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1080 points cbcowans | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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hedgew ◴[] No.15021772[source]
Many of the more reasonable criticisms of the memo say that it wasn't written well enough; it could've been more considerate, it should have used better language, or better presentation. In this particular link, Scott Alexander is used as an example of better writing, and he certainly is one of the best and most persuasive modern writers I've found. However, I can not imagine ever matching his talent and output, even if I practiced for years to try and catch up.

I do not think that anyone's ability to write should disbar them from discussion. We can not expect perfection from others. Instead we should try to understand them as human beings, and interpret them with generosity and kindness.

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ryanbrunner ◴[] No.15021858[source]
I think one thing that struck me from the linked article was the point that the memo wasn't structured to invite discussion. It wasn't "let's have a chat", it was "here's an evidence bomb of how you're all wrong".

I think advancing points is fine, but if you're after productive discussion rather than an adversarial debate, you need to proactively invite discussion. And if an adversarial debate was what he was after, that does strike me as inappropriate work communication.

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nicolashahn ◴[] No.15022073[source]
Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem). Plenty of far more aggressive articles and essays have been written from the opposite side that have not been criticized in the same way.

And for the record, I did not get any aggressive tone from his paper. I thought he was as polite as he needed to be and made the necessary caveats. I think many people were just so unprepared to hear any argument from an opposing viewpoint that they read into it what they wanted to.

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1. scythe ◴[] No.15023315[source]
>Then the correct way to handle it is to drop another refutational evidence bomb attacking his primary points instead of picking the low hanging fruit of claiming it's "too confrontational," "poorly written," "naive," or whatever other secondary problems exist (this is aside from wilfully misrepresenting his claims, which is definitely a bigger problem).

The brute problem is that it's too long to be addressed in a reasonable and productive debate, and because it was posted on an internal company messageboard it is his responsibility to ensure that it can be responded to in a reasonable and productive way. If he presents his complaints in a format which is likely to cause problems, he can be penalized, and a manifesto is certainly such a format because it lends itself so well to "viral" sharing, and it was precisely such "viral" reposting of the document that made it a practical problem for Google in the first place. Had he made his points in an ordinary discussion thread, it would have been harder to publish it everywhere as a unified whole, since discussion threads by their nature will contain counterarguments.

For example, if I think another employee is biased against me in code reviews, it does not do me any favors to write a multi-page manifesto indicting said employee on a variety of points for his/her alleged biased review practices. Good debates do not generally come from duelling essays, and it is unfair to participants -- practically unfair, in that it drives them from the debate and so deprives the conversation of their contributions -- it is unfair to participants who do not have the time to invest in researching every point of a ten-page document that they feel they must address the whole awful thing in order to say anything. In fact I try to limit the length of my HN comments for this very reason: long comments are hard to respond to well.

Internal company messageboards do not lend themselves to the publication of manifestos, and it is not reasonable to expect them to.

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2. bjourne ◴[] No.15023802[source]
That's not the way to do it. The right way to do it is to pick one statement (the weakest one) from his argument and refute that one solidly. Then repeat the process with the next weakest, the second next weakest and so on. You only have to do that about four or five times before you have established that the author is full of shit.

That's the standard method you use for refuting arguments presented in essay form.