Be careful about what you dislike

http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2016/11/5/be-careful-about-what-you-dislike/

by JonoBB • 10 years ago

351 167 10 years ago

lucumr.pocoo.org

andybak• 10 years ago

I'm fascinated by the topic of English Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

It introduced me to the idea that 'is' should be treated very carefully. Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best. It also introduces heightens the emotional tone of a discussion. If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Foo-ness is a taint on his soul. Contrast that with reformulations that make it explicit that John's foo-ness is a fleeting association related to both his present situation, your current perception of it and the current socially accepted meaning of foo along with all it's implied baggage.

I realise I might be rather off-topic :-)

wolfgke4• 10 years ago

If you say "John is foo" you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo.

Interestingly in Spanish and Portuguese there are two verbs of "to be": "ser" and "estar". These have different meanings: ser ist mostly used for persistent states of being, while estar is mostly used for something that is only temporarily as it is, but could be different the next time.

praseodym• 10 years ago

Isn't that a bit like "is" vs. "is being"?

MereInterest• 10 years ago

Also interesting is that this distinction occurs in some dialects of English as well. In AAVE, this is the distinction between "Elmo is eating cookies." and "Cookie Monster be eating cookies." The former indicates a current action that is taken. The latter indicates an action that is often taken. One is a statement about a person's actions, while the other is a statement about a person's habits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitual_be

xiaq• 10 years ago

I don't think you went off-topic at all. The article says "avoid judgement of a particular thing, since it will become outdated in future". E-prime says "now you can't make such judgements because I have taken away your tool of doing so". I think they have the same goal.

(I wrote this comment in E-prime :)

schoen6• 10 years ago

In the case of the judgments of Python that the original article refers to, I can see ways that E-prime could help (because the criticisms might be phrased more concretely, like "Python 3 lacks the 'u' qualifier for strings" or something, allowing a reassessment of whether this problem was still true in the future) but maybe one could still say something like "its creators designed Python 3 hastily and sloppily without regard to programmers' convenience", which, if true or believed at first, never stops being applicable even if the language gets improved later on.

gabemart• 10 years ago

Who would admit to lying sometimes? Almost everyone. Who would admit to being a liar? Fewer people. But what is a liar other than someone who tells lies sometimes?

I agree that the idea something "is" something else is a tricky one in language.

martimoose• 10 years ago

Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best

I was going to say this is ironic but I will rather say I find this ironic

appleflaxen• 10 years ago

completely on point, actually. Plus a link to a cool, thought-provoking concept. thanks!

debt• 10 years ago

English prime should help you become a better writer if only because it forces you to consider sentence structure which forces you to pay closer attention to what you're writing.

I didn't use it here because I'm lazy.

barrkel2• 10 years ago

The irregular nature of "to be" in English comes from it being a blend of three different roots with a somewhat similar division you're talking about (but certainly not as clear, division was more about tense than duration).

The fallacy you're talking about I consider a specific instance of the labeling problem. If someone is marginally in a group and you apply the label of the group on the individual, suddenly it seems ok to use attributes of the group to reason about the individual. One jumps from specific to general and back to specific again without acknowledging the loss of information from the abstraction layers. Often comes up in post hoc rationalisation of harsher criminal punishment, for example. John is a criminal; we need to be tougher with criminals; therefore we need to be tougher with John - without regard for the specifics of John's case.

schoen6• 10 years ago

One analysis of this is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_(fallacy) but there might also be other ways of thinking about it.

dahart2• 10 years ago

I had never heard of E-Prime, but this reminded me of Reginald Braithwaite's presentation "Optimism" [1].

He advocates becoming aware of when people use temporary or permanent language, and suggests using temporary language for criticizing other people and permanent language for praising people. This is a brilliant bit of human psychology that is highly practical in everyday situations.

I don't know whether E-Prime is practical, it seems problematic to try to police the language itself, but the goals & rationale have a good heart. We probably would be better off if we could all speak less dogmatically and hyperbolically.

I do recall someone here on HN mentioning attempts to create a new language in which one could not lie, I wonder if E-prime was what was being referred to...

