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Have you met Richard? What you're saying is so far off the mark it's not even offensive, it's just funny. :D I think he's just making an effective argument.
by jfarmer 13y ago
Have you met Richard? What you're saying is so far off the mark it's not even offensive, it's just funny. :D
I think he's just making an effective argument. If Richard's position is "you should always pay severance" and he wants to convince everyone of that, he needs to beat the other side's best argument. That best argument is something like "Capital is scarce in a startup and this employee was fired because they were incompetent. You're telling me that some of that capital should go towards paying a severance for someone I regret hiring in the first place?"
He's trying to convince everyone, not just "most people" who "have empathy for the people they fire." Those folks don't need much convincing, if any, and even they might have a hard time paying severance when they fire someone who made their blood boil.
If you ought to pay severance in the worst scenario imaginable then you ought to pay severance in every scenario. Case closed.
- rhizome 13y agoEh, I can see where you get that, but the level of support for that conclusion does not rise to "effective argument."
- jfarmer 13y agoI see no evidence to the contrary, either. As long as we're drawing conclusions about the author's personality and intentions, why not be charitable? Otherwise, we should just keep our commentary to the argument as written rather than what's going on in the author's head.
- rhizome 13y agoI see no evidence to the contrary Which would be proving a negative. Charitability has nothing to do with an effective argument, which depends on actual words engaging the actual subject at hand. If you have to clarify by saying "I was only talking about some people," it wasn't an effective argument, because you left out the entire scope of the subject you're describing.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jfarmer 13y agoYeah, on second thought, you're right. The author is probably just a dick. Screw him.
- rhizome 13y agoRight, because the only two options are to accept his argument or think he's a dick.
- jfarmer 13y agoI was responding to the original commenter's claim that Richard was a sociopath by painting a plausible alternative. I was not trying to muster a case for that alternative, except to point out one would just as justified in jumping to my "effective argument" conclusion as one would be in jumping to the "sociopath" conclusion. And, hey, as long as we're jumping to conclusions, why not give the author the benefit of the doubt? If you misunderstood what I was doing, well, c'est la vie. I'm not actually interested in convincing you so much as not having a friend of mine called a sociopath in public without sticking up for him. ;)