Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I could not disagree more. Clarity is easy if you remove all detail from the world. There's no surer way for me to be disinterested in a position than it be absolute.

The opposite of clarity is not self-doubt but curiosity. And unlike cynicism it's constructive because it's not afraid of being challenged.



I never said anything absolute. Read it again. The remark was that clarity is often mistaken for cynicism, which is often true given the lengths people delude themselves about many things. It's not absolute. I qualified it as "often," which makes it extremely reasonable.

See what happened there? A clear statement was made, but obscured because you mistook it for cynicism.


I sense some confusion, let me try to clarify:

The absolute I'm talking about in the GP comment, is in reference to the clarity you are referring to in the GGP. You don't actually provide any example of said clarity. And I didn't refer to anything you said directly as cynicism past the point in the chain where you state your preference towards analogizing a museum exhibit to an over-arching pattern about the Fed's handling of money. That to me is indeed casual cynicism, and it provides no clarity, only hand-wavy oversimplification with a defeatist sort of appeal.

Since you don't provide any other example of a statement that I would consider cynical, which in your view actually provides clarity, I'm having to use my own imagination as to what kind of "clarity confused for cynicism" you could possibly be referring to. Those are the statements I'm talking about in the GP comment. And I completely stand by what I said there.


I see what you mean.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: