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Comment by omar_a1 | Hacker News Reader

Because it's common sense that an invasive medical procedure needs to be administered by someone with some semblance of competence in medicine, if you expect the patient to have a shot at not dying. An emergency doesn't change the hard technical requirement of administering ventilation.

Or rather, this should be common sense, but the over-inflated egos on HN don't understand that it takes more than knowing which button does what to operate a ventilator. Being able to hold a paint brush is a very different skill level than painting a portrait.

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> Being able to hold a paint brush is a very different skill level than painting a portrait.

Painful given some past threads on this subject.

Other than that: spot on.

Do you believe that we can infer useful information about ventilators from this? I'm not seeing much relevance to this conversation.

I can infer some useful information about you from this thread. It is that you actually don't give a damn but you love arguing, the more the merrier and no matter whether or not you stray far off-topic, you'll be happy because that gives you yet another thing you can argue about.

If there is relevance to this conversation in the 10,000 or so words that you have spent on this thread then I fail to see it, so I really don't know what this particular comment is trying to achieve other than that it has me considering whether I shouldn't just plain give up on HN.

Don Hopkins has it right, sealioning is the perfect term to describe what you are doing and it is a destructive thing on something as fragile as this forum because it narrowly fits the guidelines and yet makes it impossible to have a normal conversation. It's the online version of passive aggressive belligerence with a veneer of sincerity on top.

That inference is 100% consistent with his past behavior as I've experienced it.

His arguments are incoherent, rambling, and and focused on nothing but derailing the conversation and wasting everyone's time. He perfectly fits the definition of "sealioning". He even admits he knows what it is and is familiar with the web comic that coined the term, then in the same post, he continues to behave as if he's working directly off the wikipedia definition, acting out its every point and symptom, as if it were his playbook.

When confronted with arguments that directly address his points, he complains and runs away and refuses to respond to them. His "concern" for the topic and interest in having a conversation is totally insincere. His only goal is to waste time. Only when he can waste time and divert the conversation away from the point, does he bother to reply. But once there is no way out but to confront the glaring contradictions in what he wrote, his suddenly disappears and has no more to say.

It's supremely ironic and proves he's a troll with absolutely no sense of self-awareness, when he says things like "I'm not seeing much relevance to this conversation", after spending so much time and energy trying to derail the conversation with irrelevant bullshit. That should serve as a warning and warning sign to anyone tempted to engage him in conversation, or take anything he says seriously.

I've been making liberal use of the flag button for the trolling comments once I picked up on the pattern.

Ditto.

On the bright side, I learned the term "sealioning" today, so thanks for that! :D

Sealioning is a Gamergate tactic, so it's quite possible he's one of those disruptive children, and that's where he learned it from. He's certainly doing it regularly and systematically and by the book, as if it's a job he's been trained to do, he has a checklist of talking points and techniques, and is being paid for his time, number of posts, and number of words.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sea-lioning

Another tactic you can see him practicing, which we're all familiar with coming out of the White House, is psychological projection. Trolls like misterman are fully aware they're sealioning, know all the terminology because they study and emulate it, and they love to throw around and misuse terms like that themselves, to attack other sincere people for doing what they're actually maliciously doing themselves, to make it seem like it's just "both sides", which it's not.

It's not just an internet thing. Here's an example of how racists sealion and project in real life:

https://medium.com/@codeGrit/a-story-about-sealions-gamergat...

Thank you! His pattern of sealioning is outrageously obvious and blatantly unoriginal and formulaic. It's as if he has a dog-eared copy of "Sealioning for Dummies" marked up with yellow highter pen and bookmarked with post-it pads, that he's following step by step, page by page, checking off each technique and trick as he tries it.

Sealioning is related to the Gish Gallop, to which there are some countermeasures that work (beyond systematically flagging his post every time he does it, which is the least we all can do to protect the community).

The approach that worked for me, and shut him up cold in his steps and made him suddenly retreat, is to be very calm and structured about your replies, and not let him derail you, which is something that we can all cooperate together on, and support each other by doing together as a tag team.

Carefully chose and enumerate your questions, and repeat them when he doesn't answer them, but don't get distracted by his off-topic diversions, or his passive aggressive belligerence with a veneer of sincerity on top. His pseudo-intellectualism and pretend-open-mindedness and saccharine-sincerity is all just an act, and you don't owe him the level of courtesy that he is pretending to extend to you and mocking you with. I can practically see him laughing to himself (and his Gamergate veteran buddies) behind the keyboard every time he thinks he's fooled anyone into taking him seriously, because he certainly doesn't believe what he says.

