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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

You implied it. What you should have alluded to is that it is necessary to use technologies today that won’t necessarily be in use in the future, merely as a stepping stone to get us to the next destination, where we will use a new but still temporary technology.

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As Scott Adams says, "Analogies are for fighting." If you try to counter a statement with an analogy you almost always simply get a fight.

Never thought about that, where do you get this from? But it kinda rings true for me in life.

I heard it from Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. In addition to writing that comic he is a very interesting thinker. He is also a trained hypnotist.

Quoting absolutes expressed by highly opinionated people is also for fighting. Not saying you shouldn’t, but maybe there’s some nuance missing. Not even saying the particular analogy was devoid of conflict, it has plenty of room for disagreement. But it didn’t feel to me like it was inviting any which wasn’t already present.

I would classify Scott Adam's statement as a trueism -- true for most people, under most circumstances, for most times. Unfortunately, couching a trueism in its most precise linguistic form with associated probabilities and error margins is a path to simply being ignored. Once a thread switches to rhetoric, dialectic responses are like pissing in the wind, forgive the analogy :-)

Well I’ll give you this: quoting Scott Adams then correctly using and understanding the word dialectic is definitely not on my HN comment threads bingo card.

Surely it's the countering bit that shows you want to get in to a fight more than the analogy. Analogies are just a way of illustrating a point.

I do wish that people would engage in dialectic conversation when they encounter an analogy, rather than rhetoric. Unfortunately, I find Scott Adam's words ring true.

I think op was suggesting someday we’d be on hoverboard or something

We're all gonna be debugging wordpress apps in the metaverse while our self-driving cars whisk us down the freeway.

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