Hacker News Reader

Comment by yoo1I | Hacker News Reader

> Howard Abramson is a freelance writer who was an executive at American Trucking Associations from 1998 to 2014.

So the same guy who wrote the piece has for 16 years been directly responsible for the lobbying he is decrying. Anyone know what's going on there?

View on HN

Maybe he's realized the inevitability of the situation and decided to jump ship. Can't completely blame him, but makes it difficult to take his opinions seriously.

Be very careful with that line of thinking. It amounts to 'he's a bad person, so we should punish him by assigning him low status, and part of that is to refuse to take his opinion seriously.' It's instinctively appealing, but it's also an area where human instinct is terribly wrong.

A better way to react would be 'it looks like he's done bad things, so when he talks about those bad things, he knows what he's talking about and we should take his opinion very seriously. Whether he should be punished is a separate question, but if so, that punishment should take a form that doesn't cripple our ability to stop the other people who are continuing to do those bad things.'

Fair enough. Though again, I do sincerely sympathize with him. If my assumption is true, he did what he did for survival of a form. Fine in my book.

In fact, I trust someone with deep experience in a topic more than an outsider.

Do you mean 1. you trust them to be more knowledgeable or 2. you trust them to be less serving than an outsider?

I don't think anyone is arguing with 1.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com