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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

They were incorrect on a side detail "shot of dopamine equals pleasure". That is not the main crux of the comment and latching onto that side detail and throwing "Fuck this and fuck that" around is is insulting the person and doesn't add anything to the discussion. Even after the original author politely answered and noticed the correction the insults continued with "this is not acceptable" .

> Just because there is debate does not mean that there is not a clearly correct answer.

The correct answer in this case doesn't really matter for the main point if we are talking about the dopamine. Which, from what I see is the clearly factually incorrect statement. Latching unnecessarily unto inconsequential details and derailing the conversion is also called trolling and bullying and will get the message downvoted or flagged.

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  > They were incorrect on a side detail (...)

Doesn't cover it at all. OP gives a mechanistic account of how the construct of "porn addiction" works and how it affects people; there isn't much to his post other than that. His mechanistic account happens to be incorrect, or at the very least sufficiently misguided to be worthless, and people call him out on that.

I think the concern is not that people called him out when he was wrong, but that one person phrased it very rudely.

Which is, when it comes right down to it, is a tone argument. Which is only one step above fallacious reasoning.[1] Calling something BS that's well, BS in a rude way does not negate that call of BS. The person doing the attacking has done so using an explicit refutation of a couple of the author's main points.

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grahams_Hierarchy_of_Disag...

Calling something BS that's well, BS in a rude way does not negate that call of BS.

And nobody claimed that it does. They simply pointed out that it's kinda weak to be an asshole in response; the fact the the asshole had a point doesn't make them not an asshole "Yeah but he's right". That's great, but not the point, and was also mentioned by the very people criticizing the asshole for being one. All further responses to that just went in circles, attacking strawmen like you just did.

Couldn't agree more. Well done for stating this. I'm not sure where some of these aggressive comments are coming from, but despite claiming to want to improve the quality of the discussion they achieve precisely the opposite. Compassion/tolerance/understanding and accuracy are not mutually exclusive.

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