If you are like most people, you probably feel angry, frustrated, or disappointed, often. That also has naturally been the case for me, but I was told a trick that made it much easier for me to handle these situations, and it dates back to antiquity.

Stoicism was an ancient Greek school of thought (that still exercises some influence today), which among other teachings, advocated self-control and avoiding making your emotions and irrational desires influence your behaviour for the worst. What they claimed was that painful feelings were not a direct result of an experience that induced pain, but rather the human mind's irrational interpretation of it.

If we move from this theory to its implications, then once something frustrating happens to you, you can say to yourself “I don’t like this. This situation is not ideal. However, feeling angry and resentful will not be beneficial, and so I should just accept this as is, try to reasonably cope with it, and make the best of it. I might even grow to like it.”

My psychotherapist told me that “Things must always go my way.” has been identified as an irrational cognitive belief by many people. (It is mentioned in this page in the Google Books’ hosted book). The solution to this is simply to say to myself that “I cannot always get what I want.” and that “Things might not go exactly like I want them to and that’s OK because I’ll survive.”.

Back to Stoicism, we can draw inspiration from the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius’s quote from his book Meditations:

Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, uncharitable men. All of these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill… I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together…

I am not an authority to speak a lot further about Stoicism, because I’ve only heard about it from hearsay and read the wikipedia entry and some other online sources, but I think we can all become a little, or even a lot happier, by adopting the mindset that the key to peace of mind is accepting sub-optimal situations, instead of insisting that we will always have our way.

Thanks

Thanks to steerpike, mofino and perlmonkey from Freenode for going over early drafts of this essay and providing some comments.

Licence

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (Unported) (CC-by) or at your option any later version. Copyright © 2012, Shlomi Fish. CC-by is a common, permissive, free/libre/open licence for cultural works, which allows for almost unlimited use. See my interpretation and expectations from people who wish to build upon it (which I believe are pretty fair).

Meta

I realise I’ve neglected this blog for a long time, and I’ve been meaning to write and publish this entry for a long time, but didn’t, but I guess “better late than never”, right? Personally, I’ve been mostly fine recently having found a part-time job, which involves a short bus ride to the office in the downtown city, so it’s at a great location for me. I also enjoyed attending the latest Israeli Perl Workshop for 2012 and written a report about it.

In the meanwhile, livejournal.com’s handling of this blog’s DNS domains has deteriorated, and now just redirects it to shlomifish.livejournal.com. This probably made me even less motivated to post on this blog, and my reports about it appears to have been marked as duplicate without a proper resolution, but I'll try to get it handled and fixed. If not, I might have to investigate other hosted blog solutions.

There’s a lot more going on with my life, but I’m not sure how much it will interest other people and how much I should share it, but I’m fine and happy and have plenty of free time for work and leisure and whatever is in between. So good bye until next time.

We are Qs! Q is us! We have formed the Q continuum. And soon everyone will be happy, shining, benevolent, unstoppable, Qs. And the New Age will finally begin, succeeding Modernism and post-Modernism.

So who are Qs? Read my screenplay Star Trek: "We, the Living Dead", to find out. But here's a short summary:

Animals

Animals live their life without choice. They are self-controlling and alive, but have no choice. Humans are not like that. Human are conscious, they are sentient, they have choice.

Mortals

Mortals are everyday humans. They can be very bad or very good or somewhere between that. But they are still mortals and their psyche may die, leaving them as dead human beings. As people with psyche death, they become resentful and less and less capable, and more envious and eventually bad, mystical people, who are parasites and try to suck life out of the living. Sometimes they succeed, but often they don't because mortals and especially vampires (see below) know better.

Vampires

Vampires are mortals who have determined to stay young forever (at least in their heart), to keep a live and healthy psyche and to enjoy life, more and more no matter what happens to them.

Rings

Rings are supreme vampires. Not only are they vampires, but they are very influential and turn all those around them into vampires, and can see through irrationality and illogicality . Even if they are not violent, they cannot lose and cannot be stopped.

