“At odds with the unavoidable meta-message” by Ruby

It is a truism known to online moderators[1] that when two commenters are going back and forth in heated exchange, and one lays out rejoinders in paragraph after paragraph of dense text, then two things will have happened:

1. Our careful communicator may or may not have succeeded at conveying well-reasoned insights hitherto unknown by his interlocutor that will change her mind.
2. He will have communicated my hatred for you is at least this long.

In all seriousness, words require effort and effort requires motivation. A lengthy message communicates whatever its contents are, but it inevitably communicates I was invested enough to write all this, typically with a connotation of strong emotion powering the keystrokes. The emotion isn't necessarily hatred. It could be a roiling anger, a neurotic anxiety, or a fervorous infatuation.

My guess is that even if you weren't carrying around an explicit belief in [...]

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
October 10th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AgkuN8wLNevBkHusf/at-odds-with-the-unavoidable-meta-message

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.