kevin_standlee | Different Worldviews

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Different Worldviews

I find myself wondering what Jonathan McAlmont and Danny O'Dare do to put bread on the table, and musing over whether whatever that is compared to my Day Jobbe is one of the reasons we are talking past each other to the point where I have taken Mary Kay Kare's advice about saying anything else over there. (In short, I am "Just [letting] people be wrong on the Internet…", as he asks.)

My Day Jobbe, which I should be doing right now and will be again in a few minutes, is a computer database programmer. I primarily write and maintain Microsoft Access-based small database application for quick deployment. (Warning: People who snark that Access isn't a "real database" will be considered discussion derailers and treated accordingly. I'm allowed to do that on my home turf, evil person that I am.) Being a programmer gives me a certain view of how I approach the world, process-wise. The character traits that led me into computer solutions engineering possibly are what drew me to an interest in parliamentary law, which is also a large rule-set that a knowledgeable person can "program" to accomplish certain tasks. I find satisfaction when the rules have been followed and everyone has had their say within those rules, even if I don't necessarily get my way. (Besides, if I lose, I often have a way to come back another day when the conditions have changed.) That doesn't necessarily mean I like the result, but if the decision was legal, I have no grounds for attacking on that basis.

(Example: the Mark Protection Committee's decisions in Australia in ~~2011~~ 2010 were legal within the rules framework, even though their substance infuriated me. I therefore worked within that same framework to overturn the decision legally. I never claimed the decision was illegitimate, only ill-advised, and I'd have a very difficult time having a meaningful discussion with someone who doesn't see the difference.)

Not everyone thinks rules are worthwhile. That doesn't make them inherently evil (c.f. the Dungeons & Dragons "chaotic good" alignment; I'm probably lawful good on that scale, recognizing that paladins and their ilk can be a right pain to be around), but it often makes it nearly impossible for me to have a useful debate with them, on account of we differ so badly on basic assumptions. It's as though I brought a golf club and they have a tennis racquet, and we're standing in the middle of cricket pitch trying to play the game. (Of course, being adverse to rules, they probably aren't interested in any competitive sports anyway, but that's another story.)

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Just finished reading that thread. Good grief.

I don't think Jonathon McAlmont noticed but he basically went in a 180 degree turn during that discussion. Starting out wanting to fix the discussion and ended up pleading for the discussion to stop and let him and people he agrees with get on with moaning and doing nothing.

Danny, on the other hand, having glanced at his blog. Oh I know Danny. Ok, not personally, but I've met him. He's an old school British left winger of the kind that Thatcher was able to destroy so ably in the 1980s, in large part because she was focused and organized and they were just what you saw on that thread. Hating anything that smacks of authority and completely disdainful of anything that doesn't fit their view of ideological purity. He wants his fandom pure and delivered the way he wants and will brook no compromise.

Indeed, we're being accused of being old geezers. Remember, the discovery that fandom is getting older and the youngsters are being driven way is Brand New and nobody has ever made it before, no matter that the exact same argument was being made before I was born. Demanding that you should be able to opine on anything at all with no reference to facts or reality means that what they really want is to shout at clouds.

I know, I really do sound like the old fogeys who patronized me when I was coming into fandom. The longer I hung around, the more I mostly understood their air of amused impatience with me. I guess every generation has to learn it for themselves. In a generation, Jonathan is going to be so unhappy when the Cool Kidz tell him that he needs to just die already. Or maybe not; he's possible immune to introspection.

Thanks for the context on Danny. I gave up on him sooner, since it seemed clear that he is the Sole Authority on Everything. (Despite what it may seem to certain Johnathan McAlmonts, I don't consider myself the sole authority on anything. Heck, I even gave a wrong opinion speaking at least semi-officially on THA.org, and had to backpedal and say, "you're right, I'm wrong" when someone else pointed out that I'd misunderstood the rule in question.)

Edited 2013-04-10 22:01 (UTC)

Amusingly, I have never seen anybody actually do a flounce off their own blog in the way that Jonathon just closed that thread.

