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I fully understand that networking protocols are truly in the center of the main vein of subjects interesting to the community of Hacker News. But can we at le

by tmuir 10y ago

I fully understand that networking protocols are truly in the center of the main vein of subjects interesting to the community of Hacker News. But can we at least admit to ourselves that being endlessly enamored with novelty and lack of precedence, telegraphs our deepest motivations to people who might have ulterior motives, allowing them to easily gain our attention and compliance by simply pointing out to us that the world is filled with irony, and novelty, and unprecedented phenomena? If you remove "DCCP", "socket", and "type" from this headline, you are left with the universal format of a clickbait headline. If DCCP is truly a networking protocol worthy of the attention of the readers of Hacker News, just imagine how much more convincing of an argument there is to be made, based on its true underlying merits. I am perfectly willing to admit that this protocol may in fact be the best networking protocol by every objective measure available. But the fact that someone who knows more than I do about it, believes that their best opening bid in the negotiation that is convincing me of its merits, is a logical fallacy, inevitably leads me to question their entire premise. If we can all agree that we don't like clickbait headlines in the general sense, then lets be even more vigilant against clickbait headlines that we are the least able to resist. Edit: added a couple of missing words that were lost on the way from my brain to my fingers.

unmole 10y ago
I think you're reading a little too much into it. The title, like the conclusion, was supposed to a joke about how DCCP is obscure and therefore hipster-esque. The intention of the article wasn't so much as to make the case for the merits of DCCP but to describe some of the aspects of networking technology that would be unfamiliar to most people, including the much of the Hacker News community. I really don't see how describing something as obscure is logically fallacious. While I will admit that I did choose the title to be alluring, I do not think it is provocative, sensationalising or misleading in any way to be called clickbait.
- tmuir 10y ago
  The inherent nature of employing logical fallacies is that the employer is pointing to a correlation, in the hope that they can convince you of causation. Causation is like a perfect happy path through a software application, whereas any single correlation is a singular path through the application. Out of all possible paths through a software application, vast amounts of those paths result in failure, whereas far fewer paths result in success. We can all agree that performing tests on the happy path is important, but inferior to 100% code coverage, if our eventual goal is to harden our software against failure, both malicious and accidental. The point I'm driving at is not that we should all become perfectly logical at every moment of our life, because the logical, bitter end of that is a world of sociopaths, completely devoid of any humanity, emotion, love, and all of the other things we can all agree are just as important as logic and reason. My point is that if we are in complete consensus about clickbait titles, with respect to subjects that we don't find interesting, yet are willing and able to defend clickbait titles when they happen to bait us in to clicking them, that is the perfect marriage of our ignorance and arrogance. If we can point out to less informed management that their desire to reduce friction along the happy path of software is _precisely_ what increases attack surfaces, why can't we see that same flaw in ourselves? The answer is not to rush to one extreme to prevent the other. The answer is to strike balance.
- sctb 10y ago
  We've updated the submission title to a representative portion of the sub-title. Your explanation is appreciated and we're not trying to be draconian about this, but we nearly always update titles when there are clickbait elements (singularity: "The X that ...", addressing the reader: "you") and complaints in the thread.
  - tmuir 10y ago
    Thank you. I can see now that my argument is largely equivalent to beating people over the head with logic, and simply shouting "logic!". My central point is that clickbait titles beat people over the head with what they were already predisposed to hear, which is bad. But my continued explanation in and of itself is the same insidious tactic. Thanks for your patience with me, and with all of us.
- tmuir 10y ago
  I will also give you the benefit of the doubt in this case. I guess I've been having some profound realizations as of late how the most important teenager in my life is utterly consumed by memes, and my fellow Americans are consumed by political news, and from where I stand, I am frustrated that what is so obvious to me is so difficult to explain to the entertained/frightened/insert emotional state here. I don't mean to call you out as the most extreme example of my point, nor do I mean to show that this is the first time I am seeing this. But I see this optimization toward 8 lane highways we construct from content creators towards our brains, for the purposes of being entertained while exerting the least amount of effort necessary, as a giant imbalance toward the content creators, at the expense of the content consumers.
webmaven 10y ago
> just imagine how much more convincing of an argument there is to be made, based on its true underlying merits Leaving aside the merits of your claim concerning the title containing a logical fallacy, HN's 80-character limit on the length of a submission's title can, at times, make this approach a bit difficult in practice.
- acjohnson55 10y ago
  Also, the policy of greatly preferring original titles.

by tmuir 10y ago

unmole 10y ago

I think you're reading a little too much into it. The title, like the conclusion, was supposed to a joke about how DCCP is obscure and therefore hipster-esque. The intention of the article wasn't so much as to make the case for the merits of DCCP but to describe some of the aspects of networking technology that would be unfamiliar to most people, including the much of the Hacker News community. I really don't see how describing something as obscure is logically fallacious. While I will admit that I did choose the title to be alluring, I do not think it is provocative, sensationalising or misleading in any way to be called clickbait.

tmuir 10y ago
The inherent nature of employing logical fallacies is that the employer is pointing to a correlation, in the hope that they can convince you of causation. Causation is like a perfect happy path through a software application, whereas any single correlation is a singular path through the application. Out of all possible paths through a software application, vast amounts of those paths result in failure, whereas far fewer paths result in success. We can all agree that performing tests on the happy path is important, but inferior to 100% code coverage, if our eventual goal is to harden our software against failure, both malicious and accidental. The point I'm driving at is not that we should all become perfectly logical at every moment of our life, because the logical, bitter end of that is a world of sociopaths, completely devoid of any humanity, emotion, love, and all of the other things we can all agree are just as important as logic and reason. My point is that if we are in complete consensus about clickbait titles, with respect to subjects that we don't find interesting, yet are willing and able to defend clickbait titles when they happen to bait us in to clicking them, that is the perfect marriage of our ignorance and arrogance. If we can point out to less informed management that their desire to reduce friction along the happy path of software is _precisely_ what increases attack surfaces, why can't we see that same flaw in ourselves? The answer is not to rush to one extreme to prevent the other. The answer is to strike balance.
sctb 10y ago
We've updated the submission title to a representative portion of the sub-title. Your explanation is appreciated and we're not trying to be draconian about this, but we nearly always update titles when there are clickbait elements (singularity: "The X that ...", addressing the reader: "you") and complaints in the thread.
- tmuir 10y ago
  Thank you. I can see now that my argument is largely equivalent to beating people over the head with logic, and simply shouting "logic!". My central point is that clickbait titles beat people over the head with what they were already predisposed to hear, which is bad. But my continued explanation in and of itself is the same insidious tactic. Thanks for your patience with me, and with all of us.
tmuir 10y ago
I will also give you the benefit of the doubt in this case. I guess I've been having some profound realizations as of late how the most important teenager in my life is utterly consumed by memes, and my fellow Americans are consumed by political news, and from where I stand, I am frustrated that what is so obvious to me is so difficult to explain to the entertained/frightened/insert emotional state here. I don't mean to call you out as the most extreme example of my point, nor do I mean to show that this is the first time I am seeing this. But I see this optimization toward 8 lane highways we construct from content creators towards our brains, for the purposes of being entertained while exerting the least amount of effort necessary, as a giant imbalance toward the content creators, at the expense of the content consumers.

webmaven 10y ago

> just imagine how much more convincing of an argument there is to be made, based on its true underlying merits Leaving aside the merits of your claim concerning the title containing a logical fallacy, HN's 80-character limit on the length of a submission's title can, at times, make this approach a bit difficult in practice.

acjohnson55 10y ago
Also, the policy of greatly preferring original titles.