> I'd say in the majority of cases, for most adult people with some life experience, shouting when you want to shout is probably a healthy thing.

Sure, and that is totally fine.

But Stoic philosophy disagrees with that. Just as with many other fundamental questions about how to live life, there are different answers/points of view. You don't agree with the Stoic one, and you even offer some reasons why you think it may be harmful. That's entirely fine. The only problem is in your implicit assumption that Stoicism has failed to consider the perspective you have, and if it did, Stoics would abandon their approach to life. That's not true. While there may be Stoics whose individual lives would be improved by adopting your approach, Stoicism as a philosophy is not blind to the perspective you're offering. It just rejects it.

I agree. But you'll note one of my professed virtues is conflict, so I'm "participating in the world" by expressing a social emotion (contempt) towards a value system I disagree with in order to change the social environment. This makes me a political animal.

This is why I express my view in this way. If I wanted to be a stoic, or nearly equivalently a contemporary academic, I'd present some anemic "balanced view" in which you've no idea what my attitude is.

But as I'm not a stoic, I take it to be important to communicate my attitude as an act of social participation in the creating-maintaining of social values. In other words, I think on HN my contempt towards stocism itself has value here, since it invites the person reflecting on stocism to be less automatically respectful of it.

> I think on HN my contempt towards stocism itself has value here, since it invites the person reflecting on stocism to be less automatically respectful of it.

In case it's helpful to you, I'll point out that your effect on me was entirely the opposite. I'm not too positively inclined to stoicism, and I feel the Epicurean and Nietzschean critiques of it hold a lot of water. However, the tone of your top-level post made me instinctively defensive of the qualities of stoicism! I think that's because I perceived the tone of your top-level post as demonstrating something akin to what Nietzsche called ressentiment.

That's one of the effects of being particular -- being a particular person, with particular feelings -- the effects are particular. That's part of the point, part of the aim.

The received view of the tyrannical mass murderers of rome is hagiography, if a few "on my side in the debate" (or otherwise) think I'm being too harsh and want to undermine that a little: great! I would myself do the same if I heard myself speak, if my feelings on what was being said were that it needed moderating.

This interplay I vastly prefer than trying to "be the universal" myself -- disavow all felling, and suppose i can in a disinterested way be unpartisan to a view. This asks vastly too much of any individual, and is in the larger part, extremely (self-) deceptive.

Not everybody is as emotional as you based on your description, some of us naturally have more control over our state of mind, emotions generally, and don't live so reactively.

This allows us not only avoid those typical massive mistakes in life (addictions, bad but attractive partners, cheating, being miserable parents, generally bad emotional big-consequence choices and so on) but also steer us to more successful life paths than most of our peers, whatever that may mean in each case.

Your system works for you and makes you happy and content with your life and its direction? Great for you, but that path is yours only, no need to broaden it to all humanity.

How does your opinion matter than the parent’s opinion?

Even in an ideal scenario favorable to you it seems impossible for it to lead anywhere, after mutually negating each other, other than generating more noise on the internet.

It took me a while to to figure out why I find your position so disgusting. I think a lot of people perceive this contempt as intentional distortion, dishonest, socially hostile.

I dont think we need more stoking of conflict and contempt, but need more good faith and balanced information sharing. I don't think your have correctly modeled the effects of your approach.

I think you hit on it, but the total reason why is slightly different, and the key is in its trigger of your disgust mechanism:

Conflict does not need philosophical reinforcement because it is a major biological default. Using our higher abilities to reinforce these prerequisite (but not higher/good) positions triggers disgust because it leads to traumatic outcomes. That is why disgust exists: to cause us to avoid actions that lead to traumatic outcomes. Sometimes the arm of perception of our disgust reaction reaches further than our comprehension.

I think cooperation is, by far, the most ordinary case. Oppressive, normative, cooperation. This may not seems so online, which is a very unusual environment -- but the vast majority of people are conflict-avoidant.

You might say a war is conflict, but not really: the main mechanisms of war are cooperation.

Very rarely are interpersonal situations prone to disagreement.

The disgust here isn't about trauma, it's a healthy narcissm: the guy doesn't want to be deceived and thinks i'm being deceptive.

I don't think I'm being deceptive, because my heart is on my sleeve -- if I were being deceptive, I'd present an apparently objective analysis and give away little of my apparent feelings on the matter (cf. seemingly all mainstream news today).

I have a different ethic of transparency -- I want people to be emotionally and intellectually transparent. Pretending not to feel one way about an issue represses itself in a manupulated intellectual presentation of the matter -- the reader becomes mystified by the apparent disinterest of the speaker.

If there's one thing I hate with a great passion its false dispassion and intellectual manipulation. So I opt for emotional honesty as part of the package.

I think your statement was compatible-with/implicit-in mine: that conflict, being fundamental in some regimes (as is cooperation) but also high-friction, does not need philosophical reinforcement. If it is philosophical then it is reasoned, and reasoned, whether deceptively so or not, is higher function submitting to reinforcing older, lower.

I don’t disagree it is better to be emotionally transparent in many cases, but there are many cases where it isn’t, and where personal emotional responses can be counterproductive and/or misleading, producing their own sets of suboptimal outcomes.

The contents of people's replies (, votes) is a measure of my effect, so post-facto, no modelling is required.