I was resisting adding the following to his comment about aging fandom: No Jonathon, the reason why you perceive fandom is getting older and less relevant is because the older people are the ones stuck doing the work while the younger generation are out there reinventing wheels and marveling at their ingenuity. Gods, this has made me feel old, much older than I actually am.

Funny thing though. For all the Hugos are not relevant and Fandom is a bunch of old farts. It still seems to keep on going.... funny that don't you think?

Edited 2013-04-10 22:09 (UTC)

If it weren't for the fact that I'm desperately trying to stay out in the hope that the whole discussion will die, I'd go in and say something about shouting at clouds, which is exactly what he's doing.

And thank you so much for the political analogy. I, of course, am Not Allowed to have an opinion about UK politics in his world view.

He'll likely end up a old, bitter, right-winger. See "Why Conservatives Think the Ends Justify the Means" spotted on Jay Lake's blog. I identify strongly with the liberal, process-oriented people, not the "do anything to win because I'm right" conservatives.

From an interesting personal perspective of British politics, given her recent demise. One of the things that worked well for Thatcher was a version of the attitudes I'm seeing there. A navel gazing desire for ideological purity over pragmatism and actual effort, which gave her, an organized and focused person, a great way to pick off the various factions of the left one by one without having to worry all that much about the competition.

In some respects the GOP are doing something similar now with the primary process and the impact on candidates.

I'm with Andrew, I'm done with him. He's lost all coherence of his position except for a feeling that people are picking on him.

Erm, Aussiecon was the 2010 Worldcon; 2011 was Reno.

Drat, did it again. Fixed. Thanks.

Oops, you did it again? ;)

BTW Kevin, seriously, Access? You should tell your company to hand roll a SQL setup with a PHP front end running Bootstrap Twitter for the UI. That's obviously a much better solution, why don't you tell your boss that that's what they should do?

:)

*guffaw* You troll, you. :)

Seriously, the reason I have a job amounts to our company having a need for database solutions that can be generated relatively quickly and without a two year lead time, an empire of programmers, and a multi-million dollar budget.

I'm a MASH unit; our IT department is Grand Memorial University Medical Center. Both approaches have their value, particularly when you don't want the patient to bleed out in front of you while you're arguing over the most ideologically pure way of operating.

What amuses me, having worked at the business end of Kevin's output, is that all that planning and programming ends up with a trucker looking at his manifest, glaring at the dispatcher, and stating "You. Are. F#%king. High." before stomping off to his truck.

Now, now :) Everything I've ever written that requires people on the loading dock to move things in or out of a truck was done with input from those dock workers, including reformatting the report to make it easier for them to work with under bad-weather conditions.

(It got flippin' cold in Columbus OH in December! I made the type larger on the reports so that they could check things off with markers while wearing gloves rather than needing fine-point pens. Exchange went roughly thus:

Dock Supervisor: "These reports are too crowded."

Me: "They look okay to me."

Sup: "Easy for you to say! You don't have to stand out there on an open loading dock in 10° temperatures in a snowstorm trying to reconcile the report to the boxes that actually came off the truck!"

Me [looking out the window at the dock workers huddling over a burn-barrel trying to warm up enough to unload the next truck]: "Point taken. I'll have a new version in an hour or two.")

You do have a point, of course. Because I'm physically surrounded by the people having to use my software (rather than being a Mysterious Unseen Presence in Portland), if I make their lives too difficult, they can come over here and stand on my desk until I fix it.

How that's customer service!

Having worked data entry for a Trucking firm in Pittsburgh, I _wish_ we'd been using access. :)

I think there's a lot of barking up the wrong tree here.

There's two impulses at work:

1) A prelapsarian belief in the Hugos. They haven't been disillusioned yet about what a raw popularity contest the awards really are.

2) The process you keep urging them to get involved in. It's too onerous. (You noted this yourself.) That's why they want an end run around it.

1. Yup. People pick shit you don't like. I am SHOCKED. SHOCKED I TELL YOU!!!

2. I proposed that we should work to make it less onerous and better to work in the online age. Apparently that was too onerous.

