Drop us a link my man.

Here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22372005

That was a straightforward observation that the writer of the original article was being pointlessly condescending and that they were alienating the people they were ostensibly trying to help.

In general, personally attacking your audience is not an effective writing technique.

He isn't talking to the people who already use encrypted email. He's talking to those who haven't made up their mind, yet, and since his goal is not to help anyone, but to increase adoption of his favorite solution, portraying the "competition" as hopeless nerds who lost contact with reality, might be an effective strategy.

> personally attacking your audience is not an effective writing technique

Absolutely true. So whenever a writer appears to be attacking their audience, you may have misidentified the audience.

Disagree with pointless. I'm just some guy but I've noticed encrypted email booming in popularity the last few years. Seems like every second nerd I know uses proton now.

Assuming these guys have been fighting the good fight the whole time, I can see why a hail mary switch in tone could be warranted. They're losing. Just staying the path and being agreeable and conciliatory would be what is pointless.

Even if there actually was some sort of ongoing email encryption crisis the snark was still pointless. That is not how you convince anyone of anything. That just expresses your anger.

In general, encrypting email is a good thing in the same way enabling TLS is a good thing. One can quibble about the details, but it is absurd and harmful to suggest it should not be done at all. So the snark seemed fairly unreasonable in this article as it doesn't addressing the root issue.

Exactly, I can agree with email being difficult to secure but for most of humanity that has to use it, any security improvements should be taken.

I personally think the viewpoint of the author was not only incorrecr but dangerous. Being condescending leads many to believe the author has such an authority over the subject that they can get away with it (which is never the case, being smart never gives you a right to look down on others,not that I am accusing the author of that).

To me, the condescending tone of the writing is masking inherent flaws in the argument being made. It's hard for anyone to challenge someone who obviously knows more than them when they appear to be obviously wrong, the condescending tone discourages discourse that would otherwise have lead all involves parties to a better understanding of the technical subject.

Good call. That's an excellent example of Paul's idea in action.

In calling that OP's style rude, respondents are really equivocating on the OP's central point. The OP is demonstrating Paul's 'Strength' concept by boldly asserting "all encrypted email is not fit for purpose" in an unequivocal way. The respondents seem to agree in part but disagree at the edges and want the OP to accept qualifiers.

It's just setting the tone of the discussion. Emotionally charged writing can be fun to read but can also be tiresome especially at length.

This is how I read it too. The problem was not the to-the-point critique, it's the author's emotions leaking into the writing.

This is not politics, it is a technical matter. Being correct is important not being loud or bold! The authors argument is infuriantingly wrong and dangerous even. If you disagree show me which part of the post describes any specific risk, any specific threat or a comparison showing the marvelous benefits of not encrypting email? I mean until this post I didn't think anyone hated email more than myself, but emotions should not triumph logic. I have seen first hand unencrypted email being used against users. The tone of the writing distracted from a calm technical discussion. A missed opportunity!

That essay was confusing because it says "encrypted email" without defining it, and the arguments are too strong; they could be used to argue that you shouldn't use email at all.

The essay isn't confusing in general just because you were confused when you read it. There isn't a single argument in that essay that depends on which flavor of encrypted email is used, so being specific about that would only weaken the points being made. The essay is also pretty clear in saying that email can be used for stuff that doesn't need to be kept secret, and that it's not fit for anything that does.

So is it saying that big email providers like GMail shouldn't opportunistically encrypt email in transit or at rest? Or that we should avoid email services that do?

Clearly not as there is no harm in it, the UI is unchanged, and it prevents certain attacks. You have to know that by "encrypted email" means "end-to-end encrypted email" to make any sense of the essay, otherwise the claim is too broad. It states the claim being defended poorly.

The article is clearly discussing E2E encryption between consumers of email and quite clearly uses PGP as a relevant example.

It even mentions hop-to-hop TLS of email as an obviously good idea (and presumably would likewise say at rest encryption is a good idea). None of this matters to the author's fundamental point. End to end encryption in email is silly and can't work because it isn't enforced at the protocol level.

You either haven't read the article or haven't understood it.

Edit: or disagree with its fundamental claim, but are talking about irrelevant issues instead for some reason.

It makes the following claims:

* encryption of email in transit is good because it does provide some security against things like dragnets.

