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But it's not a shallow dismissal. It gives a feedback of a particular shortcoming that makes the whole idea very misleading -- imagine a journalist making a con

But it's not a shallow dismissal. It gives a feedback of a particular shortcoming that makes the whole idea very misleading -- imagine a journalist making a conclusion that there's no way a baloon could fly over US territory based on such or similar simulation. It's possible to fix that shortcoming and make the idea useful.

dang 4y ago
It was shallow in the sense that it didn't explain why. When people post comments that simply dismiss what someone else has done without being explaining why or teaching the reader, that's what we mean by shallow dismissal. Both your comment and the GP's follow-up do contain a little more explanation—that's good—but even better would be to give more: walk us through what the issue is here, why it matters, and what an improvement would look like. If you just focus on what you don't like about something, how useless or dumb it is, that puts a nasty torque on conversation which is hard to get out of.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > It was shallow in the sense that it didn't explain why I was a passenger in a car en route to a funeral. I felt like the post was a little troublesome and I provided what context I could in the limited time I had to reply. I do wish I had said "deeply misleading" instead of "useless", though. Which-- deeply misleading is even worse than useless, unfortunately. > walk us through what the issue is here, why it matters, and what an improvement would look like. In this case, there's a state actor (China) deliberately conflating weather balloons and surveillance craft. Typical weather balloons drift freely and cannot maneuver; capable balloons that can control their altitude can maneuver far more freely than most people expect. "Narrative" may sound sinister, but we have a deliberate counterfactual being used in the furtherance of surveillance and geopolitical conflict. In turn, we have this "Spy Balloon Simulator - With real atmospheric data" that makes it pretty much impossible to control a balloon. It may be an accidental misstep, but it's at the very least a somewhat dangerous one.

dang 4y ago

It was shallow in the sense that it didn't explain why. When people post comments that simply dismiss what someone else has done without being explaining why or teaching the reader, that's what we mean by shallow dismissal. Both your comment and the GP's follow-up do contain a little more explanation—that's good—but even better would be to give more: walk us through what the issue is here, why it matters, and what an improvement would look like. If you just focus on what you don't like about something, how useless or dumb it is, that puts a nasty torque on conversation which is hard to get out of.

mlyle 4y ago
> It was shallow in the sense that it didn't explain why I was a passenger in a car en route to a funeral. I felt like the post was a little troublesome and I provided what context I could in the limited time I had to reply. I do wish I had said "deeply misleading" instead of "useless", though. Which-- deeply misleading is even worse than useless, unfortunately. > walk us through what the issue is here, why it matters, and what an improvement would look like. In this case, there's a state actor (China) deliberately conflating weather balloons and surveillance craft. Typical weather balloons drift freely and cannot maneuver; capable balloons that can control their altitude can maneuver far more freely than most people expect. "Narrative" may sound sinister, but we have a deliberate counterfactual being used in the furtherance of surveillance and geopolitical conflict. In turn, we have this "Spy Balloon Simulator - With real atmospheric data" that makes it pretty much impossible to control a balloon. It may be an accidental misstep, but it's at the very least a somewhat dangerous one.