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by npteljes 1263 days ago
>No self-censorship. You don't have to cater to anybody's liking of whatever your thoughts are. You don't need to win anybody's approval, and this allows for the brewing of fresh and pure thoughts.

This one is not true. There are internal mechanisms that filter thoughts, for example, what Freud called the Superego. People limit their inner thoughts in a variety of ways, for example, by developing morality, by which they judge their own thoughts too. They can dissociate, repress or project thoughts, both of which lead to some kind of self-censorship.
1 comments
rTX5CMRXIfFG 1263 days ago
And this is why the commenter has bulletpoint number 1. I think that what he really meant here is that while a myriad of factors orient our thinking in certain ways, thinking in private allows you to digress from those patterns and explore edge cases without another person’s judgment.

I frequent HN more than I should, and honestly, pretty much all comment trees follow the same pattern of moving goalposts or making pedantic arguments about how a statistical generalization is not true in all circumstances (duh). It’s all just people missing each other’s contexts (though admittedly some parent comments are really poorly expressed), which is why it’s funny when I come across the occasional “HN is superior and more intelligent than FB/reddit/Twitter” because, really, it isn’t. It’s the same garbage.

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npteljes 1263 days ago
I wrote about this because it was a revelation to me, and to an extent it still is, as I shine light on things in myself that were previously blind spots. I think it's very useful to know the limits of our ability to reflect, because it enables a higher quality of life, explains a good bunch of things around us, and makes us more resilient to manipulation.

Edit: Regarding the quality of comments, I think what you find is that comments are written by people. Different entities, all working to their own goal. I personally value HN the most, Reddit for fun, and Facebook and such are just cesspools really, if you look at high traffic, public discussions.

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