behind your words and refuse to admit that you could have possibly misspoke?
Because I didn’t.
So when you said “that is a deeply cynical and fatalistic world view”, responding specifically to @hjvt saying that tailoring a CV and cover letter to pretend you genuinely want a job that you don’t is self-harm and a lie, you didn’t misspeak?
So the “worldview” that “pretending to want a job is self-harm and a lie” is a “deeply cynical and fatalistic” worldview?
Look, the problem here is very simple. You had a strong / visceral reaction to my post. Your explanation as to why you had that reaction involves two main things:
reading things into it which I never said
I’ve gone step by step in excruciating detail explaining my interpretation, if you refuse to engage with my explanations except to repeatedly assert that our interpretation was so bizarre — even after I granted you that for the sake of argument in my modified analogy — I can’t help you.
Yes, we know you think our interpretation was bizarre, you don’t need an analogy to make that point, we understood that point. You still refuse to engage with the symmetry in my analogy, consistently pointing to details that I’ve specifically said were not intended to be exactly symmetrical.
By your logic, I must have been analogising browsing lobste.rs to playing video games. Any reasonable person understands that’s not the symmetry I was trying to draw on. Again, you won’t respond to this, because it completely shatters your baseless excuse for refusing to engage with the point of my analogy.
making analogies which paint me in a negative light.
I literally changed my analogy to better conform to yours so you could
I’ve also gone step by step in excruciating detail explaining the symmetry between you and the person in my analogy, pointing out time and time again that it’s about the response to the interpretation and none the other details are me trying to make a claim about your initial words except in the fact that they were misinterpreted.
Yet you continue to feign outrage, not even over being made to look crazy, but simply over how you were made to look as if your words could be reasonably interpreted negatively, such that we don’t make the other people look crazy.
And even after all that, I acquiesced, made the other people look crazy in their initial misinterpretation, made your initial words seem completely innocuous, and you still aren’t happy.
I’ll say it again: gaslighter!
However, the part you’re not getting is that you’re reacting to things in your head. Not to anything I said.
No, I completely get that you think that. Again, you don’t even need an analogy to make that point, it’s the most straightforward point in the world.
What you’re failing at is actually engaging with almost anything I say.
the response to the uncharitable interpretation validated the interpretation. Again, you refuse to engage with that,
Liar.
I’ve engaged directly with that. And explained why your misinterpretation of my response in no way validated the misinterpretation of my original message.
No sane person would read my original comment, and conclude that I was proposing that people apply for jobs they didn’t want.
This new analogy takes into consideration your entire gripe with my original analogy and modifies it to make the initial interpretation ridiculous,
Exactly. Your original misinterpretation was ridiculous. That’s my entire point. Which you don’t seem to understand.
while still making my point that you responded by accepting the interpretation
I’ve engaged directly with that. And explained why your misinterpretation of my response in no way validated the misinterpretation of my original message.
Can you quote where you did that?
You keep making claim and not providing the evidence. See how I’ve even been quoting my own self at times to prove my points about what I’ve said and haven’t said?
All you do is then retort, “nuh uh”. That’s been your strategy this entire thread.
No sane person would read my original comment, and conclude that I was proposing that people apply for jobs they didn’t want.
Right, so all the people in this thread that interpreted it that way are just insane.
Anyway, that’s not quite what everyone’s claiming you said. Obviously, we all want the job for the money, and most software engineers have the luxury of quite enjoying their work.
But a lot of us in the thread interpreted your original comment, with its exaggeration, as proposing that you show an intense level of enthusiasm for the jobs you apply to, at least to the degree that, even if you didn’t need the money, you’d do the job.
And for the vast majority of people on Earth, even in software engineering, that simply isn’t true.
You know the worst part? Even I missed this at first, but even @hjvt’s original comment doesn’t accuse you of knowingly encouraging lying. The implication of their comment only goes so far as to say that if most people showed such extreme levels of enthusiasm, from those people’s mouths it’d be a lie.
