>I used a simple “tell me what you had for breakfast” line to filter out people who don’t read.

Seems like a good screening. Atleast it's better than - "what are your accomplishments.?"

>considerably worse place if everyone abided by such rules

Those rules are not meant for everyone.

That's the theory, but there's absolutely normative statements in this piece. For example:

> When you spend the first third of your message establishing that you are a nice person who means well, you are not being considerate but you are making the recipient wade through noise to get to signal. You are training them to skim your messages, which means that when you actually need them to read carefully, they might not. You are demonstrating that you do not trust the relationship enough to just say the thing and you are signaling a level of insecurity that undermines the technical credibility you are trying to establish. Nobody reads "hope you had a great weekend" and thinks better of the person who wrote it, they probably just being trained to take you less seriously in the future, or at worse, if they're evil loving of Crocker's [sic?] like myself, they just think about the couple of seconds of their life they will never get back.

This very much sounds like the author believes that everyone who doesn't abide by these rules - not just him, not just people who've agreed to them, everyone - is deficient in some way. And it's not just a slip - this attitude is pervasive throughout the post.

Yes, exactly.

I strongly prefer directness in technical communication at work.

But the way the article author phrases his preferences as absolute truth rubs me the wrong way.

Also if I worked with that person then after reading the article I would have perhaps the opposite reaction to the author's intentions.

You still have to walk on eggshells to not offend him by including any bit of information that he might consider not relevant enough.

I love this point as much as I hate it in practice. We all have different preferences and it is more helpful to be clear about ours rather than declare them "correct". The way we expect these differences to be navigated can become oppressive.

The blog post is an open letter: the author wants everyone reading to follow the those rules.

No. Crocker's rules are a request for people to act a certain way with respect to you, not wrt anyone else.

Crocker's rules themselves might be, but the essay is plainly contemptuous of people who aren't naturally disposed to follow them.

… I don't know what your incident reports look like, but if there's anywhere it's normal to optimise for communicative clarity rather than social wheel-greasing, it's an incident report!

How do you figure that the author is “developmentally challenged”? It sounds to me like they are able to handle their insecurities in a more mature and emotionally balanced way than most others.

They wrote an entire article about how they hate when someone says they hope they had a nice weekend...

If that is what you took from the article I think you might have some language development issues yourself, friend.

Be more direct with me. Don't say things like "If that is what you took" or "I think", you're just wasting my time.

>whats incredible to me are how many useful idiots out there STILL fall for it.

That's about 99% of the population.

But none of us here, right?

We are special of course. Edit: Actually just me, I'm special

Perhaps even worse. I'm over simplifying: but at least some childless people know it's a lot of work and sacrifice to be a good parent, hence they opted out. On the other hand for the clueless ones, they thought of a child as something akin to having a toy - all fun and no work, only to realizes later that they are dealing with a full fledged individual.

>Good parenting is only doing better than your parents.

Also making the mistakes that your parents did not make.

Hence they delegate it to the experts: daycare, school etc. /s

>All paths in philosophy lead to nihilism.

Well, I'd say any serious non-delusional thinker would be a nihilist to some degree.

>You are reading HN, the survivorship bias and groupthink is just as high as any other self-calibrating online community

Agreed. To expand IMHO and somewhat tangentially: recognizing the importance of software/technology and using it as tool is the hallmark of a person with balanced mental makeup. Someone who has ever had 'passion' for software (or in general technology) extended beyond a few weeks can be considered to have something abnormal going on - for example autism. This is like a carpenter becoming obsessed with his chisel and deriving his entire sense of purpose and happiness from delving into the minutiae of chisels.

There is a profession called "tool maker" and their 'passion' for making tools has been quite important. Even just for chisels.

I figured that something like that would exist, hence the example.

>rationalism is mostly about the idea that experimentation is irrelevant and you can infer anything using just logic alone.

Thanks for putting it the way you did. I didn't knew it was meant be that way, but it sort of confirms my suspicion that people who use the term 'rational' and 'logic' loosely often to dismiss an opposing view never really seek experimental results before having a point of view.

Nearly every country would be 'sabotaged' then - and rightfully so. ALL gvts are a sophisticated manifestation of the more lowly protection racket run by the mafia. i.e 'We protect you from harm by the other mafia'.

Value judgments aside, organized crime often does arise in a self-organizing way from marginalized groups.

Anyways, it all boils down to a simple fact: pacifism can't enforce itself.