On Monday, 4 August 2014 at 00:59:10 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
On 8/3/14, 11:55 AM, Kagamin wrote:
On Saturday, 2 August 2014 at 17:36:46 UTC, David Bregman
wrote:
OK, I'm done. It's clear now that you're just being
intellectually
dishonest in order to "win" what amounts to a trivial
argument. So
much for professionalism.
Haha, this time it's not as bad as it was in catch syntax
discussion.
I even thought then they are blackmailed or something like
that.
It's really only this kind of stuff that has Walter and myself
worried.
We understand spirits can get heated during a debate but the
problem
with such comebacks that really hold no punches is they
instantly
degrade the level of conversation, invite answers in kind, and
are very
difficult to respond to in meaningful ways.
From what I can tell after many years of having at this,
there's a sort
of a heat death of debate in which questions are asked in a
definitive,
magisterial manner (bearing an odd implied binding social
contract), and
any response except the desired one is instantly dismissed as
simply
stupid, intellectually dishonest, or, as it were, coming under
duress.
I can totally relate to people who hold a conviction strong
enough to
have difficulty acknowledging a contrary belief as even remotely
reasonable, as I've fallen for that many times and I certainly
will in
the future. Improving awareness of it only improves the
standing of
debate for everyone involved.
For my money, consider Walter's response:
What I see is Microsoft attempting to bring D's assert
semantics into
C++. :)
As I've mentioned before, there is inexorable pressure for
this to
happen, and it will happen.
I find it to the point, clear, and funny. Expanded it would go
like "I see more similarities than differences, and a definite
convergence dictated by market pressure." I find it highly
inappropriate to qualify that response as intellectually
dishonest even after discounting for a variety of factors, and
an apology would be in order.
It's easy to get a very different impression from his post: "I
don't want to counter your arguments, so I just pick a random
snippet from your post and make a funny mostly irrelevant
comment, while ignoring everything else you wrote."
Now, I don't believe that this was Walter's intention, but in the
end it had the same effect :-( This is very bad, because I feel
this discussion is important, so it matters for both sides to
understand where the others are coming from. We can't achieve
this by evading questions and discussion. And it wasn't just this
one post; if you look at the discussion, there are entire
sub-threads where people were obviously just talking past each
other. But for me it's not easy to see _why_ they were doing it,
i.e. what exactly the misunderstanding is.
