Hacker News Reader

Comment by Empact | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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...

> 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?

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com