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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

I've asked this question before about a different subject. I think rayiner just enjoys telling HN readers how wrong and insignificant and impotent they are. It's a recurring theme in political threads.

In technical threads, rayiner often makes useful and informative comments, so he's not like this all the time.

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http://xkcd.com/386.

Seriously, though, nobody likes it when someone claims to speak for them but is really espousing his or her own views. People on HN have a real problem taking up the mantle of speaking for the public at large, when in reality they're often espousing quite minority views.

I'm not defending the pretentiousness of claiming to speak for a group that doesn't wish to be spoken for, but a view being a minority view doesn't mean it's an incorrect view. Maybe some minorities know something the majority doesn't, or maybe the experience of being in a minority alone provides an insight that the majority lacks (the inverse of which is sometimes referred to using the IMO insufficiently specific word "privilege").

An awful lot of anti-authoritarian sentiment on HN (like most of the Internet) is poorly informed and riddled with logical fallacies and cognitive biases, on subjects ranging from law enforcement to geopolitics. Having an opinion on how the world should work is no substitute for an accurate understanding of how it (imperfectly) works now.

This is exactly the sense I get. Plus, he's a programmer ("one of us") and a lawyer ("one of them") and can thus bridge the gap between the tech world and the "real" world -- if anything, we should be hoping for 100 more rayiners on HN.

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