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Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

If the solution proves effective, will you change your mind, or will you simply remain forever outraged that you didn't like how the story was told?

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If the solution proves ineffective, will you ever read about that fact anywhere?

Well, we can talk about dropping atomic bombs on Japan during WWII if you want. The discussion isn't going to be a very simple one.

Wait, what? You want to compare the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians during wartime to a story about temporarily allowing containers to be stacked a little higher?

It's a classic example of, "do the means justify the ends?" - that's what you were asking. It's a slippery slope from "make a cute story on changing container storage policy" to something more nefarious. So think: how many times have you've been manipulated like this? Are you OK with it? Where do you draw the line?

I think we all have much bigger problems to spend our time obsessing over.

Besides, slippery-slope arguments are weak because predictions based on precipitating events rarely pan out to see our worst fears realized. As an extreme example, one could get wrapped around the axle fearing that a child squashing an ant in the garden could end up being the next Hitler.

> I think we all have much bigger problems to spend our time obsessing over.

You can hold more than one thought at a time.

Media manipulation is a thing, and here's an example of it - they must have thought it's not a big deal, since they're so callous of showing the man behind the curtain. If you don't find it a problem, speak for yourself. There's many, many stories of how Facebook manipulated during the US election cycle. Also not worth thinking about?

The Japanese were ready to surrender weeks before the bombs were dropped. So it wasn't such a hard discussion really..

Sure, and how many more weeks would they have remained ready to surrender, but never had done it? We don't know. We know they were beat in all but the surrender, but we also know countries through out history have fought on long after their loss was obvious. Japan has some "interesting" internal politics going on, even if they had formally surrendered it isn't clear if the military would stop fighting (Army and Navy needs to be considered separately).

Referencing the atomic bomb in this context is also manipulation. You're trying to evoke emotion, as opposed to arguing your point with boring facts.

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