Would like a word for

[jack]

Would like a word for:

"I don't agree with the apparent thrust of your rant/argument/essay/opinion but I think a bit three quarters of the way through is new to me and relevant/insightnful/new"

Sometimes it's just, "I don't know if I'll ever agree, but I want to understand what you're saying", but sometimes it's, "I don't agree with this, but I feel like I'm learning something, I don't want to stop bashing it back and forth"

Would like a word for

"The stated aims of an ideal/community" vs "the typical representatives thereof"

It's not always obvious what the ideals/stated aims are, nor who constitutes the community for ideas without a formal membership procedure, but there's also a recurring pattern, where someone says "X-ist", and then someone says, "actually I prefer XX-ist, since X-ist tends to mean someone who believes Y", and then there's a euphemism type treadmill, where it's not clear what people are actually referring to when they say X-ist.

And it's not possible to fix in general, but it occurs to me, a common example is the difference between "I agree with the stated aims, but the community might be more build around horrible non-articulated ideas" and "I don't agree with the stated aims at all".

Comments

[ptc24]

The second one - very much needed. This seems to be turning into a bit of a brainstorm so here goes. Various quibbles:

"typical" - possibly there are several different things lurking here. If you've got a silent majority/loud minority situation, often people will want to treat the loud minority as typical, as the typical encounter with an Xist might well be an encounter with a loud minority member. Or more focussed still - the typical consequential[1] encounter. Of course, if you allow this, then what counts as a typical encounter is likely to vary considerably between insiders and outsiders.

There's also the issue of "hats" - what Xists typically do with their Xist hat on may differ from what they do without their hat on. Someone once said, "if you ask people to name a famous atheist, they usually name someone like Richard Dawkins, rather than someone like Lance Armstrong." I might have chosen a more positive example for the latter, but it makes the point quite well.

There's one interesting case: "movement atheist". I don't identify as one; possibly some of the rifts within the movement are so deep it doesn't make sense to talk of a single movement anymore.

To a certain extent a community/movement is built around people, rather than ideas; or at least large amorphous blobs of partly-shared ideas that resist concise summarization. Political parties I think are a key example of this; the part name might articlulate an ideal, there might be some founding documents, but really, people join parties (and remain in them, and are active in them) when they find the members say similar things to what they think, and bring some of their own thinking with them, which in turn informs the membership decisions of others in the future.

Like how with a crystal, the structure of the eventual crystal doesn't have to be the same as what nucleates the crystal. Except more complicated than that because people.

[1] As in, non-inconsequential

[sunflowerinrain]

Let us all know if you find (or invent) them, eh?