Comment by ineptech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ineptech | Hacker News Reader

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You spent a week arguing with me under the impression I believed X, and I pointed out that I had told you at the beginning I didn't believe X. I was curious whether you'd re-read the thread with this new information in mind and re-evaluate the things you'd said. I think we both know the answer to that, so here we are.

You are right though, that I thought I was a lot more curious than I was - I forgot about this until I saw you peddling the same line of goods in a new thread this morning. Best of luck :) I will close by saying thanks for being civil, I hope you experienced this conversation in the "Let's have a friendly tussle over this relatively obscure point for fun and to understand the world better" spirit in which it was intended. For future reference, you can enhance that good-natured spirit greatly by not accusing people of being upset. Also wouldn't hurt to pay a little extra attention when someone says, "Just to avoid misunderstanding I'll try to clearly summarize my position...", missing that caused a lot of unnecessary repetition.

I didn't spend a week misunderstanding you (I hope you realize you wrote a lot more than the one sentence you referred back to), I miswrote one line in one comment out of dozens that you've now latched onto. That's fine, but it doesn't hold as a meaningful disagreement to what I've said here, a fact I bet you hoped I'd miss.

My presumption here is you'd rather now talk about the argument instead of continue with the argument because you realize I'm correct, and piracy is immoral in the general case.

> a fact I bet you hoped I'd miss.

Don't do stuff like this. Communication via text between strangers over philosophical topics is hard enough without it. Assume good faith.

This argument has only ever been about one thing: you made a claim that there's an easy way to show that all piracy is unethical regardless of the details, and I said that was wrong. That's it. However, when somewhere along the way you get the idea that I'm also arguing that piracy is always ethical, it's not sneaky or underhanded of me to point out that I'm not. It's not impossible to imagine a world in which that would cast some of the things I've said in a new light; "your reason for believing X is wrong" is materially and non-trivially different from "X is wrong."

> My presumption here is you'd rather now talk about the argument instead of continue with the argument because you realize I'm correct, and piracy is immoral in the general case.

Wrong on both counts, but it looks like you found a new thread full of people who agree with me and still want to discuss it, so no great loss I'd imagine.

Ah but you gave away the game just now; either they agree with you and I was right to argue as I have, or you had one specific point, one nobody else has made in the second thread. Looks like the argument really was about what I said it was, after all!

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