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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

That would be missing the point. He’d have to commit to a specific statement as being a scissor. But if someone doesn’t already get the point, they’d fall into the same trap as the people in the story “what? They must misunderstand the claim. Obviously it’s true/false.”

The story’s point requires identifying the psychological state state that scissor statements put you into, where you feel reality is actually bending against you (eg “he turned her against me”).

If you think there is an explicit scissor statement Alexander could have committed to, then I think you might not appreciate the core thesis.

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I'm with you. We see in this discussion that it's difficult even to raise some potential scissors as examples without a lot of commenters falling into them.

SSC's point is not "X is a near-universal scissor", it's that there's a scissor or ten for almost everyone, and that some scissors are likely to ensnare a lot of people.

If you've never found yourself arguing vehemently and extensively, to the death, about something and sometime later wondered what that was about, you may be a counterexample, someone who is scissor-immune.

I sure am not.

The point, though, was that a scissor statement is irrelevant to an individual. To any one person, each statement is either obviously, trivially true, or obviously, trivially false. It only becomes an argument when you start discussing it with somebody who sees it the opposite way as you do.

The scissor effect can't apply to an individual. And I suppose if most everyone falls on one side of the question, even with lots of passion, there's no scissor.

But I'm arguing (SSC may not be) that effective scissor statements create both passion and tunnel vision in people, even one at a time. And so when there are people with passion and tunnel vision on both sides, voilà, scissor. (It's a little bit like "drunken mob". You can't have a mob with just one person, but each person, arguably, gets drunk on their own.)

It is either a story or a theory. Telling a story without naming the characters ranges from cumbersome to infuriating. Telling a theory, is another story

I just explained why the specifics of the story require the scissor statement not be made explicit.

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