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Comment by dre54673 | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed an increasing trend in people using phrases such as "it is trivial", "it is obvious", "it is self evident" to defend their arguments. I have yet to encounter a case where it made their argument better.

This might be off topic but it has become a pet peeve because I've even started to encounter it in real life. It is similar to starting a discussion with "if you disagree with me, you are stupid".

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This is the one tic that makes it grating for me to listen to anything spoken by Noam Chomsky (interviews, discussions, monologues etc. - his written material not so much), regardless of how persuasive I may find his arguments.

Add "you can look it up" to the list, a frequent Chomskyism which sounds like a casual declaration of confidence in his sources but in effect functions as a rhetorical control device, in that it passively asserts the listener is uninformed about the data being referred to, and that Chomsky presumes not just the authority of an expert, but arrogates the prerogative to assign homework to his listeners/interlocutors as well.

I would suggest that your perception of his use of the phrase is just your perception. I have listened to him often, and never found him to be arrogant. He is not passively asserting that the listener is uninformed. He is just saying that the sources are abundant and easily available. Not to mention, he often cites people whose work he is referring to. If you are familiar with the work he is referring to, he is clearly not assigning homework to you. If you are not familiar, I don't see how it is arrogant to ask someone to familiarize themselves with a given perspective on the subject matter where sources are easily available.

And to assume that he does not have authority as an expert in a myriad of topics seems to be giving him little credit.

"You can look it up" is doubly annoying because it shifts the burden of defending a source from he who references it to he who questions it. If one wants to use evidence to support his argument, he alone is responsible for keeping a copy of the source for reference.

IMO it's incoherent to say that a locally extreme and accelerating quality of society is a consequence of broad and fundamental forces that have been in place for millenia. Fair enough that "self-evident" is inappropriate because it presumes perspective of the reader, but it's the coherence that I'm referring to.

> IMO it's incoherent to say that a locally extreme and accelerating quality of society is a consequence of broad and fundamental forces that have been in place for millenia.

Um, why would it be incoherent? By all observations of perfectly coherent physics, the universe itself is currently the largest it has ever been and is growing at an ever faster pace. While perhaps your opinion is that such things should not be possible, it is clearly non-sensical to say that such a thing is incoherent when it actually seems to be the basis of the entire universe.

Fair enough, it’s possible, but I maintain: the model proposed would have been operative always and everywhere, so would we not expect this to be occurring all of the time? Would history not be very different, with no middle class (our middle class has only recently declined)? Wouldn’t extended periods of broad prosperity would be an aberration, rather than the broad stroke of history?

> "self-evident" is inappropriate because it presumes perspective of the reader

I don't think that is the reason for it being inappropriate. In my opinion, such phrases are a result intellectual laziness, of which I am also guilty at times.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident” - intellectually lazy, or a claim whose verification or refutation is left to the reader?

Well, maybe not lazy in the case of the declaration of independence, but it's definitely filler words.

Actually my reading says that the context there is stating the assumptions on the basis of which the rest of the document is based.

And I don't think "accelerating inequality we’re witnessing is not the natural inequality of competition and the power law, easily explained by simple arithmetic" as an axiom compares to "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".

As an aside, I believe the founders of the US did some great work, but let's not put their use of certain phrases on a pedestal. For example, I for one do not believe in a creator at all.

I'll add that I think your comment was interesting which is part of why I commented on it. My comment was meant to be generic and the only reason I commented here was that I saw this thread was popular and your comment was near the top. So it is not a critique of the information and it was a bit unfair to call you out. I am hoping others consider not using those phrases so often. I've noticed very smart people use it a lot, probably because these things are indeed trivial to them. But it does not help anyone understand their arguments. Many times just removing the statement makes the argument more understandable as there is less noise.

There's plenty of excess that can be removed or revised for simplicity and understanding in Empacts writing style that would would help in clarifying and simplifying their point...

It depends on how the word trivial is used. In mathematics, it is typically meant that the logical inference is a relatively straightforward application of the axioms. I would suppose for academics in other fields they could be using the word in this sense, however, at large, most people associate a strong negative connotation with the word trivial.

I agree and I also probably am an offender.

Would it help you to replace those phrases with, "Let's assume" because that's basically what they're saying, in a way.

I disagree. "Let's assume" leaves room for doubt, where "it is obvious" allows for none. I think most people who use these phrases are going for the latter.

An assumption is a prior, which necessarily means it can't be challenged, as in there is zero doubt about it, in the given/specific conversation.

Also, as a smell, when you say "I think most people" you're often just trying to mask your own biases.

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