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Comment by jschveibinz | Hacker News Reader

This article is interesting but tautological. It is arguable that philosophy is arguable.

The article is not about that. It's about words which have a high probability of spinning off a tangential flamewar.

I posted it because I think this happens very frequently on HN - long and unproductive backs-and-forths that only exist because someone used a "landmine" word, and someone else stepped on it.

I understand, but I respectfully disagree. In your response you used words like “about that”, “high probability”, “frequently” and “unproductive,” all of which could be argued on a philosophical basis.

And by the way, if you are going to post things and then downvote legitimate responses—then perhaps you need to rethink things a bit?

Whoa, please don't cross into personal attack, and omit swipes from your comments here.

TeMPOraL didn't downvote you. He couldn't. No one can downvote replies to their own posts (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25969116 was probably downvoted because it broke these guidelines:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

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

I downvoted you because your comment didn't add substance by explaining what you meant. You made a statement that didn't seem to apply to article I read, which is fine in itself, but its brevity meant there was no way to evaluate what you meant, yet it seemed unnecessarily combative & overall unproductive to the conversation.

And so we're not allowed to figure out what constitutes truth, and instead have to just take your definition by default? Sorry, but I can't get anything else out of this. Ignoring these landmines only benefits someone trying to sell you something on the basis of deceitful values of the landmine variables.

TeMPOraL said exactly nothing that said that you aren't allowed to figure out what constitutes truth. You're reading that into his post.

Your post got me thinking a bit. I see what you mean but I think it’s not the kind of thing the article is talking about. I should point out that I’m assuming conversations here are in the minutes-hours timeframe, not weeks-months timeframes.

My take on this is that it isn’t an issue of whether you can discuss truth or not, but rather if it’s philosophically relevant to the conversation. What I mean by that, and what I think the article means, is that the person isn’t questioning the meaning of truth really but instead avoiding the discussion going really any further by throwing out a catch phrase which is pertinent in a very distant and vague sense, but the person has no real intent to go into it.

It’s sort of seems like a form of “whataboutism” where somebody counters a point by going “Yeah but what about truth?!” It effectively ends the conversation because it’s not a matter of agreeing on the meaning of truth in the context of the discussion, but more of a distraction which can never be fully answered which stalls the original discussion.

Maybe in context those specific definitions do matter and should be stated assumptions, but often I don’t think they are. In addition, it truth or morals can’t be pinned down in centuries of effort, how could they be in these kinds of conversations? I don’t believe they could.

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