What does "interested" mean? [Matthew's Journal]

Over in

news, Sixapart's CEO apologises for the recent LJ-deletion drama. I'm going to leave much of the issue alone, since many many electrons have been spilt over this already.

barakb25 writes: "Both in the instructions for profiles and in other places on the site we make it clear that interests listed should be evaluated within the context of “I like x”, “I’m in favor of x” or “I support x”. "

Well, point of fact first. http://www.livejournal.com/manage/profile/ which is where I edit my interest from, simply says "List all your interests, separated by commas, to allow other users to find you using the Interest Search.".

It seems to me that "I am interested in the things I list as interests" is a more natural reading than "I like them" or "I'm in favour of them" or "I support them". That's how we use the word "interest" everywhere else!

I'm interested in infectious diseases, particularly those of cattle - I spend most of my working life trying to understand them better. If I put "infectious diseases" on my interests list, I think it would be absurd to think this meant I was some sort of bio-terrorist hoping to inflict my latest creation upon the world!

If Richard Dawkins had a livejournal, I'm sure he'd put "religion" on his interests list, and possibly "Christianity" as well. Indeed, glancing at the profiles of some of the more strident atheists on my fiends list, I see Christianity pops up quite often in interests lists.

So: reading interests lists as solely "I'm in favour of X" is daft. Please don't do it :-)

October

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25 1
26	27	28	29	30	31

Sun

Mon

Tue

Wed

Thu

Fri

Sat

Heaven Forbid someone put down "Islam" as an interest, especially if they're an american!
Otherwise they're obviously a muslim zealot wanting to kill all non-muslims!

[link] [reply]

AOL

Um. It says right next to the interests box in the profile editor (and has done for as long as I remember): 'Rule of thumb: You should be able to put the interest in the sentence "I like ________".'

I've always read that as a grammatical thing though, not a content thing. To ensure that people put a list of nouns, rather than using sentences.

[link] [parent] [reply]

That's how I've read that rule of thumb, certainly.

That is to help convey to the lesser-intelligent users of how to label it, as in the plural sense. Because I still see most people putting long drawn out sentences to create an interest that no one will ever share.

We need a kludge, such as prepending 'discussion-of-' or some similar boilerplate. Ideally the community would develop a simple, short, and unambiguous way of denoting this. Personally I'd go for \foo, but C people would probably prefer &foo (or is it *foo?).

"re:foo" would be fairly short and not totally obscure.

I like it.

Also, see the "gay marriage" argument. Ie: You can't be interested in gay marriage or talk about it in your LJ/on a community for it because it's illegal.

Not a terribly strong argument given the fairly clear distinction between "not legally recognised" and "you would go to prison if you did it and quite rightly so". Or do I misunderstand you?

Hmm. Well, it's specifically illegal in some/most US states.
You used to be able to goto jail for the gaysex in US states, till the court overturned it. Although I don't doubt some of those laws are still on the books.

I guess i'd have to say (at least now) there's a split between say, gay sex (which is "legal") and advocating gay marriage, which is illegal. (Not sure if you'd goto jail for it, but it's still illegal!)

Can you live in (say) a european country that lets you smoke pot and post about it on LJ, even though it's still illegal in the US?
What if some southern US state put gay sex back on the books as a crime, but in California (being based in San Fran, the gayest of CA cities. ;) it was legal?

I dunno, those are all grey area examples.

Can you still say you were caught speeding and got a ticket, even though speeding is clearly illegal? Can you say you're planning on speeding?

I guess my point is more that something is ILLEGAL, does that mean you arn't allowed to talk about it? (Yes, there's a difference between pedophilia and speeding, but both are illegal and if they're using the fact that it's illegal to remove your journal/community, well..)

By "specifically illegal' you mean "not constitutionally recognized."

It isn't illegal in the sense that you or I would get thrown in prison if we went off and got married. There are one or two states with archaic sodomy laws, which could potentially land you in prison, but those have been repeatedly deemed unconstitutional, as I am sure any arrest or "charge" of TEH GAY marriage would.

All the anti-gay marriage "laws" say is that homosexuals cannot be legally recognized by Xstate as married couple. And advocating for gay marriage is NOT illegal, otherwise every organization that supports it would have been shut down. As it stands, there are several that exist inside the US.

I keep wanting to agree with you, kyh, but dammit if you don't keep showing some serious ignorance of the issues.

And as far as everything else goes, I would like to point out that theres a difference in degree we need to understand here. Jaywalking, while illegal, is something I do all the time, but what you have to understand here is that jaywalking and, say, pedophilia are not on the same level. Yes, they did go more then a little beyond the bounds I'm discussing here, and yes I think they probably shouldn't have overreacted, but its a sad day that people don't realize they're doing the exact same thing on the opposite end of the spectrum.

This is not a black and while issue. This is not "allow for free speech or else deny it all" problem. This is an attempt to clean up some of the more unsightly issues LJ has had for a while. This is also the first time its ever happened with LJ, so what you need to understand is that they will probably fuck it up, like they did.

Heres the inside scoop, folks: by overreacting and saying things like "Can you still say you were caught speeding and got a ticket, even though speeding is clearly illegal?" is asinine and frankly repugnant. It is the intellectual equivalent of throwing a tantrum because mommy said you cant say a dirty word. Am I saying just let this slide, especially if LJ gets even more tight on its restrictions? Hell no.

What I am saying is that if you are going to put up an intellectual argument against something, at least try not to sound like you're ten years old. Understand that life has shades of gray, ESPECIALLY on these issues and stop acting like a goddamn INTERNET SITE just punched your mom.

Could you tone it down a little, please? I like people to be civil when commenting on

emperor. Thanks!

Understand that life has shades of gray, ESPECIALLY on these issues

Though I understand this as a theory and something which is generally true of life I absolutely refuse to believe that anyone but indiviguals are capable of that distinction, and SixApart are not indiviguals, they are a large bueracracy with lawyers who tell them what to do to protect their arses and then do it with little room for grey interpretation. As would be witnessed by what they actually DID do, so it's not as if I'm just being cynical here. So why, precisely ought someone understand that SixApart will manage to do what they've fantastically fucked-up already once successfully the next time? And why should someone admitt that they're overreacting and being immature because they are asking for the rules to be clear and concise by asking precisely what is and isn't allowed.

Presumably it might be illegal if you tried to do it - organised a fake marriage, then claimed you were married when it came to filling out various forms?

Okay yes, I see the difference you are saying, but this distinction can be made to other things - for example, I might support legalisation of drugs, in that I'm not suggesting that people should currently go ahead and do it anyway, but that I think that the law should be changed to allow it. It's not too far fetched that a community for debating drugs laws would list "drugs" in its interests list.

Yes I was thinking much the same. Even if we interpet it just as "interests", that doesn't mean you support it. But people often use it as "list of keywords that describe me or this journal", because of the way interest-keywords can be used to search journals.

Just like in the bad-old-days-of-search-engines, webpages used META tags, and as I said in my post, even WFI have all sorts of naughty words listed in their META tags...

There are 371 people interested in murder, which is illegal and highly morally reprehensible. And yet their journals weren't deleted. 404 are interested in theft. 123 in treason. 358 in terrorism.

I think it's the furries and the Muslims we need to really be worried about.

It's the

clunkies you really want to worry about.

Eek!

So LJ are putting their own spin on the meaning of "interest", just as they have with "friend". Nothing new there then.

Thanks for alerting me to this inanity. I have amended my profile to make it perfectly clear that I don't think the world will be a better place if we were all type 1 diabetics.

Matthew's Journal

What does "interested" mean?

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

October