There were nine (9) most notable rings in human history:

1. Moses - The Jew
2. Cyrus - The Liberator
3. Aristotle - The Objective
4. Muhammad - The Messenger
5. Saladin - The Just
6. Gutenberg - The Printer
7. Galileo - The Scientist
8. George Washington - The Liberal
9. Ayn Rand - The Objectivist

Ayn Rand's legacy was that many people who have read her words (or better, learned from her deeds) became rings themselves. So there was no use in keeping track of more. But what's missing?

Q - The Invisible

Q is the one ring of the lord of darkness (= the Q continuum). He is “The Invisible”, the most legendary vampire profile of all who was believed that they would never be found signifying the invisible hand that guides history. Even if he's fictional and imaginary, he is alive - he lives in our hearts and minds. Q's legacy was that he jumpstarted what is now one of the universe's most advanced civilisations, while still not being omnipotent (which is a logical and mathematical impossibility), and still starting off as a mortal. What made Q extraordinary, is that he was a ring who expected anyone else to be rings. Not only that, but he expected everyone else to become Qs and thus multiply exponentially.

Q is not someone else. We don't have to go afar to seek the holy grail. Q is us. We are Q. We will ascend from mortals to vampires to rings to Qs. We will be invincible, and no one will be able to stop us.

Who are the Qs of today?

Peter Ustinov (a great ring of the past) once said that “If Botticelli were alive today he'd be working for Vogue”. Back when he said that, Vogue was more subversive and avant-garde and was considered a culture of low taste. Nowadays, Vogue is more established, and many intelligent women and men will boast writing for it in their bio or resume. The same goes for Playboy, BTW.

So if an artist as avantgarde and as controversial as Ayn Rand lived today who will she be? No, she will not be on Flickr, which is great as it is, is not too subversive. She will likely be someone like Christina Grimmie. Ms. Grimmie may only be a vampirella, but if she is determined, she too can become a ring and a Q. And so can you.

What will the Qs be like?

The male and female Qs will be young-at-heart-if-not-in-body. They will be attractive and sexy. They will be very diverse. They will share their knowledge, and give away all their "secrets". They will be admired and lusted. They will be able to have any true parasite (many men, but especially many women) admit this is the case for them by using simple Socratic irony. While not being supermen and superwomen, they will be resourceful and the anti-thesis of needy, and will try to never blame external factors in their own problems.

The enemies of the Qs will be no match for their power, for they possess power far greater than firearms. They will possess the power of The Slayer, Milady de Winter, a formidable vampirella, who was sexy, competent and independent and only portrayed as an non-realistic criminal mastermind, who could "slay" all the truly evil people she encountered ("slay" - not kill). Moreover, they will possess the power of The Dispeller, the fictional Selena Mandrake, an Anglo-American female girl in her senior year in high school today, who was the first one who was able to slay The Slayer, because she did not slay individual people, but actually focused on dispelling their prejudices and superstitions. The Dispeller is one step ahead of The Slayer like The Liberator was one step ahead of The Free, and the Liberal was one step ahead of Liberator. (And who knows what the future will bring.).

Despite being Qs, they will never look down on other vampires or even other mortals, because they know that they don't know, and that dismissing a less experienced, or less talented, person, as someone who cannot teach them anything is something only "fools" do, and an ad-hominem. Some very inexperienced people can beat highly experienced ones at their own game, because that's how nature is.

Finally, the Qs will not aim to be "original", they will aim to be good. They will restore the age-long tradition of fan art (which is prevalent in such ancient books as the Hebrew Bible and the Greek writings), and it will be considered a first-class citizen, in comparison to having 100% original artworks.

The Qs of today will be the winners, and together they will start the New Age, an exciting age where people are sexy, hard-working-and-have-a-lot-of-fun-in-the-process; are masters of their own future and destiny; know that the worst way to waste your time is to never waste it; and that regardless of how complicated and comprehensive your rules are, you must always use logic and reason, that justice is defined as practised by Saladin and Gandhi, not the simplistic "eye for an eye, tooth for the tooth" of the Jewish Torah; and they will never blindly follow orders, because that is what ultimately caused all the great human-made calamities in the past, including World War II.

It will be a great age.

Sincerely yours, -- Shlomi Fish, The Eternal Jew, The Neo-Tech Invisible, and a Q.

