Comment by pjc50
6 years ago
Now that I've actually read it rather than starting with the comments, as we're all prone to do, I think it's an interesting little piece of fiction that reminds me of two things.
One is the Monty Python weaponised joke sketch: the premise of the sketch is that the joke is so funny that anyone who reads or hears it promptly dies from laughter, so it is carefully divided into pieces and translated into German for use as a weapon.
The other is the Dreyfuss affair, and its notorious ability to fragment French society for years.
It reminds me of a CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc. In that video (okay I'm interpreting a bit...) society itself acts as Scissor, "breeding" some ideas to become maximally controversial.
Which, if you take SA's story too seriously, is actually good news: it implies that we've probably already seen just about the worst scissors possible, because society's been trying to produce them all along!
> Which, if you take SA's story too seriously, is actually good news: it implies that we've probably already seen just about the worst scissors possible, because society's been trying to produce them all along!
I don't think we did. SA's machine learning based scissor generator is to what you described what engineered bioweapons are to natural evolution. The latter can produce nasty stuff over time, the former is about taking the latter, refining it, and improving on it much faster.
Like any invention, not everything that can be invented has been invented. The current culture war has only been going for around 5 years. Things can change and new divides erupt all the time.
5 years? Lots of it can be traced directly all the way back to the Vietnam war, surely? Certainly abortion has been a scissor issue since at least 1973.
Yes, and a lot of commenters are falling into the scissor, metaphorically, arguing that your analogy to the Dreyfuss case is wrong because, damn it, Dreyfuss was {innocent, guilty}.
I think that's in part because, if you're societally oppressed, you're less buffered, so you become understandably hyper-vigilant about what might be used against you. E.g a if you're rich, you may not like a certain tax law change passed out of the Senate committee, but you still have chances to reduce its impact by lobbying for the full Senate vote, the House vote, Presidential veto, IRS implementing regulations, and how your tax attorney goes to bat for you. If you're poor and dependent on certain subsidies which the Senate committee has voted to eliminate, you have fewer points of leverage between you and doom (and "doom" is much worse for you.)
All that said, I think the interesting thing about a scissor statement is that it generates tunnel vision in both sides at the same time that it's generating great passion in both sides. Losing = death, death is imminent, so this is the hill you've got to die on.
But losing is generally not death and complete losing is generally a few more steps away, even if you're on the "oppressed" side I sketched out above.
Consider the Kavanaugh confirmation. I was against it (disclaimer: I'm not personally the target of what he's likely to cause through his votes, so...). But his confirmation is not the last word - a battle not the war. Other Justices will be nominated. Legislation could increase the number of court seats. Grassroots efforts through the states can make Federal decisions less important. He might even be impeached.
And there may be positive consequences in the long term. The spectacle of the hearings may have strengthened long term support for "my side".
If you've fallen into the scissor, you see it as the war, and with no possibility of good consequences to losing.
You also -- just as in the story -- see the other side as a monolith. That works against perceiving their humanity, and it works against good negotiation tactics. Some Senators voted for Kavanaugh enthusiastically; everything about him was good. Some Senators held their noses and voted for him, because they feared their base or like some of Kavanaugh's positions. Some pro-K Senators may even have collected significant IOUs which may become handy later. Not seeing those possibilities leads to myopic strategy.
(And please please please don't fall into the scissor re the Kavanaugh fight if you respond to this comment.)
Great phrase, "fall into the scissor". I think the brilliance of this story is not whether it represents a truly plausible scenario, but that it creates a meme that is anti-divisive. These kinds of things have real power. I hope your phrase about not falling into the scissor catches on. It would do a lot of forum discussions a lot of good.
The Dreyfuss affair is a perfect example, reading the Wikipedia article made it immediately clear in the first few paragraphs where I would side, and made everyone who would disagree with me seem like an un-thinking, un-principled mob.
For others' convenience:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair
(I was ignorant)
The Monty Python sketch is exactly where my mind went, too, and this idea goes farther back, about the power of ideas (meta!): the pen is mightier than the sword. What force has compelled so many throughout history to face the sword and die by it, if not ideas? I think that skit masterfully short-circuits the concept.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riddle_of_the_Universe_and...
Oh. Was this fiction???
I thought it was fact. It was written exactly as though it were fact and all through the article I wished the author would produce a verbatim example for us to judge. At the end the author said that the reason the author wasn't doing so is because the comments section would end up nuked by infighting, and that made me appreciate it even more as fact.
Like a factual story told in detail, it had an aside that didn't really go anywhere. (For example the mozambique subreddit didn't turn private, with a cryptic statement that half of the moderators were removed, or something.)
How do you know it's fiction? What makes you think so?