You can’t prove I meant X

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n08/clare-bucknell/you-can-t-prove-i-meant-x

by Petiver • 6 years ago

63 62 6 years ago

lrb.co.uk

Etheryte• 6 years ago

Just as a heads up, if you have cookies disabled for unknown domains, this page gives you an endless redirect loop.

NikolaeVarius• 6 years ago

I really wish sites would stop doing this.

MaxBarraclough• 6 years ago

https://outline.com/Cu4sHx

commandlinefan2• 6 years ago

There's an interpretation of the biblical book of Revelation that it was written as a "disguised" attack on the Roman empire: https://www.educationalcoin.com/blog/the-mystery-of-the-book...

asveikau• 6 years ago

Very interesting that this page talks about serious stuff like which emporer slaughtered whom and then says you can buy those coins, the very mark of the beast!

commandlinefan2• 6 years ago

Ha - I just googled it and didn't realize this was a "commercial" site. I can't remember where I first read it, but I see a lot of other references.

Robotbeat• 6 years ago

Pretty common understanding among biblical scholars. Christian scholars often understand it as dual prophecy, referring both to contemporary (i.e. Roman power structures) and later eschatological ones.

Veen• 6 years ago

"this sentence could mean y as well as x so you can’t prove I meant x"

It's interesting that a lot of online debate and media commentary uses the opposite technique:

"this sentence could—with varying degrees of plausibility—mean bad thing y as well as good thing x, so you can't prove you didn't really mean to say the bad thing." The principle of anti-charity.

ebg13• 6 years ago

I think that the problem with this as a steering wheel for discussion is that sometimes what you just said is extremely accurate but also sometimes both happen at the same time, for and against some figure by their defenders vs their offendees, and also often the sentence is part of a long pattern of behavior that has implication tendrils. No sentence exists in a vacuum, but different people have differing desires to reach further in different moments, some based on whether they like the person's face, but also occasionally by guiding principle.

yboris• 6 years ago

Reminds me of the "motte and bailey doctrine" [1]. You make a claim; when attacked you retreat to an easy-to-hold position; when attackers leave you make the claim again.

Example: "God exist" is attacked; speaker retreats to "but God is just another name for beauty in the universe, do you disagree with that?"

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bri...

dkarl• 6 years ago

And of course whether charity is applied or not is all about the presumed social fault lines in the situation. For example, in the U.S. right now, if you say, "The expert predictions about the coronavirus are all over the place and changing every day," it's an uncontroversial statement when everyone's politics are assumed to be the same. Among liberals, it will be interpreted as meaning that the coronavirus is extremely dangerous and not fully understood and we need to play it safe. Among conservatives, it will be interpreted as undermining expert authority and casting doubt on social distancing. In a mixed group, though, the important aspect will not be the meaning, which nobody will bother thinking too hard about; the only thing that matters will be the presumed intent to precipitate an argument.

sneak• 6 years ago

This is why anything partisan or partisan-adjacent in the US, which includes most current "news" events of any kind, has become so supremely boring to me.

It's literally no longer about what is factual or not, or what is actually being said, simply what it it assumed that someone is attempting to imply.

It's a terrible situation, and one that has infected a lot of other areas of USian everyday communication: https://sneak.berlin/20191201/american-communication/

If you're not fluent in euphemism and current-events context, making a plain factual statement can frequently be heard/interpreted by the listener as you saying the opposite, and the listener is usually totally unaware of the fact that they're flipping things around like this.

It's one thing when I'm acting like like the beep boop robot I am, but it's leaked out and over, into just plain speech.

glaugh• 6 years ago

This is a nicely crafted example.

Human communication is so densely laden with nuance and context and subtext that it takes soooo much work and a dose of generosity to have a real conversation that doesn’t spin off into something useless.

In a technical context you can define things clearly, but in a political context it’s just too hard, there are so many things that mean different things to different people.

My attempt in daily life to deal with this is to offer a place where my “side” is wrong to foster generosity then try to tightly circumscribe the thing we’re discussing. I think it sometimes works. But it’s a ton of conversational work with unclear payoffs.

I don’t see how we’re not doomed to usually have largely fruitless conversation in the current climate. I don’t like the approach, but I understand why people move towards a “screw convincing them, let’s rally the base.” Bit of a prisoner’s dilemma there, I think, where the whole country is left impoverished by the individually rational approach to rallying the base

pjc503• 6 years ago

There's a big prisoner's dilemma thing going on. If you're charitable, and the people you're discussing with are too, you can have better discussions.

If you're operating in an environment like the internet where you can more or less guarantee that there will be one comment based on the the worst possible interpretation of what you said, being charitable in advance just makes things worse for you. You're playing "cooperate" with an endless stream of "defectors". Trolling has always been "defect" in this environment.