  [1] https://github.com/raganwald/presentations/blob/master/optimism.md
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12298898

dorianm6• 10 years ago

For comparaison, Ruby 3 is gonna introduce a pretty big breaking change (frozen string literals) but they already shipped a way to optional enable it by-file (magic comment) and globally to the ruby interpreter (just a parameter) so that all the libraries and projects can slowly fix it in a compatible manner (often just calling .dup is enough).

So that's when it's time for Ruby 3 the transition will be pretty painless.

More info: https://wyeworks.com/blog/2015/12/1/immutable-strings-in-rub...

(Frozen string literals allows strings to be in memory only once and not having to reallocate each time, so a pretty big memory and cpu optimization)

(Also for instance rubocop already recommends adding the magic comment to all ruby files)

uiri• 10 years ago

(Frozen string literals allows strings to be in memory only once and not having to reallocate each time, so a pretty big memory and cpu optimization)

Isn't this the purpose of symbols in the language? This seems like a pretty basic optimization, surely there were good reasons not to introduce it in earlier versions.

dorianm6• 10 years ago

e.g. 1000.times { "hello" } creates strings 1000 times but: 1000.times { "hello".freeze } only one time.

The thing about frozen strings is they can't be changed "inline":

e.g. : "Hello".freeze << " world" doesn't work but "Hello".freeze + " world" does because it creates a new string.

(It's funny because << is often recommended as an optimization)

maxerickson2• 10 years ago

Magic imports from __future__ are the usual way of turning on features in Python.

The incompatibilities introduced in Python 3 weren't done that way to save on implementation effort among other reasons.

dorianm6• 10 years ago

Maybe python2 --enable-print-parentheses and other flags could have been useful to slowly detect future issues on python 2 code.

eveningcoffee• 10 years ago

This is a quite good example about myself. After I realized that too many people around Ruby do not understand the concept of immutability, I stopped to care about the whole ecosystem around it.

If this catches up, it is worth to give the Ruby a fresh look.

dorianm6• 10 years ago

There are a few immutability options, for instance Hamster: https://github.com/hamstergem/hamster/blob/core/README.md

lazyjones• 10 years ago

It's not the responsibility of the author to anticipate future changes that might weaken his current arguments. The reader is responsible for taking into account the time and context of the text they are reading.

It's why we like to have e.g. "(2013)" added to anchor texts on HN, for example.

johncolanduoni• 10 years ago

It is, when the author is writing them (or saying them) in 2016. I thought he made it pretty clear that was what he was complaining about.

simonhamp• 10 years ago

I think a sideline point here is to not appropriate other people's opinions from a specific point in time just because they happen to align with yours (opinion/bias) at the current time.

And of course, try to have as wide and deep an understanding of the subject as possible before forming strong publicised opinion in the first place.

9mit3t2m9h9a• 10 years ago

I think the effect described in the text has another side: imagine that at some point using XYZ was obviously a bad idea for multiple reasons for a specific person in specific circumstances. Obviously, keeping track of the changes in XYZ will have a lower priority for a person who is not going to use XYZ anyway, even if one of the multiple show-stoppers gets fixed/changed/redesigned. This means that the person's opinion about XYZ slowly gets stale.

TazeTSchnitzel6• 10 years ago

Then the entire thing spiraled out of control: people not only railed against TTIP but took their opposition and looked for similar contracts and found CETA. Since both are trade agreements there is naturally a lot of common ground between them. The subtleties where quickly lost. Where the initial arguments against TTIP were food standards, public services and intransparent ISDS courts many of the critics failed to realize that CETA fundamentally was a different beast.

CETA has ISDS as well, and if only on that point alone, CETA is objectionable. This argument comes off as disingenuous, the similarities between the deals are not imagined. ISDS isn't even the only similarity; CETA also contained objectionable new copyright provisions (though apparently those are mostly gone now), for example.

the_mitsuhiko7• 10 years ago

CETA has ISDS as well, and if only on that point alone, CETA is objectionable.

Author here: that is not disputed. However the ISDS in CETA is a permanent tribunal where both Canada and Europe elect lawyers equally. The processes also require transparency and there is an appeal process. None of that was in the original draft of it and has been added over time as a response to criticism.

