To put this another way—when I’m giving someone career advice, how ‘hardcore’ they are is one of the top 3 things I need to know to tailor the information to them so that it’s actually useful.
Things that make our content more appealing to ‘hardcore’ people can make it less appealing to ‘softcore’ people and vice versa. If I need to communicate that to someone else on the team, I need a way to express it in words.
Because I’m doing work to directly serve these different groups, I can’t afford to enter a fantasy land where we refuse to have a descriptive term for a group, because acknowledging its existence would hurt someone’s feelings.
Very good points! I was updating closer to ABG’s position initially, but these points convinced me that we really need terms to indicate both the lower end and the higher end of involvement. Thanks!
I just think you’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. The reason I think it doesn’t exist is because most movements don’t have the problem. You can either explain why we’re actually different, how they are actually the same, or why such successful movements as Christianity and the Labour movement also living in fantasy land. In the last case you also need to explain why living in fantasy land is actually bad if it doesn’t prevent such success (i.e. Could it be, maybe, that respecting people’s feelings correlates with movement building success..?)
What you can’t do is patronise the problem out of existence. I await a real response that meets one of the above three criteria.
I don’t think we are different. I think those groups do use extreme and some other term for less extreme. Perhaps not in their induction booklet, but internally definitely they do. How can they possibly canvas without recognising the range of views in the people they speak to?
There are benefits to being welcoming, and there are benefits to being demanding. I think being so undemanding that we go far out of our way to avoid thinking about or drawing attention to differences in how extreme people’s attitudes are is too far. We have to retain at least some intellectual honesty about describing the world as we see it and not bullshitting the people we speak to.
To put this another way—when I’m giving someone career advice, how ‘hardcore’ they are is one of the top 3 things I need to know to tailor the information to them so that it’s actually useful.
Things that make our content more appealing to ‘hardcore’ people can make it less appealing to ‘softcore’ people and vice versa. If I need to communicate that to someone else on the team, I need a way to express it in words.
Because I’m doing work to directly serve these different groups, I can’t afford to enter a fantasy land where we refuse to have a descriptive term for a group, because acknowledging its existence would hurt someone’s feelings.
For this purpose, things like “more committed” and “less committed” seem like they would work, and indicate a range rather than firm categories.
Very good points! I was updating closer to ABG’s position initially, but these points convinced me that we really need terms to indicate both the lower end and the higher end of involvement. Thanks!
I just think you’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. The reason I think it doesn’t exist is because most movements don’t have the problem. You can either explain why we’re actually different, how they are actually the same, or why such successful movements as Christianity and the Labour movement also living in fantasy land. In the last case you also need to explain why living in fantasy land is actually bad if it doesn’t prevent such success (i.e. Could it be, maybe, that respecting people’s feelings correlates with movement building success..?)
What you can’t do is patronise the problem out of existence. I await a real response that meets one of the above three criteria.
I don’t think we are different. I think those groups do use extreme and some other term for less extreme. Perhaps not in their induction booklet, but internally definitely they do. How can they possibly canvas without recognising the range of views in the people they speak to?
There are benefits to being welcoming, and there are benefits to being demanding. I think being so undemanding that we go far out of our way to avoid thinking about or drawing attention to differences in how extreme people’s attitudes are is too far. We have to retain at least some intellectual honesty about describing the world as we see it and not bullshitting the people we speak to.