Disruptive Thinking Is Usually More Constructive Than Always Agreeing with the Wisdom of the Crowd

An innocent albeit somewhat flippant remark that I made online was relatively recently used, by a person that I was trying to have a civilized conversion with, to turn me into Public Enemy Number 1. All I really did was suggest that while what this person was saying did make sense, at least on the surface, it was also possible to view the issue from a very different viewpoint and that in my opinion, that different viewpoint made more sense.

And this was interpreted as a declaration of war.

Since I have been writing my silly posts on Mad Patent Translator’s blog for almost six years now – there are 585 posts and 7,451 comments on my blog, and it has well over half a million views – I have had a number of these kinds of exchanges with people who have expressed intense hostility to whatever it was that I was saying in such an extreme manner that I consider these people trolls, which is to say that I’m not interested in talking to them anymore as it’s a waste of time to try to discuss anything with an angry, combative troll.

I can think of perhaps five instances of people who were trying, for a number of reasons, to attack me in any way they could imagine, instead of trying to have a civilized discussion from which both parties could benefit. It should be a self-evident truism that the losing party in a discussion gains more than the winner because that’s the party that learns something new. But that truism can only be true of course when further discussion is still possible. Maybe it’s no longer true. It’s definitely not true in the mass media, where winning a shouting match is indeed not just everything, but the only thing that matters.

I think that it’s interesting that two of these five people that I consider trolls were originally enthusiastic readers of my posts and occasional commenters, until I said something that they just couldn’t stomach, although it didn’t relate to them personally, at which point they decided to become my sworn enemies.

Another two of them went to the trouble of creating different WordPress pseudonyms for their personas, also known as “sock puppets”, in order to continue attacking me while pretending that they weren’t who they really were, just to be able to do it from a safer, more anonymous space. One of them admitted that this was indeed the case when I called her/him out on it, which I consider kind of classy. In fact, having done so, (s)he is probably no longer in the troll category. The other one didn’t admit anything, which I consider kind of cowardly, but did seem to have disappeared after I called his/her bluff, possibly out of embarrassment at being caught.

Are these people still reading my posts? I don’t know. For the sake of their sanity, as well as mine, I hope they aren’t. Life is too short to fight wars with imaginary enemies. There will be plenty of real wars in life that will need to be fought. We need to pick our battles carefully and try to conserve our strength for fighting wars that are indeed necessary and worth fighting.

I generally know when I am about to get into trouble already when I am writing a post. For some reason, I do it anyway. For example, when I came across a study by Jeremy Brunson from the Department of Sociology at Syracuse University with statistics indicating that the overwhelming majority of sign language interpreters are women, I concluded in my post that the real reason for this is that women like to be the center of attention, and being a sign interpreter is a good way to have your face shown on TV while you are so cleverly interpreting in your new clothes.

It was a joke, of course, but as expected, I was immediately attacked by women, and some men, who called my post ill-informed and worse, as if they truly believed that I had seriously meant what I said in it. I was asked repeatedly, by several people, months after I wrote my post, to delete the post or take back what I had said or else! The truth is, it’s OK when women are making fun of men, but it’s strictly forbidden in our culture for men to make fun of women, just like it’s forbidden for white people (but only for white people) to use the n-word. Making fun of women in any manner whatsoever is politically incorrect and terribly sexist, hence the general uproar after a post that contained so much misguided cheekiness. But the post was very popular, it got hundreds of likes on Facebook, so somebody must have liked it.

We translators just love to agree with each other! I don’t know whether it’s true about blogs on topics other than translation, but many translators’ blogs contain preachy advice for translators that I find mostly useless because what is expressed in their posts is simply common sense. But many translators love to read similar posts, which is evidenced by the number of commenters who eagerly chime in to express their absolute (100%) agreement with everything the blogger said. I call these comments “Dear Melanie comments”, because they are often posted by women, usually young women, who like something that another young woman said (darn it, I think that I’ve just said something politically incorrect and extremely sexist again!)

If on the other hand what you say is not in complete and absolute (100%) agreement with what the other person said, you risk stirring up a hornets’ nest.

I noticed for the first time how intolerant some translators can be to an opposing view when I wrote a post titled Friends Don’t Let Friends Use Trados or Other Translation Memory Tools. This was in July of 2010, about 5 months after I started blogging, but this old blog post still has a lot of views just about every day, dozens of comments and the comment section keeps growing. Not surprisingly, the guy who made the last comment only 7 days ago too simply can’t believe that anybody would be so dumb as not to see the obvious advantages of CATs, and Trados in particular, because it works for him so well.

Trying to explain to CAT lovers that those damn CATs don’t work for me and that I need them about as much as I need a hole in my head is like trying to convince citizens of North Korea that their beloved Chubby Leader probably is not really a genius. It just can’t be done: the crowd absolutely hates it when somebody dares to say something that is incompatible with the wisdom of the crowd and you run a serious risk of becoming Public Enemy Number 1, whether you dare to question the genius of The Chubby Leader, or the wisdom of using The CATs.

The problem is, if there is pressure on blogging translators not to dare to express views that might be somewhat controversial, not to make fun of sacred cows because some people might be offended by it, and if nobody dares to resist this pressure because it could be risky, most of what is said on our blogs will be very boring.

In closing, I apologize in advance to all women named Melanie who feel offended by my post today, especially the young ones, but I’m not taking anything back.