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by matthewmacleod 1387 days ago
I'm genuinely getting pretty annoyed by this increasingly prevalent style of know-it-all neo-ludditism that manifests as middlebrow, pithy dismissals of entire technologies with obvious benefits.

If you have a viewpoint on the relative risks of these technologies, the I genuinely wish you'd use your time to talk productively about what you think the risks are to help others make an informed choice – instead of sarcastically assuming that anybody who doesn't have the exact same set of priorities as you is a fucking idiot. It's making the quality of discussion on this site totally unbearable.

1 comments

Well, asbestos has obvious benefits. It's an amazing, cheap way to insulate things, and it's very resistant to fire.

We knew abestos was dangerous even before the WW2, and kept using it because it was so convenient.

That's the thing about know-it-all neo-ludditism pithy dismissals. They started 30 years ago witha much more soft tone. But since not only people ignored the warnings, but eventually even came to insult the people performing said warning (even after the warning proved to be true), the same people turned kinda sarcarstics.

Poor you to have to read a rational argument in a comment using history and logic to underline our societies shit where they eat and ignore the asymetry of risk.

Sacarstic people are mean and don't understand how to have quality discussions. They should always stay perfectly calm and neutral while they feel like half of the population is setting us up for troubles.

>Poor you to have to read a rational argument in a comment using history and logic

Your comment above didn't actually contain any such thing. It contained a vestigial semblance of them too trivialised by vitriol to land a persuasive point.

>Sacarstic people are mean and don't understand how to have quality discussions.

Not always for sure, but yes that's often the case.

Oh but this comment is part of a thread. Because comments are in a context. Like this one, from 6 hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32763171