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by jbooth 5348 days ago
I'd say it's incumbent on Cheez to make a less simplistic argument if he doesn't want to be subject to reductio ab adsurdum.

If his argument is a silly one-liner that's demonstrably refuted with a pointer to Somalia as an example of "less government", it's not javek's responsibility to fill in the blanks for him.
2 comments
yummyfajitas 5348 days ago
Similarly, if anyone advocates more test coverage, we should automatically assume they want 100% quickcheck-like coverage testing all possible occurrences including power outages, network cables being unplugged, etc. What nonsense! How could anyone get work done in a place like that?

Or, to use a political example, if anyone advocates more regulation of X, it's incumbent on them to explicitly explain they aren't actually advocating Stalism.

This gives us an easy way to dismiss all views we disagree with without even having to consider the actual proposal.

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jbooth 5348 days ago
"More test coverage" isn't actionable, and if you try to act on it then you'll make stupid tests that don't help, waste effort, and hinder later refactoring efforts. "I'm worried about the foo module, do we have test coverage for this type of failure" is reasonable.

And I'd similarly pile on anyone who asked for quote "more regulation" without specifying so much as an industry and type of behavior to be regulated.

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yummyfajitas 5348 days ago
In the context of a conversation about module foo and all the KeyError exceptions it's raising, a charitable person would interpret "more test coverage" as "write tests that look for KeyError's in module foo." An uncharitable person would make the leap I described in my previous post.

Note to self: don't hire pedantic employees who interpret my statements in the most unreasonable way possible just to prove a point.

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burgerbrain 5348 days ago
If I said I wanted to raise taxes, would you start posting bullshit about what would happen if all property belonged to the government?

Of course not, because you wouldn't be trying to set up a strawman to attack if I said that.

"it's incumbent on Cheez to make a less simplistic argument if he doesn't want to be subject to reductio ab adsurdum."

Bullshit. Bullshit in any circumstance.

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