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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

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ceejayoz

Yes, it is.

> The person proposing has been thinking about this for weeks or months.

This doesn't mean they know what they're doing. Their thoughts can be bad.

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Oh, the irony...

Knowing how to stop a bad idea is a skill.

Knowing when it's a bad idea is a skill.

Knowing when you don't know is a skill.

There's more than one skill in life. More than one may be applicable to a situation.

Everyone on this forum has probably run into one of the "idea guys" who just need a tech cofounder to do the coding for 2% equity.

He's pointing out that it's ironic to come into a thread about not shooting ideas and do nothing more than shoot down the idea. It's literally the exact behavior described in like the first paragraph of the article. It IS ironic.

It’s only ironic if the headline is correct.

Or are you ironically shooting down my idea that it is a skill?

No, irony does not depend on correctness. When the discussion is X, if your only input is -X, then it's ironic in the face of a discussion on shooting down ideas.

Yes, irony depends on correctness.

It would be ironic for me to make a typo while bashing your spelling prowess. It would not be ironic if I didn’t.

It is similarly ironic that the Alanis Morrisette song about irony mostly mentions non-ironic things; “rain on your wedding day” isn’t ironic! And that’s ironic!

I expect the comment was about your (pre-edit) "there doing" vs the current "they're doing", shame you didn't acknowledge your mistake in the change.

At no point did my comment say "there doing".

Great, so what did your comment say the first time?

"Yes, it is."

(I'm also not clear on what would make a typo ironic in this case.)

  "Shooting down ideas is not a skill"

  "This doesn't mean they know what they're doing. Their thoughts can be bad."

Can you clarify? The alleged typo is… not there? Or their? Or they’re?

What’s ironic here?

Ok, I just thought it was ironic that the article was about how being critical of something isn't skillful. And, it appeared to me (but all my downvotes prove I'm in the minority), that you just added a critical comment without doing anything else the author wrote about.

For the record, I was curious about what else you have written, so I read some of your posts and comments. And, you seem to be a very thoughtful and intelligent person. I'm sorry if my comment was offensive, I meant it to be funny.

It felt very low effort and did not contribute anything to the comment thread.

i dont agree with the self-indemnifying approach. let us apply this concept to itself - what could go wrong with not shooting down ideas? a lot of time could be wasted giving credence to that which is invalid. for example, ive just donated my energy debating the merits of an article that was probably written by a large language model (this is a judgement based on overt presence of negative parallelism, punchy prose, tripartite sentence structure, AI generated image, ...) - on a personal basis id prefer to have spent my time otherwise, as this entire argument can be summed as "be curious, not judgemental". therefore shooting this one down was probably a good idea?

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