Hence the value in having more closed environments for discussion. HN is open enough that people can make throwaway accounts and use them for valid points, and closed enough that the more obvious trolls get downvote-hammered quickly.

TheSoftwareGuy• 6 years ago

I've found it to be pretty effective to simply not engage with those who keep taking the worst possible interpretations of your (or others) arguments. It sort of simulates an environment where everyone is charitable.

In other words, "Don't feed the trolls"

crankylinuxuser• 6 years ago

There's a big prisoner's dilemma thing going on. If you're charitable, and the people you're discussing with are too, you can have better discussions.

Privately, I'd very much agree.

However Cardinal Richelieu's quote comes to mind when posting to the internet at large (yes, im counting HN in this):

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

And that is evermore so, with concern trolls and those in mind with being 'wronged' in some way. Because, no matter how charitable you are, there is someone who isn't and will assume the worst. And then you become the brunt of a social media campaign gone awry.

mc322• 6 years ago

I agree and I didn’t take notice till the day I learned a woman flying to ZA wrote some quick satire on twitter before departing, when she landed many hours later she learned her tweet was taken straight and was summarily fired with the tireless assistance of the twitter-rage-mob.

I agree with Cleese and Chapelle. It’s madness.

stallmanite• 6 years ago

I am curious to read about this but googling “woman flight ZA twitter outrage“ is getting me nothing. Could you provide a name?

lonelappde2• 6 years ago

She was a PR rep who spewed vile racist hatred.

And she got her job back anyway.

https://www.vox.com/2018/1/19/16911074/justine-sacco-iac-mat...

19963• 6 years ago

This is a long yet fascinating read on how poets hacked libel laws to push their ideas.

For example:

But now, go search all Europe round

Among the savage monsters crown’d,

With vice polluting every throne

(I mean all kings except our own).

Thanks to the last line, the poet could claim plausible deniability.

Even better: due to semantic evolutions, the mere "imagining" that before meant plotting made thought crimes an attack on monarchy.

Therefore, by saying the poet was attacking the king, the prosecutors would be guilty themselves of such "imagining".

pjc503• 6 years ago

Two modern equivalents of this kind of thing are the use of euphemisms to bypass Chinese censorship: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Main_Page and the ever-mutating set of "dog whistles" used by the far right ("fourteen words" etc.)

The historical background of the 1700s I'm a bit vague on, but it was crucial for the development of Parliamentary government in the UK through a long series of succession crises from the civil war onwards that only really ended with the childless death of the younger Charles Stuart in 1788.

Essentially there were two incompatible criteria for English monarchs to be publicly accepted: "not Catholic" and "not foreign".

19963• 6 years ago

("fourteen words" etc.)

This is signaling through lingo (keywords), very different from this article, yet also worth studying during this lockdown.

If I simply replied "88 bro", the average reader may not click, and think I was just saying I was born in 1988, like you, and we are maybe "birth year brothers".

Yet to the initiated, it would signal that I have some very special political ideas! Once you have started learning that, you will see custom license plates very differently!

As hackers, we should learn to decode such telltales, to know who may mean us harm.

Here's another one that may look totally innocent: blood type tatooed 8 inches above the elbow.

hawkice2• 6 years ago

Strange tattoo example (and Google-able). Boggles my mind why someone would want to identify so strongly with Nazis, but obviously I strongly agree that we should receive those signals. What a bunch of idiots.

baud1472582• 6 years ago

I get the 88 thing, but not the blood type tatooed 8 inches above the elbow, care to explain?

_v7gu4• 6 years ago

All this dogwhistling stuff is fun and games until you start to put innocent people under fire for dogwhistling. If more people start reading Nazi propaganda just to avoid dogwhistling, you will have created more enemies as a second order effect of your actions.

A better approach would be to fill the whistles with noise, so they lose their use for the people trying to use them to identify allies. There's a reason why the phrase "normies ruin everything" is so common

cafard• 6 years ago

Not foreign was negotiable: wasn't George III the first of the Hanovers more comfortable in English than in German?

pjc503• 6 years ago

Yes, it was negotiable, but that negotiation was the politics of the time; the Hanovers making concessions to Parliament to retain their acceptance, while being variably popular with the actual public, and unpopular with some of the polemic writers under discussion in the article.

The massive Hanoverian propaganda effort of George IV is written all over Edinburgh street names.

0xff00ffee• 6 years ago

This is a fairly dense article, but it is a really profound intersection of "hacking", "reason", and "context". Hacking a language to sound reasonable while delivering a side-channel message through an established context. I guess I never really thought of poets and writers as hackers, but now it clicked into focus.

mnw21cam• 6 years ago

"Please enable Javascript to read the full article".

How about no.

rendaw• 6 years ago

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neonate• 6 years ago

https://archive.md/Kmhr1

You can’t prove I meant X

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