Dunning-Kruger and the New Media Douchebag

I think he just starts trip­ping balls before he writes any­thing. It’s the only way it makes sense.

Well, look, I’m not sure if this was really worth your time as the post you’re talk­ing about is a rhetor­i­cal mish-mash of the first order. It’s like a word salad that has been chopped. So, over­all, you’re right, he’s an idiot, and the con­clu­sions he draws don’t make any sense; so, we’re deal­ing with an aver­age blog­ger here.

Being angry is always worth my time. Besides, New Media needs to have their idols torn down from time to time.

I real­ize that since you’ve built a whole blog around it this is prob­a­bly piss­ing in the wind, but falling in love with your own anger is really the worst way to write. Turn your pas­sion for what­ever it is you’re try­ing to say into direct state­ments and let that do the heavy lift­ing. It’s infi­nitely more con­cise, read­able, and per­sua­sive.

Basically, writ­ing in this man­ner may work in some poetry or songs, but when you’re writ­ing per­sua­sive prose like you are, it just comes off a bit self-impressed and wanky. It’s clear you have some com­pre­hen­sive thoughts you’re try­ing to express, so it’s unfor­tu­nate to just let them lan­guish under a bunch of repet­i­tive pejo­ra­tives and hand-wavy OMGs.

Do you get a free pony with an English degree on your planet, or is it the full unicorn?

Huzzah! The con­cern trolls are here! Here’s some lyri­cal prose for you: Fuck off and die.

Lame attempts at Princess Bride quotes are also a point­less waste of my time. Get a clue you wit­less fuck. No one cares about your “con­struc­tive feed­back”. You’re just another one of the end­less streams of men­tally con­sti­pated tools who feel the need to cor­rect people’s “tone” on the inter­tubes. You’re the inter­net equiv­a­lent of the shrink­ing lit­tle old lady scold­ing ran­dom peo­ple on the street for their man­ners. In short you’re the most pathetic excuse for a troll imag­in­able.

I know this comes as a shock, but no one cares what your opin­ion is about any­thing. Go piss off back to your teas room and leave the adults alone.

You keep slap­ping your fin­gers against the keys, and yet you still can’t man­age to make a point.

When you man­age to muster up enough con­vic­tion to actu­ally say some­thing other than that you don’t appre­ci­ate my tone, well, then you’ll be on the first step to an actual per­son­al­ity.

Here’s the thing you fuck­ing simp. I have a rich, reward­ing, fully actu­al­ized life and I don’t need the approval of ran­dom twits on the inter­net. You should try that, it’s actu­ally pretty neat. I eagerly await your next mis­sive.

See, I know you won’t be able to resist.

I’m not of a mind to care whether I’m explic­itly asked for feed­back on a blog. You don’t pub­lish some­thing then shrink away when peo­ple have some­thing to say about it, even if the thing they’re talk­ing about isn’t what you want to hear.

To use your own words, “Knowing The Score doesn’t do you an ounce of good if you don’t also Get The Point.” You have obvi­ously missed it by leagues. The point isn’t that you shouldn’t give your opin­ion, it’s that why should any­one care what your opin­ion is? Your tone comes across as pre­ten­tious and con­de­scend­ing. From the way you write you are the final arbiter on what actual dis­course is.

To be blunt that is a com­plete crock of shit. The best “dis­courses” I have had, and learned the most from, involved a lot of hand wav­ing and lan­guage that would make a sailer pale. Did I hate the peo­ple I did that with? No. Did we go out for lunch later and laugh? Yes. It’s some­thing I like to call pas­sion. Oh you need rea­son in there too, but if some­one isn’t will­ing to go to the mat to defend their posi­tion then they really don’t have any­thing to say.

My ques­tion to you, con­vince me you have any­thing worth say­ing. Why should I care what you think about this blog or any other? Why should I allow you to dic­tate to me what I can say and the way I should say it?

Step up to the plate bitch.

See what I did there?

Ah, look, it’s a fuck­ing writ­ing troll. I love you loons, I really do, because you are so pre­ciously stu­pid, so blind to that stu­pid­ity, and so con­vinced that you’re doing some­one a pub­lic favor. When in fact, what you are is the inter­net equiv­a­lent of some old diar­rhetic fat guy in the mid­dle of dia­per play sud­denly lec­tur­ing oth­ers on the impor­tance of proper dress.

You sit there, lec­tur­ing on writ­ing style, and yet you say noth­ing. In fact, the whole point of your screed(s) can be boiled down to “you should write more like these other two guys who write for com­pletely dif­fer­ent venues and on dif­fer­ent sub­jects, and so have to have com­pletely dif­fer­ent writ­ing styles.” You’re bitch­ing at a flamethrower for not being a flower vase. Can you even begin to grasp just how gob­s­mack­ingly stu­pid that really is? Especially com­ing from some­one who demon­strates such shit writ­ing skills?

Bless my heart, of course you can’t. You’re an idiot.

You seem to think that every­one in the world writes on the web purely to get hit counts and win pop­u­lar­ity polls. But as we’ve estab­lished, you’re an acephalic lack­wit with delu­sions of impor­tance, so it’s not like you’re going to think over­much, much less cor­rectly. Run along sonny, this here blog’s for the grownups.

Here’s what it boils down to: you’re on the per­sonal blog of a man who knows who he is, what he wants to say and how he wants to say it. You com­ing in here and not only ignor­ing the arti­cle entirely, but also com­ment­ing on the Angry Drunk’s “tone” and writ­ing style, says some­thing about you.

It says that you love to hear your­self spout inane, unin­formed crap. You have the unde­served arro­gance of a grad stu­dent who just bought a $1 cup of cof­fee with a credit card while simul­ta­ne­ously rock­ing out to the White Stripes on his Sansa.

