the effect is that they, and hopefully their friends and family who come to them for advice, don't buy lenovo's products. that's independent of what else they happen to be boycotting.
Do you think there’s no value in a positive action unless the person doing it also did some other, unrelated positive action? Why? I think you’re just playing gotcha.
I think if Lenovo's CEO can tell the board "look, we can see x% of customers are anti-rootkitting and avoid companies that use rootkits, therefore we want to switch away from rootkits" that's going to be a lot more effective than "some guys are boycotting us; they say it's about the rootkits but really who knows".
You think that a Lenovo CEO will be completely unconcerned with a boycott of Lenovo products… because their competitors aren’t also being boycotted? Or just less concerned?
If you mean just “less concerned”, then even then, that means the boycott still has some value, right? So what is wrong with someone just boycotting one of two “bad” companies?
Just to transpose the logic to a different situation: say if someone gives $10 to a charity fundraiser, but they actually had $20 in their wallet, does that make their $10 donation less valuable? If this is not a fair comparison, please help me understand exactly what the relevant difference is.
> You think that a Lenovo CEO will be completely unconcerned with a boycott of Lenovo products… because their competitors aren’t also being boycotted? Or just less concerned?
I mean unlikely to take the actions you're trying to push for. If you're not consistent about when to boycott a company, how can they trust you to be consistent about when to stop boycotting a company?
> ...the difference between say 0.1% as likely and not at all likely.
Heh, to think that this sub-thread began with someone (you? Can't recall) complaining about "arbitrary" boycotting... That's a mighty arbitrary number you've got there. What's to say the difference isn't actually between 80% and 99%?
I'm definitely claiming an arbitrary boycott is less than 20% as effective as a clearly principled one. I'm agnostic about whether an arbitrary boycott is completely 100% ineffective or a teeny tiny smidgen effective and I don't think that's a meaningful distinction to draw.
How would most sellers even know whether people are boycotting them "arbitrarily" or not?!?
1) A boycott is a boycott; they only notice that people are boycotting them.
2) ALL boycotts are "arbitrary" in the sense that [almost no | few | some | many | most | almost all] people participate in them, for reasons of their own.
3) ALL boycotts are "clearly principled" in the sense that the people participating in them are doing it because of some principle that's important to them.
4) Seller A can't know -- and probably doesn't give a shit about -- whether each of the participants in the boycott is also boycotting sellers B, C, D, E, F, etc, which perhaps they ought to also boycott on the same grounds they're boycotting seller A.
5) As I already mentioned, some of the people boycotting seller A are probably also boycotting sellers B and C even though they can't be bothered to boycott D, E and F; some others boycott A, D and E although not B, C and F; some A, C, and F; etc etc. For every boycott, you'll find people who also for the same principled reasons boycott other sellers. Lots of arbitrary decisions make a random distribution; it all evens out.
And the numbers (or number-adjacent adjectives) you keep throwing around, apparently in an effort to lend your totally subjective opinion some air of scientific legitimacy, are still totally arbitrary, or to call them what they are: pulled straight out of your nether orifice. How do you KNOW that "an arbitrary boycott is less than 20% as effective as a clearly principled one"??? What data do you have to claim the question is "whether an arbitrary boycott is completely 100% ineffective or a teeny tiny smidgen effective", when it could just as well be whether it is -- to pull equally random numbers out of my own arse -- 90% effective or only 60%? Sure, that might not be "a meaningful distinction to draw", either: Both are pretty fucking bad for the seller.
So... Sorry, but to me your whole screed still feels just as arbitrary and unreasoned as you accuse those partial boycotters of being.
> 1) A boycott is a boycott; they only notice that people are boycotting them.
Well if that's all they can find out then the boycott is pointless. If a boycott is meant to change the company's behaviour then there has to be a way for them to find out what the boycott is about.
> 5) As I already mentioned, some of the people boycotting seller A are probably also boycotting sellers B and C even though they can't be bothered to boycott D, E and F; some others boycott A, D and E although not B, C and F; some A, C, and F; etc etc. For every boycott, you'll find people who also for the same principled reasons boycott other sellers. Lots of arbitrary decisions make a random distribution; it all evens out.