It doesn’t follow from their comment that they were accusing you of knowingly telling people to lie, only that you were telling them to show a level of enthusiasm that for most people would be a lie.
So I guess we all owe @hjvt an apology because we just read things into their comment that technically weren’t there (even if they did intend to imply that, in the end, they didn’t).
This new analogy takes into consideration your entire gripe with my original analogy and modifies it to make the initial interpretation ridiculous,
Exactly. Your original misinterpretation was ridiculous. That’s my entire point.
But now that I’ve taken into consideration your entire gripe with my original analogy, and you have responded, “Exactly”, I’m assuming that gripe is dealt with. So why not now engage with the modified analogy?
Didn’t I say that you’re avoiding engaging with the modified analogy where I make our original interpretation look as unhinged as you analogised it to be and analogised your original statement to be so innocuous that you couldn’t possibly interpret it negatively? And your response is to… avoid engaging with it again?
I’ll say it again: the only thing that will satisfy you is complete and utter agreement with your perspective that:
your initial statement didn’t even have an uncharitable negative interpretation, it only had one innocuous interpretation which is exactly what you meant, no more no less, and
therefore all the people that interpreted your comment negatively weren’t just uncharitable, but unhinged, and
your response to that was definitely not to call cynical and fatalistic @hjvt’s view that pretending to genuinely want a job you don’t genuinely want would be a lie, despite quoting them at the point where they say exactly that, and
and you definitely have not misinterpreted anyone’s words even in the slightest, and
every time you quote yourself to point out how innocuous your phrasing was, they’re definitely verbatim quotes and certainly not complete rephrasings — oops, I mean paraphrasings — of your past self such that it retroactively makes any negative interpretation look malicious.
Which you don’t seem to understand.
No, I’ve been understanding that to be your point. If you’re not getting that from my comments, then it’s you that’s not understanding me. Or pretending not to.
Liar.
“Nuh uh!”
Did the person in the analogy accept the misinterpretation of their interlocutor? If so, how is their response relevantly different from yours such that we can say they did but you didn’t?
Of course. But it’s completely dishonest to use “screaming invective” as an analogy to comment of “edit a text file”. You’re (again) ignoring that point of my reply.
You could say “Hey, as an analogy, if someone punches me in the face, I fight back”. And then spend a dozen or more messages wondering why I don’t agree that the analogy is in any way relevant to the comment at hand.
Let me be perfectly clear: When I say “when you’re applying for a job, you should edit your CV to make yourself look good”, it is simply not possible to rationally conclude that what I really meant was that people should “pretend” to that you “genuinely” want a job you don’t “genuinely” want.
Your entire argument is based on reading things into my comments.
Absolutely not. No reasonable person would conclude that “edit a CV” was in any way analogous to “screaming invective”. That analogy is false, disingenuous, and lying.
The analogy was that screaming invective was interpreted honestly by the listener, and that the listener was rightly shocked and horrified by the screaming invective. And then only after finding out the real cause of the issue, the listener understood that the screaming invective wasn’t real.
That analogy is utterly irrelevant to the real case here. There is simply no possible way for anyone rational to read what I wrote, and be shocked and horrified by it.
The reading of my comments as intending “self harm”, or that people should “pretending” to want a job, or (bizarrely) that people should apply to a job they don’t “genuinely” want are not supported by any facts, logic, or reason.
And you haven’t explained. How do you get from my post to someone “pretending”? Or that I was advocating that people should apply to a job that they don’t want.
The only explanation you’ve given is an analogy which paints me in a very bad light. But honestly (wink wink) you didn’t really intend to paint me in a bad light. The analogy of me screaming like a lunatic is intended only to show how you respond to lunatics, and has nothing whatsoever to do with my statements.
To go with your analogy, if you heard that screaming invective from the video game player, and you then asked him “Why are you screaming the N word?”, he would respond that no, he wasn’t saying that, and no reasonable person would conclude that from what he said.
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No idea what you’re saying.
