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Comment by tripa | Hacker News Reader

The point is, calling it zero-tolerance when it's not is misleading. There's a perfectly fine way to describe zero-tolerance with exceptions, and it's not even far fetched: “low tolerance”.

Complete sentences may make it possible to pretend bad wording is consistent, but that doesn't make it good wording.

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My point wasn’t that it’s good wording, just that it may be good enough to understand what someone meant to convey. I can be very literal myself, and I can take others’ words overly literally as well. It hasn’t made life better for me to insist on that kind of consistency from others, especially when they know I know what they meant to say. It has helped me to develop some instinct for accepting the intent of people’s communication rather than the minutiae of it. Even when I find the inconsistencies. It’s much nicer to realize what someone meant, and sometimes even to have a small laugh to myself about the way they put it.

> There's a perfectly fine way to describe zero-tolerance with exceptions, and it's not even far fetched: “low tolerance”.

They are not the same thing.

Let's say there is a scale from 0 to 10.

If you accept 1-2, that's low tolerance.

If you reject anything above 0, except this particular 2 and this particular 5, that's zero-tolerance with exceptions.

I posted a clarification upthread.

Misleading? I wasn't mislead. It seems like you weren't mislead. The person who responded to you wasn't mislead. Was anyone mislead? Really, a single person? Or is language a mechanism to probabilistically encode information and not a formal system, even if it often approximates one? Go learn Lojban and leave everyone who actually wants to communicate be.

This conversation does not matter. You should both carry on for your own health.

Yeah with the benefit of 5 minutes hindsight it's hilarious that I got suckered in literally just because I felt a single word wasn't precisely accurate. I mean, "misleading" didn't mislead me in the slightest, the overall meaning was clearly that it's better to be correct than not, precisely the impetuous of my snark. He who is without sin, yada yada yada

Well at least you have the self awareness to recognize and make humor out of it. I'd call that a win.

Still a loss for the rest of us who got suckered into reading the last ten or so stupid comments but oh well...

I've been there too. All you need is a slow morning and too much caffeine.

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