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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

As a terrible ponderer, I depend heavily on about half the examples listed in this article to stop worrying about anything and everything. I don't think they're as obviously bad as their context in this article suggests.

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I agree, many of these clichés are just verbal shortcuts to a pretty useful filter:

"This is not important for me to think about or discuss right now."

I think there's quite a meaningful difference between the suggested phrasing (which is quite honest and open, and I think should be generally acceptable) and the general character of the listed instances which serve to exemplify the concept, which dismiss the general (rather than contextual or personal, immediate) importance of the subject (e.g. "it's not that deep" rather than "I don't find it that deep" or "it's not particularly relevant right now"). I see it as a kind of refusal to take responsibility for refusal of engagement: external deflection of unimportance, rather than acceptance of non-engagement/disregard of (externally recognised) importance. I'd rather welcome people speaking as you exemplified: it's an explicit 'self-veto' from the relevance of the situation (and thus basis of involvement), rather than a dismissal of others' engagement (which ideally needn't involve the one who doesn't wish to be involved, of course).

It sounds like this kind of 'low-order dismissal' serves you as a kind of coping mechanism for anxiety. With respect, I suggest that, while it might be the best way of dealing with it that you currently have, there may be ways of addressing the deeper reasons that you need to stop yourself from worrying so often, else perhaps better ways of managing that worry: dismissal doesn't make a problem solved, it only mutes the warning signal—and we should ideally be able to trust (and bear) our warning signals. It thus seems fair to speak of the negative effects of such a fault of reasoning, whether it's a coping mechanism or not. To be clear, I appreciate your 'use case', and would agree that this kind of response is thus not an absolute negative; a more nuanced view might also spare people like you from (ironic) unfair dismissal or disapproval for depending on this kind of attention management strategy: the world is messy and optimisation is context-dependent, and almost all situations almost necessarily must involve some (or even all) 'non-ideal' methods.

Is there a particular part of the article that notably reads to you as unhelpfully negative or overgeneralising? I'd like to see what you're seeing here for how it might improve the article.

Come on, eg "it is what it is" is basically stoic philosophy in a nutshell. That's not a cope, it's a useful way of separating what you can control from what you can't. If the still-closeted overthinkers in this thread want to call that a "Thought-Terminating Cliché" then fine by me but to suggest that none of these can be useful tools is ridiculous.

The article suggests that "further discussion" is always good and my argument is that, well actually, no it isn't. Not always. And especially not when the entire discussion takes place inside of one person's brain.

There's an idea that I agree with there, but I think that the low resolution of the phrase holds within it ambiguity which is conflating different intents and different effects across different contexts: I see "we shouldn't try to control it" as quite different from "it can't be changed", and the use to oneself of such a phrase is much different from using it in response to the concerns of others. I'd suggest that the article is using this phrase as an example for some cases with a particular set of possible intents, which doesn't preclude all possible uses, nor that they might be 'non-negative', as you're suggesting here. Similar cases can be made for some of the other examples; this shows that they're not absolutes, but it doesn't show that they can't be used in a context where their effect is less a healthy affirmation on the limits of responsibility and effort, and more of an unconsidered dismissal of responsibility outright—and I don't even see that the article paints the essential dismissal of the concept as inherently negative, only that dismissal is occurring. I can clearly see it being legible with a negative tone, though, particularly given some of the examples.

I wouldn't say the article suggests that there should always be further discussion, either, only that these phrases tend to shut it down. I don't see such evaluative statements around the examples of that term at all. Does it seem like I'm missing something?

>> and the use to oneself of such a phrase is much different from using it in response to the concerns of others

Quite right.

I'm so enamored with similar concepts, I like to think about them as tools that I might reach out to, and they help me in achieve whatever, say thinking clearly and correctly.

Iirc when I've first seen someone linking this wiki article on HN I got so angry at it (both the person and the wiki article) that I wrote a ~15-sentence rant how stupid I found it.

This is definitely a tool that I would never use and only get angry when I see it. IMO it's no good.

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