I learned to debate by arguing with the campus street preacher bigot at Ohio state. My goal was never to convince him, but to reveal how ignorant his arguments were to the other people gathered.
I learned that it’s powerful to cede as many ancillary points as possible to avoid distraction - just focus on the main argument.
I learned that when someone gets into a position where they have argued themselves into a corner there’s no final fantasy victory music that plays from the heavens, and they are free to ignore their own failure. That’s fine.
I learned that as long as you have no emotional stake in the conversation it’s easy to tie someone who does into circles.
I learned that there’s no intrinsic value in debating someone arguing in bad faith. If you choose to engage do so for fun, or to dismantle their arguments in front of others. Never try to convert or convince.
I learned that earnest curiosity is disarming to someone anticipating hostility. That scammers can’t engage on that level easily.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
If you're looking for new engineering opportunities please consider joining me at @ModeAnalytics. It's a great place to work with a solid, well-positioned product. We need good engineers to help us improve our offerings.
We've got open roles for Java, Ruby, Go and Typescript.
Our Ruby is a monolith solving interesting problems.
Our Typescript is an Angular app.
Our Go and Java are used for standalone services.
Why is this a good place to work? A lot of reasons, and I don't say that lightly. A flexible schedule, fantastic colleagues, challenging but solvable problems -- and my manager and I are working on a promotion path for ND people specifically.
For a long history of predatory "medical" professionals selling snake oil to desperate terrified parents (who they are explicitly terrifying) re: autism treatments, pick up @stevesilberman's Neurotribes.
People hate autism so much that parents will make their kids drink bleach, will subject them to chemical chelation, will put them on highly restrictive diets, etc. All to "cure" the autism.
But the autism can't be cured. The TRAUMA can sure be addressed, though!
This was helpful to me. Hey fellow white #ActuallyAutistic folks, give this short video a watch to get a tiny bit of context into what our Black friends are dealing with. We need to do better.
White autistic privilege:
1) If I start stimming or otherwise acting "Autistic" in public, many people have a framework for understanding what's happening.
2) When I talk about my experience being autistic I'm going to have a lot of (white) people telling me they share my experience, because they have the privilege of recognizing and diagnosing (or self-diagnosing) more easily.
Thank you especially to @AnnMemmott and @AutSciPerson for leading the charge on this. They are both leaders in our community and you should follow them if you don’t.
Yikes, wow, unfollowing now. Was a big fan of successfully and predictably replicating measurements to prove theories, did NOT know about the total inability to engage meaningfully with the subjective domain of experience.
But yikes, unfollowing now. I was a huge fan of its ability to treat illness using scientific rigor, I did NOT know it pathologized everything it didn’t understand and normalized anything it couldn’t address.
Big yikes, unfollowing now. Was a huge fan of the ability to use numeric values to explore relational truths, did NOT realize it was impossible to do this with any kind of internal consistency without injecting external context and meaning.