That's only true if everyone is making their decisions randomly though. It doesn't hold if there's a correlation in which companies people do and don't boycott, e.g. people think they're arbitrary boycotting some but not all of the companies that do X, but unconsciously they're boycotting Chinese companies but not American companies.
> And the numbers (or number-adjacent adjectives) you keep throwing around, apparently in an effort to lend your totally subjective opinion some air of scientific legitimacy, are still totally arbitrary, or to call them what they are: pulled straight out of your nether orifice. How do you KNOW that "an arbitrary boycott is less than 20% as effective as a clearly principled one"??? What data do you have to claim the question is "whether an arbitrary boycott is completely 100% ineffective or a teeny tiny smidgen effective", when it could just as well be whether it is -- to pull equally random numbers out of my own arse -- 90% effective or only 60%?
All I've been doing is clarifying what I'm saying. I'm putting numbers on it because you asked! First playpause had some strange fixation on whether I was claiming arbitrary boycotts were completely ineffective or only mostly ineffective, and then you jumped in with some strange fixation on the numbers I used to illustrate what I was saying. It's a bit much to ask for intense precision and then complain when I try to be precise.
> > 1) A boycott is a boycott; they only notice that people are boycotting them.
> Well if that's all they can find out then the boycott is pointless. If a boycott is meant to change the company's behaviour then there has to be a way for them to find out what the boycott is about.
Sigh... Yes, if some people "arbitrarily" choose to boycott company A for some reason that you think is somehow "invalid" if they don't also boycott companies B, C, and D that you think it should also apply to, they will of course let the company know that "We're boycotting you because of this principled reason!" What we were discussing was (your silly hangup on) their "arbitrariness" in not also boycotting other companies, and that company A neither knows or gives a shit about.
Are you genuinely this obtuse, or just pretending because you think you'll "win" a discussion with intentional "misunderstandings"?
> > Lots of arbitrary decisions make a random distribution; it all evens out.
> That's only true if everyone is making their decisions randomly though.
No, read it again: Arbitrarily. That's enough. Because everyone's "arbitrary" is different, the sum of them all will be indistinguishable from random. (In fact, there is an old adage that if you could measure all preconditions exactly, there is no such thing as "random". Even the movements of all the molecules in a gas wouldn't be "random" if you could know the initial position and velocity of each of them exactly... But you can't; that is, in a way, what "random" is.)
> I'm putting numbers on it because you asked! First playpause had some strange fixation on whether I was claiming arbitrary boycotts were completely ineffective or only mostly ineffective, and then you jumped in with some strange fixation on the numbers I used to illustrate what I was saying. It's a bit much to ask for intense precision and then complain when I try to be precise.
No. Either you're very bad at understanding what is being asked of you, or you are just plain lying when making this quoted claim. Absolutely nobody has been asking you for "intense precision" in numerical terms. We're asking for a qualitative motivation for the particular numbers you're making up: WHY should the effectiveness of "arbitrary" boycotts be as minuscule as you claim, and not on the hugely different scale I just as arbitrarily made up?
Please stop deflecting; either provide some sensible replies or just admit that you've been bullshitting without the least speck of support from the very beginning.
> Yes, if some people "arbitrarily" choose to boycott company A for some reason that you think is somehow "invalid" if they don't also boycott companies B, C, and D that you think it should also apply to, they will of course let the company know that "We're boycotting you because of this principled reason!"
But this claim will clearly be false, and so they will not be credible.
> No, read it again: Arbitrarily. That's enough. Because everyone's "arbitrary" is different, the sum of them all will be indistinguishable from random.
Call it capricious rather than arbitrary if you think that's important; the point is that people's decision to boycott company A and not company B might be not based on the issue that they claim the boycott is about, but also not random.
