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Comment by kerpele | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if you were serious or not but your comment seems like a nice example of what the article talks about

I don't think he's agreeing or disagreeing with the article, just providing a possible explanation for this behaviour. The two people arguing are ignoring the context, which is common in many debates. Especially with politicians - shift the context a bit and you're right even if what you're saying is unrelated to the original point.

The article chose pretty good examples, they are all of the form, "generally true statement" with a "specific, or even completely unrealistic, edge case disagreement". They all require no context to understand the exchange.

Debates, especially political debates, are purely about winning the debate. Context in a debate is particularly irrelevant.

I'm not sure I agree with "edge case disagreement". TLS, for example, has shown it's limits (e.g. CA hijacking) and was improved (e.g. CT). However, someone had to find those edge cases and discover the limitations of stated assertions: "2010 TLS was safe under the assumption that the CAs are not hijacked."

Ok. So, are you saying that we should stop using HTTPS and instead use HTTP? If you are not, what is your point? Is it not under the 100% correct but missing the point label this article is talking about?

Well, you could use HTTP over an IPSec tunnel with a pre-shared key (obviously distributed face-to-face), and that would have been resistant to a CA being hijacked.

However, nowadays, I believe with CT HTTPS is really safe. But again, someone had to nitpick on the security limitations of HTTPS for CT to be invented.

Could you enlighten me as to why my comment isn't relevant to this post or how I've missed the point?

I've read the post again in the best faith that I can give and I think I understand the point, I just thought it would be intersting to discuss the idea of "context" in conversation.

Instead of seeing the replies as pedantic seekers to logical truth they may just be misunderstood individuals who is talking with a different context. If we assume my comment as the first comment in his examples, I am equally at fault for not communicating my context clearly.

Unlike the author I don't find such interactions as frustrating, and hopefully I've effectively explain why in this comment.

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