So why, when @hjvt said that “tailoring a CV and a cover letter to pretend otherwise [i.e. to pretend you want a job you don’t want] is both an act of self-harm and a lie” did you call that deeply cynical, fatalistic, extremist, and negative?
You’ll keep dancing in circles to avoid ever engaging with that point.
And why do you even now insist on standing behind your words and refuse to admit that you could have possibly misspoke?
By the way, don’t think it’s escaped my notice that you’ve not even been quoting yourself accurately this whole time. You said, “I tried to send a message of OMG, my entire life I’ve been working towards getting this job!”, which is far more fairly summarised or rephrased as, “I tried to send a message of intense desire for the job”, rather than “I tried to make myself look good”.
The only reason I’ve not focused on that is because you’ll continue to insist that our interpretation was so uncharitable. Something you cannot escape is the fact that, when @hjvt said lying is bad, you called that a cynical worldview.
The only disingenuity here is your repeated insistence on taking parts of an analogy in isolation when I’ve repeatedly pointed out that not every detail in an analogy is isomorphic to what’s being analogised.
You have zero comeback to that. You know it’s true, but you insist on gaslighting so you can avoid the gotcha you’re caught in to act like you’ve got me in a gotcha instead, when I’ve already addressed your point a dozen times. I say X, you respond Y, I respond Z, and you repeat Y as if it’s a comeback to Z. What the hell are you doing?
To repeat the clear example that demonstrates my point: I’m not saying that playing video games and browsing lobte.rs is analogous either. You have zero comeback to that, either. My prediction is that, rather than address this, you’ll continue to act as if I hadn’t said it… for the dozenth time.
We’re not going to agree on whether our original interpretations were reasonable or done with honesty (and I guess you’re now okay with making claims about other people’s mental states).
You’ve brought this point up before, and I’ve told you that all the analogy requires is that there are multiple possible interpretations. Even if we amended the analogy so the initial interpretation was completely unreasonable, it wouldn’t change a thing, because again, the point of the analogy is not in the initial interpretation, it’s in the response to the misinterpretation.
But even worse, I specifically made the initial interpretation of the guy in the analogy at least possibly uncharitable (though not so bizarrely unreasonable as your analogy).
When I was rereading the analogy to myself before posting it, I specifically left it as a video game, because it’s usually pretty obvious when someone is playing a video game vs. shouting genuine threats from the tone of voice. So the player could make a case to say the listener should have been able to tell they were playing a video game and it wasn’t a real threat and they shouldn’t even have to clarify, i.e. they have a case against the listener for being uncharitable.
Yet you’re not even happy with that, and you insist on an analogy where the misinterpretation is so extreme that only deliberate lying could explain it, whether to troll, to character assassinate, or for some even more sinister motive (and yet you rail against my analogy making you out to be screaming invective and so on; just another example of your ‘standards for thee, but not for me’ attitude).
But let’s go with that, just to close off the final avenue for your petty complaints and see if you can finally respond to the point of the analogy. Let’s rebase my analogy on top of yours. As a reminder, you said:
Now, try this instead:
You’re talking to a friend, and say Wow, I love my job. Your friend expresses great shock and horror, and says Why are you saying that you want to crawl under your bosses desk and service him? You’re happily married! You love your wife! Cheating is wrong! You retort with Cheating is wrong? That’s a deeply cynical and fatalistic world view. I’m sorry you have such an extremist and negative views about the world.
Don’t forget, you quoted specifically the part where @hjvt said that pretending to genuinely want a job you don’t want is a lie and an act of self-harm, and you said that was a fatalistic and cynical worldview. You said:
Essentially saying that it’s cynical and fatalistic to think that pretending to want a job you don’t genuinely want is a lie and self-harm. So, yeah…
Yeah, it’s so bizarre that you agreed with it and attacked his criticism of pretending as extreme instead of saying you never said to pretend.
