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xpeyesterday at 3:55 PM1 replyview on HN

Looking around at the comments, I have a birds-eye view. People are quite skilled at jumping to conclusions or assuming their POV is the only one. Consider this simplified scenario to illustrate:

    - X happened
    - Person P says "Ah, X happened."
    - Person Q interprets this in a particular way
        and says "Stop saying X is BAD!"
    - Person R, who already knows about X...
        (and indifferent to what others notice
         or might know or be interested in)
        ...says "(yawn)".
    - Person S narrowly looks at Person R and says
        "Oh, so you think Repugnant-X is ok?"
What a train wreck. Such failure modes are incredibly common. And preventable.* What a waste of the collective hours of attention and thinking we are spending here that we could be using somewhere else.

See also: the difference between positive and normative; charitable interpretations; not jumping to conclusions; not yucking someone else's yum

* So preventable that I am questioning the wisdom of spending time with any communication technology that doesn't actively address these failures. There is no point at blaming individuals when such failures are a near statistical certainty.


Replies

47282847yesterday at 4:24 PM

I agree with your analysis but try to not agree with your conclusion, purely for my own metal hygiene: I believe one can retrain the pattern matching of one’s brain for happier outcomes. If I let my brain judge this as a “failure“ (judgment “it is wrong“), I will either get sad about it (judgment “… and I can’t change it“) or angry (… and I can do something about it“). In cases such as this I prefer to accept it as is, so I try to rewrite my brain rule to consider it a necessary part of life (judgment “true/good/correct“).

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