George Bernard Shaw said in Man and Superman that:

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

While this quote is somewhat amusing, I'll make the claim here that it is false, and that it should no longer be taken for granted, as a way to undervalue all the great teachers out there (of all kinds).

Paul Graham agrees with me in his essay The Hundred-Year Language:

It's not true that those who can't do, teach (some of the best hackers I know are professors), but it is true that there are a lot of things that those who teach can't do.

(Hackers here means a competent software developer (or any creative individual in general), not necessarily a computer intruder. See what Graham wrote about it further in the word "Hacker".)

However, I found earlier insights to that in the so-called Jewish "Oral Torah", where various Jewish scholars, in many periods, collaborated and ended up saying that "I learned a lot from my teachers, and from my peers more than from my teachers, and from my students the most". (There's an old page about it in Visual Hebrew on the Hertzog College site.) That was during the middle ages, many centuries before Shaw (though it is possible there were older, similar, insights among Greek or Roman philosophers).

I think it means that one learns more by experiencing than by passive learning, and even more than that by teaching. From my experience in working on the "Perl for Perl Newbies" series of tutorials (and further educational material about software-related topics down the road), I can say that I had to structure my thoughts in a logical and deductive way, that my intended audience will be able to understand after reading it in order (or maybe only after skimming parts of it). I'm not sure if I did a very good job, but it still increased my understanding of Perl higher than the many years I've actively written Perl code. A different software trainer I talked with claimed that he invests about 24 hours in preparing the material for every hour of training he is giving. I've also gotten many similar insights from educating people with their Perl problems on various on-line forums.

So, we should realise that those who teach well, can. There are a lot of bad teachers of all sorts out there, but being a good teacher requires that you have a good understanding of the material, be high competent, and also work very hard (which despite popular belief, can still bring a lot of joy and happiness). It's high time we put the "Those who can, do; those who can't teach" prejudice to rest.

(Also see what I've written about the variation "Those who can, do; those who can't, complain.".)

Licence

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (Unported) (CC-by) or at your option any later version. Copyright © 2011, Shlomi Fish. CC-by is a common, permissive, free/libre/open licence for cultural works, which allows for almost unlimited use. See my interpretation and expectations from people who wish to build upon it (which I believe are pretty fair).

Meta

This was a small filler post for this blog ( "Unarmed but still Dangerous" ), as I'm busy working on some other articles and essays, and enhancing some existing essays and stories. I had previously written about it in my essay "Thoughts about the Best Introductory Language", but I think it got lost in confusion, and did not make a large enough impact on the Blogosophere there.

My previous post proved to be very popular after it was Slashdotted successfully, and afterwards featured on some other news sites, blogs, microblogs, and on-line forums (some people told me it became "viral"). So I'm happy with all the attention, and that "Unarmed but still Dangerous", has gotten off on the right foot.

Moreover, my introductory post was covered in Eric Raymond's "Armed and Dangerous" blog (after I refered him to the fact that my blog's name was a parody and tribute to his) and sparked an active discussion there. The blog appears to be down at the moment, but I'll give a link to the discussion once it is up again. Update: Here is the post with the discussion.

You have probably heard various opinions about how to deal with people who write insulting or provocative remarks on various Internet forums (also known as "trolls" or people who "flame"). The most common is "Don't Feed the Trolls", which says that all the people in the forum should avoid responding to the troll. However, as you will see below, "Don't feed the trolls" is also a wrong and ineffective approach for dealing with trolls.

Luckily, I discovered a much better way to handle criticism in the book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, which is an internationally best-selling self-help book by Dr. David D. Burns for learning how to deal with periods of clinical depression. The book teaches cognitive therapy, which was proven to be effective in dealing with a variety of mood disorders. The book has helped me a lot both in learning the cause of my psychological conditions, and in giving me tools to overcome them.

This post will focus on a certain chapter in the book called "Verbal Judo: learn to talk back when you're under the fire of criticism", as adapted by me to the world of online, Internet-based, communication. What this chapter does is instruct depressive people (and other people in general) how to properly handle criticisms from their peers. The super-executive summary for this post is: "On the Internet, don't be right - be smart."

