

Tell HN:  Something that bothers me about discussion here. - amichail

I'm personally fascinated by debate whether or not the topic is all that reasonable.<p>Moreover, even if the topic is not all that reasonable now, it may be more reasonable in a decade or two and could be argued in that context.<p>I suppose others here think differently and don't want to debate anything that is not of practical significance today.
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nostrademons
It's more that as you start doing things of greater complexity, the number of
possible things to debate explodes exponentially, and you _have_ to prune away
fruitless discussions to avoid getting overwhelmed. Most topics have far more
depth to them than is apparent at first glance, and once you start getting
into them, you'll find there's a lot of interest just within a narrow
specialty. If you tried to apply that same level of depth to _everything_ that
might possibly be of interest, your brain would just get overwhelmed.

I used to want to discuss anything and everything too, when I was in high
school. In many ways I miss that, but I also think it was largely because my
life was so much more sheltered and less rich than it is now. I just wasn't
exposed to all the depth in the topics I was discussing, so I needed to
discuss more of them to fill up my brain.

Part of the price of growing up, I guess, and one of the reasons why adults
are more boring than children.

~~~
amichail
Don't people accumulate life experience as they age thus potentially making
philosophical debate more interesting?

~~~
nostrademons
Right, but that life experience usually takes the form of greater depth and
not greater breadth.

One of the things that most surprised me about growing up is that I don't know
_more_ , I know _better_. When I was a kid, how smart you were was determined
by how many facts you could remember, and how broad that knowledge was. Now,
how smart I am is largely determined by how effectively I can judge whether a
piece of knowledge is relevant to my particular situation. I've found that
very few of the things I believed in childhood were _wrong_ , but a great many
of them were _incomplete_. They had little corner cases to watch out for, and
situations that they didn't apply to.

An interesting corollary of this is that it explains why adults always seemed
so dumb to me. It's not that hard to find a random fact that most of the
adults around you don't know. (It was a little depressing how often this
happened in the subjects that they were teaching me, but that's another
issue.) But that doesn't mean they're dumb: it means that you've stumbled into
an area that just isn't that useful for them. They know a lot about their
specialties, but the chance that you'd happen to be seriously interested in
their specialties was pretty low.

So yeah, philosophical debate is more interesting among experienced people -
_if_ you're debating things they have experience about. I think that's why
most of your submissions don't get much attention; they just seem rather
useless to the things that most of us here want to accomplish.

~~~
amichail
But many people here are attempting startups or hope to in the near future.

Breadth is useful for coming up with a compelling new idea. Depth is useful
for refining and implementing it.

And btw, as I have aged, I have lost interest in technical things and have
gained interest in more speculative/high level/philosophical matters.

------
icey
I'm sorry, but what are you talking about?

~~~
amichail
See this for example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=905867>

------
Mz
FWIW: If you are saying people aren't responding as you had hoped to things
you are posting, you are the best person to do something about that.

I really suck at starting threads. For the most part, I try to avoid starting
too many threads because it usually goes pretty badly. At one time, I made it
a specific goal to figure out how to get better at that in one forum I
participated in regularly at the time. I did get better at it. One thing I
did: I observed what other people did who had a track record of successfully
starting conversations. I couldn't do exactly what they did but I did have a
style all my own that worked reasonably well for me in that forum, at least
for a time.

Often, it's not simply the topic that is the problem but what the way it is
framed.

And if that's not what this question is about: Nevermind.

