Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by viccis 15 hours ago
>All, without exception, point out that failure to address the emotional content is a bad idea and one of the reasons conversations become ineffective.

I am not sure how you could walk away from this comment thread and still think that's the case. Minus this digression which does argue about central concepts, the discussion about the original point is pretty close to the bottom of Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement.

I guess maybe a better question would be why you think pivoting a conversation about how open weight models are changing the industry into a conversation about whether a commenter was rude is a positive outcome? I would understand either ignoring him or answering his content, but I'm trying to understand how getting into back and forth about tone (back in my day we call that a flame war) is a good use of one's time.

>Do understand: Until about a decade ago, I thought like you. It caused me all kinds of headaches in the real world

I've found it to be quite the opposite! Not rankling at someone's emotionally charged language in real life has been incredibly useful, both for interactions with friends and strangers, but also with family. The people I know who are miserable about visiting family at Thanksgiving feel that way because they are unable to stop themselves from getting into conflicts because their relatives made some emotionally charged statement. There are also plenty of situations where people come in hot and angry, and you can turn it around by simply letting their tone slide and trying to help them. Happened all the time when I tutored compsci students. They'd come in angry and surly because they'd been beating their head against a problem or concept, and a little patience and forbearance went a long way towards improving their attitude.