Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vcavallo 1788 days ago
What's your point?

I'm saying that SirensOfTitan's comment adds nothing that isn't already present in the linked video (and he freely admits that he didn't watch it) and therefore really serves no purpose (other than to boast, "I know things about this topic already _and_ I don't even need to watch the video".)

Your defense of SirensOfTitan's comment's supposed utility is to make your own tangential point which does nothing to argue that the original comment is valuable.

So I maintain: What was the point of SiresOfTitan's comment?

1 comments

The point is when someone has already established themselves as an idiot its pretty easy to dismiss them. The utility SirensOfTitan's comment is informing us that the person in question has already established himself to be an idiot. It is therefore relevant because anything the video says is already suspect, it can easily be dismissed. You don't have to go far in the video to establish this as the first statement in the video is a balance fallacy.
So if I declare you to be an idiot nobody ever has to listen to anything you have to say in the future?

Aside from the obvious problems of how to determine “established oneself as an idiot”, what implications does this have for the concept of redemption?

> What implications does this have for the concept of redemption?

People don't change without an impetus to change. Since the majority of the complaints that Sanger has had with wikipedia can be equated to the false balance logical fallacy and Sanger opens the video with the false balance logical fallacy then Sanger has continued to establish that he is in fact an idiot. Pretty easy to dismiss. You can declare me to be an idiot. You clearly don't care what anyone has to say, you seem to have an agenda, I don't know what it is or why you're so hot under the collar about this but I could call you an idiot as well and dismiss what you have to say. As a matter of fact...