Be careful about what you dislike

I have realized over the years that it is wise to be naturally skeptical of any opinion that is strong, either positive or negative. People who have an appreciation for gray areas, even if they ultimately do have a preference, tend to be a lot more emotionally balanced than those who maintain a very strong stance on something. I have noticed this so consistently over the last 15 years that I now consider it a fundamental benchmark by which I can gauge my ability to work or socialize with someone in general, on any topic, over the long term.

I&#x27;m fascinated by the topic of English Prime: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;E-Prime" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;E-Prime</a><p>It introduced me to the idea that &#x27;is&#x27; should be treated very carefully. Any assertion outside of strict formal languages that use it are half-truths at best. It also introduces heightens the emotional tone of a discussion. If you say &quot;John is foo&quot; you tend to create the impression that John will always and has always been foo. Foo-ness is a taint on his soul. Contrast that with reformulations that make it explicit that John&#x27;s foo-ness is a fleeting association related to both his present situation, your current perception of it and the current socially accepted meaning of foo along with all it&#x27;s implied baggage.<p>I realise I might be rather off-topic :-)

&gt; Then the entire thing spiraled out of control: people not only railed against TTIP but took their opposition and looked for similar contracts and found CETA. Since both are trade agreements there is naturally a lot of common ground between them. The subtleties where quickly lost. Where the initial arguments against TTIP were food standards, public services and intransparent ISDS courts many of the critics failed to realize that CETA fundamentally was a different beast.<p>CETA has ISDS as well, and if only on that point alone, CETA is objectionable. This argument comes off as disingenuous, the similarities between the deals are not imagined. ISDS isn&#x27;t even the only similarity; CETA also contained objectionable new copyright provisions (though apparently those are mostly gone now), for example.

This brings to mind a fantastically lucid comic about the utility of questions vs answers:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kiriakakis.net&#x2F;comics&#x2F;mused&#x2F;a-day-at-the-park" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kiriakakis.net&#x2F;comics&#x2F;mused&#x2F;a-day-at-the-park</a><p>After all, the an opinion is just an answer to the question, &quot;What do I think of this?&quot;

A very common cognitive bias or logic pattern our brain follows is to whitelist or blacklist things. When we trust something, we follow it without question or we begin rationalizing it no matter what. And in the day of the internet and Google we can confirm basically any bias we have on either side of an issue.<p>You should scrutinize your own thoughts and opinions and others to see if they are just believing something because it was true in the past.<p>In terms of Javascript, there is definitely a lot of hate out there for the language and ecosystem which was entirely true. But I would argue JS has the best trajectory right now of any language out there. So you better learn it if you want to stay relevant in development.<p>Lastly, I&#x27;ve found it best to not be so opinionated about everything. Sure having some opinions are great but you develop too many biases otherwise. So what if something sucks, use it anyway. You might learn something new, or maybe you can help improve it if it has potential.

Our realities are each a collection of stories we each tell ourselves. Sometimes parts of the stories two people believe will overlap and we&#x27;ll call those opinions or facts depending on situation.<p>I&#x27;m finding it helpful to view every signal my body encounters as a chance to choose how to process it, including what I do, taste, or hear.<p>Since adopting this view, I&#x27;ve effortlessly enjoyed eating foods I&#x27;ve hated my entire life (tomatoes, olives, CILANTRO?!), listening to country music, and doing things like chores that used to bore me to tears.<p>If anyone sees danger in learning to view the world that way by default, I&#x27;d love to hear about it.

It&#x27;s unfortunate, but we have a tendency to take some beliefs so deeply that they become a part of our core identity. Once this happens, validation of the idea becomes validation of ourselves. Attacks upon the idea become attacks upon ourselves.<p>Once someone has reached this point, logic simply cannot reach them. Successfully defeating their arguments will only strengthen their resolve (the backfire effect), because they&#x27;re being driven by the amygdala, which only understands threat response. They will grab onto any argument, no matter how flimsy, and be completely unaware of how little sense it makes. Any further argument with them will at best do nothing, at worst make you look as much a fool as he.<p>The wise man learns to recognize this state and back off.

It&#x27;s not the responsibility of the author to anticipate future changes that might weaken his current arguments. The reader is responsible for taking into account the time and context of the text they are reading.<p>It&#x27;s why we like to have e.g. &quot;(2013)&quot; added to anchor texts on HN, for example.

For comparaison, Ruby 3 is gonna introduce a pretty big breaking change (frozen string literals) but they already shipped a way to optional enable it by-file (magic comment) and globally to the ruby interpreter (just a parameter) so that all the libraries and projects can slowly fix it in a compatible manner (often just calling .dup is enough).<p>So that&#x27;s when it&#x27;s time for Ruby 3 the transition will be pretty painless.<p>More info: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wyeworks.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;1&#x2F;immutable-strings-in-ruby-2-dot-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wyeworks.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;1&#x2F;immutable-strings-in-rub...</a><p>(Frozen string literals allows strings to be in memory only once and not having to reallocate each time, so a pretty big memory and cpu optimization)<p>(Also for instance rubocop already recommends adding the magic comment to all ruby files)

I naturally see both sides of almost any argument, and my personality is such that I would rather synthesize the arguments of both sides into a final position via dialectic.<p>I have lost almost every major argument I&#x27;ve had in a corporate environment.

