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Comment by skyraider | Hacker News Reader

I know you're doing it in jest, but it's interesting how often the tendency to 'well-actually' minor, irrelevant factoids and the tendency to reduce conversations to axiomatic systems appear together. It's part of the hacker desire to be Less Wrong (TM).

But in doing so, they are More Wrong (TM). Both situations involve missed social cues. Correcting a minor point is another way of saying you place a higher priority on correctness for its own sake - even if doing so prevents you from reaching higher goals - than you do on understanding.

These things can make it hard to for non-hackers to converse with hackers, and vice versa.

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> These things can make it hard to for non-hackers to converse with hackers, and vice versa.

Discussion should be about connecting and learning, not one-upping.

This distinction is why the Internet 'communities' almost never are. Nerds love to be pedantic while not realizing it doesn't add anything to the discussion. Actually, it potentially poisons the discussion, steering it towards who is more right, rather than actually, y'know discussing things.

"But, someone was WRONG!" It doesn't matter, and nobody cares.

Yes, and the ironic thing is that the 'well-actually' person is often /less/ correct in that they miss the main point in pursuit of compliance with arbitrary rules.

Being pedantic is akin to writing beautiful code that never gets used.

It's not necessarily correctness for its own sake. Sometimes it's the linguistic equivalent to pointing out a spot of mustard on someone's shirt, which is a courtesy in my book.

That being said, an audience member pointing this out to someone on stage is a net negative. But I'm not convinced that I should ignore irrelevant errors altogether, especially for errors that people use as signal levels of education or intelligence (nuclear and nucular, you're and your, etc.).

To be more specific - the notion that it's a courtesy is mistaken. It's considered rude at best, and the general public may (rightly) interpret a well-actually as a mark of low social or emotional intelligence.

So, we must carefully consider what really signals intelligence.

Linguistic errors pale in comparison to errors of understanding like missing the point.

> it's interesting how often the tendency to 'well-actually' minor, irrelevant factoids and the tendency to reduce conversations to axiomatic systems appear together.

Simplicity is seductive, especially when you're convinced that the minor factoid you're harping on is something you're absolutely sure is correct. If you take a situation and reduce it down to the abstract axiom that you know is true, you can assure yourself that your interpretation of the situation is correct regardless of any nuances in the reality. Because "facts".

This is the definition of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism is named from the effort to get the fundamentals right. In doing so, they completely isolated and cut themselves off from reality.

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