| HN Mirror

If it is clear to you that it is simplistic, why do you publish it anyway?

geocrasher 279 days ago

I only mentioned that I know it's simplistic so that the pedants would not attack my character for being so naive. But, I guess it takes more than that to keep the pedants from finding fault.

I did not point to naïvete. I asked why, if you see the thing has gravity, you would be treating it as just a "oh well no great loss".

Because humans have the capacity to compartmentalize and reason about things despite their gravitas, provided the opportunity and capability to do so.

For example, yes, the given family friend dying is very heartbreaking, but we might discuss it separately that he was basically a living corpse for the past several years already as-is, and so their family is probably at least going to be able to move on now, even if they don't feel that way themselves at the moment for understandable reasons. We might also be very wrong about that, and this may well be very rude to say out loud, and then incredibly embarrassing if found false later. Such is life.

There's no such distinction here however, because it's the internet, it's a public forum, so everyone sees everything. The best next option then is to communicate the distinction and trust that people understand the intent. We both did in our own ways. You did not care either time, and/or was not willing/able to treat it as intended. That's the risk we took. A lot more people did than did not reassuringly though - maybe that should tell you something about this.

Why shouldn't they?

"Hunger in Abysland" // "Ah, right, I just started a diet" // "Immediately I thought it funny to remember that once we also had little to eat"

Appropriateness.

Right. Well, I think they were being perfectly appropriate and that your comparison is asinine: starvation is about as indisputably bad as one can think of, whereas missing out on social media really isn't. Almost as if highlighting that was my damn point, which they then found appreciable, and you clearly didn't.

Coincidentally related is why I withdrew myself from most online community spaces. Pretty much the only alternative to constantly and pointlessly arguing, or being reliant on content sorting and filtering. The latter two of which will constantly receive some (but on occasion a lot?) of commentary about being biased in some way, automatically or manually (how would one know?), fairly or unfairly (according to who?), and repressing dissent or giving a voice (usually both, but never to satisfaction).

> starvation is about as indisputably bad as one can think of, whereas missing out on social media really isn't

"Hunger" (etc.) was used to try and frame the lack of appropriateness - in the logic, not comparing earthquakes and floods; not perfect, not meant to be perfect. "Missing out on social media" is not representative of the facts: a coercion over a population, not excluding the possibility of attempted population control, not excluding the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war, and a coercion that tries to stop the access to a formerly unbelievable wealth of information (YouTube is in there).

So, yes, I call it serious. And when the above is matched by a jump like "oh I am also doing without" - that is inappropriate.

> not perfect, not meant to be perfect

Nor was what we were going for, yet your scrutiny didn't escape us.

> "Missing out on social media" is not representative of the facts

It is quite literally the bare fact itself as per the title and the article's contents.

> a coercion over a population

This is a characterization. I could remark that it was in defense of a population, and it would hold the same weight: it's worthless.

> the possibility of attempted population control

Just like the previous, this too is a matter of characterization. I can choose to look through an uncountable number of philosophical lenses, and what I'll see will conform to each. If I look at it through a lens of ethnic tension somehow, I'll see ethnic tension or a lack of it. If I look at it through a lens of globalism vs protectionism, I'll see either one of that. If I look at it through... you get the idea.

The cherry on top to this is the phrasing "the possibility of". Lots of things are possible indeed, kind of at any point in time.

> the possibility of an inability to manage the wave of informational war

Last time I checked, social media were tools of mass telecommunication. I think it's fairly agreeable that if one cuts themselves off of such platforms, then the cheap and highly scalable tools of modern informational warfare will become ineffective, and the old ones will need a return. Did you entertain gauging the possibility of that? Why not?

> a coercion that tries to stop the access to a formerly unbelievable wealth of information (YouTube is in there). So, yes, I call it serious.

Was I trying to argue there's no merit to these platforms or something? Did I ever question its seriousness?

You seemingly rattled off on the idea - which was complete headcanon on your side - that my "goal" is to make light of this, to downplay its seriousness, or to deny the merits of these platforms' existence. But that was in fact not the goal - it was the predictable side effect, because turns out, there's lots of downsides to these platforms, which I felt was rarely ever brought up in threads like this. The goal then was to remedy this strange miss. To finally break the unending cycle of blackboard-scratching tier perpetual unproductive whinging about """free speech""" and censorship that a HN thread about an issue like this would normally receive. And to that end, I was successful. There's still a lot of that, with the usual end results, but for once that's not all the thread is about.

> And when the above is matched by a jump like "oh I am also doing without" - that is inappropriate.

Wake-up calls are rarely gentle. Perhaps it's not my behavior that's odd, but instead your frame of mind on this is. I cannot tell you.

geocrasher 279 days ago

My comment was not about suffering, war, starvation, or anything of the like. You've clearly added your own context and then judged me for it. Great job.

The context I added was that of the facts I construed from the shreds of events and opinions I met. They are not there to be compared to "starvation" as a parameter with scalars of "what is worse": they are in the same cone of "something bad happening", in front of which simplistic dismissals are puzzling.

geocrasher 279 days ago

Since you added context to my comment that I didn't ask for, I'm going to add some to yours that you didn't ask for.

Because of an unknown metabolic disorder, I watched my wife starve to death. She literally died from malnutrition. It was the most awful ugly thing I've ever seen.

You have no idea what you're talking about or who you're talking to.

mdp2021 278 days ago

Sorry, but I suppose there is an ugly thing I should add, geocrasher.

It remains very unfortunate that I came to pick a simile about hunger not knowing about your past - to signify in perching_aix's case that abstincence better be voluntary and in yours that loss of something achieved remains a bad thing.

The ugly thing: about "having no idea what I'm talking about",

we are both in this world together - and the rest. We all have seen hell and misery, in the different forms that chance and the evolution of facts inflicted us. I felt immediate participation to your story. Do not suppose, for good or bad, that you are an exception.

We all have seen and lived the most horrible things.

I am terribly sorry to hear that, geocrasher.

Of course the simile I found to try and show that "look, this branch does not seem appropriate for the context" was random. I thought of a few, in time constraints, and the one that looked the best of the bunch happened to be the one of "starvation". It could have anything - surely you understand.

> You have no idea what you're talking about or who you're talking to

But I was talking of the matter in context, and the simile, as said, was logic, not comparative.