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Comment by botro | Hacker News Reader

>The degree of the provocation proves the value of the statement.

This is a great heuristic to practice often. I just told my wife she looks fat in her new dress, and the degree of her provocation proves the value of my statement.

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I’d expect a bit more nuance on Hacker News. What I wrote is not provocative by being offensive or hurtful to anyone. It’s provocative by introducing an idea that intelligent, educated people cannot come to a consensus on in a purely intellectual way.

What you’re missing is there is not a debate about your point. The debate is about whether it adds anything to the discussion.

Saying “the sky is up” and having people respond by telling you that is a trivial point shouldn’t be conflated with fostering a meaningful dialog.

And yet you yourself have been passionately engaged at length in the very debate you say doesn’t exist. The evidence abounds here from your own comments that it is not purely about the triviality of my comment. In fact, your first objection was about whether you thought I owed you additional data before I’m allowed to make the statement that I made. Moreover, there are plenty of other comments engaging in discussion and debate that clearly go beyond a mere discussion of triviality but rather actually engage with the concept.

That's fair. I'm trying to point out that the degree to which your statements illicit an emotional response from someone, by any means, has no bearing on the validity of that statement.

And I acknowledged that by providing additional clarification.

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