Papua New Guinea. There are nearly 850 languages spoken in the country, making it the most linguistically diverse place on earth. … Mountains, jungles and swamps keep villagers isolated, preserving their languages. A rural population helps too: only about 13% of Papuans live in towns. …. Fierce tribal divisions—Papua New Guinea is often shaken by communal violence—also encourages people to be proud of their own languages. The passing of time is another important factor. It takes about a thousand years for a single language to split in two, says William Foley, a linguist. With 40,000 years to evolve, Papuan languages have had plenty of time to change naturally. (
A strong in-group will deploy frank and open speech. This is obvious if we think about how people are more open—not less—in private and with friends and family. Our speech becomes more direct and open.
Irony is a way of hedging meaning, and so it is a way to avoid confrontation—the sort of confrontations that will occur with greater regularity in cosmopolitan societies where disputes could occur if we say what we really mean. It’s also a way to insult people in a deniable form, or in a form that is only understood by an in-group.
About 15 years ago, the Conservatives ran an election campaign with the slogan: “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?”. The slogan was used for a variety of topics, including immigration. This slogan shows how a more cosmopolitan society encourages opaque communication to avoid offence (perhaps even criminal prosecution)—after all, what were the Conservatives “really thinking”? That, due to cosmopolitan sensibilities, had to be ambiguous.
Irony, in this situation, is your friend—it might even keep you out of jail.
Is this where Poe's Law comes from? (It's impossible to write implicit satire on the internet, because no matter how ridiculous or stupid you make yourself sound, there's always someone out there saying the same thing and who means every word.)
I think irony had a lot to do with being able to say what wasn't allowed. When free speech is not allowed, irony became the way to say the unsay able, a version of plausible deniability, and a way to communicate with the like minded, so subversive. Dictators and would be ones would be against irony though may prefer it to outright opposition. If you believe everyone is free to speak their mind, then there is less need for it, yet it can communicate so succinctly the situation and stance on it, it can rise to satire or sarcasm. Should cosmopolitans also adjure all languages other than their own in favor of better communication as well? We may be headed there anyway, but I don't think cosmopolitan means homogenization but diversity even if it costs something.
For sure! I have no disagreement with that statement.
But that is not the scenario I am presenting. I was careful to say a "popular" lecture. Even when speakers go out of their way to avoid technical language and to explain things simply to a lay audience, there will likely be some listeners who just don't follow and others who just wish the guy would speed up.
If physicists go out of their ways to use special technical terms that outsiders don't understand, when they could have just as well used widely familiar terms, that is in fact disrespectful to those outsiders.
Think of a stand-up comedian telling jokes in a comedy club. Suppose he's really good and most people laugh. Laughter is infectious, and those who otherwise wouldn't laugh might. They might then wonder why they were laughing, and might eventually figure it out to the extent that they would be the first ones laughing at the next similar joke. Conditioning or learning? (Or both?) Cosmopolitanism or multiculturalism on the micro scale, in any case.
I just read your ref to slatestarcodex. It's one of his better ones; they're generally tl;dr to me. (See? They exclude me, but I'm not insulted!)
But however that may be, I don't think I'd put irony in the Anti-Inductive category, which seems to imply a succession of novel suggestions that become meaningless cliches and that then get replaced by new novel suggestions (which, in some cases might be very old ones that became cliches and were abandoned, and, having been forgotten, are now getting revived).
I rather think of this, joke by joke, audience by audience, as tempering the wind (i.e., the hot air of the speaker) to the shorn lamb(s) of the listeners. If the audience is diverse, there are going to be some people who don't get it and others to whom it is overly obvious. Neither of these groups will laugh, but hopefully enough will to have made it worthwhile.
I am including irony in the category of "joke", just like, say, a pun.
Where I depart from Robin is where he seems to be saying that if your discourse excludes some, it must therefore be avoided if one deems oneself cosmopolitan. I think that is true when what the insiders are laughing at is insulting to the outsiders (for example, racist jokes).
But I don't view a joke that some will not get as inherently disrespectful to those who don't get it, any more than a popular lecture by a famous physicist is insulting to those in the audience who have no idea what the hell he is talking about.
Less exclusionary irony seems to me possible. There is a middle ground between highly fractured Papua New Guinea, and monolithic in-groups, for example in multi-ethnic federations . Spending time in multilingual, multicultural federations, such as Switzerland or Indonesia, I notice that people there seem used to modulating between ironical tone conversing inside a language group, and a "safer" unironical tone when crossing language groups (at least in face-to-face meetings). In places like my native Australia, it seems we hold a belief that there is a homogeneous dominant culture that we are all agreed upon, and we tend to cut each other less slack in interpretation.It seems that in proactively multicultural places like Indonesia or Switzerland, irony is one of the suite of language features one learns to modulate as part of general cross-cultural communication skills. In other places, like Australia, handling this kind of context is not so valued a skill and it seems less prevalent.
I don't have quantitative evidence of how much these tendencies hold; this is based purely on observations of my peer groups in those countries. But I would argue that cultivating skills in cross-cultural communication is a more attainable goal than getting people to swear off irony, based on my informal observation.
Three Australians walked into a bar... where a friend and I were in Japan. The Australians were IT guys who had just finished a two week stint in Tokyo and one asked my friend and I, who had lived in Japan many years, "Do Japanese understand irony?"
My friend grinned, shook his head and said: "No, they do not."
I countered, "Tomiko does!"
My friend laughed and responded: "Yeah, but you conditioned her!"
Actually, the opposite is true.
