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by y-c-o-m-b 1957 days ago
> This is a reductionist argument stating that everything you learn in college is just a piece of paper. It's a bad faith argument. If you believe it, you weren't convinced and if you don't believe it, you still weren't convinced. The whole intent was to be polarizing.

Don't you think you're being too literal here? You're honing in on something that is ordinarily irrelevant. The point was to convey how employers falsely believe people with a degree are more skilled than those without. Once again, focused on the author and these arbitrary granular issues than the broader subject...

> This is a clear example of hypocrisy and an opinion that is regurgitated over and over in the article. The man being discussed never asserted that his son was better than everyone else, that was the author's excessive bias. Believe it or not, many fathers are proud of their children's' achievements. The whole argument being peddled is that nothing of value was gained and that this man needed to be put in his place by the author because she's better than his son.

Not at all how I read it. That's extrapolating a lot from a simple paragraph. Funny, I think you're asserting your own excessive bias here; especially if you take in your last sentence. That's really stretching the intent. All of which is understandable if you're reading this while you're pissed off or offended. Have you tried reading it from a neutral perspective?

> The tone that the author set for the article in the very beginning is that people are supposed to be enraged, like the author is, that employers want some indication that the candidate is a good quality candidate. In the current system, that often means getting a college degree. Employers want the closest thing they can get to a guarantee that the candidate knows something. Without proposing an alternative this was just a poorly supported rant by the author. Your devil's advocate that I must stimulate discussion because the author did not is again, fallacious.

It's rich how you call everything fallacious when it doesn't fit your poorly understood narrative of what the author is saying. The author was enraged by the comment by the man because of the underlying idea of discrimination against those without a degree. If this subject was about skin color, the outrage would be understandable, yes? That's the entire point of this article. Case in point: the fact that you think a discussion is beneath you only validates an elitist attitude.

> The takeaway was supposed to be that all people with college degrees got no value because the author had no nuance.

Yet that's not what the takeaway was supposed to be after-all. The takeaway was supposed to be about discrimination against those without degrees, not discrimination on those with degrees as you've apparently taken it.

> You're asserting that I am assessing that the author is inferior because she doesn't have a college degree? I actually don't know whether the author has a college degree, but don't find the points particularly convincing either way.

Here-in lies the problem with everything you've said. It's clear from my comment that's not at all what I was asserting. Just like you did with the author, you're fabricating these false narratives and extrapolating information from thin air. I mentioned nothing of her having a college degree. Go read that quote again. What I said is you're imposing some arbitrary set of rules on the author and using it to brush away the vast amounts of effort she put into the article. I'm not asking you to invent anything, you're doing that on your own already. I'm asking you to read the article from a neutral point of view instead of brushing it off as fallacious or arguing semantics.

The fact that you don't think this article is worthy of discussion and yet you engaged in all this effort debating me is amusing.

1 comments

To be clear, you think that going out of your way to go on a self-righteous tirade against a guy because he's proud of his kid graduating college is on par with racism? You're being intentionally obtuse and it's readily apparent by the fact that you have to attack me and "my understanding." Your critiques ignore all of the arguments that I made about the substance of the article in favor of attacks. You complain that we can't have discussions and yet you're the person who makes it so we can't have discussions.

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html