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Comment by Impassionata | Hacker News Reader

Referencing the fictional arguments of 'a lot of people' just means you're too ashamed to own your own opinion.

The voting bloc that considers themselves "climate change skeptics" or whatever label they identify with is neither fictional nor small. I simply pointed out that there are going to be several people who throw this "climate emergency" piece out immediately because this magazine has a history of supporting left-leaning causes. It may or may not be a good strategy. That's it.

Those people are capable of speaking for themselves and don't need your advocacy. Rethink your approach, muddling equivocator.

There is no good strategy to convince the unscientific. Your project of seeking a good strategy is deluded nattering which adds nothing.

Your strategy, in other words, is bad.

To reiterate: Referencing the bad arguments of other people is stupid. Don't do it.

Racists aren't going to be convinced that Black Lives Matter but if I spend my time pointing that out in every topic about a cop killing a human being I'm doing something wrong.

There’s room here for opinions of what a voting population will think about something.

That wasn't an examination of voting population dynamics, that was just lazy opinionating with a flimsy curtain over the motivated reasoning.

It seems otherwise to me. I don’t read many articles in Scientific American, but I recall they endorsed Joe Biden for president last year (it was posted on HN.) My understanding of American politics is that many Republican voters oppose publications that openly support Democratic candidates. Here we have such a publication making a pronouncement about what could be a bipartisan initiative, and it seems like the publication’s political history could influence Republican voters to dismiss the emergency wording.

Laziness is a problem, but I don’t see a problem with a comment speculating that popular behavior will occur using and using fewer words to explain the potential mechanism than I did.

Happy to accept criticism of this explanation of the user’s opinion, how it could be more clear, etc.

Scientific American didn't merely endorse Joe Biden for president last year, they justified it with a description of the biggest crisis currently facing humanity (the Covid-19 pandemic) that was both nakedly partisan and really obviously contradicted by what was actually happening in the real world but that they declared was pure indisputable Science.

It doesn’t bother me that they endorsed him, nor would it if they hadn’t. I was only interested in the idea proposed by your original respondent that a user on HN can’t in good faith surmise the behavior of a voting population.

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