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Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

Pithy statements should be a solid rhetorical technique for 6th grade debate class. They should also have no place intellectually mature discussion.

That statements like Hanlan's Razor, Occam's Razor, should be regarded as "truths" is the kind of BS that propagandists use to elevate their position.

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I might add that insulting people might not provide a way to encourage “intellectually mature discussion” either.

OTOH he is not necessarily "insulting people": he is likely correct that debate class (or logic class) is the best venue for learning about Hanlon's Razor and other ideas. But the application of such tools to real-life (as opposed to simple logical problems), where logic may not completely describe problems, is far more variable yet IMO still useful.

I, for one, do not feel insulted and even feel that his post is a useful elaborative warning along the path to "truth", which in the real world may have many traps, wrong ways and pitfalls.

Insulting bad arguments might encourage people who make those arguments to leave.

I have an idea for a forum where ML buffers the conversation by becoming some sort of virtual referee, or that folks can score the comments in many dimensions, not just up down. Many posts just need a slight tweak to stay on track.

A kind of semi-automated lint for discussions.

Clippy could come out and say, """

I see you are insulting someone's mother in a discussion about Ayn Rand taking social security payments, are you sure this furthers the conversation?

"""

I've seen this attempted in comments, turned out to be just a bad-word filter. A system that can track a semantic argument would be non-trivial, and if you could do it it would probably be wasted on this use case.

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