I’ve definitely shared this concept or observation or whatever you want to call it before, but recent events have made me think of it again. I should clarify first that what I base this train of thought on isn’t entirely something that clicks for me, something I might not get into expressing, but it definitely makes you or at least me wonder why the implications in the train of thought aren’t considered, at least outside my occupation (since I’m in an occupation designed to work around the otherwise neglect of the concept), and I thought of running this by.
Back in the old days, it was common for business people to pay their workers more honestly, as in based on what they thought the worker seemed to deserve. Often the workers would seem underwhelmed. Organized criminals would then step in and say “you’ll get more out of us” and so that part of society grew. For some reason, the first thing within the mind of the people in charge, trying to assess everything, was “let’s invent this thing, we might call it the minimum wage”. Alrighty. So this side thinking, what do we think of it? Something happened, right?
So here is where the train of thought works into the picture. Matters of monetization are just one arena up the sleeve of bad actors. A lot of people feel abruptly socially isolated. When this happens, instinct is often to seek out companions. Social life might be dead or people might be avoidant. Someone I know is in such a situation. Along comes what might be called a bad actor. To them, they might see a potential extension of themselves with freedom of minimal effort. And voila, someone new joins the “bad crowd” or “dysfunctional crowd”.
Watching this unfold myself, I think to myself. Places have a “minimum reference point” for the topic of exchange/payment/whatever the word is, so then what does the non-thinking come from to apply this thought to the whole isolation thing mentioned? Anyone here have people they know who were absorbed into a bad part of society when everything seemed dead and thought “well, it’s not like anyone else was going to give them what they need”?
I read the whole thing multiple times and still have no idea what you’re proposing
Right there with you. I understood none of it so here’s chatGPT’s intrepretation of it:
Assuming this is correct I kind of understand what OP is saying but I still don’t get what they’re actually suggesting. Some form of mandatory socialization for isolated people perhaps?
I mean that’s not inaccurate.
As a person whose first language isn’t English I didn’t understand anything they said
As a native English speaker, I didn’t either.
As a person whose first language isn’t English, I did.
Though that might be a factor in some things.Which part is confusing?
I found it very confusing between …
… and …
Give the biggest example of a part that confused you.
I’m not sure I can give a larger part that 100% of it. I would recommend that you follow the advice of Northrop Frye and sit down and think before writing. The number of people who are misunderstanding or plain old not understanding what you are suggesting (if anything) should be a strong clue that you have communicated with stunning ineptness. To cite the linked document, these people (myself included) don’t know “whether [you] are pregnant or just have gas on the stomach”.
Learn structure. Learn expression. Learn, in short, to think, remembering, as per Frye, that “there is no such thing as an inarticulate idea waiting to have the right words wrapped around it” but rather that “ideas do not exist until they have been incorporated into words”.
Then, once you’ve actually solidified the thoughts in your own head so you understand yourself what they mean, try to communicate them again. You’ll find a lot less frustration that way.
Suppose I was writing an equation. If it was incalculable, it would be due to having structurally written a part wrong. If not, anyone mathematical enough could solve it. If there is ambiguity, something can be rearranged until someone can triangulate what is being communicated based on what they all interpretationally have in common. That’s why I ask. In terms of structure/expression, only one would be an issue and I actively ask about it.
Your job here is to pitch an idea that others do not currently accept. Whether they do not accept this idea because they disagree with it and need persuasion, or simply have never heard of it, it is incumbent upon you to communicate this idea effectively. If you do not communicate this idea effectively, your idea is stillborn. Hence Frye’s position of ideas not existing until they’ve been incorporated into words.
It is your responsibility to express your ideas using the five Cs: Correct, Complete, Concise, Courteous, and Clear. Failure in any of these is going to lose you your chance to persuade others of your concepts. Notably it is not incumbent upon anybody else to try and tease the five Cs out from you. There’s a whole lot of ideas out there competing for the attention of people, and if your ideas aren’t structured in a way that makes people want to read them, they won’t spend the time. They’ll move on to the ideas that are properly communicated.
Given your screed above, I’ll do you a solid and critique it piece by piece. Every so often I’ll parenthetically add one of the five Cs I think you’ve broken like this: (Courteous).