You continued after your ‘more apt’ analogy, by attempting to summarise how you think the conversation went:
Forget rebasing this one, it needs a complete overhaul, because it’s entirely inaccurate. Here’s a much more accurate retelling:
You: Edit the resume to send a message of intense desire for the job.
[Bear in mind at this point, the respondent here reasonably assumes that most people do not have such intense desire for any job they even apply to, let alone work — i.e. they wouldn’t work it if they didn’t need the money — and lives in a world where lying on your CV is not uncommon advice]
Response: Lying on your resume is self-harm.
You: Lying is self-harm? That’s a deeply cynical and fatalistic world view. [This is where you should have said, “I never said to lie”.]
Response: You’re really saying that people should self-harm?
You: No, I don’t mean that at all!
There is definitely unordered thinking, except it’s in you and not everyone else.
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Yes, you clearly don’t understand analogies.
Because there is no rational way for anyone to read my original comment, and conclude that I was advocating that people “pretend” to want a job they don’t actually want. This is the point you keep missing.
Nonsense. I’ve addressed it repeatedly.
Because I didn’t.
Look, the problem here is very simple. You had a strong / visceral reaction to my post. Your explanation as to why you had that reaction involves two main things:
reading things into it which I never said
making analogies which paint me in a negative light.
I fully agree that if I had said insane things like “apply for a job you don’t want”, then a natural reaction is to have a strong reaction to that. However, the part you’re not getting is that you’re reacting to things in your head. Not to anything I said.
I fully understand your position, and that you think your position is based on a reasonable interpretation of what I wrote. But it’s not.
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Well, that’s the literal reading of your original comment, so I guess the rational thing is to assume nobody means what they say and read between lines?
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Utter bullshit.
That’s the root cause of the problem. You see “literal” meaning in things which exist only in your head.
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Huh, what do you know, I was right.
What is the point you’re trying to make with that analogy? Because if it’s that my analogy was unconnected to what actually happened, it does nothing to prove that.
Analogies aren’t wojak memes where you can make your opponent look as incompetent or evil or unhinged as possible whatever you like; you need to actually be able to point out the relevant symmetry between the analogy and the real scenario if asked.
And if the relevant symmetry is simply, ‘the guy in the analogy is as unreasonable as you are’, you’ve failed; no one needs an analogy to understand that, you can just say that. The analogy should make obvious the specific flaw in the chain of reasoning used by the characters of the analogy in a way that the individual being analogised can understand, or you should at least be able to explain the symmetry to them if they don’t immediately get it.
I explained several times what the point of my analogy was. There is a similarity in that the response to the uncharitable interpretation validated the interpretation. Again, you refuse to engage with that, talking about anything and everything under the sun but that.
No, this is the point you keep asserting yet failing to prove. But I even granted you the charity of saying let’s agree with that for the sake of my argument, and you still couldn’t respond to my point.
Again:
This new analogy takes into consideration your entire gripe with my original analogy and modifies it to make the initial interpretation ridiculous, while still making my point that you responded by accepting the interpretation yet criticising the person for being against pretending instead of telling them they misinterpreted you and that you never meant pretending.
But. You. Still. Can’t. Engage. You simply want to shove your point into the conversation without responding to mine.
I’ve explained why I thought the initial interpretation was reasonable:
And I’ve explained why you validated that interpretation even after amending my analogy to one where you don’t use invective and we simply interpreted you in an absurd way. I literally used a slight modification of your analogy — which makes us look crazy AND your initial statement look so innocuous, COMPLETELY GRANTING the fact that you were misinterpreted to such an extreme degree that boggles the mind — and you still couldn’t respond to it!
You’re a gaslighter! Nothing will ever satisfy you!
Okay, then quote two places where you did!
So when you said “that is a deeply cynical and fatalistic world view”, responding specifically to @hjvt saying that tailoring a CV and cover letter to pretend you genuinely want a job that you don’t is self-harm and a lie, you didn’t misspeak?
So the “worldview” that “pretending to want a job is self-harm and a lie” is a “deeply cynical and fatalistic” worldview?