Just calmly point out every time he ignores one of your questions or somebody else's questions, or tries to derail the conversation. Keep relentlessly pushing him back onto the topic, and never let him derail you. When I did that, he was mortified and childishly complained that I was not the boss of him, and that I could not tell him what to do, or force him to answer my questions, then he immediately lost interest and fled without another word, because the last thing he actually wanted to to was to stay on topic and answer the questions I would not stop asking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

Technique and counter measures

During a Gish gallop, a debater confronts an opponent with a rapid series of many specious arguments, half-truths, and misrepresentations in a short space of time, which makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of a formal debate.[3][4] In practice, each point raised by the "Gish galloper" takes considerably more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state in the first place.[5] The technique wastes an opponent's time and may cast doubt on the opponent's debating ability for an audience unfamiliar with the technique, especially if no independent fact-checking is involved[6] or if the audience has limited knowledge of the topics.

Generally, it is more difficult to use the Gish gallop in a structured debate than in a free-form one.[7] If a debater is familiar with an opponent who is known to use the Gish gallop, the technique may be countered by pre-empting and refuting the opponent's commonly used arguments first, before the opponent has an opportunity to launch into a Gish gallop.[8]

> Because it's common sense that an invasive medical procedure needs to be administered by someone with some semblance of competence in medicine, if you expect the patient to have a shot at not dying.

Common sense does not determine how difficult something is, how difficult it is determines that. Reality, for the most part, flows into the brain from the outside world, not the other way around.

> An emergency doesn't change the hard technical requirement of administering ventilation.

Neither does common sense. The "the hard technical requirement of administering ventilation" is precisely as hard as it is. So, how hard is that? You represent (in poker parlance) that you know the answers to such things, but you seem reluctant to provide evidence.

> Or rather, this should be common sense, but the over-inflated egos on HN don't understand that it takes more than knowing which button does what to operate a ventilator.

This seems a bit ironic, because no one other than you has made that specific claim.

> Being able to hold a paint brush is a very different skill level than painting a portrait.

Now this statement is actually correct, but unfortunately I don't think it has much relevance to the topic at hand.

We've rate-limited your account again because of how awful this flamewar was. Please don't do this kind of damage here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like you've been using HN mostly for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that. Please stop doing that.

Hi Dang,

For starters, sincere apologies. You asked me nicely to stop this behavior in the past, I didn't, and you subsequently rate-limited me. After some time, once I had gone through some "personal work" as they say, I asked for this to be removed, you kindly accommodated me while repeating your earlier warning, and I promised to comply.

I think it is more than fair to say that I have clearly violated your trust - although, I would also say, only in a sense. I will describe the details of my thinking on that (the method to my madness so to speak), in a reply to your last email when I can find the time (next few days or so). Not that you care I imagine, just an fyi.

Just as a preview of that email, I won't be arguing for a removal of my rate-limiting. You have your hands full on HN maintaining some reasonable level of decorum (herding cats) in discussions, in a world that seems to have almost gone mad. This is no small task, and I fully appreciate why you must resort to this. No disagreement from me on this particular decision.

Rather, in the email I will attempt to explain the reasoning behind my (deliberately) anomalous conversation style (this entire comment, for example). Whether you will agree with my thinking, or even have the time to give it any serious thought, is of course up to you. As I said, you are a busy guy with a thankless job, and if you decide that you can afford little time to spare on entertaining the out-of-the-box theories of some random crackpot (who also exhibits numerous signs of classic schizophrenia) on the internet - no disagreement from me on the decision. You have been more than fair and patient with me under the circumstances as you understand them (and yes, I am aware of the ~"implied condescension" in that statement - I believe noting such things can be useful to minimize misunderstandings regarding beliefs &/or intent).

I've anticipated the day your hammer would come down on me, as did some of the folks I was in conversation with - it seemed quite inevitable. The only ways that quickly come to my mind for how this eventuality could have been avoided are:

- I personally decide to "knock it off" (rather unlikely, to say the least)

- Multiple people happening to notice a pattern in behavior, and realizing "what it is I'm up to", or "what I am trying to draw people's attention towards". To my mind, "what I am up to" is so blatantly obvious that it boggles my mind that not one single person, in a community of thousands of the planet's best and most logical minds, has noticed the method. One person I can think of noted it somewhat, but I got no sense that they noticed the systematic and intentional pattern, but rather were merely thanking me for "pointing out" when we were straying from evidence-based discussion in his particular sub-thread. One thing I speculate people may be overlooking in this situation, or "the point I am trying to make", is that there is a "pattern in behavior" that can be observed not only on my behalf (this one is easy to see), but also in the behavior of my counterparts, in essentially every conversation I've participated in recently.

Wrapping up, I'll just say: no hard feelings on my end. On the contrary, I am sincerely grateful for your patience with me. You've got a job to do here, you did it with amazing restraint under the conditions, but at the end of the day, sometimes pragmatic justice must be dispensed to maintain overall order.

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