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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

The GP was, and now I am, objecting to your speaking "brutal truth" and then acting like the brutality of it is a virtue. As if it's courageous to be mean to people. And then talking about being unable to understand the world, it being like sticking your head in the sand, without it! .. It's not 'euphemism' to speak respectfully about people. The point is less brutality, not less truth.

I would never advocate for being mean. There’s no warm and fuzzy way to put it, that some people are taken advantage of because of their low intelligence. I was responding to someone who said that the suggestion was “insulting”.

You simply could have said "easily taken advantage of", omitting the needless offensive words; you were not in a discussion where it was necessary to provide a root cause diagnosis for why people are easily taken advantage of, nor is your diagnosis especially useful, since the overlap between credulousness and low intelligence is significant but not perfect.

More importantly, in that conversational circumstance, why double down on it? Wasn't your point that we should acknowledge fallibility and use it as a policy premise? Why get off track?

In my opinion, we could all use a little more "brutal truth" in our life.

Yes, the words "dumb" and "ignorant" are harsh, but so is truth. Marcoperaza wouldn't use those words to insult them to their face, and neither would I, but it's important to be able to talk about things honestly.

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