RE: Ontological Disproof of God
August 21, 2018 at 7:05 pm
(This post was last modified: August 21, 2018 at 7:15 pm by bennyboy.)
I'm going to say something in defense of the OP.
I have no doubt that the original intent of the post was sincere enough, and was not trolling. The emotional language used by the OP in response to perceived hostility from the forum community shows that he had at least some hope of being praised for his intellectual efforts.
I've experienced this kind of language plenty of times as an English teacher. Among ESL students, unnecessary complexity is a kind of flexing-- just showing off that they CAN use those words, and CAN use those elaborate sentence forms. In that case, there usually is a well-formed argument under there somewhere, and simplifying the language results in a better work of writing.
Among native English speakers, this kind of stuff is almost always done by college students with a term paper deadline-- they pad the sentences to meet a word count requirement, and scramble the structure as a challenge to the teacher: "If you can make sense of this, you'll see that there's very little substance under all these words. But I challenge you: give me my 'A,' or put off the other 200 term papers for an extra 30 minutes while you wade through mine." In this case, the student will be highly resistant to requests to simplify- as it essentially means he's going to have to write a paper, after all.
This case is different, and a little outside my body of experience. He's brought this writing into a forum to be judged. Why, then, wouldn't he make the ideas as clear as possible? Why voluntarily go into a forum with this kind of language? I'm reasonably confident that we're looking at some kind of narcissistic / OCD / austistic personality here. He's clearly a very high IQ person, but cannot organize ideas in a way that others would consider coherent. In other words, he HAS to use language in this way, because it's the most natural expression how he thinks. Therefore, attacks on his writing style constitute a perceived attack on his personhood, because the former is a direct expression of the latter. He's neither showing off NOR attempting to confound us-- he just doesn't think like we do.
And I don't mean that as an insult. If my guess turns out to be true, it would probably change the way I dealt with the OP, and certainly I'd be more willing to take the time to read the entire piece. negatio, what say you? Am I on the mark?
I have no doubt that the original intent of the post was sincere enough, and was not trolling. The emotional language used by the OP in response to perceived hostility from the forum community shows that he had at least some hope of being praised for his intellectual efforts.
I've experienced this kind of language plenty of times as an English teacher. Among ESL students, unnecessary complexity is a kind of flexing-- just showing off that they CAN use those words, and CAN use those elaborate sentence forms. In that case, there usually is a well-formed argument under there somewhere, and simplifying the language results in a better work of writing.
Among native English speakers, this kind of stuff is almost always done by college students with a term paper deadline-- they pad the sentences to meet a word count requirement, and scramble the structure as a challenge to the teacher: "If you can make sense of this, you'll see that there's very little substance under all these words. But I challenge you: give me my 'A,' or put off the other 200 term papers for an extra 30 minutes while you wade through mine." In this case, the student will be highly resistant to requests to simplify- as it essentially means he's going to have to write a paper, after all.
This case is different, and a little outside my body of experience. He's brought this writing into a forum to be judged. Why, then, wouldn't he make the ideas as clear as possible? Why voluntarily go into a forum with this kind of language? I'm reasonably confident that we're looking at some kind of narcissistic / OCD / austistic personality here. He's clearly a very high IQ person, but cannot organize ideas in a way that others would consider coherent. In other words, he HAS to use language in this way, because it's the most natural expression how he thinks. Therefore, attacks on his writing style constitute a perceived attack on his personhood, because the former is a direct expression of the latter. He's neither showing off NOR attempting to confound us-- he just doesn't think like we do.
And I don't mean that as an insult. If my guess turns out to be true, it would probably change the way I dealt with the OP, and certainly I'd be more willing to take the time to read the entire piece. negatio, what say you? Am I on the mark?
