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You've been breaking the site guidelines badly in this thread—e.g. here and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38826719.

Please don't do that on HN, no matter how right you are or feel you are. Instead, please make your substantive points thoughtfully. This topic raises a lot of strong feelings in everyone. If your feelings prevent you from commenting within the site guidelines, please wait to comment until that's no longer the case.

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is important for preserving the community here, and it's important for another reason as well: to the extent that what you're arguing for is true, by posting aggressively and abusively you end up discrediting the truth that you're arguing for. That's not only not in your interest—it hurts everyone. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. We've had to ask you this more than once before, so it's clear that this problem is not limited to this topic.



It's a fair point and I don't object with this comment being flagged but please notice that the parent one is calling me unreasonable when I try to be polite and provide thorough reasoning about my position on the issue.

Is that O.K. really? They don't even address me when talking about me, that's why I felt the need to reply with a bit of a sarcasm and emotional tone. I also provided a document by the United Nations to keep this grounded. I don't know how this is less substantive than the parent comment talking about me in a sneering manner.


Do you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38827758? "Isn't going to be reasoned with" is maybe not the best wording; "isn't likely to be persuaded" might be a better way to put that. But I don't think it was really a personal attack. I can see how it could feel that way in the context of an intense conflict like this one, but from an outside perspective I think it's a stretch to say that the comment "is calling me unreasonable". Moreover the intention was clearly trying to dampen the flamewar, which is a good thing.

Here's a point I've often tried to communicate in situations like this, which I'll repeat here in case it's helpful—but please understand that I'm not talking about you personally; as far as I can tell we all have this bias...

There's a common pattern where people underestimate the provocation in their own comments by (say) 10x and overestimate the provocation in the other person's comments by another 10x. Put those together and you get a 100x distortion in self/other perception. That's a lot of distortion. It's basically "objects in the mirror are closer than they appear". In my experience it's helpful to remember this and try to consciously correct for the distortion. Even if you bend over backwards to do that, you probably won't compensate for the entire 100x but you'll at least be less likely to misgauge the impact of your posts and thereby produce unintentional negative effects. Not that any of this is easy, but it's something we should all be aware of and working on.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...




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