[corresation]

Can we get "(for me)" added to the topic here?

Such a disclaimer (or rather "for some people") could be added to almost every lifehack / productivity tip / work habit / fitness technique / etc.

Work at home / in the office / in the cafe / for yourself / in a team / pair programming / standing desks / morning walks / coffee brewing / IDE tools / soylent / fasting / feasting / work-life balance / pretty much everything else.

People make absolute statements of universal truth to pitch their confidence and certainty, but really it seldom applies to more than a small subset.

[sanderjd]

(I think) This is similar to how you could preface nearly any statement you make anywhere with "I think". My instinct is to qualify everything and I often have to go back and delete the qualification because it pointlessly weakens every sentence. Either that or I notice it after I've already written and cringe at re-reading it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6457261). (I think) It is usually better to let your readers decide which statements are subjective and which are objective.

[ekianjo]

Well the problem of not mentioning "I think" is when you pretend that "X does not work" while 99% of your peers use it and do not seem to have a significant problem with it. Then the statement makes more sense if you phrase it "X does not work for me" or "You may like X but I don't", since it would then seem that you are a very unique person with a very unique problem.

If you had this kind of statement in other fields, like "Gaming on Consoles is broken", no doubt you'd get tons of people saying that this is wrong, because obviously millions of people have no problem with it.

Making such absolute statements is akin to trolling.

[kalid]

Agreed. There's often a pedantic need to point out some structural "flaw" in a statement and dismiss it, vs. making an effort to gain insight from its message.

"All Cretans are liars" - Epimenides

The logical robot concludes that because Epimenides was Cretan, the statement is a logical contradiction (hah, got you!) and nothing can be learned. A wiser man realizes he should be wary when in Crete.

[Karunamon]

Consider your example in the context of a HN topic.

    ^  All Cretans are liars
       7 points by Epimenides | 5 minutes ago | flag | 2 comments

Consider your audience: Programmers, startup entrepreneurs, in other words people who deal intimately with logic on a daily basis.

I'd expect this article to be flagged into oblivion, both by Cretans who are not liars, and by people peeved by the obviously incorrect absolute in the topic.

Doesn't it bug you at all when people engage in these kinds of fallacies to further a point, when they should damn well know better?

Would it have really have killed the submitter to reword as "Be wary in Crete" instead of knowingly posting something false? Would it really kill someone who's making an absolute statement, (a knowingly false one, mind) to reword it into something that still gets their point across, is actually correct, and won't lead to endless corrections in the comment thread?

To me, it shows a certain disdain for your reader when bait like this is written.

[dllthomas]

Well, you can make absolute statements without the implicit "for me" or "for some people" once you've done proper studies that support them...