Re: Giving an application a window icon in a sensible way


"Twisted" <twisted0n3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1164716549.750542.281930@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Twisted:
Unless, of course, you actually meant that I should acquiesce
*falsely* (i.e. the first thing, acquiesce, without the second,
consider my judgment to be inferior).
Dishonesty seems like it may be a method of fairly early resort
for problem-solving for you, doesn't it?

Me:
Not in my opinion.

Twisted:

What would you call it, then?

I see this is a direct question stated at me, but there isn't enough
context
for me to recall what I had originally suggested you did, so I don't
know.

The things you said you wouldn't call "dishonesty". Which apparently
include:
* Acquiescing to a hostile argument you don't actually believe is
correct.
* Leaving out information you know to be relevant.

I'd rather see the exact words I wrote. No offence, but I find you tend
to misread things I write. So hearing your version of what I said is like
playing a game of broken telephone.

[...]
Eistein is giving a lecture. Some guy says "Einstein, you're an idiot".
Einstein says "Ok, I respect your freedom to consider me an idiot. If you
do
not wish to hear my theories, feel free to leave the lecture hall, but
there
are 200 other scientists here who seem to be interested in hearing about
it,
so for their benefit, I'd like to continue my explanation uninterrupted."
And then he goes on, doing what he was doing before the interruption, as
if
nothing had happened.

Unfortunately, what actually happened more closely resembles the same
guy remaining and interjecting the "idiot" comment at frequent
intervals, every time necessitating a similar response.

And also, you weren't giving a lecture, but asking a question. Yeah,
it's different, but the fact that you can say "Ok" and go on with your life,
without having your life become worse off is the same.

If the other scientists wanted to hear Einstein's lecture, after a
repeated interjection of "idiot", the entire crowd would get upset and ask
the person to leave. If the other scientists agreed with this person that
Einstein was an idiot, and didn't want to hear the rest of the lecture, then
Einstein would be wasting his time giving the rest of it, and should just
pack up and leave, heading towards the next conference, giving the next
lecture there.

I forget why I told you this fictional story, though. =P I never
realized how much I depended on being able to check the parent and
grandparents of a post in a thread until now that it's unavailable to me.

Depends on whether everyone's playing the same game, I guess.

In *every* game, walking away constitutes a forfeit.

What if the game was seeing who could walk away the fastest?

Also, in *this* universe, if two soldiers in
foxholes are popping up and spraying machine-gun fire at one another,
and then (without a negotiated cease-fire) one of them just gets up
and starts walking off, he's liable to get a bullet in his back.

Yeah, but if that soldier happens to be Superman (or otherwise
invulnerable to bullets), what does he care if he gets shot in the back?

I'm not Superman.

Learn to become him. Obviously, this is probably impossible in the
context of actual warfare and firearms, but it's certainly possible in
usenet forums. Learn to become invulnerable to insults slung your way.

I guess in the game you're playing, if someone insults you on USENET,
you lose points, and if you reply, defending yourself, you gain points.
Something like that, right?

Obviously.

In the game I'm playing, if I'm happy, then I win points. If I'm sad,
angry, or otherwise unhappy, I lose points.

Now consider these scenarios:

1:
Someone insults you.
You let it stand unchallenged.
Everyone else believes it.
Now everyone calls you names or, at best, ignores you, and this kind of
cramps your lifestyle.
Now you're unhappy.

2:
Someone insults you.
You explain why the content of the insult is incorrect.
Everyone else's beliefs fluctuate for a bit, but settle roughly where
they originally where, seeing as they've now heard arguments in both
directions whose effects cancel out.
Now everyone continues to behave in the manner to which you are
accustomed.
Now you're no more unhappy than before.

According to your own scoring, 2 is better. (And 2 repeated is better
than 2 a few times and then 1, with the attendant negative
consequences.)

Right, but you forgot about secret strategy 3.

3:
Someone insults you.
You ignore it.
Everyone else ignores it.
Your life remains as happy as ever.

