[lame88]

“I mainly wanted to provoke people...” I hate this. I see it way too often. It’s either a cop-out to avoid having to own up to your arguments or its just poisonous rhetoric in the first place that contributes to partisan opinions, especially when the speaker has an air of authority that causes people to accept what they say at face value. It is directly antithetical to critical thinking.

[vidarh]

> It is directly antithetical to critical thinking.

I don't think it is.

Yes, it can get some people to just lash out in response.

But it also often forces people to think critically about how to convincingly justify their own standpoint to counter the provocation. This can be particularly useful when a viewpoint has "won" to the extent that people just blindly adopt it without understanding why.

It does have it's problems in that it is hard to predict, and there's a risk that measured reactions gets drowned out by shouting, so I'm not going to claim it's a great approach, but it has it's moments.

[lame88]

True, I can see how in this case, at that time, it could be effective. But ironically, there seems to be a similar dogma surrounding FP these days - speaking even as a fan of the paradigm, with a perspective tempered by experience. I can’t help but think that polarized viewpoints like this contribute to replacing the subject of the idealization rather than the underlying problem of idealizing itself, if only indirectly due to the combination of the arguments themselves and the sense of authority behind them, rather than the merit of the arguments alone.

[carlmr]

>This can be particularly useful when a viewpoint has "won" to the extent that people just blindly adopt it without understanding why.

Like the blind acceptance of OOP religion (not the message passing kind), since the 90s