TazeTSchnitzel6• 10 years ago

Well, that might be a slight improvement, but it's still ISDS. The fundamental problem with ISDS is not its lack of transparency, but that it allows corporations to sue governments for domestic policy changes in the first place.

makomk• 10 years ago

More broadly speaking, this is a reason why it's not necessarily irrational or unreasonable to continue to believe old arguments - the effort required to claim that yes, things have changed and the old arguments are therefore invalid is so disproportionately small compared to the effort required to confirm the changes are in fact inadequate or non-existent.

michaelsbradley• 10 years ago

Hear! hear! I also recommend, more generally, reviewing logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and misconceptions as part of a regular self-review. It's important to keep a flexible mind, though achieving greater degrees of interior freedom is hard work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions

crawfordcomeaux3• 10 years ago

Our realities are each a collection of stories we each tell ourselves. Sometimes parts of the stories two people believe will overlap and we'll call those opinions or facts depending on situation.

I'm finding it helpful to view every signal my body encounters as a chance to choose how to process it, including what I do, taste, or hear.

Since adopting this view, I've effortlessly enjoyed eating foods I've hated my entire life (tomatoes, olives, CILANTRO?!), listening to country music, and doing things like chores that used to bore me to tears.

If anyone sees danger in learning to view the world that way by default, I'd love to hear about it.

immobilenopass• 10 years ago

This sounds like an excellent blog post, or even a book.

crawfordcomeaux3• 10 years ago

I'm definitely going to blog about it, now that you've said that. Thanks for the inspiration :)

I think I'll title it "Olive happier when olive olive the foods." (I live happier when I love all of the foods)

xg15• 10 years ago

Sometimes parts of the stories two people believe will overlap and we'll call those opinions or facts depending on situation.

I'd argue that happens slightly more often than "sometimes" - this is the basis which communication, and with it relationships and communities need to function.

If anyone sees danger in learning to view the world that way by default, I'd love to hear about it.

The main danger I see is not trusting your body. Your virw seems to treat all reactions to signals as equal - but that ignores that some reactions might be more justified than others. Some contain knowledhe by others, some evolutionary development by your body. E.g., even if you could bring yourself to like the taste of rotten meat, it would be a very bad idea to do so.

crawfordcomeaux3• 10 years ago

True...now that I think about it, I can always choose to find some sort of relationship between what I believe & what you believe, even if metaphorical. That's fun :)

The main danger I see is not trusting your body. Your virw seems to treat all reactions to signals as equal

I'd argue what I'm doing is learning to dampen the bias my mind introduces when it processes signals from my tongue/nose/ears. It's trusting the signals my body generates more than what my mind has to say about them. Rancid food is still going to taste/smell/feel/look spoiled & if I do somehow enjoy it, my body's still likely to react negatively in other ways to let me know it was a bad decision.

datashovel• 10 years ago

It may be less the responsibility of the "consumer" of the information and more the responsibility of the "producer" of the information.

If the argument is presented as if something is and will always be a certain way (or even if the argument is presented without admitting that something may change) it can probably lead a lot faster to groups of people assuming the argument will be valid forever.

EDIT: Or can be misinterpreted that someone presenting an argument believes the argument will remain valid forever.

btw. never saw the talks the author cites, and have not followed the trade agreements very closely so I'm only speaking generally here.

msinclair• 10 years ago

Except Internet Explorer... that will always be the same. :)

dorfsmay• 10 years ago

Part of the issue is efficiency, we have to make choices and cannot reevaluate everything constantly. Also, we can't be specialists in everything.

So programming languages, we have to pick a few and become good at them. It's one thing to take another hard look when applying for a new job for example, but we cannot keep track of all programming languages and their evolutions.

cyberpanther• 10 years ago

A very common cognitive bias or logic pattern our brain follows is to whitelist or blacklist things. When we trust something, we follow it without question or we begin rationalizing it no matter what. And in the day of the internet and Google we can confirm basically any bias we have on either side of an issue.

You should scrutinize your own thoughts and opinions and others to see if they are just believing something because it was true in the past.

In terms of Javascript, there is definitely a lot of hate out there for the language and ecosystem which was entirely true. But I would argue JS has the best trajectory right now of any language out there. So you better learn it if you want to stay relevant in development.

