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Comment by gotaquestion | Hacker News Reader

Excellent point. I try to do that on HN: differentiate between describing how you interpreted what they typed ("said something greedy and childish") rather than a value statement about that person ("you are greedy and childish"). Easy to forget sometimes, but super important to separate the words/actions from the person. We all say/do dumb shit sometimes that is out of our normative character for all sorts of reasons.

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I certainly agree that it's important to leave people room to change who they are, but if a person isn't defined by their actions, then what are they?

I guess it is polite discourse these days to distance a person's actions from some intangible person-ness, but it feels very mushy.

"I guess it is polite discourse these days to distance a person's actions from some intangible person-ness"

Are you acting obnoxious or are you obnoxious?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder ;)

A person is perhaps defined by _all_ their actions, but they're not very definable by a single action, out of context. That's the kind of reasoning that writes someone off if they make a mistake, which is totally intolerant.

That's fair. I would say a person is defined by what they do next.

I think what you're saying is that you should be careful telling someone that they 'are a baby' or 'are dumb', because they might believe you.

I would also be careful of telling someone they are 'acting like a baby' or 'acting dumb', because most people won't appreciate the semantic difference.

In the context of this article, though, I'm not too bothered since the article is about how one can change their baby-like habits. But it is always a good reminder.

I'm not really so concerned with what you tell someone else, but what you end up telling yourself can be pretty important and stick with you for a long time. an article like this is mostly targeted at one's perception of themselves, and if you read it and start to adopt the model that that "you are a baby" when you act that way, you might have adopted a slightly less healthy model than you could have.

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