The Pig Hates It

How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People

People on the ‘net often like to quote the George Bernard Shaw line “Never wrestle with a pig because you both get dirty and the pig likes it.”

The implication is that bad-faith internet arguers love it when you use their techniques to debate them. Curiously, my experience suggests otherwise.

Source: https://thefrontlines.com/comics/a-pilot-wrestling-pig/ Maybe pilots are just #builtdifferent?

I. Socratic questioning

Yesterday, a popular effective/accelerationist tweeter challenged “AI doomers” with loaded questions and gratuitous insults. Normally, I just ignore these comments. But today I was feeling charitable, so I decided to respond with an insulting question of my own.

Instead of “wrestling in the mud and liking it”, aka continuing a convivial discussion, or thanking me for the attempt to argue in culturally-appropriate ways, he just made a comment that didn’t address the mimicry angle at all and immediately blocked me!

Was the problem that my reply wasn’t insulting enough? I considered adding “idiot” to my reply but I was worried that the mirroring attempt would be too obviously sycophantic via copying his tone. Ah well.

Was it just my bad luck in encountering an unusually non-pugnacious pig? Perhaps. But consider also:

II. Rhetorical Reasoning

I often see logical fallacies on Twitter. Historically I tried a combination of a) pointing out the logical fallacies, b) countering with different lines of factual arguments and c) ignoring the fallacies and moving on.

But this has at most mixed success! So in an anthropology-inspired foray into alternative argumentative norms, I attempted to argue against unusually bad logical fallacies (from MAGAs and far-leftists alike) by using logical fallacies of my own.

Alas, far from being “pigs who like wrestling in the mud,” political posters who deploy logical fallacies get even MORE angry at you when you argue against them with the same fallacies, than when you just dispassionately argue in logically coherent ways! It’s quite curious.

III. Race Dynamics

Another example: I’m sure you’ve all noticed the rise in racial arguments on X.com. Like truly stupid racial arguments about Haitians or Indians or w/e would get millions of views and thousands of likes.

Over the last three years, I tried to engage them plainly, logically, factually, with exasperation, or with wry humor. All failures!

So recently I had a brilliant idea: maybe instead of attempting to counter racism with abstract logic, it’d be better to mirror their reasoning?

So I constructed a number of fun #based, #justnoticingthings, #justcurious lines of attack. Armed with my new arguments, I politely attempted to engage with white supremacists and HBD’ers.

Tragically, my arguments about the inferiority of white people have not been well-received. If anything, they made online white supremacists even angrier¹ than my previous attempts!

(unfortunately I can’t seem to find these tweets anymore. #cancelculture)

IV. Conclusion & Future Work

It turns out cross-cultural communication is hard!

But I’m optimistic. I probably just haven’t spent enough time deeply engaging with non-Gricean argumentative norms, and truly grok the inner brilliance of other Twitter subcultures.

One day, perhaps one day soon, I’ll finally learn how to throw gratuitous insults and logical fallacies as well as the best of them.

And then, finally, we can understand each other deeply and have a real conversation. ☺️☺️☺️

_________

Live in the Bay Area and interested in more cross-cultural communication? We’re hosting a Three Idiots (Bollywood) movie night on Monday the 13th! The Linchpin subscribers and new readers alike are welcome, just DM me for an invite!

1. Incidentally, they also do not appreciate it when they think you called them “pigs”, even after you hastily clarify that no, no, you were trying to explain why they’re different/worse than wrestling-pigs!