> Absolutely nobody has been asking you for "intense precision" in numerical terms. We're asking for a qualitative motivation for the particular numbers you're making up
The post that started this whole chain was, in full: "So, completely unconcerned, or just less concerned? Which?". That's not a request to explain my motivation, it is a request to give (IMO intense) precision.
>> they will of course let the company know that "We're boycotting you because of this principled reason!"
> But this claim will clearly be false, and so they will not be credible.
This is where you're wronger than a $3,50 bill, so glaringly not-even-wrong that it baffles the mind that you can't see it yourself.
To begin with the lesser reason: "clearly". Clear how, why, and to whom? For the umpteenth time: How would the boycottee know anything about this? Maybe you have participated in more boycotts than I (not a very high bar to cross), so please tell me: Is one usually required, before being allowed to tell Nike "I'm not buying any more of your shoes as long as you keep using third-world child labour!", to declare which other companies one is boycotting and on which grounds -- and above all, which ones one isn't boycotting? How does it work, in practice; is there a form to fill out? Does each company that gets boycotted make up their own form, or is there some central registry? Or is it just hired goons that nab any picketers outside the headquarters and give them the third degree? This is anything but "clearly" false.
Mainly, of course, because it isn't fucking "false" at all. Oh sure, when I was a kid I was also very "principled". But then I grew out of my teens -- or into them? -- and realised that that isn't how the world works. I'm sorry if this comes as news to you, but there is such a thing as differences of degree, and they matter. As somebody[1] is supposed to have said: "Quantity has a quality all of its own."
That is, things can be more bad or less bad, and since nobody has the time or energy to care -- or at least, to do something about -- all of them, people pick and choose which ones they care the most about, and do something only about those. This is perfectly normal, valid, logical and correct. Everyone does it: You too. Say you don't, and we'll know you're lying.
Kids, and perhaps people on the infamous "spectrum", can't distinguish between what's important and what's much less so. This leads to the fallacy of "If you don't do something about everything, you're not allowed to be against anything!" If you're a fully-functioning adult seeing it spelled out this starkly you'll realise how fucking wrong it is. If you're very young, you will when you grow up. If you tend towards autism, this was your lesson for this week on how we neurotypicals see the world[2].
I mean, we're all against Bad Things, right? We think people who do what's obviously wrong should be punished, or at least severely reprimanded. Have you ever uttered your displeasure with some, say, rapist, drunken hit-and-run driver, drug dealer, or genocidal war criminal? Even if you didn't even write a letter to your political representative; just being one more voice contributing to the general opinion in the break room at work, you might have put the last grain on the scale that made someone else write in, right?
But that's about Really Bad People. When did you last go out waving placards -- or even just go on a bit of a tirade over a cup of coffee -- about the evils of, say, occasional littering, jaywalking, or riding a bike without a helmet?
Naah, didn't think so.
Q. E. fucking D.
> Call it capricious rather than arbitrary if you think that's important;
The only one who does seems to be you.
> That's not a request to explain my motivation, it is a request to give (IMO intense) precision.
On the contrary, it is clearly (Hah!) a request to answer a binary, black-or-white, yes-or-no question: Do boycotts, irrespective of your imputed "arbitrariness" of their motivation, still concern the boycottee? The commenter was probably going to continue in the vein of "Even if it is a bit less, who gives a shit? They're still concerned, so they'll have to do something about it." But hey, congratulations, your Sheldonning seems to successfully have deflected that. Are you satisfied with this? Even proud, perhaps?
Don't be.
___
[1]: Often attributed to Stalin, IIRC.
[2]: I gather a rather typical strategy in order to "fit in" is to learn to either understand the reasoning or, if one simply can't, to just bloody fake it. Free tip, worth every penny you're paying for it.
> That is, things can be more bad or less bad, and since nobody has the time or energy to care -- or at least, to do something about -- all of them, people pick and choose which ones they care the most about, and do something only about those. This is perfectly normal, valid, logical and correct.
Sure. Boycotting company A because it does more or worse bad things than company B is perfectly reasonable and principled. But no-one's claimed that's what they were doing in this case.
> The only one who does seems to be you.
