You Can’t Countersignal Online Writing

Hacker News commenter Snow_Falls dismissed a submission from Asterisk Magazine on the grounds that:

I’m not sure I can trust a magazine that has a grammatical error in [the] title of an article on the front page.^✱ Now this doesn’t say anything about the quality of the article itself (who doesn’t make silly mistakes) but it does speak to a lack of editorial oversight. These sorts of basic mistakes do not inspire confidence.

^✱ bottom article on the front page: “Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Children Learning?” should be “are our children learning”.

This is a good example of the difficulties with signaling and communication: anything which looks like an error is a ‘thing you can’t countersignal’ to people unfamiliar with you and without a reason to extend you the benefit of the doubt. (If you show up at a hacker meetup wearing a business suit, don’t expect them to automatically appreciate how you’re only wearing one ironically…)

This commenter is so contemptuous of Asterisk that he sees a blatant ‘basic’ error which somehow evaded the writers and editors all this time, and assumes that this means they are that incompetent. And indeed, for such an error to slip through everyone, in the very title, does imply a severe lack of editorial oversight indeed, and one would justifiably lack confidence in such a magazine.

But he doesn’t consider the modus tollens, that the error is deliberate and he is the one failing to understand what is a well-known George W. Bush allusion. If he had a higher opinion of Asterisk, he might have instead checked (if he took even a second to google the title “Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Children Learning?”, the first 5 Google hits all explain the allusion), or at least withheld judgment—but he didn’t, so he just snarks on HN and gets to be embarrassed when someone politely explains the joke to him.

This happens all the time in places with context collapse, especially on Twitter—I don’t know how many times I’ve seen someone retweet something ‘stupid’ or ‘obviously wrong’, where actually the original tweet was a pretty amusing reference that the retweeter didn’t get. (For example, if someone tweets something along the lines of “They spent $X, for that much money, they could have given every American $Y million dollars!”, others might get angry about the arithmetic being wildly wrong by multiple orders of magnitude, thereby demonstrating utter innumeracy… Because the original tweeter is making fun of a famous instance of innumeracy.) It is a particularly infuriating kind of criticism because it often is done in bad faith, due to contempt and laziness and assuming the worst possible interpretation of something one has written with great effort, and it is especially irritating to be condescended to by someone who is so ignorant compared to you that they don’t even realize their ignorance.

It’s a pity because it makes it hard to write publicly in any way but the most boring way for the lowest common denominator, given that inevitably someone is going to come along and take your Socratic ignorance for genuine ignorance, or your playful misspelling as proof you can’t even run a spellchecker, etc., and you can hardly explain every joke without vitiating them.

And even if you did tediously explain all the jokes and dissect the humor to death, that doesn’t help with many readers, who are reading either in bad faith or with, shall we say, low levels of charity & effort. (The commenter in this example didn’t even get as far as skimming the essay in question—they saw the title on another page!)

The only way to stop that is to not have anything which cannot be hoist out of context and abused: this is one of the virtues of one-liners/tweets/puns, it’s actually quite difficult to edit them down to the point where an informed third-party viewer is unable to understand a reference or joke by the first-party which the hostile second-party didn’t/wouldn’t understand. (It is, however, easy to quote selectively from a Twitter thread, where for any kind of intelligent discussion, there will often be at least one tweet which looks bad in isolation, eg. ‘Thesis, antithesis, synthesis’—‘OMG look at this horrible antithesis, I’m literally shaking with anger right now!’)

This is also a way to deal with giving statements to hostile journalists: provide them a single sentence, perhaps long & complex, rather than a whole statement; the rules of the journalism game generally require quoting a whole sentence or nothing, so you at least get something through intact.