Theory

[icycalm]

Continued from here: http://forum.insomnia.ac/viewtopic.php?p=12222#12222

I don't plan to post here often, or at least not until I have a better understanding of the community here. Unlike many people on the internet, I am considerate enough to acknowledge that I must adapt to any new community I become a part of, not vice versa.

Can anyone figure out what is wrong with the last sentence?

[zinger]

It'd be better to take what you like from a community and oppose what you dislike. Keeps you, your head and the forum sharp. I'd say that an adapting forum member is usually a much bigger problem than a rebel.

[Nybble]

I assume what he is saying is "This community holds a high standard for continued membership, and I'm going to make sure I don't make the mistakes that others before me have made". However, this goes without saying, because you're going to show whether you have any worth in this community whether or not you have "lurked" enough.

If you have adapted fully, you have brought nothing to the table. You are merely a reflection of what the forum already is and you are unable to contribute new insight, which is a waste of time and space. You become a mere "yesman".

[icycalm]

I had no intention of banning him, but then he dared to post some fucking intolerable off-topic nonsense in this thread (which I deleted because I couldn't stand the idea of having it on my website), that I decided I just did not want to have to deal with him.

So yeah, you guys got it right more or less. Here is a rather more complete and nuanced explanation (which will probably find its way into a future article in some form).


The dude is saying that a new member must adapt to any community he joins, and not vice versa. But a community is an abstraction -- without its members it doesn't even exist. A community, in fact, is nothing other than the result of a play of forces and counter-forces between a certain group of individuals. Each individual represents a specific force, with his own magnitude (some stronger than others), and his own direction (tastes, interests). The community then is the resultant force of all these different forces. It follows that any change in the community, either by a person leaving it or a person joining it, will change this resultant force -- a change which will be small or great in proportion as the person leaving or joining is small or great. But to imagine a case in which this change is exactly ZERO, which is what the dude is saying, is to imagine a human being whose effect on others and the world around him is exactly ZERO. Now, one might joke and say that some people are indeed zeroes, but this is only an exaggeration -- no one is a zero. The zero is an invention of logicians -- in the real world zeroes do not exist. It's just that some people are so small that their effect is so hard to measure it might as well be regarded as negligible. One can think of this in the manner of what happens with gravitational forces. An apple exerts the same amount of force on the earth as the earth does on the apple. But since the earth is so much greater in mass than the apple, we see the apple affected a great deal more by this mutual force than the earth -- which latter, without the help of absurdly sensitive instruments (which we do not even yet possess), does not in fact seem to be affected at all. Now if you bring in another apple to the surface of the earth from across the galaxy, you will not be able to notice any change in the earth's behavior. If, however, you bring in a black hole or a neutron star, some pretty interesting things will happen, and they will be pretty fucking noticeable! Translated back into our discussion, this is what happens, more or less, whenever I join some other forum. A situation which, as in the case of a neutron star or a black hole suddenly appearing inside a peaceful, sleepy solar system, is not fated to last very long!

A philosopher: a fateful man around whom snarling, quarrelling, discord and uncanniness is always going on.

So there is always violence -- that is to say change -- whenever the equilibrium of a community is disturbed by the arrival or departure of a member. And even this equilibrium is always relative, i.e. ultimately illusory, for equilibrium is another absurd idea of the logicians. In practice, a community is never sealed off from the rest of the universe: its individuals are constantly changing through their interactions with outside individuals and communities, and hence forever jostling and reaccommodating themselves within the boundaries of the "original" community under consideration.

And since I gave an example of the more violent forms these interactions can take (myself), here are a couple more mild cases, which are therefore also the more common.

Recently, a bunch of people have joined who seem quite interested in and knowledgeable about PC hardware, and who have been contributing extensively to my PC component threads in the hardware forum. This, to an outsider contemplating this community, is quite a significant development. There is no doubt that these people, with their contribution of a large number of posts in this area, have changed the nature of this community.

Another example. A couple of years ago we had a big fan of MMORPGs join the forum (bullethell), who has since then started at least a couple of dozen threads on MMORPGs -- games in which I have no interest and which, without him, would not have been mentioned here at all. To be sure, I did edit out a little bit of flagrant fanboyish talk from one or two of his posts, just as I moderated the hardware discussions, but there is no doubt that the "community" as a whole ended up adjusting to him and to his tastes and interests (by the mere act of tolerating his threads, if nothing else), just as he adjusted to everyone else's tastes and interests (by accepting my edits, for example, and by self-moderation so that future edits would not be needed).

All of this, by the way, has been succinctly put by Lichtenberg:

It is impossible for a being to undergo the effect of some other without that effect being mutual. ... Every effect modifies the object that is its cause. There is no dissociation of the subject and the object -- nor any original identity -- there is only an inextricable reciprocity.

http://insomnia.ac/essays/on_the_world_ ... usoriness/