Persuade xor Discover • Hacker News Board

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#21

Post by modeless » Tue, Sep 22, 2009, 9:41 PM UTC

tsally wrote: post #4

I've never met Arrington, so whether he's nice or not doesn't really apply to me. I also don't own a startup, so there's no conflict there. My personal beef is that TechCrunch is a 'serious journalistic entity' when they get documents leaked to them, but the second people start trying to hold them to the standard of real journalism suddenly it a blog. It's difficult to pinpoint, but there's something two-faced about…

The thing that bothers me about TechCrunch is that the comment section is a cesspool. Every time I scroll down there I regret it immediately.

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#22

Post by sachinag » Tue, Sep 22, 2009, 9:41 PM UTC

ewjordan wrote: post #17

sachinag wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical that some groups of people are inherently braver, smarter, or harder working than others.

Too imprecise. The claim was that a segmentation by birth year would not be expected to correlate with bravery, smarts, or hard work, not that there's no segmentation that correlates with any of those qualities. Your proposed version is quite PC, to be sure, and I'm sure most humanities majors would defend it tooth and nail (cheap dig, I know :) ), but that in itself suggests to me that it's not what pg had in mind..…

Actually, that's what makes it better. The argument against Tom Brokaw's Greatest Generation isn't that those WWII heroes were so special; it's that no one generation could be.

I could have been more precise with a modifying phrase such as "by accident of birth", but that was too unwieldy. The upvoted comments are specific to the GG argument, which are suboptimal, because they don't work as good writing unless you've seen PG's original.

(Yeah, I'm a part-time writer/editor to pay the beer bills, and I can get defensive about my writing. Sue me. You're better at design/coding/picking up chicks than I.)

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#23

Post by mrshoe » Tue, Sep 22, 2009, 9:45 PM UTC

heuristix wrote: post #14

This is a strawman defence. PG is defending Arrington's curtness when you meet him in person and accepting the facts as presented (since I have no personal knowledge), the defense sounds reasonable. However, as many others mention below, most people dislike Arrington because Techcrunch has no journalistic scruples. The way they attacked Last.fm without even bothering to properly check into facts was yet another examp…

That's probably why the title of the essay is "Persuade xor Discover". pg started out thinking about Arrington, but, since he was writing to discover, he explored other ideas. Those ideas became the main point of the essay.

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#24

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Sep 22, 2009, 9:50 PM UTC

heuristix wrote: post #14

This is a strawman defence. PG is defending Arrington's curtness when you meet him in person and accepting the facts as presented (since I have no personal knowledge), the defense sounds reasonable. However, as many others mention below, most people dislike Arrington because Techcrunch has no journalistic scruples. The way they attacked Last.fm without even bothering to properly check into facts was yet another examp…

[deleted]

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#25

Post by babyshake » Tue, Sep 22, 2009, 9:52 PM UTC

iamwil wrote: post #10

dfranke wrote: post #7

I'm fairly sure it's the comment thread that I started ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=831461 ) which set off this essay, so I guess I'm the archetype of "ordinarily calm people who go berserk when [Arrington's] name comes up in comment threads". But if your explanation of my psychology is correct, then why don't I go berserk at you as well? I've disagreed with a few of your essays, and by and large pointed out…

The essay is less about arrington berserkers than it is about why pg writes the way he does, even though the discovery started off as a question about arrington berserkers.

I agree. One of the common traits of a 'discovery' essay is you don't end up answering the question you asked.

And I should mention that the reason I don't like Mike involves a very poor way he treated someone I know.

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#26

Post by heuristix » Tue, Sep 22, 2009, 9:56 PM UTC

mrshoe wrote: post #23

heuristix wrote: post #14

This is a strawman defence. PG is defending Arrington's curtness when you meet him in person and accepting the facts as presented (since I have no personal knowledge), the defense sounds reasonable. However, as many others mention below, most people dislike Arrington because Techcrunch has no journalistic scruples. The way they attacked Last.fm without even bothering to properly check into facts was yet another examp…

That's probably why the title of the essay is "Persuade xor Discover". pg started out thinking about Arrington, but, since he was writing to discover, he explored other ideas. Those ideas became the main point of the essay.

The fact that the essay is mostly about the other ideas and titled as such does not discount the fact that the argument therein that most people dislike Arrington simply because he is curt is flawed.

pg cites his own curt/succint approach to writing as a reason people dislike him and speculates that people dislike Arrington for the same reason, thus using Arrington as an example for part of his argument. While pg's central thesis in the essay stands, the Arrington example does not.

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#27

Post by heuristix » Tue, Sep 22, 2009, 9:57 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #24

heuristix wrote: post #14

This is a strawman defence. PG is defending Arrington's curtness when you meet him in person and accepting the facts as presented (since I have no personal knowledge), the defense sounds reasonable. However, as many others mention below, most people dislike Arrington because Techcrunch has no journalistic scruples. The way they attacked Last.fm without even bothering to properly check into facts was yet another examp…

[deleted]

> Can an essay whose explicit purpose is not to persuade even make a straw man defense?

Yes, it can (and does) make a flawed argument, which to most people would seem to be a defense of Arrington even if not intended as such.

What you take away from an essay is obviously up to you.

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#28

Post by vinutheraj » Tue, Sep 22, 2009, 10:01 PM UTC

mrshoe wrote: post #12

I think a lot of hackers, myself included, have a hard time with persuasion. I've found that my first instinct is often to respond to a coworker's proposal with something like, "Here are 10 reasons why that's a horrible idea." That ends up being counter-productive, so I'm trying to learn how to suppress that instinct. Unfortunately, people's egos get hurt easily. You can't tell them what you think. You can't disagree…

"Learn how to tell them to go to hell in such a way they'll want to go." - heard in the 61st Emmy Awards, forgot who said it though !

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#29

Post by pg » Tue, Sep 22, 2009, 10:05 PM UTC

paul wrote: post #18

This is a very interesting observation. It might be amusing if PG rewrote some of his more controversial essays in the second style, then made both versions available. Think of it as "skinning". Since the discovery version was written before the persuasive version, the persuasion needn't interfere with the discovery.

Intriguing idea, at least as a sort of practical joke. The problem is, it would change the ideas. For example, when I rewrote the paragraph about labor unions, I had to ditch the point about fallen civilizations overrating past eras; though I didn't make the link explicitly, the comparison to medieval history would be obvious to anyone who'd studied much of it. (People in medieval Europe felt inferior to the ancients long after it ceased to be true.) I didn't like tossing this point, but there was no convenient way to get it into the new version.

Re: Persuade xor Discover

#30

Post by pg » Tue, Sep 22, 2009, 10:13 PM UTC

heuristix wrote: post #14

This is a strawman defence. PG is defending Arrington's curtness when you meet him in person and accepting the facts as presented (since I have no personal knowledge), the defense sounds reasonable. However, as many others mention below, most people dislike Arrington because Techcrunch has no journalistic scruples. The way they attacked Last.fm without even bothering to properly check into facts was yet another examp…

When people dislike something intensely, the reason is not always what they claim, or even believe themselves. Try this thought experiment: if Arrington seemed like the nicest, most self-deprecating guy in the world-- like Father Mulcahy, for anyone who remembers MASH-- would people be so angry about his supposed lack of journalistic scruples?