The first paragraph is rambling and incoherent (Clear). There’s at least three ideas expressed in there, without linkage internally (Clear), and no visible relationship to the rest of your essay. It strikes me as ranging from entirely irrelevant—nobody cares if you’ve expressed this before, nobody cares what your vague and unnamed occupation is, etc.—(Concise) to flat-out confusing and head-scratching—the entirety of the second sentence, even if it were relevant (which I rather doubt) should be taken out back and shot, replaced by at least a pair of sentences, possibly more, that actually communicate—(Clear).
How old are we talking here? At no point in my nearly 60 years of life, nor in my father’s life before me, does this describe how salaries were assigned. (Salaries have always seemed to be assigned as “whatever the bosses think they can get away with paying”…) If this is your thesis statement, it is absolutely unsupported by most people’s lived experience, I’d guess, and thus is a big breach of (Correct). If you have receipts, naturally, that would be fine, but you don’t supply them, which is a breach of (Complete). So which is it? Incorrect or incomplete?
This statement is so vague it could be held up as an example of how “vaguebooking” escaped the confines of Facebook and bled into Lemmy. (Concise) (Clear)
And again, more receipts are needed. This is such a bizarre explanation for the nature of criminal enterprise and its history in humanity that if you don’t substantiate it this is just going to make people stare at you and then check your temperature quickly if you were to say it in person. (Correct) (Complete), one of the two.
And here we fall into a straight-up example of purest word salad. (Clear) I have absolutely no idea what it is you’re even trying to communicate here. Which leads us to the next paragraph.
This is a complete non sequitur from the previous paragraph. There’s no linking of the concept(s) of the previous paragraph to guide the reader’s thought. You’re just back to mentioning this vaguely-articulated “train of thought” from the first paragraph that has not yet even come close to being introduced. The result is confusion. (Clear)
And here we finally see your point…ish? You’re saying money isn’t enough; that there needs to be also a “minimum social wage” if I’m reading you correctly. This is actually an intriguing idea that’s worth developi…
…DAMMIT! And the development peters out. There’s no exploration of what such a “minimum social wage” might look like. How you’d measure socialization. How you’d prevent bad actors from gaming whatever rules you came up with (like they game minimum wage). No definitions. No expansion of ideas. No nothing. Definitely this is not a pregnancy, it is just gas on the stomach, to invoke Frye again.
And here’s a segue away from the actual idea’s ghost and back into vague and meandering non sequitur.
This is why you’re getting faced with confusion instead of robust discussion.
If you really want to have a robust discussion you need to learn to communicate your ideas better. You should probably pick up a book on informational writing (technical writing, essay writing, etc.) and maybe even take a class on it to have a teacher assess your writing (in far greater detail than I did!) to improve it. That way you’ll express more than gas on the stomach.
In line with a part of what I was saying, is it always one’s fault if another person doesn’t understand? This isn’t what one would call “deflecting”, success comes from both ends (one could yell into the void, but is there anyone there who may hear or is it all deaf). I would not blame someone else if this was an issue. For a third time, it’s why I may say to give specific pointers (which nobody has done yet), which would also allow one to know what to dissect, not that two of the five things you mentioned aren’t opposites, as well as range between objective (correctness/completeness when it comes to that) and relative. People ran the whole thing by an algorithm which didn’t have this issue, but then people said they had the same problem from the algorithm, so I’d take a guess and say maybe it’s not just a me thing. Also keep in mind (and this addresses several parts of your dissection), but the first part of all of this is also contextually a recap of a previous inquiry, and much ambiguity comes from the efforts to contrast the two societal concepts a second time (also, does one really need to be ultra specific every time they use an adage like “the old days”?)
OK, I’m punching out of the conversation here. I think that:
Should you ever find the desire to improve your ability to express your thoughts so that you can actually partake of the conversations you seem to want, well, I’ve given you the advice to get there. I am, however, out.
(P.S. Yes, I’m aware that there is a tension between “Concise” and “Complete”. You seem to think you’re a smart guy. You’ll figure out how that’s a) possible, and b) resolvable. After you get over sulking, I mean.)