Lastly, I've found it best to not be so opinionated about everything. Sure having some opinions are great but you develop too many biases otherwise. So what if something sucks, use it anyway. You might learn something new, or maybe you can help improve it if it has potential.

eric_cc• 10 years ago

JS has the best trajectory right now of any language out there
I've found it best to not be so opinionated about everything

Lol

jerf• 10 years ago

To be fair, JS does have a pretty good trajectory. When you start from near the absolute bottom, there's nowhere to go but up. I do not mean that as a crack against the language; it is an observation that even JS partisans ought to agree with if they think for a moment. I'm looking back all the way to its creation, when it was a language designed to handle onclick events that fit into one attribute tag. There was a lot of up to go from there.

However, looking into the future and seeing where a language with Javascript's technical foundation can end up, it's hard to see it ever exceeding Python 3 or Ruby, and both of those languages, while perhaps not in outright decline, are certainly looking at having peaked and entering their "maturity" phase. Confident declarations that it is the future are probably not warranted when it is at most the present. I don't think WebAssembly will "kill" Javascript any time soon, but once it really gets going it's going to start eating away at all the really big uses of it, because WebAssembly will permit languages that can fit into niches other than the 1990s-style dynamic language maxima. It's a nice maxima (totally no sarcasm, I'm just barely old enough to have tasted the paradigms it replaced and dynamic languages got as big as they did for a reason) but it's now in 2016 also abundantly clear it's not the only one.

ak39• 10 years ago

Good article.

List of some of the things I don't like for which I have to occasionally take another peak to see if I'm finally wrong:

1. (In languages) Garbage collection and the idea of "safe code". I didn't like it then and still don't.

2. ORMs

3. (Relational) Data models with compound keys flying around as FKs everywhere.

4. The idea of self service BI (like PowerBI etc in the hands of a business user)

5. Regexp

allendoerfer• 10 years ago

It is your lucky day, I can solve 4 of your problems (I don't even know what 4. is). The answer is: They are neither bad nor good. They are just tools, whose usefulness depends on the job.

minusf• 10 years ago

for me personally it is news the_mitsuhiko is "not vocally against python3 anymore". i cannot find any other recent blog posts besides this one, where python3 is praised or encouraged fully. so why be surprised if people still think he is a big python3 critic?

as i see it, the issue is less about parroting other's outdated technical opinions, it's about not being vocal enough about the change of heart.

Veen• 10 years ago

i cannot find any other recent blog posts besides this one, where python3 is praised or encouraged fully. So why be surprised if people think he's a big python critic.

I think this attitude is exactly what the article argues against.

If (1) you read his earlier posts about python 3 and (2) understood the specific objections and (3) are aware the current state of python 3 is such that those objections don't apply, then you have no good reason to suppose he still considers them to be valid objections.

If (3) isn't the case, you still don't have a good reason to assume his opinions haven't changed, because the world moves on and that has to be accounted for.

hellofunk5• 10 years ago

I have realized over the years that it is wise to be naturally skeptical of any opinion that is strong, either positive or negative. People who have an appreciation for gray areas, even if they ultimately do have a preference, tend to be a lot more emotionally balanced than those who maintain a very strong stance on something. I have noticed this so consistently over the last 15 years that I now consider it a fundamental benchmark by which I can gauge my ability to work or socialize with someone in general, on any topic, over the long term.

hiou2• 10 years ago

I find that people who sit in the greys tend to be very worried about their public perception or have very little passion beyond maintaining personal comfort.

The people I look for are those that take strong stands but are willing and able to adjust and even quickly reverse those stances.

To me it's the difference between a leader and a worker bee.

twic• 10 years ago

The people I look for are those that take strong stands but are willing and able to adjust and even quickly reverse those stances.

Sometimes called "strong opinions, weakly held".

I find this principle to be incoherent - if you understand something well enough to have a strong opinion, you understand it well enough to hold that opinion strongly. Holding strong opinions on things you don't understand that well seems unhelpful.

rdiddly• 10 years ago

That sounds like something I might've said long ago, but today it seems to me that those at the extremes are the ones concerned about public perception. Like "Hey everybody look at me with my strong opinions!" It's a sales pitch for that person, for you to like and pay attention to them. And it will be necessarily very simplified and won't represent reality per se. A clickbait headline would get no clicks if it said "10 nuanced observations on the subtly complex and contradictory nature of reality, complete with all the exceptions. Number 6 will leave your mind totally blank as you stare out at the foggy hilltops!"

