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Comment by smoll | Hacker News Reader

"ran by sales that need a checkbox for their presentation" is a total strawman. I think we both agree that being entirely sales- and short-term profit-driven is a terrible strategy, but it is possible to have an appropriately long-term outlook yet uncompromising about the unit economics when the success of your business is still an unknown. Being sales-focused is perhaps even a way to keep "what people want" in top of mind, and works especially well for certain products/industries.

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A strawman argument is when a person tries to disprove your point by attacking a presented argument that you did not present. I was not disproving anything you wrote. Eg. I didn't start with, "No that isn't correct, or actually I disagree, etc." I was just stating something I thought. Someone replying doesn't mean they want to argue or disagree. Personally, I feel people yelling strawman (especially when they don't know what it means) really ruins conversations.

Sorry to contribute to a diversion, but that’s not how I’ve understood the phrase (and to add argument-from-authority to the mix, I did grad studies in philosophy). I understand a strawman to be an argument presented by the author in a particularly weak way, so as to be easy to attack. The origin is straw figures set up by medieval soldiers to attack while training... they never fight back.

The argument doesn’t need to be put into your counterpart’s mouth to be a strawman, just artificially weak.

The typical straw man argument creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent's proposition through the covert replacement of it with a different proposition

^ striaght from Wikipedia

Like the poster above, that was my understanding of the term strawman. But upon rereading your post I realize I misread it, and that you're more saying to be careful so you don't fall into that trap (rather than saying "all companies who are sales-driven will necessarily end up falling into this trap"). My bad.

Yup! It’s a balance. It’s a hard fought balance...

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