Hacker News Reader

Comment by sigkill | Hacker News Reader

I think I didn't make myself clear in my previous comment (which I've edited btw). It's not about THIS article or THAT article or anything. It's just that I've found when you (not you you, but the general you) focus on edge cases you lose sight of the bigger picture. Sure it may help you win an internet argument by appealing to emotion ("Terrorists will come again", or "She's not lazy, she has a real problem"). I don't disagree with those points but sometimes those are just too small in the probability field that we need to ignore them.

For instance, each iteration of the Rabin Miller test reduces the probability that a number is composite by 10^-4. So sure, you might argue "Well, you never know if the 16384-bit number is prime or not merely on running the rabin miller test 10 times because there's still a 1 in 10^-40 chance it's not prime so you method is invalid." I find this kinds of arguments infuriating.

View on HN

The question I have is - what good does it do anyone to be cruel and judgmental? Sure, the mean case may be "lazy slob", but so what?

Besides letting anonymous Internet People guffaw in armchair superiority, what does this judgment accomplish?

As a former fatty myself (well, okay, I'm not exactly thin, but no longer huge), I can say without even an ounce of doubt that no amount of ridicule contributed to my turnaround. Support and the complete internalization that the ship can be turned around was what did the trick for me - no amount of haranguing (thanks, parents) nor ridicule (thanks, high school) over years did squat except drive me further away from success.

So we assume that a random fattie is the mean case, and is fat because she's a lazy slob. Then we are justified in saying cruel things behind the mask of anonymity. She feels worse about herself and wallows in another pint of ice cream, and the Internet People tip their fedoras at one another.

Is there any positive to this? Isn't this just entirely negative for all involved except for some people who got a 0.5 second endorphin injection?

I don't know about you, but "things that are damaging to some and provide no good to anyone except ego boosts" counts as a Bad Thing in my book.

I agree that it is bad to be cruel because it does not gain us anything other than bad karma here. I do not think we should call a fattie as a fattie because it's better to not say anything at all if you can't say anything nice. Of course, ridicule is pretty bad. Some people's problems are visible (physical appearances) while others are not (mental problems), and obviously shaming isn't a good idea.

Btw this isn't a debate/argument but just a casual discussion. I was just observing that how quickly a person pulled an extreme card.

Sure, but leaping at "lazy slob" vs. leaping at "medical problem" are both dumb ideas, except one is considerably meaner than the other.

This may be a shitty analogy, but I can't come up with something better:

I give you two boxes. Box A has a 50% chance of being a pizza, and a 50% chance of being $1000. Box B has a 90% chance of being a dog turd, and a 10% chance of being $1,000,000.

Which box do you pick?

It's a trick question of course. The answer is: open the boxes up and take what you want (presumably the million dollars).

It doesn't matter what the bell curve looks like on the causes of obesity - because we're not dealing with aggregates, we're dealing with a specific individual. If you want to know where on the bell curve she lies, ask someone. Leaping to any conclusion because of probabilities is idiotic, because you're not dealing with a probabilistic unknown.

So it doesn't really matter if the majority of obesity is caused by poor lifestyle choices, or if it isn't. It doesn't at all matter how many people are fat due to hormones or due to Big Macs - because in the case of an individual we can directly ascertain it for ourselves. Probabilistic decision making when you can simply observe the individual is nonsensical, and frequently simply represents an attempt to deliberately paint an individual as a generic member of their class.

The part you're missing is the assumptino that your pre-judgements are the bigger picture.

I know you think you are being eminently reasonable, but it's really just another way of saying you intend to keep to those prejudices and not be distracted by treating individuals as individuals. That would be edge case thinking.

You're saying that my assumption is "Majority of the fat people are fat because of intake of food and not because of actual health problems." In this context, yes, that is exactly what my Bayesian priors (so to say) assume but it's not relevant to the point I'm trying to make. I've read things that seem to support this many times over the years so obviously that is what I would assume. If I am wrong, would you kindly care to educate me.

Actually no, don't. Because that is not the point. The point is (like I said in other comments) my gut feeling suggests that we as a society are moving towards optimizing for edge cases and that's not a good thing. (Immediate examples that come to mind are parent fearing children going out and playing, security theatre, crime television, crazy safety labels etc.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com