Re:Judge Rules Terrorism Watchlist Violates Constitutional R...
by dang on Thursday September 05, 2019 @12:44PM
(#20888456)
Calling someone disingenuous is a fancy way of calling them a liar, which is obviously attacking the person. It breaks another guideline, too, in the most literal way possible: "Assume good faith". You have no way of knowing that exabrial's view isn't sincerely held. Since most people's are, that ought to be the null hypothesis.
Disingenuousness isn't a behavior—something somebody says or does—but a state that one has to infer from such behavior. I think what may have happened is that you made that inference, or it made itself, so rapidly as to not to notice that you were making it [1]. I say that because you used this very interesting phrase:
> so prima facie absurd
On a non-siloed [2] internet forum like HN, one commonly runs into views that are more divergent from one's own than is usual in real life or on the siloed internet. Once the distance between some other view and our own exceeds a certain limit, this other view strikes us as more than just wrong. It seems absurd, impossible that anyone could hold it sincerely. This is not a pleasant experience; it feels a bit like being assaulted, and there is an immediate impulse to push back with a force that goes beyond just counterargument. This is natural and we've all felt it, but it's the moment that the HN guidelines are asking all of us to interrupt. For thoughtful conversation, people need to hold steady until that initial reflex passes and there's a chance for a slower, more reflective response [3] to kick in. This is a skill that can be learned, and one can think of HN as an experiment in having a large group of strangers work on learning it together.
Most views that seem absurd to us are not absurd in any universal way, but are legitimately held by people who we just normally don't talk about these things with because they're not in our strongly-connected component [4]. HN is an experiment to see whether we can have thoughtful conversation between components. It's easy to do that within one's component, but hard outside it. The question is whether we can do it enough for a richer overall graph to develop, or whether turbulence will shatter what few edges we do have and cause the whole thing to break down and become disjoint.
1. I don't mean to pick on you personally; this applies to all of us.
Disingenuousness isn't a behavior—something somebody says or does—but a state that one has to infer from such behavior. I think what may have happened is that you made that inference, or it made itself, so rapidly as to not to notice that you were making it [1]. I say that because you used this very interesting phrase:
> so prima facie absurd
On a non-siloed [2] internet forum like HN, one commonly runs into views that are more divergent from one's own than is usual in real life or on the siloed internet. Once the distance between some other view and our own exceeds a certain limit, this other view strikes us as more than just wrong. It seems absurd, impossible that anyone could hold it sincerely. This is not a pleasant experience; it feels a bit like being assaulted, and there is an immediate impulse to push back with a force that goes beyond just counterargument. This is natural and we've all felt it, but it's the moment that the HN guidelines are asking all of us to interrupt. For thoughtful conversation, people need to hold steady until that initial reflex passes and there's a chance for a slower, more reflective response [3] to kick in. This is a skill that can be learned, and one can think of HN as an experiment in having a large group of strangers work on learning it together.
Most views that seem absurd to us are not absurd in any universal way, but are legitimately held by people who we just normally don't talk about these things with because they're not in our strongly-connected component [4]. HN is an experiment to see whether we can have thoughtful conversation between components. It's easy to do that within one's component, but hard outside it. The question is whether we can do it enough for a richer overall graph to develop, or whether turbulence will shatter what few edges we do have and cause the whole thing to break down and become disjoint.
1. I don't mean to pick on you personally; this applies to all of us.
2. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
3. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
4. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20886068 in this thread for an example.