Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by threethirtytwo 124 days ago
It’s an aspect of the truth. Tons of people don’t price match and tons of people do.

Whats nuts about humans is the quickness of judgement and extremity of statements. Think about this, the man who said that is not actually nuts. And you calling him “nuts” is actually the more ludicrously unrealistic statement.

2 comments

I also did err by making a blanket statement "no one price matches for protein bars", so GP was right to call it out.

I do understand and see that there are cases in which one's time preference could be such that it is sensible or necessary to price-match at that granularity even when buying a single unit. However even then there's still other constraints such as cost of transportation & reputation of vendor.

Even today you can often find protein bars or name-brand supplements on Amazon for a slightly lower price (including shipping) than supermarkets, but that comes with the risk of adulterated, expired, or tampered products that not everyone will accept for the sake of slightly lower prices.

>I also did err by making a blanket statement "no one price matches for protein bars", so GP was right to call it out.

This was clearly an error. GP is right to call it out, but not right to characterize it as nuts. It's obvious what you meant.

It's not that "nuts" to take the literal meaning of people's own words. Calling it "obvious" someone meant something rather than what they actually typed with their own fingers is pretty nuts though. It might be common for folks to misspeak (mistype), but that by no stretch of the imagination makes their actual meaning obvious. It's quite literally the opposite...
So you’re saying I’m nuts? Do you go to peoples faces and say that?

You’re not nuts. But you are trying to twist the logic to justify your own situation. The correct word to characterize this is “manipulative”.

Clearly, no one is nuts on this thread but some people are just dicks.

It’s completely normal for people to not be literal, and to also mistakenly say something.

I didn't say you are nuts, I said your statement is. The distinction should be "obvious" no?

Here's a hint though: normal is a myth.

Normal isn't a myth. The mistake people make is taking the mode as normal, or worse mistaking their own experience as normal. But humans generally do tend to have a range of common behaviors that a significant percentage of people fit into. And you probably can even predict it to a reasonable degree, if you have some other metadata to correlate which sub-group they might correspond to.

Normal in the sense of "you can model a distribution of human behavioral processes or outcomes" that encompasses, say, 95% of humans in a given culture or geography is very much a thing you can do. And I'd go as far as to say a large chunk of the mental bandwidth of the average person is running those simulation models just to operate in a multi-human-agent world.

(If you want to say we observe bimodal or other multi-peaked distributions in practices rather than "normal" ones, I will strongly agree, but that usually isn't the objection when people say "normal is a myth")

They said "no one". Not even "most", let alone "half" or "some". Those are their words.

To live in a country where tens of millions of people have food insecurity, 50 million rely on food stamps, and the median income is 40,000 while the median rent is 1,700 (20,000/year) and claim no one has to watch their grocery bill to their own inconvenience would be utterly disconnected from the reality of the survival of half of their countrymen.

Anyway, the irony is not lost that you simultaneously advocate for the parent being interpreted non-literally, by intent, but my colloquial, common use of the word "nuts" is "unacceptable".

>To live in a country where tens of millions of people have food insecurity, 50 million rely on food stamps, and the median income is 40,000 while the median rent is 1,700 (20,000/year) and claim no one has to watch their grocery bill to their own inconvenience would be utterly disconnected from the reality of the survival of half of their countrymen.

Stop turning this into some kind of holier than thou angle. He knows, you know we all know.

>Anyway, the irony is not lost that you simultaneously advocate for the parent being interpreted non-literally, by intent, but my colloquial, common use of the word "nuts" is "unacceptable".

It is, because it's a targetted attack. Let me put it this way, would you say what you said to someones face? Your best friend? You mother? or father and call them nuts because they said something that was off? Would you go on some holier than thou lecture on the amount of people relying on food stamps? You would? Then please continue.

> it's a targetted attack

What are we, children? You're acting like I insulted their mother and called the police.

> would you say what you said to someones face?

Yes, of course I would. I have. "That's nuts" or "it's nuts" is such a basic, inoffensive phrase and has no bite.

I've also said "incredulous" and "absurd" and "crazy" and a myriad of other adjectives. I've also had my arguments called those things - correctly. Maybe we keep different types of company, but when I'm having an argument/debate with friends or family, they're not so delicate we can't call each other out when one of us is being ridiculous.

> Would you go on some holier than thou lecture on the amount of people relying on food stamps?

Damn, objective facts and counterpoints related directly to the conversation are holier than thou now? I guess I forgot that when people say things diametrically opposed to basic reality, we're all supposed to just ignore it and let it go.

After all, we wouldn't want to be seen as a loon by a random guy on the internet, offended on someone else's behalf over a one syllable word that wasn't even directed at any individual, but an idea.

I mean, heck, that actually sounds kinda nuts.