* attempts to bolt end-to-end encryption on email, regardless of what tools you use, are insufficient to provide any real security against the kinds of threats you generally use end-to-end encryption against.

* If you need secure messaging, use Signal

* If you need to send documents securely, use Magic Wormhole or age

EDIT: and if you don't need secure messaging, then continue to use email

Not that I want to perpetuate a discussion about my post on this thread, but "use Signal" isn't the claim we make; "use any modern secure messenger, they are all better than email" is the claim we made.

Fair enough. I was attempting to be succinct, but the correction is appropriate (I believe you did say that Signal was "standard" and "best").

Btw, I did find your essay persuasive. In my search for a paid email provider (as an alternative to Gmail) I've decided not to go for one that uses E2E encrypted email. If I need secure messaging, I'll use Signal (or something similar) but for email I would rather go for features and ease of use than E2E encryption.

If you read the essay, the scenarios being considered and the type of security desired are pretty clear from the examples.

And then you realize that things like "providers opportunistically encrypting in transit or at rest" are largely irrelevant to having truly secure communications. You could have a conversation about "is Gmail less bad than Outlook.com" or whatever, but the whole point of the essay is that neither are meaningfully different if you have important secrets.

"Truly secure communications" isn't all that matters when discussing email security.

There are meaningful differences in the scale of access. It matters whether the NSA (or China or whoever) can just read everyone's email off the network, versus law enforcement sending requests to email providers where they are verified to be legal. It's the difference between lawful access and espionage.

Gmail.com uses HTTPS. Already encrypted. /s

To be very clear here (I missed this thread when it came up, sadly): I don't care that he's right (and I'm willing to buy that he's right!), I just believe he went about positioning his argument in the wrong way.

There is a very serious problem in any privacy/security discussion right now where, like it or not, the average person is poking their head in and wanting to learn more. There's a wealth of misinformation and paranoia strewn all over, and a tone like this is needlessly rude and condescending... which doesn't help provide a place where people can learn.

His entire point is that people ("technologists") need to stop recommending encrypted email, but the tone with which the article is written will drive away anybody who's actually recommending it. It's (IMO) effectively shouting into the void.

People seem to have this idea that I'm personally offended by what he wrote, when I couldn't care less (as I don't LARP, myself) - I genuinely (usually) like reading stuff from him, whether it's comments on here or elsewhere. ;P

I believe people arguing "politeness" are missing the point, though. What I most value is "dialectics" (not sure if that term is commonly used in English).

I. e. the willingness to entertain the best argument against your position in good faith. Two people who are excellent in doing so (and familiar to HN) would be Scott Alexander of slatestarcodex, and Matt Levine at Bloomberg.

(Someone rather bad at it, usually arguing against some caricature of what he imagines his opposition to be, and generally tending towards the "either unactionable, obvious, or wrong" end of the spectrum is, well, Paul Graham.)

Could you highlight a piece of writing by Matt that appealed to the part you alluded to:

  the willingness to entertain the best argument against
  your position in good faith.

For example someone quoted this article on Goldman Sachs in previous HN posts off late

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-05/goldma...

A clear and even-keeled accommodating of an argument - one very discordant from your own argument - is a rare find these days. People feign even-handedness but what seems a fair shake to them doesnt to others who happen to sit a little further, in the spectrum of opinions.

I want to see if Matt measures up.

There's a fine line. PG's essay is about usefulness. An essay is probably more useful if a point can be made just as strongly but in a way that a greater number of readers will receive it well.

It's one thing to argue exactly how much politeness is necessary and whether a specific article meets the standard or not, but it seems ridiculous to write off the entire concept of politeness. If someone wrote an article arguing a point and included tons of expletives at anyone who believed otherwise -- even if they're fully right and it's about an important safety issue -- then the article probably isn't going to be good at convincing anyone who came in already believing otherwise. The article will just be cheerleading and a pat on the back for people that believed the article's point to begin with. (Sometimes that's useful to energize people who already believed the article's point, but in that case people should be clear that's the point of the article, and not delude themselves into thinking the article is something they can send to people to win them over.)

I'm having trouble seeing how anything you said in this comment is relevant to anything I wrote in mine. So much so I am tempted to ask if you accidentally replied to the wrong person.