The benefits of 3 over 2 is that you don't even get that temporary dip
where you happiness falls for a short while and comes back up.

In my game, the winning strategy is not to get sad, angry, or
otherwise
unhappy when someone insults me. And so far, I'm winning. =)

You seem to be implying that you can control what you feel, rather than
it being the result of your circumstances and only controllable to the
extent that you can control your circumstances.

Yes. And I now recall that a lot of people claim that they are unable to
do this. I think I may have a slight advantage here because I have
high-functioning austism, so I don't seem to go through emotions the same
way other people do. However, it certainly is doable by so called
"neuro-typical" people. Buddhism, for example, is all about learning to
control your emotions, and I'm sure a lot of Buddhist monks are
non-autistic.

So for instance
everyone could start hating (or just avoiding) you and you could by
force of will continue to be happy anyway.

Perhaps in theory, but in practice, unless you do something really bad
(e.g. slaughter Jewish people), it's very unlikely that *everybody* will
hate you. So this problem very rarely comes up.


Tell me, sir, what drugs are you on? Perhaps I should try them. :P

See below...


Then again, I'm not sure I like the idea of how I feel being completely
unrelated to my circumstances. Taking happy pills for life so the
shoddy miserable slummy conditions of your environment seem to be
paradise is a cop-out at best, and I would find it a *boring* life
regardless. (I'm assuming here that the drug is expensive or illegal
enough to result in shitty real-world conditions, such as a slum or a
cell of either the barred or padded variety, or else the shitty
conditions result from taking no actions to better your circumstances,
which you by hypothesis no longer care about because of the drugs.)

Note that the above argument remains unchanged if we replace "drugs"
with "biofeedback", "sheer bloody-mindedness", "meditation", "prayer",
"really frequent masturbation", or any other phony source of feel-good.

I claim that meditation, prayer, or really frequent masturbation, will
not result in shitty real-world conditions, such as a slum or a cell. As for
the drugs I take, I suppose you could call it a combination of those three
things, though I don't "actively" meditate or pray in the sense of actually
setting out a time to be in a quiet location alone with my thoughts. I get
plenty of opportunities to just let my mind wander (which is basically what
meditation is) on the subway on the way to work or going back home.

If you want to be in this happy state, but don't want your life to go to
***, take responsibility for something. Depending on your age, join a Big
Brothers or Big Sister organization, or raise a pet, or if that's too big of
a commitment jump, take care of a plant. Because you're responsible for some
other form of life, you won't allow your own life to go to hell, but you'll
still have all opportunities to be happy as you did previously.

(*) They actually believe it. In which case the person is too easily
swayed, believing anything they read on the Internet. I don't really care
what people of this type think of me. They are free to consider me to be
an
idiot, if they want.

I used to think this way. Then I discovered that everybody falls into
the category described.

I had a fairly close friend that grew distant, and then hostile,
because of unfounded rumors circulating on the Internet. This was a
decade and a half ago or so. (Yes, I had net access back then.) That
taught me my lesson -- whatever the theory about how nobody who's that
easily swayed is worth your time, the practise is that either they are,
or nobody in the world is worth your time (and by extension you're an
arrogant SOB, not to mention a lonely one).

This was a friend I did not consider to be especially gullible. The
effect this had was to make it take longer before their behavior
changed because of what some person on the net was saying about me,
rather than to prevent their behavior changing.

It sounds like this particular incident had a very dramatic effect on
your outlook on life. In my experience, relatively few people fall into this
category. For me, the vast majority of people fall into the "Don't care"
category listed below. If I'm reading through a newsgroup, and I see a
message written by "Jack" and it says "Jill is an idiot", I'll notice that I
have no idea who Jack is. I have no idea who Jill is. And frankly, I don't
really care what Jack thinks of Jill. So this message will not leave a very
lasting impress on me, except perhaps that Jack tends to post off-topic
messages.

I'm believe that most other people on usenet feel this way too, and from
my experience so far, it seems that this belief is correct.

