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?

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