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HackerNews has ruined my ability to read articles like this. I got one paragraph in, saw him call somebody an "idiot", and hit the back button. Comments here

• hga 16y ago
  Well ... one problem we have here is that Drexler style nanotech is something that attracts a lot of cranks or just people who don't get it (Drexler related sometime in the '80s or so the need to convince an acquaintance that it is incapable of transmuting the contents of an ICBM warhead in flight...). However, you mischaracterize the author: his only use of idiot as a root word is "It is idiotic to blame Drexler, Merkle, Freitas when they did not get the money" (plus a repeat of this thesis statement at the end). He's saying Locklin and company's behavior is idiotic, not that they are idiots, which is at least to me a very different thing. He then goes on to state why his thesis is self-evidently true (they've never got the funding to try out their ideas). I have no trouble with this style of argument.
  • jasonkester 16y ago
    I stand corrected. "Idiotic" appears in that paragraph, but the actual ad-hom attack is "since he is a flamebaiting troll". He makes no attempt to refute the person he attacks, and the only point of the attack seems to be that he's not linking to that person, because he doesn't like him. Why bring it up at all? Why not just write your article, refute any arguments that need refuting, and try to sound like somebody worth listening to? That sort of tone gets you voted down to -4 here in comments. It gets your article skipped too.