Now as to how this relates back to your situation, I suspect that the
vast majority of readers here won't remember you as (and I'm going to assume
you're male for the moment) "Twisted... he's that guy who made that thread
that blew up into over 300 posts, right?", as opposed to "Twisted... he's
that guy who valiantly defended himself against every attack of his
character. Every one of his posts was logically impeccable, and thus all
accusations against him were unfounded. Obviously, he's no idiot."

Notice here that what (I hypothesize that) they remember about you has
very little to do with the actual content of the messages themselves;
rather, they'll only remember the size of the thread as a whole. As further
evidence of this, notice how you need to constantly repeat yourself to
newcomers to the thread, who have obviously not bothered to read your other
messages.

I think most people here will also fall into the "Don't care" category.
I suspect what typically happens is that they'll read 3 or 4 messages to
establish some minimal context, with the last message being an unanswered
leaf. They'll notice a(n implied) request for more information, and they'll
chime in if they know the answer, but they really don't know, or care to
know, what was said in the 290 other messages in this thread.


I am starting to suspect, however, that people honestly believe
that I believe what you are saying they believe I believe,
I'm glad.
Why? I didn't actually say those things!
I'm glad that you're starting to suspect that people honestly
believe that you believe what I'm saying they believe you believe.
In other words, I'm glad you're starting to believe what I'm telling
you.

That isn't very useful. How do I convince people that what I actually
say I believe, but thinking I believe a random bunch of other things
is liable to mean being mistaken?

I think there are multiple ambiguous parsetrees for this question, so
I'm not sure what you're asking.

I was afraid of that. :P

How do I convince people not to fantasize all kinds of weird crap and
then treat it as factual? For example, if I say "not now", not to
fantasize that I really meant "not ever" and then behave as if I
actually said "not ever" (which seems to have actually occurred here
recently).

In general, you can't. There's no sure-fire way to prevent
misunderstandings in human communication.


For that matter, why are they inventing
various beliefs to attribute to me to begin with?

Misunderstandings happen.

But it's happening an awful lot, even where I'm not in the least
unclear in my language. And it's causing nasty side effects.

"Misunderstandings happen" is a cop-out, not a constructive suggestion
or even a genuine explanation. :P

A genuine explanation would probably be extremely complex, dipping into
psychology, group psychology, linguistics, etc. and beyond my abilities to
derive and provide. As for a constructive suggestion, I wasn't aware that
you were asking for one, but now that you did ask for one explicitly above,
I'm affraid I'm going to have to say I have no suggestion for avoiding these
misunderstandings, other than the ones you don't seem to approve of already.
(i.e. the one which you call lying or being dishonest).

I guess they want to talk about comp.*. Specifically, I guess
the people who post in comp.lang.java.programmer want to talk about
the Java programming language.

Yes, but the logic-deficient personages in question posting here seems
like a tribe of pygmies asking for (or worse, actually giving)
game-playing tips in rec.games.basketball.

If they provide valuable or useful advice, what's wrong with the
advice-providers being pygmies? Or if they want to learn some
game-playing
tips, what's wrong with the persons asking for advice being pygmies?

If they start biting the other participants' knees it becomes a
problem.

Is it against the rules to bite the knees of other participants in
Basketball? If not, then I suppose that's a valid basketball strategy for
pygmies to use. If not, then I suppose that if the pygmies are going to
cheat anyway, there's nothing we can really do to enforce them to obey the
rules. Certainly, banning them from rec.games.basketball will not stop them
from biting people's knees.

Here the logic-deficient people are reading nonsense into
everything, then insulting people (me anyway; I'm not following any
threads besides the few I've posted to as the group's so high volume),
and then failing to even parse the arguments as to a) why the insults
are inaccurate and b) why they should stop, resulting in them
continuing.

So now that you see from (b) that people do not nescessarily behave the
way you think they should behave, maybe it's time for you to revise your
strategy... or better yet, revise the rules of the game you're playing in
such a way so that you end up winning with less risk or effort.

- Oliver


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