Also look at Trump (if you can stand it). He sells himself by saying extreme stuff. You do want that "extreme" person in a position where they can sell your company! But sales is orthogonal to leadership. A person who appreciates subtleties, if a leader, will quietly lead you to a river of money and not make your life hell on the way there. Or if they're a worker-bee, they'll quietly write bug-free and dependable code at a steady pace.

snupples• 10 years ago

Sure the leader may have a strong opinion. But most people do, and often about complete BS, which is particularly obvious during election season. So it means nothing. The more important differentiator is the leader is more persuasive in backing the opinion. The nuanced opinion/argument is often more difficult to make persuasive though.

BeetleB• 10 years ago

I find that people who sit in the greys tend to be very worried about their public perception or have very little passion beyond maintaining personal comfort.

Or, you know, the issue is grey. Why take a strong stand when you have plenty of reasons not to?

The funny thing is that I find the opposite. I call it the "cowardice of taking a stand". Being a fence-sitter in this culture is fairly negatively perceived (except out of academia). As such, I notice people are very reluctant to state the nuances - they're afraid of being labeled a fence sitter. Cowards, in harsher words.

The people I look for are those that take strong stands but are willing and able to adjust and even quickly reverse those stances.

The people I look for are those who ponder over, and see the flaws in their stands before becoming a strong proponent.

Wisdom is usually inversely proportional to posturing.

This is very reminiscent of: "Do you want a fantastic firefighter on your team, or one who prevents fires?" The firefighter is very noticeable because he keeps saving teams from crises. The one who prevents fires doesn't get noticed because there never was a fire. Poor managers reward firefighters.

I remember when I was interviewing for my last job, I would try to pose indirect questions to the potential manager to get an idea on whether they can handle uncertainty from their employees. If not, I would move on to the next interview. Managers who say stuff like "I never accept 'I don't know' for an answer" are to be avoided like the plague. They end up with a team of employees who are pretty adept at BS.

Society wants people who take strong stands, and your comment is a perfect example of it.

aswanson• 10 years ago

That sounds to me like a loudmouth versus someone who thinks about what he's saying before saying it.

chucksmash2• 10 years ago

Espousing nuanced opinions and making effective arguments are often at odds though. It's very easy for people to lose the thread of an argument if it is chock full of footnotes.

I try to aim for "strong opinions, weakly held" - present a specific, actionable and strong position but be open to changing it if a better argument is made.

jacobolus• 10 years ago

More to the point, nuanced opinions are at odds with clickbait/flamebait. If you want to get lots of attention and start a big internet fight, say the most outrageous aggressive thing you can, and argue sloppily, with just enough reasoning behind you to get the folks who agree with you to come fight for your side.

rexpop• 10 years ago

Where did you pick up the phrase "strong opinions, weakly held"?

imagist• 10 years ago

There's a parable of a guy who lost his keys in the park at night. Upon realizing he lost his keys, he begins to look for the keys in the street near a street lamp. When his friend asks why he's looking for his keys in the street instead of in the park where he lost them, the guy responds that the light is better in the street.

It's true that espousing nuanced opinions and making effective arguments are often at odds, but the fact is, reality is often nuanced. Glossing over that nuance to make your argument more effective is like searching where there's light. Sure, it's more persuasive, but if you are persuading toward an incorrect idea, what are you really accomplishing?

Of course as Asimov's Relativity of Wrong points out, not all wrongs are equal. It may be worthwhile to persuade someone of a not-very-wrong given limited resources. But this sort of compromise has problems of its own. A social justice movement that ignores the nuance of handling white men's needs is effective until it needs white men's cooperation but instead generates backlash (Trump). The devil is in the details.

profalseidol2• 10 years ago

Understanding of man, the ultimate wisdom- Confucius

jklinger410• 10 years ago

I'm passionate about how wrong people are to be convinced of everything.

What does that mean?

