Hacker News Reader

Comment by hiatus | Hacker News Reader

When my brother was getting married, the priest looked over the audience and singled me out, asking, "Do you love your watch?" I said no—it's a good watch but I don't _love_ it. He moved on to ask others about some objects in their possession and asked if they loved them. Each answered yes. He told the group that love should be reserved for people and living things, and that we do love a disservice when we profess our love for inanimate things.

View on HN

Lewis Black had this golden reaction to his audience applauding a smartphone: "Don't you ever, ever applaud an inanimate object again. I believe that's why they have that section about the golden calf."

https://youtu.be/g0YKW0NLP64?feature=shared&t=565

I wouldn't put religion as a good moral compass, it tends to point to itself and its elite. Even more, I think people applaud the achievement of making that smartphone available, not that specific smartphone.

What would you put as a good moral compass?

That is one of the few question where pure secular philosophy could give practical answers; but even a simplistic precept like "don't harm others gratuitously" would be a better moral compass than organized religion, despite its potential for personal interpretation.

The word used in the OP was “like” not “love”

interesting that we have Christians coming to America to rape and slave people and bring gold to fancy churches in Europe... Vatican is a also a quite fancy and rich place in 2025

what if you love your pro-social company or your gadget that allows you to do a more effective activism that helps people? what if loving your gadget makes you not treat them as an ephemeral thing, thus making you stay with them longer and contributing to the enviroment with less e-waste?

I don't mean to single your comment out, but i feel like this is a line of argument i see frequently that I don't think has merit. Like, sure "love your pro-social company or your gadget that allows you to do a more effective activism that helps people" is maybe theoretically possible but come on.

in 99.99999999% of cases people loving a company or a gadget is bad and it's not particularly nuanced or complicated. Why must people (or just engineers?) fixate on some weird imaginary possibility edge case instead of just accepting the statement as "true".

Is it pedantry, cope or something else i'm missing?

I think the root issue is that the word “love” in English has far too many meanings.

When you “love” a company, it’s not the same as “loving” your wife.

And “loving” your wife is different, still, than “loving” your brother or best friend.

People do this with every subject. Do you think X is bad because in every case you've seen it's caused harm to people? Well, he says smugly have you considered this imaginary case where X isn't actually bad? actively subtracts from any serious conversation about a topic

Did you reply to the wrong comment?

I don’t see the connection, sorry.

What i'm saying is my original comment was calling out a specific thing where people fixate on edge cases for no reason. "love" is not the issue here since it's general case we see even when that word isn't involved

I always likened those rebuttals to the “it’s just how we’ve always done things” refrain, spouted by people who believe they have more to lose by changing the status quo than to gain, but refuse to investigate why and adapt accordingly if true.

Because you’re right, fandom toward products and enterprise is objectively bad. It’s taking the same hooks actively exploited by religion and cults, but now towards iPhones and B-Corps. They are being exploited, and choose not to recognize it because their identity is tied to their fandom.

Yeah, life is a lot harder being the wet blanket in the conference room, asking pointed and specific questions about why we do things this way, could we do them better, etc, but it’s also liberating to see just how much of the world is blind momentum built on fear of literally any other alternative.

> fandom toward products and enterprise is objectively bad

fandom from the HN crowd is (usually) excessively bad but there's much more than the Silicon Valley Rainbow, AI and millionaire CEOs essays out there... and this group has better tech education than amazed ordinary people buying yearly new devices to call an API on a server or open Instagram/X with faster processors and higher pixel values on an ant's larvae sized camera sensor with fixed F-stop lens

Reply on news.ycombinator.com