91–100 of 599 posts
Instead of telling them "We should do x, because its better for y", I ask questions even though I have the answer in mind: "Hmmm... I was thinking about y, how could we solve that?" and the answer is often "x" or something else that sometimes even impresses me.
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I may be wrong if I am stating an opinion and I cannot be wrong if I stating a fact. Our society, since it got consumed by “social” media, has lost ability to accept facts, everyone doing their own “research” and all that…
Every "fact" you state really includes the opinion that the "fact" is indeed a fact. Is climate change man-made?
To answer your question, if by climate change you refer to the dramatic post-industrialisation acceleration of warming and climate disturbances, the correct answer is "the overwhelming majority of existing evidence points to yes".
It applies to arguments in general, and increasingly there seems to be fewer and fewer 'pure' technical issues.
I have observed a proliferation of people believing things that are simply not true. Much of this comes from people stating unproven or undecided factors as absolute fact, and then building an argument on those foundations.
The caveat is that I think you have to remain civil, be meticulous at addressing the argument, and to never assume that you know the hidden state of another person's mind.
This isn't about winning arguments, it is about balancing them. This is well established on a court of law. A decision decided after a claim has been robustly challenged is held to be a more objective decision.
I don't feel like my part is to push a narrative forward, but to assist in stemming the tide of absolute ideology. I think the ideas themselves do have the capability to advance on merit, but not if they come under sustained attack.
I think a lot of people have given up on arguing, leading to the voices of only the most motivated becoming dominant, which in-turn, advances the more extreme positions that drive their motivations.
I think, perhaps in such an environment, Andrew Wakefield could have elevated his claims to be a majority opinion, he convinced a remarkable percentage as it was.
If unchallenged ideas becomes majority opinions it becomes very difficult to unseat them. The claim that most people believe a thing is enough to assert it's truth is pervasive.
The insideous thing is how many of these things have gotten through, what falsehoods do we believe that go unchallenged now because everyone believes them. You can't really tell yourself because you as part of the population likely believe it too.
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You should read the whole thing. At the end he switches the argument on to himself and says that one should always ask questions, put the ego away and try to get better. He already made the point you made.
And yet, a statement is a position, and this blog is stating his case, which is an argument for truth. So he's still arguing, yet not listening, as it's all one sided now. This isn't actually that unusual, books, newspapers, and more often do one way communication. But as soon as you state a position, you're arguing it.
What I do now:
Explicitly state what should be obvious: "there is rarely a free lunch. everything has trade-offs." This also _always_ neutralizes the conversation, because it's no longer about winner-take-all existential threat to my ego, it's about preferences across a continuum.
For example:
I was at dinner with friends, I was talking about Roblox and the founders discussion on Conversations with Tyler. We were interrupted by the waiter to take an order. Afterwards, we resumed and I said "where was I?", my friend said: "you were telling us why Roblox is bad." and I said: "I am a poor communicator, there isn't a bad and good, it's that there are trade-offs..." This gave everyone an opportunity to keep their respect and dignity without feeling like there was a judgment.
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Why did I spend so much time posting this to HackerNews when I should be working? Ego!! No one cares what you have to say, pricees, go back to work. Okay, I will!
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This is not AI
The headings style wasn't an immediate giveaway to you? The rules of three in every. short. staccato. paragraph? The X, not Y? The author's writing is wildly different pre-AI.
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Every "fact" you state really includes the opinion that the "fact" is indeed a fact. Is climate change man-made?
Are you arguing against the existence of an objective reality? Seems a little extreme. There are countless facts, indisputably so. Gravity, death, the fact you wrote me an answer, the fact I'm writing you an answer. These aren't opinions
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One of the most tiring and depressing developments of 2026 is that nowadays, every single discussion relating to every single blog post out there degenerates into a "This is AI slop" accusation fest. I would be a huge friend of introducing a new rule on the Hacker News that whoever accuses others of using AI and cannot support his accusation by something substantial, gets permabanned.
Every single post made prior to ChatGPT has a very strong irreverent sense of humour as well as specific Chinese-English phrases. If you speak to Chinese migrants/colleagues/suppliers you'll recognise it immediately:
https://wangcong.org/2009/04/09/got-a-new-job/
https://wangcong.org/2019-03-14-how-to-pretend-to-be-a-linux...
https://wangcong.org/2008/12/25/when-i-was-in-portugal/
Then magically, every single post after the invention of LLMs happens to be structured exactly like the dominant LLM style of the era:
https://wangcong.org/2025-02-27-ebpf-trend-analysis.html
https://wangcong.org/2026-01-13-personal-taste-is-the-moat.h...
https://wangcong.org/2026-06-30-why-i-stopped-arguing-with-p...