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Comment by escape_goat | Hacker News Reader

Could we just not do things like this. I'm sorry to be singling anyone out but there is a pattern here. People, the "well actually" rebuttals that you pull out of thin air in two minutes are not a useful or meaningful response to someone's reportage of their lives experience and do not facilitate the quality of discussion that brought you to HN in the first place, and if you do not understand that then consider that perhaps a life in which most problems are inherently tractable, if not an easy search result from Stack Overflow, does not actually leave you with a correct understanding of your ability to understand or solve complex problems in the world.

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What we call “lived experience” today used to be called, “an anecdote,” and what brought me to places like HN, actually, is that the kind of people who came here understood why we distinguish such statements from data. (There’s a pithy aphorism to this effect, which you may be familiar with.)

The grandparent comment here is very good and I agree with all of it — comparing prison to high school is risible, at best — but that doesn’t mean we should fetishize expression of personal experience above any other kind of comment.

Look, I like data — meaningful data — just as much as the next person here, but this is a little bit of a strawman argument, isn't it. You're not defending a comment that was based on any data, you're defending the a priori reasoning with which someone decided to rebut someone's reportage of own experience. I do not think you would stand for that for one second if the topic was operating system development or database engineering or anything at all involving experience that you recognized and valued.

Secondly, you're wrong. "Lived experience" is not the same as "an anecdote." An anecdote is a story. Experience is interrogable. The man sharing his experience is right here on HN. The person who wrote was not repeating a story that he had heard, or describing a single isolated incident.

LOL, no... "lived experience" is exactly the same as "an anecdote". There's literally zero difference. Its a different way of saying, "a story". Anecdotes are interrogable as well. Hell, its in the goddamn definition of the word.

an·ec·dote

/ˈanəkˌdōt/

noun

a short amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person.

Your key word in that definition is "real".

Could we please not try to prohibit critique and discussion just because someone doesn't agree with it? Open discussion and well founded criticism is what makes me read the comments.

I actually was searching for a response to GP claims about prison not being a deterrent and if nobody had mentioned it would commented it myself.

To add to the arguments: GP even contradicts himself by stating how bad prison is and that you really don't want to be there while claiming it's not a deterrent.

Criticizing that point was absolutely fair and doesn't mean the rest of GP's comment is bad or untrue.

I think he was saying it's not a deterrent from committing more crime, not that it's not a deterrent from going back to prison. Which is to say, it's not deterring what we want it to be deterring.

Even if that part is useful though there's no real reason to impugn the integrity of the people the GP references, and the reply does not tell us why we should find those people more likely to be prone to self-rationalization, which it needs to.

A contradiction is when two things both can't be true. Not just when things are unlikely to be true.

It would be a contradiction if people only ended up in prison because they wanted to go.

In reality many people commit crimes for other reasons, like lack of food and shelter.

Its much harder to get a job with a criminal record, so many former criminals end up forced back into criminal activities for food and shelter.

In behavioral science it is well documented that punishment is an ineffective driver for behavioral modification. In fact, for punishment to work at all it has to be consistent and immediate. Prison is neither.

So our best theory of behavioral modification states that prisons is not a deterrent for crime, nor is there any evidence for it in the records. All the while prisons are an inhumane and terrible way to treat people. Can we just please abolish prisons.

Car thieves don't steal cars while in prison. Bank robbers don't rob banks while in prison. Some crime may continue within the walls of the prison, but the world outside is protected. If a person would commit crimes for 40 years, keeping that person in prison for 20 years is a 50% crime reduction.

There are other ways to confine people then prisons. E.g. you can place people under house arrest, curfew, etc.

Also your logic if flawed. Confining people after the deed seem logically a really poor and inefficient way to reduce crime. While one criminal is confined, there will always be another. So your 50% crime reduction is closer to 0%.

Rather than personal attacks you should take the time to actually respond to their comment if you feel so strongly against it.

I took the time to respond to what I felt strongly about, and maybe characterizing criticism as a "personal attack" describes how it makes you feel, but that doesn't mean that it describes what it is.

Calling somebody sheltered is objectively a personal attack on this forum.

I absolutely intended to tell an entire category of people that they were sheltered. I disagree with you, but it's true that I've certainly seen the term appear within the context of a personal attack in the past, so I agree that if I had found a better way in which to express my anger and disapproval then that would have been preferable.

> if you do not understand that then it is because you live in a very sheltered world

This is the part which is a personal attack. You have some time to edit your comment to restate that, if you're up for it. :)

Fair enough, I've restated that.

> if you do not understand that then consider that perhaps a life in which most problems are inherently tractable, [...] does not actually leave you with a correct understanding of your ability to understand or solve complex problems in the world.

Ugh. That's not really any better. You're still effectively saying the person is an idiot / incapable of reasonable thinking. :(

Okay, assuming that you understand my point, how would you restate it in a way that didn't imply that a person who engaged in that sort of response was an idiot or capable of reasonable thought?

I don't actually have a problem with people being wrong or not very bright in the comments they make. I have a problem with the arrogance and self-involvement that I feel responding to someone like this — someone who has literally signed up to HN so that they could share a few paragraphs about their life — represents. So if you can do a better job of making the problem with that clear to people who might otherwise make such a mistake, then that would be even better.

> someone who has literally signed up to HN so that they could share a few paragraphs about their life

Hmmm, I think we're coming at this from different places.

Personally, I have no problem at all with people coming to HN to share their life experiences. For me, that helps my understanding of the world. :)

Right, but what about the people that respond by rejecting those experiences or implying something unsavory about the person sharing them?

Responding to somebody's life experience with "maybe the people you spoke to were lying" is more a statement about what your priors are than a substantive contribution to a conversation.

Why? What purpose does that serve? If he re-butts one there's half a million others ready to take it's place.

This kind of thing only gets solved one way. And it's not pretty.

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