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People: let me provide a little advice, please. If you click on the poster's name you can see their avg karma. You don't have to respond to just any dumb thing
by jessedhillon 14y ago
People: let me provide a little advice, please. If you click on the poster's name you can see their avg karma. You don't have to respond to just any dumb thing said out here, especially not when a person's comments are consistently voted as not useful -- e.g., photon137. That's why those scores are public.
When someone tries to cast a complicated political question like this in terms of yup and nope, just assume they are a dumbass and move along. And have faith that other reasonable people will do the same.
- greedo 14y ago1. Ad hominem isn't really a good argument for ignoring a poorly composed post. 2. If you think that avg karma is a good metric for measuring the usefulness of a comment, you might be confused about confirmation bias...
- jessedhillon 14y ago1. The argument isn't to ignore the comment because the author is dumb. The argument is to ignore the comment because the comment is dumb, prima facie. That is, a reasonable person who has thought about the issues at hand would easily conclude that the comment is not the product of serious effort or consideration. 2. I'm offering a heuristic, not correlation.
- greedo 14y agoBackpedaling when it's plain to see that you called him a dumbass doesn't work. You didn't attack his comment, you attacked his history of posts, using a flawed metric.
- sp332 14y agophoton137 and eli have the same average karma.
- jessedhillon 14y agoI don't know if I was mistaken then, but I thought it was < 2.0 when I looked previously.
- sp332 14y agoOK, interesting. I've averaged >10 karma per day for the last 3 years but my per-post average karma is pretty low. (Also "average" karma is calculated a bit strangely http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3148927 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3148927 )
- photon137 14y agoReally? You've to resort to name-calling rather than provide a logical argument as to why my statements would be wrong? Would you have called me a dumbass if we'd have met in real-life? Or would you have been more civil? Should I assume this representative of your behaviour towards people you haven't met face to face? Or do you think people have a "karma" number floating on top of their heads when they walk about?
- jessedhillon 14y agoFirst, I didn't say you're a dumbass. I said, assume that the person is a dumbass. In real life, yes I would assume that you're a dumbass if you had given this kind of argument. I also would have ignored you and moved on if I had heard you giving this kind of opinion. If pressed to give a response, I would have said it's not a serious argument. And the point is that people don't have to respond to everything that is said, and additionally, it's preferable that they don't as that leads to wasted efforts and irrelevant discussion. I was responding to the effort dedicated to your argument. Personally, how I determine whether or not an argument is dumb is if the first formulation of the argument does not consider and respond to the most obvious challenge. Yours does not consider for example, that a nobody would be making a radar dish if it weren't for politics, not does it consider that the whole history of technology has been driven largely by military (and thus, political) needs. That seems to be a very obvious hurdle to your argument, which as I understand it is basically a semantic game where the term "technology" is confined to "a technician and the breadboard or terminal in front of him/her." That you kicked off a semantic exchange with a flat out "nope" just seems smug, making it all the more amazing that the subsequent argument was so naive.
- jessedhillon 14y agoActually, let me just say this: I'm sorry I called you a dumbass. That was out of line, regardless of what I think about your argument or the way you presented it. I'm sorry.