Comments on: Mr. Smarty Pants goes all Martian (aka the problem with scorn)

By: Carol Gee

Carol Gee — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 23:43:56 +0000

Grant, great post. It seems to me that scorn is easy, and all too often, automatic. At its simplest it seems to be lazy thinking, particularly when it is exhibited by very bright people.

By: Tom Asacker

Tom Asacker — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 12:10:25 +0000

"several meetings would go by before I heard anyone use a metaphor"

Impossible! And I say this with not even a hint of scorn. Great post Grant.

By: Mary W

Mary W — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 06:30:41 +0000

Gosh, I loved this post. You're exactly right. Sometimes conversations that start out as discussions of a topic, seem to follow the emotional arc of: critical thinking => critical => condescending => scorn/contempt. There's something about analysis that tends to slip into criticism, judgment into judgmentalism.

By the very fact of labeling something as "worthy of scorn" — you've removed any obligation to understand it. Just say it sucks; then not only are you dismissing it, you're also put social pressure on others in the conversation to diss it as well.

It reminds me of John Gottman's research on married couples, where he found that the emotion that was most predictive of divorce was contempt (more predictive than anger, arguing, etc.) There's something about contempt/scorn that cuts deeply into our ability to relate effectively to other people; it kills all feeling of empathy.

Oh, and the kitten is cute. *snuggles the kitteh*

By: german dziebel

german dziebel — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 22:57:27 +0000

Grant, I came across as scornful in a discussion that was supposed to go beyond that. My apologies. Probably theories sit well with some people, but not with others. All theories tend to sacrifice reality for the sake of a model. Talk to one person, and his reality was not sacrificed; talk to a different person, and he thinks his reality was violated. Defining pragmatics seems more worthwhile to me than creating metapragmatics. In Peirce's original formulation, pragmatics is the quality of acting as a sign to a fellow person. This is solidarity at its core, protopragmatics, an unconditional belief in human solidarity before word, utterance or action. Maybe it is Heideggerian, phenomenological, hermeneutical, primitivist instead of structuralist, constructivist and progressive. Maybe we could invoke Durkheim to differentiate between two kinds of solidarity, however, idealistically. But again this line of thinking may not resonate with you. Like Silverstein just didn't resonate with me. Thanks for your post, and thanks for being the catalyst of a Martian mentality. I am still lacking one. German

By: Grant

Grant — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 14:04:45 +0000

Sam, good question, I think bad practice, really bad practice, is easy to spot as clueless, and this give the opportunity to practice an ingroup/outgroup distinction, the clueless website maker "just doesn't get it." We clearly do. They are out, we are in. More metapragmatics. More generally, it's like that joke about families. All terrible websites are terrible in the same way. All merely bad websites are bad in their own way. Or something. Thanks, Grant

German, how very reductive of you, sir. I don't doubt that some academic camps and careers are manufactured this way, but for crying out loud Silverman is just about the smartest man in the universe, full professor at 26 or something, his ideas really do make the world make sense. I think. Thanks, Grant

Steve, what you said (because I couldn't say it better). Thanks, Grant

By: srp

srp — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 08:47:14 +0000

Defining things by failure and indulging in scorn are separate matters. Analytically, it often is easier to pin things down by what's wrong–Christopher Alexander once wrote that good design could only be defined as the "disjunction of all possible misfits." But scorn rarely leads to enlightenment, although sometimes it feels good and sometimes it is warranted.

By: german dziebel

german dziebel — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 20:17:29 +0000

Every post of yours, Grant, makes me want to respond because it is very good. Let me send along one reflection. I remember taking a class on metapragmatics and evidentiality with Michael Silverstein and John Lucy at the University of Chicago in 1998-1999. The only substantial thing I got out of it was witnessing how a self-fulfulling prophecy works in practice. One just has to invent a word and then build a discourse around it. This discourse should satisfy one condition, namely it should be parasitic on something earlier, in this case "pragmatics." (Itself, the result of Morris's misreading of Peirce.) Into this discourse more and more people get coopted. Then the circle closes up, guards with automatic guns are put on each and every corner, and the new theory, approach or paradigm starts functioning as an attention-getting, scorn-provoking and low-delivery machine. If you don't belong, the faults of this machine are made your faults. The same can be said of postmodernism that exploits modernism without overcoming it. Just get meta- and post- about something, hold your ground for a while, get support, establish solidarity, and you are good to go. It is ironic that Grant uses metapragmatics to elucidate the faults of postmodernism, but like any other irony it works.

By: Sam Ford

Sam Ford — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 19:22:57 +0000

Grant, you make some good pionts here. Wonder why it is that we have an easier time defining "worst practice" than we do best practice? It seems that human nature seems to be to define a good idea by picking its opposites, and that these oppositional pieces help us piece together what we actually think is a good idea, which we are much more reticent to point out. Perhaps it's easier to say what doesn't work than it is to understand why...

I have had this "scorn" discomfort as I try and perform in the blogosphere. I find myself having a tough time taking on the type of rhetoric often deemed necessary to be writing what is perceived as a true critical piece, since we often seem to equate insight with skepticism, and often even cynicism. But what you find is that such rhetoric often puts a division between some of the most interested people "outside" the industry and the industry itself, when there should be a healthy dialogue happening. For instance, a lot of really astute observations made on the Internet, either in discussion groups or on the blogosphere, never makes it back to the industry because of the scornful language these points are written in.

But you are absolutely right that we need to put more time into thinking not just about what doesn't work, but why it doesn't work, what industrial or cultural forces have caused marketers or content providers to THINK that they will work, and why what often seems intuitive doesn't work in business practice becuase of a variety of regulatory and infrastructural issues.

Sometimes, the most informational instances worth looking at really are the "bad practice," but not just to excoriate and define yourself against but also to try and analyze and understand so as to figure out both why they are bad and why we have to move past them, as you indicate...

Great piece, though, Grant.