One final note: I am not a mental health professional and this is not professional psychological advice. I believe anyone is allowed to give such insights from their knowledge and experience, just like everyone is allowed to give their opinion on computing or on legal matters, while stating the usual disclaimer. So don't blame me if this thing back-fires, and use your reason and judgement with what I'm saying here.

Case Study

Someone joins a Python IRC channel and says "Perl rocks my socks and Python sucks balls, LOL. Python programmers are incompetent imbecile losers, ROTFL…"

(I'm giving it about Python to avoid Perl-elitism on my part. I'm also using "him", "he" consistently, though the troll might be female. )

What not to do?

1. Criticise his judgement:

   • "Python does not suck, and you are being rude."
   • "WTF are you saying? Everybody knows that Perl sucks."

   Saying sentences like that will likely irritate the troll further, will likely yield an even more aggressive response from the troll, and will only escalate the heat in the conversation.

2. Don't feed the troll" - i.e: ignore him. Someone will "feed" him eventually and the troll may continue trolling and feeling he's right and superior, or alternatively that the Python people on the channel are being "jerks" for not responding.

3. Ban him / call for banning him - a great way to create another enemy, and can also possibly start some "was it right to ban him" converations. Will also negatively contribute to the channel's atomsphere among the channel members.

   The troll may also prove to be a useful resource in the future, or can be taught to love Python eventually.

4. Tell him not to troll. - you're labelling him, insulting him and making him feel like he's alienated. Some people may still respond harshly.

5. Cancel the project, or close the channel - may seem very far-fetched but in a project I was involved in and made some suggestions which were perceived as annoying, I was told that they actually considered cancelling the project. Naturally, this is throwing the baby along with the bathwater, so you certainly must not do that.

What to do instead

So what should we do instead. It's very simple:

1. Ask him what he means. ; interrogate him:

   • "Why do you feel that Python is so bad? What do you find wrong with it?"

2. Agree with him (but use a softer language):

   • "Yes, Perl is a nice language, and I agree that Python has its downsides and/or trade-offs in comparison to Perl."
   • "It's OK to prefer Perl, we'll still accept you here."

   This will make the troll lose steam and help you find a common ground.

3. And eventually negotiate a common ground: "Would you agree that some people like Perl better and some like Python better? (And some may like both equally.). Maybe you can still write Python code and be productive in it while still not in love with it. Who knows, maybe you'll even grow to like it. Feel free to stick around and ask questions."

(After I originally read that in Feeling Good, I immediately thought that it made immediate sense, and that it will likely work in most cases. However, later I thought that I probably would not have thought about it myself.)

Repeat that a few times and the troll will eventually calm down and will become more friendly and hospitable. Some people who've read a draft of this article claimed that such a person will probably troll further in the future, and so one should get rid of him as quickly as possible. While this may often be the case, one should understand that it is not always the case for all trolls. Moreover, you should learn to tolerate people that have some bad personality traits which you don't like, instead of deciding right away that you hate them and don't want to have anything to do with them. I have decided to do that, and often found these Internet people to be of some value, whether in entertainment, knowledge or technical help.

On the other hand, if you dismiss every one as a "troll" for any small problem, your community will not grow a lot and you'll leave people with a lot of bad taste in the mouth.

Practising

The rest of this post gives more useful advice for communicating with people who are making provocative statements, and can be read at your own leisure. After you've read that, you may wish to practice what was said here using role-playing, by one of the following scenarios:

• Someone comes on a FreeBSD channel, and claims that Linux and the GPL have "won" and that the BSD licence and the BSD clones have no future.
• Someone joins a channel of the GNU project and claims that the GPL licence is an "evil", anti-capitalistic and anti-commercial licence, that does a lot of harm to the open source world.
• You are talking on a Perl channel, when someone joins and says that "Perl is dead".
• You are chatting on a mailing list or chatroom dedicated to development of open-source software when someone says "Why are you people spending so much time making sure your programs run on Windows? One should prohibit running FOSS on Windows! Everyone should avoid porting their software to Windows? By providing Windows users with great FOSS software, you make sure Windows remains popular and are working against the cause."
• You are discussing Emacs when someone joins and say "Emacs is a bloated operating system that lacks a good text editor. Only losers use it. vi FTW!".
• You are on a Vim channel, when someone say "Everybody knows that vi sucks! Emacs is the only one true editor. Vi users are lamers.".