A strong in-group will deploy frank and open speech. This is obvious if we think about how people are more open—not less—in private and with friends and family. Our speech becomes more direct and open.
Irony is a way of hedging meaning, and so it is a way to avoid confrontation—the sort of confrontations that will occur with greater regularity in cosmopolitan societies where disputes could occur if we say what we really mean. It’s also a way to insult people in a deniable form, or in a form that is only understood by an in-group.
About 15 years ago, the Conservatives ran an election campaign with the slogan: “Are you thinking what we’re thinking?”. The slogan was used for a variety of topics, including immigration. This slogan shows how a more cosmopolitan society encourages opaque communication to avoid offence (perhaps even criminal prosecution)—after all, what were the Conservatives “really thinking”? That, due to cosmopolitan sensibilities, had to be ambiguous.
Irony, in this situation, is your friend—it might even keep you out of jail.
Is this where Poe's Law comes from? (It's impossible to write implicit satire on the internet, because no matter how ridiculous or stupid you make yourself sound, there's always someone out there saying the same thing and who means every word.)
Yes irony is useful to evade speech bans.
I think irony had a lot to do with being able to say what wasn't allowed. When free speech is not allowed, irony became the way to say the unsay able, a version of plausible deniability, and a way to communicate with the like minded, so subversive. Dictators and would be ones would be against irony though may prefer it to outright opposition. If you believe everyone is free to speak their mind, then there is less need for it, yet it can communicate so succinctly the situation and stance on it, it can rise to satire or sarcasm. Should cosmopolitans also adjure all languages other than their own in favor of better communication as well? We may be headed there anyway, but I don't think cosmopolitan means homogenization but diversity even if it costs something.
so, irony helps speciation?
For sure! I have no disagreement with that statement.
But that is not the scenario I am presenting. I was careful to say a "popular" lecture. Even when speakers go out of their way to avoid technical language and to explain things simply to a lay audience, there will likely be some listeners who just don't follow and others who just wish the guy would speed up.
If physicists go out of their ways to use special technical terms that outsiders don't understand, when they could have just as well used widely familiar terms, that is in fact disrespectful to those outsiders.
Think of a stand-up comedian telling jokes in a comedy club. Suppose he's really good and most people laugh. Laughter is infectious, and those who otherwise wouldn't laugh might. They might then wonder why they were laughing, and might eventually figure it out to the extent that they would be the first ones laughing at the next similar joke. Conditioning or learning? (Or both?) Cosmopolitanism or multiculturalism on the micro scale, in any case.
I just read your ref to slatestarcodex. It's one of his better ones; they're generally tl;dr to me. (See? They exclude me, but I'm not insulted!)
But however that may be, I don't think I'd put irony in the Anti-Inductive category, which seems to imply a succession of novel suggestions that become meaningless cliches and that then get replaced by new novel suggestions (which, in some cases might be very old ones that became cliches and were abandoned, and, having been forgotten, are now getting revived).
I rather think of this, joke by joke, audience by audience, as tempering the wind (i.e., the hot air of the speaker) to the shorn lamb(s) of the listeners. If the audience is diverse, there are going to be some people who don't get it and others to whom it is overly obvious. Neither of these groups will laugh, but hopefully enough will to have made it worthwhile.
I am including irony in the category of "joke", just like, say, a pun.
Where I depart from Robin is where he seems to be saying that if your discourse excludes some, it must therefore be avoided if one deems oneself cosmopolitan. I think that is true when what the insiders are laughing at is insulting to the outsiders (for example, racist jokes).
But I don't view a joke that some will not get as inherently disrespectful to those who don't get it, any more than a popular lecture by a famous physicist is insulting to those in the audience who have no idea what the hell he is talking about.
Less exclusionary irony seems to me possible. There is a middle ground between highly fractured Papua New Guinea, and monolithic in-groups, for example in multi-ethnic federations . Spending time in multilingual, multicultural federations, such as Switzerland or Indonesia, I notice that people there seem used to modulating between ironical tone conversing inside a language group, and a "safer" unironical tone when crossing language groups (at least in face-to-face meetings). In places like my native Australia, it seems we hold a belief that there is a homogeneous dominant culture that we are all agreed upon, and we tend to cut each other less slack in interpretation.It seems that in proactively multicultural places like Indonesia or Switzerland, irony is one of the suite of language features one learns to modulate as part of general cross-cultural communication skills. In other places, like Australia, handling this kind of context is not so valued a skill and it seems less prevalent.
I don't have quantitative evidence of how much these tendencies hold; this is based purely on observations of my peer groups in those countries. But I would argue that cultivating skills in cross-cultural communication is a more attainable goal than getting people to swear off irony, based on my informal observation.
Right - something like an Anti-inductive system.
pre and code tags don't work, apparently. I apologize for the extra noise.
Three Australians walked into a bar... where a friend and I were in Japan. The Australians were IT guys who had just finished a two week stint in Tokyo and one asked my friend and I, who had lived in Japan many years, "Do Japanese understand irony?"
My friend grinned, shook his head and said: "No, they do not."
I countered, "Tomiko does!"
My friend laughed and responded: "Yeah, but you conditioned her!"
FYI, Disqus has a post describing allowable HTML in comments. The character entities I used above are
¡ and
¿
Absolutely :-)
I've checked Wikipedia's list of character entities and both "iexcl" and "iquest" (i for inverted I assume) are available in HTML 3.2.
Character entities ¡ should work ¿ if the system supports them. I'm not sure how flexible your ASCII conventions are.
As I think you've just illustrated, there's a lot to be said for plain ASCII conventions.