Retra• 10 years ago

It means you've been convinced of something that is wrong.

smallnamespace• 10 years ago

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity." - Yeats

hellofunk5• 10 years ago

What an apropos quote! Never seen that one before, good to know it now.

lordnacho• 10 years ago

You're right. It's almost instinctive that when I hear some forcefully presented opinion, even if I agree with it, I put a mark next to the person's profile (in my mind).

One quite large issue is that once you've said your opinion, you are held to it. It's often easier to go even more extreme than to backtrack. And the effect is worse the more extreme you've gone.

I've had some sympathies for libertarian opinions lately, but when I see how far some of my friends take it, I wonder whether they're really thinking as clearly as they like to imagine.

crimsonalucard• 10 years ago

This is true, however, I think the people who have strong opinions end up becoming successful entrepreneurs.

amag3• 10 years ago

Or utterly failed ones...

robertelder• 10 years ago

I now consider it a fundamental benchmark...

Sorry to be pedantic, but I just wanted to point out the paradox you get by holding such an opinion so strongly.

hellofunk5• 10 years ago

I thought someone might say that. It is possible to have a general opinion on something, or at least some guidance, without maintaining a stubborn perspective on it. I can easily be proven wrong, when someone with strong opinions reveals to be an exception to my experience. I have no problem with that. Doesn't really happen much, though (yet).

greenhatman3• 10 years ago

I only hold one opinion strongly, and that is that people with strong opinions are full of shit :)

user5994461• 10 years ago

I've found it very difficult to write/argue gray-ish about any topic.

Either it's positive or it's negative.

The way between is full of self-contradictions and footnotes. That makes a difficult read/conversation.

iheartstartup• 10 years ago

what matters in the end is being right. When opnions have to turn into action, knowing what is the right thing to do (knowing what technology to use, for example), and a careful balance of tradeoffs is always the sign of good leadership. This may include taking very strong stands on various things.

I've found people have tendencies to delude themselves in certain ways, however. Either being too positive or negative. The former is less harmful than the latter, but both are miscalibrations of judgement.

booleandilemma• 10 years ago

Go not to the Elves for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.

J. R. R. Tolkien

benjohnson• 10 years ago

“Ask two Jews, get three opinions.” - a jewish quip given to me by Rabbi Glickman.

PerfectElement• 10 years ago

That's only true for opinions that are not generally accepted.

I believe you have strong opinions about all sorts of things, e.g. you probably have a strong stance against slavery. Take this strong stance 300 years back, and you would be seen as an emotionally unbalanced person, by your standard.

I'm glad there are people with strong opinions. The world would be a much darker place if everyone was always on the fence.

greenhatman3• 10 years ago

Yea, Hitler had strong opinions too. This can go either way, I guess.

I think having strong opinions based on a deep understanding is better. And generally a deep understanding means you'll discover both pros and cons to most situations.

This means you can make balanced and calculated efforts, instead of blindly starting a crusade and hope you turn out to actually be right.

hellofunk5• 10 years ago

You misread me. I didn't say on the fence, that is something else entirely. I said, an appreciation for gray areas, even if you ultimately do have a preference.

amag3• 10 years ago

It seems you have a very strong opinion about who you can work and socialize with... ;P

hellofunk5• 10 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12880623

warlox• 10 years ago

There are issues where being unable to take a strong stance is indicative of a weak mind, such as Nazism and genocide. If you can't stand strongly against things like those, you're simply a bad person.

xtiansimon• 10 years ago

Headline: Engineer cries Political Arguments are not 'valid'; Forks off own nation.

rdslw• 10 years ago

Paul Graham in one of his best text explained similar concepts writing "I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions"

Highly worth read: http://paulgraham.com/identity.html

pimlottc2• 10 years ago

This brings to mind a fantastically lucid comic about the utility of questions vs answers:

http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park

After all, the an opinion is just an answer to the question, "What do I think of this?"

Unman3• 10 years ago

That is superb. Thank you for referencing it.

dredmorbius3• 10 years ago

Please submit this to HN. That's fabulous.

(It's also much better than a few similar conversations I've been having myself.)

pimlottc2• 10 years ago

I took your suggestion and posted it, let's see if it gets any traction

carsongross• 10 years ago

I naturally see both sides of almost any argument, and my personality is such that I would rather synthesize the arguments of both sides into a final position via dialectic.

