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>That's literally step one in OPs advice.

No, it's your generous, retroactive re-writing of the OP's advice. If you genuinely don't understand that you communicated something that wasn't in the original, then your communication skills are not at the level that justifies the confidence with which you're posting.

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He was interpreting it generously, which is a pretty good way to keep discussions civil. The site guidelines say to "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says", and I think that has happened pretty well here.

That ... doesn't apply when the topic at hand is the validity of oft-repeated conventional wisdom. In that case, the real anti-pattern to pretend that the conventional wisdom actually means a specific (sane) interpretation that lives only in one HN poster's head.[1]

Which, coincidentally, is the very thing I was criticizing.

It's really bizarre to see "be charitable in discussions" used to defend Orwellian reinterpretation of bad advice no one actually follows.

[1] See sanewashing https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sanewashing

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