“At odds with the unavoidable meta-message” by Ruby
Description
It is a truism known to online moderators[1] that when two commenters are going back and forth in heated exchange, and one lays out rejoinders in paragraph after paragraph of dense text, then two things will have happened:
- Our careful communicator may or may not have succeeded at conveying well-reasoned insights hitherto unknown by his interlocutor that will change her mind.
- He will have communicated my hatred for you is at least this long.
In all seriousness, words require effort and effort requires motivation. A lengthy message communicates whatever its contents are, but it inevitably communicates I was invested enough to write all this, typically with a connotation of strong emotion powering the keystrokes. The emotion isn't necessarily hatred. It could be a roiling anger, a neurotic anxiety, or a fervorous infatuation.
My guess is that even if you weren't carrying around an explicit belief in [...]
The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
October 10th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AgkuN8wLNevBkHusf/at-odds-with-the-unavoidable-meta-message
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
United States