I have lost almost every major argument I've had in a corporate environment.

ahartman00• 10 years ago

compromise is often wise, but beware design by committee

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_committee

Unman3• 10 years ago

Hmmm... while agreeing with the sentiment I am unimpressed by the lack of evidence for one of his supporting examples. What stood out for me was this bald assertion with no reference to falsifiable specifics:

"_Not_only_was_it_already_a_much_improved_agreement_from_ the_start_,but it kept being modified from the initial public version of it to the one that was finally sent to national parliaments."

Either the writer of this is an expert on the topic, well-known in the field and the weight of this judgement on its own is a valuable primary source; or, the writer is referring to such an analysis conducted by other experts but has not bothered to include a citation/link; or, the writer has their own critique but instead of presenting _that_ has just stated an opinion which they know to be controversial.

All of the above possibilities contribute substantially to the noise around any discussion.

zanny2• 10 years ago

Same thing with this line:

TTIP was negotiated in secrecy (as all trade agreements are)

That seems like a really steep assumption to try to start a conversation about changing perspectives with time. He opens with a purported tautology about how you must do trade deals, which I feel hurts the argument against moving goalposts - because that seems like the exact kind of sentiment that leads to the behavior in the first place. This has always happened, thus it must always continue to happen is rarely a way to start productive dialog about something.

Unman3• 10 years ago

That's another good example. The original post is actually nearly an example of "How to start a flamewar."

You can even see the discussion of CETA spawning a long, subsidiary thread which distracts from the central thesis which we should be arguing about. (I am not offering an opinion on the content of that discussion.)

kstenerud• 10 years ago

It's unfortunate, but we have a tendency to take some beliefs so deeply that they become a part of our core identity. Once this happens, validation of the idea becomes validation of ourselves. Attacks upon the idea become attacks upon ourselves.

Once someone has reached this point, logic simply cannot reach them. Successfully defeating their arguments will only strengthen their resolve (the backfire effect), because they're being driven by the amygdala, which only understands threat response. They will grab onto any argument, no matter how flimsy, and be completely unaware of how little sense it makes. Any further argument with them will at best do nothing, at worst make you look as much a fool as he.

The wise man learns to recognize this state and back off.

mooreds• 10 years ago

Try not to move the goalposts. If someone compromises, acknowledge that and thank them for it, rather than saying "I am glad you finally saw the light, but now we need to take it a step further".

Brinkmanship rarely serves to get anything done, and burns bridges when it does actually accomplish something.

profalseidol2• 10 years ago

Two words:

Socrates, Marx

danso• 10 years ago

As a relative newcomer to Python, I had no real interest in working with 2.x. But I appreciated Armin's critiques of 3.x -- it was really difficult finding thorough, thoughtful critiques that were focused on 3.x's flaws, not on the pain of porting/division of the community, which is of less concern to recent bandwagon jumpers like me. Most of all, I appreciate that his libraries -- Flask, flask-sqlalchemy, Lektor -- are 3.x compatible.

agumonkey• 10 years ago

This is a broader topic, it touches on how to deal with communication, debate, idea exchange, solution finding, society. I've seen the postures recently from supposedly right wings partisans that were mostly stuck up on old negative facts that don't apply today.

z3t4• 10 years ago

Web URL's are seriously underrated ... You can not go back in time and change what you told someone ... But if you have a blog that has an URL, you can actually update the content.

madsbuch• 10 years ago

We need to establish that all communication is the senders responsibility. In the case of CETA, bot parts are not senders. Only one part is. They have a clear obligations to let people know about updates and imprecision about their communications.

slavik81• 10 years ago

The bit on CETA was interesting. I was very disappointed when I heard CETA was signed last week because I strongly opposed the copyright term extension and anticircumvention clauses from the 2009 leaked draft. However, as far as I can tell, those are not in the final agreement. Opps.

sitkack• 10 years ago

I have to reference an Arthur C Clarke essay, "Hazards of Prophecy" with this quote

  > When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that
  > something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When
  > he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.

I have found that the wisest, smartest, most mature folks will re-evaluate their opinions in light of new information, and often change their mind.

Be careful about what you dislike

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