You can probably think of others.

Some Advice for Communicating with Trolls Properly

1. Relax: don't worry if you don't get everything exactly right.

2. Communicate clearly: write in the best spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalisation, idiomatic speech, etc. that you can, no matter how bad the troll's messages were in this respect.

   It may be a good idea to avoid too high or complicated words, because many foreign speakers of English often have poor English vocabulary.

3. Don't criticise what he says directly or the way he says it (Style over substance etc.)

4. Avoid logical fallacies: see the Nizkor project about them and the List of fallacies on the English wikipedia.

   Especially avoid ad hominem: "You're under age and much younger than me and not a lawyer, so you're not qualified to give your opinion about open-source licences."

5. Be polite and friendly.

6. Don't be too terse. Write coherently, and explain what you want.

   Proper human communication has a lot of redundancy, but people prefer it this way. Even in Information Theory, you cannot compress an arbitrary amount of data to a message which is too short.

   

7. On the other hand, don't be too verbose, as people won't bother reading you. It may be better to put a claim and reiterate.

8. If using E-mail, always do bottom-inline post and never top-post (unless you know better than that, which you probably don't). When top-posting, the one who responds can often reply not to the point or miss many important posts:

   1. Quote a selected message
   2. Disarm the troll using the methods above.
   3. Repeat.

   See the English Wikipedia article about posting style for more information.

9. Don't selectively trim the message without leaving enough context.

10. Don't mis-interpret or jump to conclusions - ask the troll what he means if you don't know.

11. Try to avoid using aphorisms, proverbs, "famous" quotes, rhymes or verse etc. Instead use free-form, coherent speech and say what you want in your own words.

    The problem with aphorisms, and their ilk are that they tend to project authority, and usually backfire because a person intuitively knows that.

    Sometimes they may lead to an aphorism war or for "correcting" the aphorism or discussing its larger context and origins.

    All of these can sometimes spice up a friendly conversation and add humour to it, though, but your kilomterage may vary.

12. Don't make fun of the troll. Respect him and try to avoid unnecessary humour. Be pleasant - not funny.

13. Don't be rude; use soft words such as "I think", "I believe", "In my opinion", "I find that", etc.

14. Don't label: "open-source and Creative Commons are Socialism" (So what if they are? They are still beneficial.)

15. Always start the conversation with a "Hi [name-or-nick]," and possibly thank him for what he says or otherwise start with a compliment. This will better allow disarming him.

Further Reading

1. "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Revised and Updated" by David D. Burns.
2. "How to Protect Your Open Source Project From Poisonous People" - by Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick of Subversion fame. A Google Tech Talk - not sure if there are subtitles or a transcript.
3. The Book "Producing Open Source Software" - by Karl Fogel (of CVS/Subversion fame).

Licence

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (Unported) (CC-by) or at your option any later version. Copyright © 2011, Shlomi Fish. CC-by is a common, permissive, free/libre/open licence for cultural works, which allows for almost unlimited use. See my interpretation and expectations from people who wish to build upon it (which I believe are pretty fair).

About the Author

Shlomi Fish is an Israeli software developer, essayist and humorist, who is passionate about open source, open content, and freedom and openness in general. He's been either trolling various online forums, or alternatively dealing with people who troll them, since he's been seriously involved in the Israeli and international open-source world.

Among his many sins, he can list writing many "farfetched" and avantgarde stories and screenplays, releasing a lot of open-source programs that he's not sure anyone besides him uses, adopting some programs and CPAN modules by other people that seem to be more popular, contributing to projects with many contributors (often not regularly), being called "passive-aggressive" and understanding that he is often over-domineering, regularly getting into undesirable psychomedical periods of being "hyper", (while lately deciding to openly admit it.), and writing many opinionated articles, essays and blog posts about various topics. He prides himself in being a geek, who is a person who is inclined in one or more creative or research endeavour, but does not have prejudice for or against either geek culture, popular culture or popular geek pseudo-culture. He chooses what he finds good and happens to like, not what other people consider as hip or trendy or passé. As such, he belongs to the empty set of people who like both Pink Floyd, as well as Shania Twain and Atomic Kitten (meow!).

