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by temporaryi3 1661 days ago
Politeness > accuracy & honestly is a very common preference, but not mine.
2 comments

You can be honest and accurate without being needlessly nasty/mocking as the quote seems to be

Your sentiment is a really common and insidious one that way too many people use to feel smug and "rational" about being mean

People are allowed to be blunt and even curmudgeon, there's nothing wrong with that, it's just one of the many dispositions we can assume. That's diversity. This is a personal blog and it's totally reasonable the he takes this posture, it's slightly refreshing. If this were a public intellectual being taken seriously, or if he had a huge audience, then there would be more scrutiny, but otherwise he's just a guy with an odd way of communicating with a small soap-box on a small corner. It's fine.
> That's diversity.

Careful - you'll cause some heads to explode before they can retreat to their safe spaces...

Based.
> " Politeness > accuracy & honestly "

These concept are pretty much orthogonal. While I don't disagree that insistence on politeness can get in the way of good discourse, it is an all-to-common mistake to read or promote lack of politeness as a signal of honesty and accuracy - which manifestly isn't the case.

It's also often done in a lazy way. Which doesn't imply the thinking is also lazy, but there is a good correlation.

In practice they are far from orthogonal.
That doesn't match my experience at all, and I suspect it isn't unusual.