Rugby union isn’t particularly random. Indeed, it’s one of the most technical sports in the world in terms of requiring things to be done within tightly-defined parameters, in a sort of choreographed way. Avoiding infractions is a big part of the game: there’s a pretty narrow channel of legal next steps that the…

There are some occasions where I’m coding late at night and I’m on such a roll that it does make sense to sacrifice tomorrow as an effective working day (or an enjoyable leisure day) just for an extra two hours. Software engineering is one of those 80-20 activities, and if you’re in the 20% zone, it normally pays to…

This is an acceptable claim without further data:
“I felt like this guy was harassing me on Twitter because I was a woman!”

I agree with that as a general principle. However, it is not relevant to this conversation thread.

Yes, comments sections often contain comments on a post or article. It’s astonishing, isn’t it? And that’s really my point; how are you intending to demarcate this special brand of gendered harassment and/or reflexive chuntering when the medium is designed for instant commenting and replies? You need a better…

But you do need data to determine whether or not people who feel compelled to reply to everything are doing so disproportionately to women. Proper enquiry uses data, not anecdotes and feelings.

The subway car thing is a non sequitur. 

Do bars and restaurants typically have rules and procedures in place to deal with this sort of thing? Maybe assigning senior staff to a problem table, who might feel more comfortable in asking them to leave if the issue persists. 

I barely use Twitter, so I doubt that.
It does strike me sometimes that there is an entire generation that appears to be almost totally untrained in how to engage in dialectic. All they seem to know is angry tribalism and ad hominem, mistaking this for actual discourse. (Your wrote only four sentences, and each one of…

For me? What’s this got to do with me?
And all I’ve heard is anecdotes. As I’ve said several times, actual data are required. I know this is difficult for some people to get to grips with, raised to believe that heartfelt anecdotes are pre-eminent as tools of discourse and axioms of reasoning. They aren’t.

Twitter is designed fundamentally as a medium where every comment posted has a concomitant open invitation to others to reply. If this were not the case there would be a feature to make posts with no comments allowed. That feature has never been implemented to the best of my knowledge.

Okay, fine. (Holds up hand.) It was a paraphrase, not a quote. 

‘You know that “reply guy” on Twitter?’

> Nah, it doesn’t. It just needs to be something you said.

Yeah, I did subsequently. But if you’re going to use a quote or paraphrase, its meaning should be plain as part of the argument you’re building. In this case, it wasn’t. And, honestly, it’s a bit of an odd thing to pull out of the Bryan article. I mean, the thing to which it most obviously maps is this snippet:

“Unlike…

I mean, a little bit. But really just trying to lock down the specifics of what Bryan was objecting to. The “adding their own little take, no matter what the subject” seemed like it was possibly in the crosshairs as being problematic in and of itself. But that seems to misunderstand Twitter as a medium. Obviously…

Hence my final two sentences. 

That’s all very interesting, but my focus is on the Bryan quote. 

I am sure that’s right. But the topic of my post was only the hot take stuff, not about personal and/or gendered comments, or dick pics.

Yeah, agreed. I think there are people who feel a compulsive need to shove their oar in on anything. There may well be some guys who will do this disproportionately to women. I’d just like to see the data. Too much modern discussion is fueled by perception bias, gut instinct and anecdote.
I can well believe that…

Well, clearly one of the key questions raised by the article is “Why am I even on Twitter?” Maybe lots of people on Twitter are using it in the hope that it’s like writing an old-fashioned newspaper article, when it isn’t. And is the real problem that Twitter is one of the few fully democratized and useful tools of…