As a relative newcomer to Python, I had no real interest in working with 2.x. But I appreciated Armin&#x27;s critiques of 3.x -- it was really difficult finding thorough, thoughtful critiques that were focused on 3.x&#x27;s flaws, not on the pain of porting&#x2F;division of the community, which is of less concern to recent bandwagon jumpers like me. Most of all, I appreciate that his libraries -- Flask, flask-sqlalchemy, Lektor -- are 3.x compatible.

Hear! hear! I also recommend, more generally, reviewing logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and misconceptions as part of a regular self-review. It&#x27;s important to keep a flexible mind, though achieving greater degrees of interior freedom is hard work.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_cognitive_biases" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_cognitive_biases</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_fallacies" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_fallacies</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_common_misconceptions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_common_misconceptions</a>

Part of the issue is efficiency, we have to make choices and cannot reevaluate everything constantly. Also, we can&#x27;t be specialists in everything.<p>So programming languages, we have to pick a few and become good at them. It&#x27;s one thing to take another hard look when applying for a new job for example, but we cannot keep track of all programming languages and their evolutions.

I think a sideline point here is to not appropriate other people&#x27;s opinions from a specific point in time just because they happen to align with yours (opinion&#x2F;bias) at the current time.<p>And of course, try to have as wide and deep an understanding of the subject as possible before forming strong publicised opinion in the first place.

Hmmm... while agreeing with the sentiment I am unimpressed by the lack of evidence for one of his supporting examples. What stood out for me was this bald assertion with no reference to falsifiable specifics:<p>&quot;_Not_only_was_it_already_a_much_improved_agreement_from_ the_start_,but it kept being modified from the initial public version of it to the one that was finally sent to national parliaments.&quot;<p>Either the writer of this is an expert on the topic, well-known in the field and the weight of this judgement on its own is a valuable primary source; or, the writer is referring to such an analysis conducted by other experts but has not bothered to include a citation&#x2F;link; or, the writer has their own critique but instead of presenting _that_ has just stated an opinion which they know to be controversial.<p>All of the above possibilities contribute substantially to the noise around any discussion.

Paul Graham in one of his best text explained similar concepts writing &quot;I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions&quot;<p>Highly worth read: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;identity.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;identity.html</a>

I have to reference an Arthur C Clarke essay, &quot;Hazards of Prophecy&quot; with this quote<p><pre><code> &gt; When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that &gt; something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When &gt; he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong. </code></pre> I have found that the wisest, smartest, most mature folks will re-evaluate their opinions in light of new information, and often change their mind.

Try not to move the goalposts. If someone compromises, acknowledge that and thank them for it, rather than saying &quot;I am glad you finally saw the light, but now we need to take it a step further&quot;.<p>Brinkmanship rarely serves to get anything done, and burns bridges when it does actually accomplish something.

We need to establish that all communication is the senders responsibility. In the case of CETA, bot parts are not senders. Only one part is. They have a clear obligations to let people know about updates and imprecision about their communications.

I think the effect described in the text has another side: imagine that at some point using XYZ was obviously a bad idea for multiple reasons for a specific person in specific circumstances. Obviously, keeping track of the changes in XYZ will have a lower priority for a person who is not going to use XYZ anyway, even if one of the multiple show-stoppers gets fixed&#x2F;changed&#x2F;redesigned. This means that the person&#x27;s opinion about XYZ slowly gets stale.

The bit on CETA was interesting. I was very disappointed when I heard CETA was signed last week because I strongly opposed the copyright term extension and anticircumvention clauses from the 2009 leaked draft. However, as far as I can tell, those are not in the final agreement. Opps.

This is a broader topic, it touches on how to deal with communication, debate, idea exchange, solution finding, society. I&#x27;ve seen the postures recently from supposedly right wings partisans that were mostly stuck up on old negative facts that don&#x27;t apply today.

Web URL&#x27;s are seriously underrated ... You can not go back in time and change what you told someone ... But if you have a blog that has an <i>URL</i>, you <i>can</i> actually update the content.

It may be less the responsibility of the &quot;consumer&quot; of the information and more the responsibility of the &quot;producer&quot; of the information.<p>If the argument is presented as if something is and will always be a certain way (or even if the argument is presented without admitting that something may change) it can probably lead a lot faster to groups of people assuming the argument will be valid forever.<p>EDIT: Or can be misinterpreted that someone presenting an argument believes the argument will remain valid forever.<p>btw. never saw the talks the author cites, and have not followed the trade agreements very closely so I&#x27;m only speaking generally here.

for me personally it is news the_mitsuhiko is &quot;not vocally against python3 anymore&quot;. i cannot find any other recent blog posts besides this one, where python3 is praised or encouraged fully. so why be surprised if people still think he is a big python3 critic?<p>as i see it, the issue is less about parroting other&#x27;s outdated technical opinions, it&#x27;s about not being vocal enough about the change of heart.

Headline: Engineer cries Political Arguments are not &#x27;valid&#x27;; Forks off own nation.

Two words:<p>Socrates, Marx

Except Internet Explorer... that will always be the same. :)

Good article.<p>List of some of the things I don&#x27;t like for which I have to occasionally take another peak to see if I&#x27;m finally wrong:<p>1. (In languages) Garbage collection and the idea of &quot;safe code&quot;. I didn&#x27;t like it then and still don&#x27;t.<p>2. ORMs<p>3. (Relational) Data models with compound keys flying around as FKs everywhere.<p>4. The idea of self service BI (like PowerBI etc in the hands of a business user)<p>5. Regexp