I’ve gone step by step in excruciating detail explaining my interpretation, if you refuse to engage with my explanations except to repeatedly assert that our interpretation was so bizarre — even after I granted you that for the sake of argument in my modified analogy — I can’t help you.
Yes, we know you think our interpretation was bizarre, you don’t need an analogy to make that point, we understood that point. You still refuse to engage with the symmetry in my analogy, consistently pointing to details that I’ve specifically said were not intended to be exactly symmetrical.
By your logic, I must have been analogising browsing lobste.rs to playing video games. Any reasonable person understands that’s not the symmetry I was trying to draw on. Again, you won’t respond to this, because it completely shatters your baseless excuse for refusing to engage with the point of my analogy.
I literally changed my analogy to better conform to yours so you could
I’ve also gone step by step in excruciating detail explaining the symmetry between you and the person in my analogy, pointing out time and time again that it’s about the response to the interpretation and none the other details are me trying to make a claim about your initial words except in the fact that they were misinterpreted.
Yet you continue to feign outrage, not even over being made to look crazy, but simply over how you were made to look as if your words could be reasonably interpreted negatively, such that we don’t make the other people look crazy.
And even after all that, I acquiesced, made the other people look crazy in their initial misinterpretation, made your initial words seem completely innocuous, and you still aren’t happy.
I’ll say it again: gaslighter!
No, I completely get that you think that. Again, you don’t even need an analogy to make that point, it’s the most straightforward point in the world.
What you’re failing at is actually engaging with almost anything I say.
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Liar.
I’ve engaged directly with that. And explained why your misinterpretation of my response in no way validated the misinterpretation of my original message.
No sane person would read my original comment, and conclude that I was proposing that people apply for jobs they didn’t want.
Exactly. Your original misinterpretation was ridiculous. That’s my entire point. Which you don’t seem to understand.
Liar.
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Can you quote where you did that?
You keep making claim and not providing the evidence. See how I’ve even been quoting my own self at times to prove my points about what I’ve said and haven’t said?
All you do is then retort, “nuh uh”. That’s been your strategy this entire thread.
Right, so all the people in this thread that interpreted it that way are just insane.
Anyway, that’s not quite what everyone’s claiming you said. Obviously, we all want the job for the money, and most software engineers have the luxury of quite enjoying their work.
But a lot of us in the thread interpreted your original comment, with its exaggeration, as proposing that you show an intense level of enthusiasm for the jobs you apply to, at least to the degree that, even if you didn’t need the money, you’d do the job.
And for the vast majority of people on Earth, even in software engineering, that simply isn’t true.
You know the worst part? Even I missed this at first, but even @hjvt’s original comment doesn’t accuse you of knowingly encouraging lying. The implication of their comment only goes so far as to say that if most people showed such extreme levels of enthusiasm, from those people’s mouths it’d be a lie.
It doesn’t follow from their comment that they were accusing you of knowingly telling people to lie, only that you were telling them to show a level of enthusiasm that for most people would be a lie.
So I guess we all owe @hjvt an apology because we just read things into their comment that technically weren’t there (even if they did intend to imply that, in the end, they didn’t).
But now that I’ve taken into consideration your entire gripe with my original analogy, and you have responded, “Exactly”, I’m assuming that gripe is dealt with. So why not now engage with the modified analogy?
Didn’t I say that you’re avoiding engaging with the modified analogy where I make our original interpretation look as unhinged as you analogised it to be and analogised your original statement to be so innocuous that you couldn’t possibly interpret it negatively? And your response is to… avoid engaging with it again?
I’ll say it again: the only thing that will satisfy you is complete and utter agreement with your perspective that:
No, I’ve been understanding that to be your point. If you’re not getting that from my comments, then it’s you that’s not understanding me. Or pretending not to.
“Nuh uh!”
Did the person in the analogy accept the misinterpretation of their interlocutor? If so, how is their response relevantly different from yours such that we can say they did but you didn’t?
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