Then why are you still here, nitpicking a thread from over a week ago that didn't even involve you?
> On the contrary, it is clearly (Hah!) a request to answer a binary, black-or-white, yes-or-no question: Do boycotts, irrespective of your imputed "arbitrariness" of their motivation, still concern the boycottee?
The difference between 0% and 0.1% is exactly that kind of "binary, black-or-white, yes-or-no question", and I replied accordingly. How exactly does this support what you said a couple of posts back: "Absolutely nobody has been asking you for "intense precision" in numerical terms. We're asking for a qualitative motivation for the particular numbers you're making up"?
> The difference between 0% and 0.1% is exactly that kind of "binary, black-or-white, yes-or-no question", and I replied accordingly. How exactly does this support what you said a couple of posts back: "Absolutely nobody has been asking you for "intense precision" in numerical terms. We're asking for a qualitative motivation for the particular numbers you're making up"?
It's as simple as that, yes: What makes you think the difference is between 0 and 0.1 -- HOW do you know it's not a matter of 99.9 vs 88.8?
And why are you so stubbornly refusing to answer that point?
I think I know: Because you don't. You just made them up. Right?
Because numbers like "0.1% vs 0.0%" illustrate something qualitatively vastly different from "97% vs 78%". The former says "totally or almost totally irrelevant, who cares, it's still irrelevant", whereas the latter says "a bit less effective, who cares, it's still effective". By arbitrarily (Hah!) choosing one set of numbers in stead of the other you're not "just illustrating" something; you're saying the exact opposite of what the other set of numbers would say.
And this claim of yours is utterly unproven, since the numbers were totally pulled out of your arse. All I've been asking for is for you to give some sensible reason for why the numbers should be your ridiculously low ones and not some much higher ones that would imply the exact opposite of your original claim. If you have no support for your numbers being so low, you have no support for your claim; if you admit that the numbers could be the much higher ones, the claim they "just illustrate" is the opposite of yours. And since you have no support for your made-up low numbers, you logically have to admit they could be much higher.
i.e, it's not just a matter of "just illustrating", it's a matter of you admitting that you have absolutely no logical support for your original claim and that for all you know the exact opposite could just as well be the case. "Just illustrate", my ass!
Frankly, this all feels so utterly bleeding obvious that it's very hard to believe that you've been arguing in good faith here. IOW: The "gotcha" is that you once again showed that you've been prevaricating, dancing around, stubbornly arguing by repeated assertion, in effect just plain (pardon my French) lying this whole time. There, "gotcha" enough for you?
The numbers have always been an irrelevant side issue. If you want to disagree with me saying that a boycott that seems arbitrary will be overwhelmingly less effective than one that seems principled, then by all means disagree with that. But don't hammer me with these demands for crazy precision and then accuse me of all this crap because I clarified what I was saying like I was asked to. And now you say I'm lying about what I was saying? WTF?
1) Sorry to be ragging on you personally so hard about this. It's frustration out of disappointment: Many other comments by you in other threads[1] have said so much better things about your intelligence and reading comprehension that this apparent blind spot of yours, not being able to see that the numbers you brought are not some "irrelevant side issue" but actually are (just another way of putting) your whole claim, feels like more of a mountain than a mole hill.
[1]: For instance, there were a few on testing and deployment in the https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29188863 thread that I was going to upvote. Hm, maybe I didn't; gotta go check.
> The numbers have always been an irrelevant side issue.
Bullshit. Saying "the difference between 0% and 0.1% is immaterial" says something _fundamentally different_ than "the difference between 82% and 96.5% is immaterial", so which set of numbers you chose was what you were saying.
> accuse me of all this crap because I clarified what I was saying like I was asked to.
No, you have clarified nothing. You've been harping on about the evil of numbers -- which takes quite some gall, given that you were the one who introduced them in the first place -- and said nothing about why your thesis should be true. (i.e. why the numbers should be so low; it's the same thing.)
> And now you say I'm lying about what I was saying?