Among other things, I never "wrote off the entire concept of politeness", the article I was talking about didn't include a ton of expletives, I never commented on how convincing or not the article was and I don't remember the article itself doing so either.

That's actually what made the comments on politeness, and reaching more people that way, even weirder in context (which is why they stuck with me, funny how that works).

Your original comment is talking about how the politeness of some post didn't matter at all because it was right, and that critics were wrong to consider the politeness level because it was right. That's what I was arguing against. I mentioned a hypothetical post with a bunch of expletives as just a more extreme example of where it would be more obviously right to consider the politeness of a post.

I had actually previously read the post you linked to, and while I agreed with its point, I also agreed with the critics of its tone. I don't think that post would be convincing to people who didn't already agree with it. I think your original post here is overly dismissive to that criticism.

You are doing exactly the thing pg talks about in this essay -- making up a fictional version of what the other person said so that you can argue with it.

Am I really going wrong in interpreting this text as saying "it's wrong to criticize impoliteness if the author happens to be right"?

>Someone was telling the author that he would achieve more if he phrased his point in a more "polite" way, just because the certainty of the writing made the critic mad. Thankfully, the author was here in the comments responding, and he didn't budge.

>That interaction was very refreshing for that very reason: The author was right, knew he was right, someone didn't like that the author knew he was right, but the author remained steadfast.

I interpret that quote differently. To me, it says, “some people mistake being right for being impolite; don’t listen to those people.” I can imagine that someone could confuse being right for impoliteness would happen if the other person were right about an inconvenient truth.

I don’t think the quote says anything about ways of being impolite that don’t consist solely of being right, such as being impolite by swearing at someone.

I read it all again with your interpretation in mind and it looks like that one was intended.

I think I missed or skipped past that interpretation to another because I think luord's original framing was a very misleading/unuseful way of looking at a situation. The post he linked to (elsewhere in the thread, that prompted his original post) wasn't complaining just about someone's certainty, but their impoliteness while being so certain. It seems very misleading to reduce this down to being a complaint about being "too certain", rather than being about tone/politeness:

>Y'know, you can have all the valid points in the world and still come on a _bit_ too strong.

>I get the point the author is making re: LARPing, but this kind of attitude and tone is bordering (or, bluntly: is) condescending to anyone who doesn't know as much as you.

Sure, they phrase it as "coming on too strong" at first, but then they get specific and talk about the tone/attitude problems. They suggest things that could be changed other than the certainty level.

Policing tone is passive aggressive censorship & bias. It's as hideous a concept as 'culture appropriation' or the cult of positivity.

https://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977

"Tone policing" is a term made up by rude people in an attempt to excuse themselves for being rude. If someone in your group is yelling "fuck you" at another group, it's never going to help, and it's okay to point that out.

Someone likened the cult of positivity, to a trend in Silicon Valley employers that emerged over the past decade or so.

The trend of offering employees, unlimited & unrestricted vacation time.

Some people argued - and I fully agree with them - that while on paper the offered vacation time is unlimited, what it really meant in action was that your vacation time was unlimited,

* contingent on your readiness to accept any work load, shoved to your plate, equivalent or more in volume, that was displaced from the time you were gone.

* contingent on your willingness to accept blame for any "fires" that they had to put out in your absence, emerging from you not being there in your full working capacity.

and other stuff that went without saying and is implied in such matters.

So not even close to unlimited vacation in that sense.

This also meant employees feared taking anytime off because of all the implied risk.

Sometimes not even the amount of vacation they would take if they had clearly defined paid time off.

So it was a practice that was thoroughly hollow and false, even in intent.

Goes without saying, we need a lot less of this kind of faux positivity, masquerading in our lives.

I don’t get how that’s related to the OP’s comment.

The grand OP referred to concept of "cult of positivity."

  Policing tone is passive aggressive censorship & bias. 
  It's as hideous a concept as 'culture appropriation' or
  the cult of positivity.

It may have been voted down and dead at the time of your writing. Now its back alive.

The contrast between your argument and your tone is amusing.

Can't you call it microcensorship or something? Actual censorship is still very much a thing.

Censorship is a small subset of the techniques for shutting down discussion, and tone policing isn't in that subset at all. A diminutive doesn't help here.

Censorship doesn't always mean government censorship, or restriction of rights. Spam filters are censorship, for example.