I particularly loved the bit where they said "WSFS isn't some sort of government of fandom" whilst ignoring the fact that it is, explicitly, the government of the Hugos.

But the whole thing is troubling; it's symptomatic of the way that younger people as a rule (not just fans, and not just now) have a huge amount of energy focused on spotting what is wrong and needs fixing, and zero willingness to engage with the often fusty processes that work to enable change.

Thanks for noticing. :)

The funny thing is that I certainly don't remember being like that when I showed up in 1984. Yes, I had the "I want to change everything!" attitude, but I went about it by learning how the system works and doing my best to take it over. To some extent, I succeeded, to the extent anyone in this community does. I surely didn't think someone else was going to do it for me!

I'll lay good odds that the old farts of the time saw you that way :)

But then we grow up.

Likely. Bruce Pelz coined what he called Standing Rule 2: "Shut up, Kevin." (Rule 1 was, "Shut up, Robert [Sacks, notorious WSFS gadfly of the time with vastly longer history than me].")

Ah, but I enjoyed the business meetings when Robert was around. It was theatre of the absurd, and I have a weird sense of humor. Today's business meetings are much more serious (though not totally).

That was the point where if I had been having the conversation in real life things would have got very very ugly.

On a more serious issue, regarding your second point. I'm only 44, am I really so old that I completely agree with you?

As I said to Kevin in another thread. It was reminding me of conversations with my 15 year old niece who just can't wrap her head around the fact that her dad (who's older than I am by a margin) and I both know when she's lying about boys, parties and drinking and can''t wrap her head around the fact that the reason we spot it so fast is that we did it too and her grandfather was a much bigger bastard than we are.

My favorite is when MTV started up (remember when it showed videos?) and I told my daughter, That's a Good Group; That's a One Hit Wonder; Boy Band, they'll last as long as their fans do; etc, etc, etc. My pre-teen daughter fussed "How would You know, Mom?" Now, as an adult, she better understands, her "old" Mom saw Iron Butterfly Live, The Beatles Live, and some how my hearing lived to tell about the concerts. And has been listening to R&R on the radio since 1960. Go Beach Boys and Jan & Dean! I've seen a lot of rock bands come and go in my day.
As for the crowd in our "discussion" - When they claim to be fans but can't bother to go to the cons, or do anything but pontificate on the Internet, I really wonder how fannish they are. They may read the stuff, but they are hardly "FANS" = Fanatics. Pontificating on the internetz is lazy fandom at best, arrogant fandom at worst. It is definitely NOT participation fandom.
I know I am an Old Lady, but my daughter is in her 30s and my son just turned 24, and the grandkids at 18,14, 12 and 7. I have a busy presence on Facebook with friends of all ages. And I talk to all of them. I am hardly Out of the Loop by any definition. Well, I guess sort of, almost everyone I'm friends with Goes to Cons, even the 20-somethings. That's how I meet people, and keep my heart and brain young. What a concept.
And I ran away from the "conversation" too, when it became obvious, they weren't interested in Real Life Answers or even Real Life, just Pontificating on the Internetz and telling all of us we are Wrong, because that is what they do instead of going out and meeting people. Sad life.

Edited 2013-04-11 08:58 (UTC)

" I really wonder how fannish they are. —— Pontificating on the internetz is lazy fandom at best, arrogant fandom at worst."

On the other hand, it's usually not very productive to criticize people for the kind of fandom they enjoy. Conventions are not for everyone, and fandom should be big enough for all kinds of people, to do the activities they like. "Lazy fandom" to me reads like there should be only one kind of "proper", accepted fandom, and that's not the way I like to think of things. In my opinion, claiming to be a fan and somehow communicating with others is quite enough to be accepted as a fellow fan.

And, in my experience, a "lazy fan" (using your term for someone who only connects to other fandom through discussions on the net) can sometimes become an active, participating fan, when treated right. If someone just wants to discuss things on the net, and you do that long enough without demandind anything else, sometimes you happen to be present when they ask if there's something more they could do.

I'm not saying that particular conversation would necessarily have turned out differently if the participation in WSFS part would have been left out, mind you.