What you’ve done is the equiv­a­lent of walk­ing into a police sta­tion and telling all the detec­tives in the room how to look for clues. Or call­ing up Larry King on his show and telling him how to inter­view his next guest. Your com­ments are unwar­ranted, unwanted and, to be hon­est, com­pletely stu­pid.

People like you remind us why peo­ple like John Gruber don’t allow com­ments on their blogs — because your words are use­less and take away from the con­ver­sa­tion.

In response to the arti­cle itself — Anil Dash has some cock­eyed opti­mistic view of the world and the Web. Some of his lat­est tweets are sur­real, like ask­ing MG Siegler why he lets TC’s com­ments degrade into name-calling and trolling. I don’t think Anil has a firm grasp on how the TechCrunch or the Web work…or real­ity for that matter.

Ah, my favorite excuse for shitty think­ing, “you just don’t under­stand the sub­tle humor here.” No, I’m fairly cer­tain that Anil is a whack­aloon with no dis­cernible under­stand­ing of the way that the world works. Either that or he’s just a mas­sively shitty writer. But that can’t be the case, he’s writ­ten mil­lions and mil­lions of words on the inter­net.

In sum­mary, piss off.

I think you’ve got an inter­est­ing idea on this whole agreement/disagreement dichotomy. Histrionic wail­ing about a bunch of irrel­e­vant non­sense (“My blog is very impor­tant! People pay me to say things!”, “You’re an old lady!”, “You’re just a passive-aggressive cunt!”) is nei­ther agree­ment nor dis­agree­ment. It’s some­where between pro­ject­ing inse­cu­rity and rhetor­i­cal chest-puffing.

The short of it is that I gave feed­back that, while obvi­ously unwel­come (gosh I won­der why), was com­pletely valid. It’s fine if the blog’s shtick is to just have a big grumpy group­think about every­thing, and to try to turn this lit­tle cor­ner of the inter­net into your safe haven to just be mad and angry about any lit­tle thing you want, but when some­one comes along and says “I think maybe this isn’t the most effec­tive way to get your opin­ion across to the inter­net at large” then the only objec­tively sound response is to say “Yup and we like it that way”. Acting like it’s my fault for see­ing the obvi­ous flaw is charm­ing but I’m not sure how you can frame it as any­thing other than the base trib­al­ism that it is.

You can call me what­ever names you want, for as long as you want, and it’s not going to change any­thing. If you’re hung up on who I am, rather than what I said, then you’ve kinda proven my point — all this fetishiza­tion of “angry” rhetoric has hin­dered your abil­ity to think clearly.

You’re just com­pletely full of shit, aren’t you.

Oh bull­shit. You gave an asi­nine opin­ion on etti­quette while being rude your­self, and then when you weren’t imme­di­ately agreed with, accused peo­ple of “shrink­ing away” from your crit­i­cism.

Again, Darby, me, and the third Angry Mac Bastard actu­ally get paid to do this. So some­one thinks we have some­thing of value to say. So obvi­ously, our method of get­ting our point across is pretty damned effective.

I have no idea what I would be “win­ning”. You’ll have to explain what it would mean to win, first, and then I’ll tell you how I feel about my chances. You can then respond to that with dis­dain or bemuse­ment or what­ever and I won’t respond so that way you can have the last word on your own blog because I guess the alter­na­tive would seem rude or something?

Who asked for yours?

What they all said, but I’ll just point out its Lewis Black, not Louis. He’s Jewish, not French. And while Black won’t be will­ing any polit­i­cal offices any­time soon, he makes damned good points, and does so in a way that makes peo­ple laugh (mean­ing they’re more likely to remem­ber them, pend­ing they are smart enough to under­stand them in the first fuck­ing place). But when you’re so far up your own tight ass, I can see where you might feel the need to gut check every­body around you and make sure they are just as men­tally fucked as you are.

Likewise. But the fuck­ing idiot could have at least spelled his name right if he’s going to wield it as some kind of ill-concieved insult.

Thank you for your nice reply.

Now it is clear where the Dunning-Kruger effect is work­ing its way.

Actually, I haven’t called any­one a ple­beian, I’m not defin­ing stan­dards for civil dis­course, and I never threat­ened my scorn upon any­one who dis­agreed. Why would I? What would any­one here care about my scorn? I think you need to re-read what you’re para­phras­ing. The short of it is that by cut­ting out a lot of the rhetor­i­cal fluff, you can write in a much more pointed fash­ion (and I’ve pro­vided exam­ples of peo­ple who suc­cess­fully use anger as the locus for much of their writ­ing) that gets the point across a lot more effec­tively. There’s no threat of scorn, and there’s noth­ing in there about ‘civil dis­course’. The orig­i­nal post is still there where I left it, so you can still go back and read it if you need a refresher.

Wait, wait, wait.

Let me get this straight. You came to this web­site, read the entire arti­cle, and the only com­ment you have is about the writ­ing style, and how it’s appar­ently mak­ing him less clear and/or per­sua­sive (as evi­denced by the last sen­tence)?

So, I have to ask: how many Zimas did you have do drink to get to the point where Darby wasn’t clear? The way I fig­ure it, you had to be in a seri­ously altered state of con­scious­ness to lose the point that was being made, and given the tone of your responses, as well as the con­tent, I can’t see you being able to drink any­thing harder than Zima, so it had to be a met­ric ass­load of Zimas.

The only “Self-impressed and wanky” writer here is you. Go find some com­pre­hen­sive thoughts.

And yet you keep reply­ing, as if you expect a dif­fer­ent out­come. There’s a diag­no­sis for that condition.