Shlomi is interested in any contracts or commissions involving writing essays, blog posts or articles, or in publishing polished versions of his fictional stories or essays, or collections thereof, in print or E-book form. He can be contacted by various means, but please don't ask him to fix your computer or other personal help where an online forum will better do.

Coverage

• On Slashdot.org
• On the Life Hacker blog (took me a lot of time to find a non-AJAX URL, because I resent AJAX URLs)

Update 1

I may have misunderstood the word "troll" to be anyone who is provocative, including by intending well (see the comments), although saying that a person is "trolling" or even "spamming" in this case may be commonplace now. I still think that even if it's a consciously malevolent troll, he can eventually lose steam and lose all the fun they wanted to have by using the techniques above. But this is just a hypothesis. See an insightful comment about that.

Update 2

A few people said that I shouldn't have given this advice because I too have made provocative statements (what was nicknamed "trolled") in several online forums in the past (while usually having good intentions). I admit this is the case, because I'm an opinionated man, who tends to want to fix "inefficiencies", and expresses his opinion a lot. However, that does not invalidate the fact that my advice may still be sound, and that you can also safely apply it to disarm me, when I'm being provocative. Or to sum up, often the "Pot calling the kettle black" accusation is a variation of the "Ad hominem to quoque" fallacy.

Update 3

IDEA.org has written a great follow-up post to this post and other posts by other people about how to deal with malevolent comments of various types, and also attempting to fully classify them.

Hi, everyone! "Unarmed but still dangerous" (subtitled "Changing the world one post at a time") aims at providing insights about applied philosophy that one may even find useful at times, from the perspective of computer software and media enthusiasts, who enjoy writing software applications, articles, essays, works of fiction, images, pictures and photos, music and sounds, videos, games, and/or works of science or technology. In short: "hackers" (not necessarily computer intruders, though the more honest, "white-hat" ones are also encouraged to read this blog), be it of software, or of anything from cooking up to rocket science. What you will find here is an attempt to expand the intelligence, wisdom, and insights gathered from hacking on stuff to other fields, including software, of human-to-human or human-to-machine interactions.

The name "Unarmed but still Dangerous" is as a homage and parody on Eric S. Raymond's blog "Armed and Dangerous", which I neither follow nor read regularly, but which does provide some insights at times (or leads one to better insights). I should note that I am very fond of a lot of the stuff on Raymond's old homepage, especially his "How to Become a Hacker" document, and his "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" series.

My name is Shlomi Fish, I'm an Israeli open source and open content enthusiast. I have kept several blogs on various topics, both technical and philosophical/personal, and an actively updated and enhanced personal web-site, which contains many original online resources, including fiction, presentation material, mathematics, essays and software resources.

One myth that I'd like to help dispel in this blog is that philosophy is not practical. The first fact to note is that the ancient Greek called all scholars "philosophers", and that they often dealt in many fields of scholarship that we now consider more sciency. This is still preserved in the expansion of a Ph.D. - "Doctor of Philosophy". Often philosophy and philosophy as applied to different fields can lead one to detect common errors as they are done, avoid bad situations, and win arguments. I am philosophising now and you philosophise all the time.

The main audience of this blog are what Ben Collins-Sussman (of Subversion fame) calls the "20% of programmers" - the alpha programmers, those who love programming, are constantly expanding their horizons, spend a lot of time hanging on various online and offline forums for geeks (including mailing lists, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), Slashdot, Reddit/Digg, various blogs, various open-source clubs), often have their own blog, and who are otherwise brighter and more intelligent (not necessarily in the IQ sense, which does not say a lot of one's mental potential for growth and success). Hopefully, it may also be of interest to geeks of other fields of endeavours who are still computer savvy enough to read and follow a blog.

Hope you enjoy it here and happy hacking!

Update 1: This blog and entry, and this blog in general, had been referenced in Eric S. Raymond’s Armed and Dangerous blog, which like I said inspired the title of Unarmed but Still Dangerous, and had sparked a discussion there. Sorry for not putting it here earlier, but Raymond’s blog had been offline for a while .