Comment by wamatt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wamatt | Hacker News Reader

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Meta: OP is looking past the author's sentiment, generalizations and inaccuracies to respond thoughtfully to the central point of the message.

Someone is following their own advice:

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

So regarding hypocrisy, while it's true in certain contexts and under certain conditions, calling out hypocrisy, could constitute a logical fallacy, simply stating that possibility, says very little about how to value it.

Is hypocrisy good or bad? Perhaps the question is ill-framed. Avoiding hypocrisy, can create a powerful resonance between the speaker's aligned actions and words. It may be worth nothing this not a moral value judgement, but speaks to leadership. People on average, appear more willing to follow those with strong and bold congruency, and yet abandon them, when that illusion shatters (aka Lance Armstrong).

That said, my own view is that hypocrisy is generally inefficient, as it appears to increase the noise in the system.* As the proverb goes "talk is cheap" and hence it costs little to put an opinion out there, which is not bad in and of itself, merely that it requires little effort.

Thus with a sea of opinions floating out there, and limited time to process (if your cognition doesn't naturally operate in a frequentist manner), who can you trust?

There does not appear to be a definitive set of answers, however the heuristic of matching words to actions, while not perfect, combined with a test for integrity, has personally proven useful over the years.

*cf bounded rationality, opportunity cost, SnR etc.

Do you speak like this in real life? I went ahead and read your other comments on other threads and I can't understand what you're writing until I've read the words at least three times.

Interesting that you should pick up on that. It usually depends on the audience.

In general if one has a slightly more divergent worldview than that of the company in which he/she finds themselves, it's historically been useful (albeit frustrating at times), to be more considered and precise.

Between my best friend, a fellow coder/entrepreneur of ten years, (who has a very different personality), we can communicate in shorthand as he understands what I mean, irrespective of the natural imprecision, that creeps in by wanting to be "good enough" to get the message across. Although the early days of our friendship was somewhat.. challenging.

Some of the usernames on HN that I've noticed that have insightful content, do not appear to reward sloppy rhetoric, and even, I suspect, use it as a filtering signal.

Hence, it would seem rational to at least demonstrate one is willing to embrace the norms of that group, but more importantly to avoid genuine misunderstanding, which has plagued me since childhood.

(I know what a cliche, what a special snowflake etc etc ;) Yes I dislike how it sounds too.

Lastly my own values dictate a personal preference for dialectic over sophistication. But perhaps that's a debate for another time.

You use too many ",", and they make your writing hard to understand. Use shorter sentences, and consider replacing "," with a full stop.

It's not about commas, it's about "asides" (I just looked this up in a dictionary, I hope it's a correct term in English) - end it's true that he's using many of them, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend changing this. Rather, I'd think about assigning priorities to those asides and grouping them in relevant chunks, using parentheses, dashes and semicolons beside colons, because - as we all should know (and those who do not have a chance to learn) - this could substantially increase readability of his writing. Long sentences can be a pleasure to read as long as their construction follows some consistent plan.

Just trying to help a bit :)

Since you asked earlier, you probably got downvoted for concatenating a reply to the bottom of your post about a totally different part of the thread with no transition in between.

It took me a minute to figure out why you were talking about hypocrisy.

Thanks. In general I find articulating the conceptual stream to be a challenge, especially since it jumps around disjointedly.

Usually it takes a few iterations of a post, to improve the quality or tone, even though from my perspective, the core spirit of message remains unchanged between drafts.

The trick in communication is to be understood on multiple levels, not to simply output claims, irrespective of how accurate they are. Took me two decades to realize that, and still trying to improve. :)

Hence, the feedback is appreciated.

I actually think the parent's confusion is twofold.

First, you're comma-splicing some of your sentences, making it harder to read what you're saying. Commas have rhymes and reasons to them; and, it is good to know when to use them and where. It also seems like you are too quick to begin a new paragraph. Concepts that connect to one another should be put into the same paragraph so a person knows where one idea (or sub-idea) ends and another begins.

And second, you're choosing to use words that are larger that, while possibly being more precise, actually make you more difficult to understand in a normal conversation. For example, "I find articulating the conceptual stream to be a challenge." "The conceptual stream" is hard to follow. What conceptual stream? Do you mean you're having trouble articulating what you want to say? Then why not say that? "Conceptual stream" is not something usually said in conversational English and means that people will need to parse everything you said, rather than read it. It's almost like obfuscating code, or at least code-golfing. For the right audience it's great; but in other audiences, or in production code, it's just difficult, and un-necessarily so. Remember that in most instances, people online that you're speaking with are conversing at about the same level as a group of chums in a circle, at a pub.

What you say may very well be important; but, remember that being heard is equally important, and speaking in language too high to be followed in a conversation is too high to be heard, especially since so much is already lost from speaker to listener.

I've read some of your other comments in other posts, and I have noticed that you can and do speak in a more conversational tone, albeit fleetingly so, and often by mistake (if you consider it a mistake. It seems more like passion for a topic seeping through); so, I know you still can.

Long story short, know your audience.

:)

>"The conceptual stream" is hard to follow. What conceptual stream? Do you mean you're having trouble articulating what you want to say? Then why not say that? "Conceptual stream" is not something usually said in conversational English

A fair point. While some statements could be a somewhat unfamiliar/unusual, it only take a little more effort to process, if one just thinks about it.

eg "conceptual stream"

Take the concept of a stream (aka a social network news feed, or a data stream). Take the concept of a concept. Then merge the two. Hence you should have an image of a stream of concepts, interconnected via a graph.

Another way to look at it could be to picture a sports commentator. We see him speedily narrating the action as he watches the game. Event's are often linked: "He hit the ball", "Now he's going for 3rd base", "Oh and it's a homerun", "the crowd is ecstatic"

Now what if we replaced the real word events, with concepts?

Sometimes events are completely unconnected too, concepts work in a similar way (at least for me).

Now in my head the nodes on the graph connect, although this may be non-obvious. Nodes could correlate with concepts and edges roughly with causality. How accurate that graph (map) to reality is, would always open to honest debate (if the goal is towards improving accuracy versus trying to score points).

It's difficult perhaps, because in some ways probably different to how you usually operate. There is also the very real possibility, that many simply find metacognition, largely uninteresting (which is fine too).

Continuing this theme, there are some are highly visual thinkers (such as Temple Grandin [1]), while for myself, for the most part am most comfortably naturally operating abstractly, conceptually, strategically and focusing on outcomes. In theory I tend towards impartiality, but in practice I'm biased towards a utilitarian framework.

Many highly intelligent people here operate highly tuned abstract pattern matching. I simply don't work like that, and yet I can appreciate its general effectiveness. I do feel genuinely happy, if on occasion, the courtesy is reciprocated. Ideally this would be irrespective of whether at that point in time, there happened to be agreement or not.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin

I see what you're referring to, basically:

"Stream of Consciousness, focusing on the concepts that arise"

I know it's already been said, and English is obviously not your first language, but you should try to tone down the verbiage a bit:

", while for myself, for the most part am most comfortably naturally operating abstractly, conceptually, strategically and focusing on outcomes"

No need to repeat "most" "most comfortably" is redundant with "naturally" If you are focusing on concepts you can't be focusing on outcomes

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