I'm clearly aware of the existence of people who want an "objective (unemotive) presentation", and clearly aware of what effect emoting has on those people. I haven't failed to model it. On many issues I'm quick to suspend this expression, and engage in a more dispassionate way with a person who wants me to, if I see some value in it. But I'm loathe to give up expressing my feelings, because that is part of the purpose of expression.

I am only doing what you are here in this comment -- you express your contempt in much more extreme terms ("disgust") than I, in order that I may take your feelings into account.

Likewise, when appraising stoicism, I think there's value in others taking my feelings on the matter into account. If only as a means of a kind of reflexive emotional equilibrium modulated by surprise: there's too little contempt towards stocisim in my view, and in its absense, has grown a cult around figures like aurelius.

I've been to the cult meetings in which he is read in a religious manner, cherrypicked and deliberately misunderstood. I'm here out in the world you see, participating -- and I wish to reflect that in my thinking and feelings on the world.

Im not opposed to expressing ones feelings, or advocating for unemotive speech.

Im opposed intentionally seeking heightened conflict via deceit and misrepresentation. It is the political metagaming for effect and attention, an intentional manipulation of the emotional equilibrium.

If you are a true believer in what you say, that is one thing. If you are intentionally being hyperbolic, overexpressing emotion, or omitting facts you know to be true, then you are engaging in political rhetoric. This is adversarial, not collaborative.

When the well is sufficiently poisoned, there is no point in outside discourse, or even truth-seeking.

Rhetoric is a good way to make short term gains on a topic, if you have an edge. Long term it is negative sum, as your community falls apart.

I see that your sibling comment explains your position, and was insightful. I have no problem with radical self expression, or radical transparency. What I have a problem with is placing conflict and effect above truth and transparency. This is how I interpreted your comments above.

If I can speculate: your perspective seems to be at least a second, maybe third-order perspective, of someone in an atypical environment surrounded by would-be stoics, who are all participating in order to succeed in e.g. middle management. This corporate stoicism produces suboptimal product results because while stoicism is perhaps necessary and valuable to hold a position, as you noted it is fundamentally detached and dishonest.

But until someone lives in your version of the social environment, they cannot see the relative value of a return to “radical candor” and so you get rejections, both from people behind you in their profession into stoic corporatism and from those who make their living from behaving in accord with it and believe they are superior for it.

> I suspect that screaming at a person who has done you wrong, in the vast majority of cases, has both the intended effect and a desirable one.

Not usually. Just some examples:

Customer service people tend to be trained to de-escalate and send things up a level. Sometimes they call it "killing with kindness"; basically you repeat your stance with a smile on your face until the person going wild either calms down on their own or leaves. Either way, the person yelling does not get what they want. On the other hand, if you're charming to customer service people, a lot of times they'll bend the rules for you if they can, and if they can't -- well, you don't have to have on your conscience: "ruined the day of someone making minimum wage"

In long term relationships (say, work relationships or family relationships) this sort of excessive emotionality doesn't work either. In a job, you'll probably just get fired, or if you're the boss, people will avoid telling you things. Your family can't fire you, but they can set a boundary and stop dealing with you.

Basically, what I'm trying to get across is that uncorked rage is very rarely effective. It may work once or twice but it's a bad overall strategy.

If you don't want to be exploited, a controlled show of mild anger is a lot more effective. People who are not in control of their emotions can be easily exploited, but those who are in control of their emotions are not. I think you think there's this axis of Rage-a-holic <--------> Door-Mat, but the problem is both ends of those axes have people that aren't in control of their feelings. The door mat lacks control also, but in their case it presents as withdrawing from the world.

> If you are in an elite position of leadership, and otherwise have more Machiavellian options, then you can always try to calculate revenge instead -- or forgive endlessly and be exploited.

Yikes dude.

You're assuming that in most cases when people shout, they're being excessive.

I don't think that's true, at least "per capita". Maybe most shouting is done by the emotionally unstable, but most people arent emotionally unstable (as adults).

If an adult were shouting at me, I'd be greatful of it. I was slapped once, and I said thank you to the person who slapped me -- it told me I was being careless.

For people who arent evilly trying to manipulate you, like customer service -- expressing how you feel helps others know how you feel. I am, in many cases, grateful to know.

If I saw someone getting angry at a person in the customer-service-way, my instinct as an adult with life experience, is to treat that anger as symptomatic -- not evil. This is the danger in saying you shouldnt get angy: blaming the victim.

> Yikes dude

I wasnt endorsing that, I was saying, that's less healthy than just being angry.

There's definitely a cultural aspect, but at least among the people I tend to interact with, shouting is very much a last resort.

If you're at the point where the only way to make your point is by being louder than the other guy, then you're really just winning on intimidation rather than persuasiveness. If both people, or multiple people, are shouting, is anyone actually listening? And if not, what's the point of being so loud?

I see your example of being slapped and I mean, I guess it's good that you took that act in a positive way, but, to me if I'm being so closed off that I need to be slapped, I really need to evaluate how I'm acting.

> I wasnt endorsing that, I was saying, that's less healthy than just being angry.

Fair enough, I'm mostly saying yikes to the implied spectrum of [ scary powerful sociopath bent on revenge <------> complete doormat ]. I don't think anyone needs to concoct weird revenge fantasies to be taken seriously unless you work for the cartel or something, and in that case I'd recommend a career change.

Well now it sounds like you are disagreeing for it's own sake. There may be a name for what you describe, but it's not what is commonly understood as Stoicism.

And in my many years, I have never found shouting at another person to be a healthy thing.