> You don't think HN users are capable of realizing when they are engaged in mind/future reading, even if it was an explicit rule? You surely know the userbase better than me, but this seems unlikely.
> If you want nothing to change, so be it, but the idea that functionality changes cannot have an effect is very frustrating.
dang:
> Correct. Not only HN users but humans in general—I just don't think we work that way. The way we work is that we have our preference on X and then we propagate that preference through every edge in our mental graph of associations from X.
> One can imagine a user saying something like "Although I personally am against nuclear power, since this is the 'optimism' thread it isn't the best place for my counterarguments so I'll post them in the 'pessimism' thread instead". However, such people are somewhere between vanishingly rare and unicorns. Statistically they may as well not exist.
I can see how you might (correctly) take exception with a strict interpretation of "wholesale" in my comment, but is it not true that he is asserting at the very least that people cannot stop engaging in mind/future reading, and that functionality changes cannot have an effect (as well as other things if you read the discussion)?
And as for mind reading: how is it that dang has obtained accurate knowledge about the maximum potential of many thousands of people, in the future, under conditions that have not been tried?
What an incredibly weird exercise in mind-reading you're doing there. Really, an extraordinary mis-extrapolation from his actual statements in that thread. The irony, it burns.