Not necessarily: Either lying, or just not understanding what you actually said. Because you've been pretending -- or genuinely thinking; I don't know which is worse -- this whole time that what you originally said, and are still saying here:
> a boycott that seems arbitrary will be overwhelmingly less effective than one that seems principled
...is obvious and correct and unquestionable. Which it isn't; at least you certainly haven't shown it to be true. Sure, it's true if the difference between their effectiveness is that between 0% and 0.1% -- but those numbers are just made up from nothing out of nowhere. Plug in 90% and 99% in stead, and what you're saying is that both are effective, not ineffective.
So, your original claim that a boycott that seems arbitrary will be overwhelmingly less effective than one that seems principled -- got anything to support that? What? You've had two weeks, and brought nothing but screeching protest at having your made-up illustrative numbers questioned. I'm saying it's BS; a boycott is a boycott and just as effective regardless of how "principled" people's motivations for participating in it are.
My counterclaim: It doesn't matter if people participate in the boycott even though they then "ought to" participate in other boycotts too in order to be "principled". Or, to put it in the terms you originally did, so what if an "unprincipled" boycott is only 79,9% effective vs 92.3% for a "principled" one? And now please DON'T try to keep gibbering about those numbers per se -- they're only interesting insofar as they are the actual claim. If you're still seeing them as a separate issue -- an existing "issue" at all, actually -- you're still confused. And it's getting harder and harder to believe that such monumental confusion can be genuine.
> then by all means disagree with that.
I'm still baffled at you not getting that that is exactly what I have been doing all this time.
And you have brought absolutely zero actual arguments for your original thesis. Again: WHY should the effectiveness of a boycott be dependent on your reasoning about its "level of principledness"? (Or, to put the exact same question in your own numerical terms: WHY should the effectiveness of a boycott be only 0.32% if it's "unprincipled", and not, say, 87.8%?)
ISTR bringing some arguments against it, but it's been weeks, so I'm not sure I can remember them. AFAICR, they went something like this (apologies if I'm making up new ones; though I suspect that's more than compensated by forgetting others):
1) A boycott is a boycott; sellers suffer when people refuse to buy their stuff. It doesn't matter to the seller if those same people then also "ought to" boycott other sellers, perhaps in wildly differing industries -- that doesn't affect their bottom line.
2) The seller has no way of knowing[1] whether any one person boycotting them is also boycotting the "correct" other sellers they "ought to" boycott in order to be "principled".
3) In fact, come to think of it (this may be new, or at least expanded from earlier hints), the less "principled" any single boycotter is, the more "principled" they may look to the seller: Som "ultra-principled" boycotter -- you? :-) -- might write them a personal letter, outlining their reasons and motivations, perhaps even explicitly mentioning (or at least giving clues to) what other causes they do or don't support. Or, you know, chat with staff going in and out of the corporate HQ they're picketing. Whereas the "just jumping on the bandwagon" types (whose "unprincipled" opinions you seem to think shouldn't count) just CL1XXOR H3R3 TO 5UPP0RT!!! on some campaign page, giving no clue as to the "level of principledness" that made them do so. But: So will a bunch of the "ultra-principled" ones, because they're just not the letter-writing type, or live on the other side of the continent from corporate HQ, or whatevs. Not knowing which is which, and giving the bandwagoneers the benefit of the doubt that after CL1XXORing that page they will at least be principled enough to actually abstain from buying their stuff (even though they're not boycotting all other "equally-evil" sellers too), what can the seller do but assume the worst -- that they're all pretty much genuine?
Refute any or all of those and you're actually discussing. So far you haven't been. (Or, sorry, if you have I must have missed it.)
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[1]: Short of hiring a poll firm to deep-interview a significant sample of boycotters about their ethical views and wider boycotting habits, I guess. Or cross-referencing all the "Likes" on the "Boycott Evil Corp X!" Facebook page with the Upvotes on the Disqus comments on the "Boycott Evil Corp Y!" Web page... Can't do that by user ID only; and a lot of them won't have the same profile pic either. Bit of a job in both cases; my guess would be pretty much nobody does either.