It might. It would not have lasted very long and consisted of like-minded moans of "Oh, everything is terrible, and the horrible Evil SMOFS will never change anything and it's impossible to change anything whatsoever, Woe Is Us."

The regrettable thing is that those of us who do actively engage with the process and who are willing to listen to proposals are going to be put off by all of the wingeing, making changes even less likely.

They're not actually interested in change, I think. As I said to

daveon, they're moaning about the weather, with as much chance of actually doing anything about it. My mistake was thinking they wanted something to change. They don't. They want to revel in the joy of being persecuted victims.

I'm with you on this up to a point. And the point for this was where Jonathon wanted a discussion, when actually what he wanted was to sit at a table at the back of the pub with his friends bitching about how crap everything is and how nothing gets done and he's being oppressed.

I have a real issue with people moaning loudly about the need for change and inviting a discussion and then getting upset when they get it. Fans are hardly unique for displaying this kind of behaviour and I must admit it does feel like an age related thing.

But then, I'm fairly sure there was a panel on 'The Greying of Fandom' on the programme of the first Con I went to 20 years ago, and I suspect that there were similar panels on convention programming 20 years before that. And yet, here we still are.

I don't mind that he doesn't want to do conventions, I would find purely online 'fandom' a little antiseptic myself but you don't get to moan about how convention fandom does things and how weird it is and still get to tell them/us what to do to please you.

"Jonathon wanted a discussion, when actually what he wanted was to sit at a table at the back of the pub with his friends bitching about how crap everything is and how nothing gets done and he's being oppressed"

I've known some people like that, and sometimes they can still be coaxed into having a fruitful discussion anyway. But that requires a considerable effort from the other party to check their own ego at the door, to avoid pusing buttons and steering the conversation to topics that they have something more positive to contribute. (Not that I'm claiming to have succeeded in that all that often.)

Purely online fannish stuff isn't for me. And as I said to him and one of the other people whinging there. I've been involved in online 'fandom' for over 15 years. I like going to conventions, which I've been doing for 20 odd years, I like hanging out with people in the bar and talking about stuff that I just can't discuss in polite society. Hell, I only came out to non-fan friends about my SF involvement when I had to get the app built for Reno.

It certain feels arrogant to me, as bad as the Trufen guys moaning at each other on their email list. Lazy? They all seem to write a lot, but actually I think that's part of their problem with the Hugo Awards.

Writing large volumes doesn't always mean writing good stuff, and good stuff will get missed and lost in the noise. Not to mention, there's a LOT of Blogs out there. Getting enough people to agree on a single writer and blog that would get enough nominations to be on a ballot strikes me as being quite hard.

He also wanted RequiresHate on the Ballot and that's as unpalatable to me as Ted Beale being there.

Bears worlds views is fishs ands berries hmmms ands honeys ands beings nices. Bears says bes nices

We might all be better off if we paid more attention to you.

Please not the "computer people are too logical to deal with normal human beings" argument! That leads inevitably to the autism supremacists' stance that having normal social abilities should be a disqualification from working with computers because only the purely logical can do it right, which is basically the old argument that women are "too emotional" for math and science reskinned. As a computer person whose particular professional interest requires undestanding how human beings work in order to get anywhere, I assure you that being good at computers does not necessarily make you too logical for everyday discourse.

There's a great parallel to the thread you're talking about, though-- you've expressed a thought you came up with yourself that seemes reasonable to you, and suddenly you discover that it's been expressed before and in worse terms, and someone who's seen that argument over and over is reacting to more than just the piece you have.

(Yes, BTW, there really are autism supremacists. Just to be clear, I'm not accusing you of being one of them, nor do I expect to ever have grounds to.)

Well, thanks for not accusing me of beliefs of which I do not have.

I know it's not a new idea. I was just trying to find some logical way of explaining why there was so much what I considered cognitive dissonance over there. But then again, as I said elsewhere, some people just want to be victims: it absolves them of any responsibility.

A further thought: I think it's possible that within SF fandom, I'm not "abnormal" enough in some respects.

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Different Worldviews

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