Comment by obviouslygreen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by obviouslygreen | Hacker News Reader

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Sometimes opinions are just opinions, sometimes anecdotes are enlightening, and sometimes generalizations, metaphors, analogies and other abstractions come into play.

Opinions are opinions. They should be stated and treated as such. If your "opinion" is stated in the form "x is y," then maybe you are the one who should be more conscious of the way people communicate. Sure, it's just an opinion; that's fine. Just don't expect anyone else to take it as a fact or agree that it's at all meaningful outside of your own head.

I don't agree with this assessment of the problem. Some people want to participate in discussions about how things are or how things work or why things were done or what actually happened -- discussions of fact and logic -- yet they want to inject anecdotes, generalizations, metaphors, analogies, and other abstractions.

It's irritating and intellectually backwards. But it's not going to stop, because most people less interested in what a discussion is about than they are about making sure people pay attention to their contribution, whether it's valuable, on topic, or other.

I used to start a lot of my sentences with "I think...", "In my opinion...", or "To me it looks like..." and I noticed my emails would commonly go unresponded to, or worse: the conversation would go directly opposite of the point I was trying to make.

Lately I've been experimenting with just saying "x is y" or "x is broken the fix is y". Things seem to be working out better for me that way. It keeps my emails from getting cluttered and the words are obviously my own perspective and opinions, which I will sometimes make explicit at the end.

It is irritating that facts and opinions and everything else can't be kept separate from technical discussions, but that's just how many people communicate and there's not a lot that can be done if you want to include them in the conversation.

>If your "opinion" is stated in the form "x is y," then maybe you are the one who should be more conscious of the way people communicate.

Irony much? :)

>"It [x] is irritating and intellectually backwards [y].

To be ironic means to speak in contrast to what you really mean. Usually, people are expected to pick up on it by tone of voice.

Irony is what most people think is called sarcasm. It is a form of intentional wordplay, derived from the behavior of the Eiron, a feature of greek theater. (Sarcasm is irony which is meant to hurt feelings.)

Irony is not what Nelson from The Simpsons would laugh at, and is never unintentional.

If a safety worker botches the installation of a safety device which later gets them killed, that is not irony. When someone leans over the rail and yells "good job keeping people safe," that is irony (and since it's mean, it's also sarcasm.)

http://rhetoric.byu.edu/figures/i/irony.htm

Opinions are opinions. They should be stated and treated as such.

Let's not generalize and remind to ourselves that there's a difference between a well-formed opinion and an uninformed opinion and those two are not equal just because they are opinions.

This coincides with what rayiner and tokenadult have posted regarding basis of knowledge.

> If your "opinion" is stated in the form "x is y," then maybe you are the one who should be more conscious of the way people communicate.

I don't think that's true. Some examples:

"That place smells bad."

"Red is too bright a color for a car."

"Lost is a terrible TV show."

Those are all opinions and it's obvious that they're opinions. You could prepend "In my opinion" to each one and no one would complain, but it's unnecessary, and people say stuff like this all the time with full knowledge that they're opinions. Their status as opinions isn't contingent on anyone stating that they are; they're just opinions because they're value judgements or statements of preference.

I've found that it's generally easy to separate opinions from statements of fact, and so it's not required that anyone be the "that's just your opinion!" police. Of course it's their opinion; that's why they said it. The weird thing about complaining that opinions should be explicitly demarcated is that is suggests that either a) you have trouble telling the difference between fact and opinion or b) you assume the person saying them doesn't know the difference. Both of those are bad.

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