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Comment by yowlingcat

What is the first principle from the guidelines?

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

When I say "what a strange lack of curiosity" I meant it literally -- it goes against the spirit of this forum, and furthermore I find it intellectually dangerous. I find that as dangerous as your own admission that you "didn't intend to address the lede of the story." Curiosity, as pertains to these stories (and I would say regarding most dystopian fiction in general) allows you to fully engage with the world that is being constructed.

Its opposite, which is a reactionary kind of incuriosity, allows you to project a presumption into a full response without fully engaging with what it's trying to say. To cherry-pick broad "Alexanderisms" that could equally apply to any other elements of Alexander's work is to risk missing specific details or the point of the specific piece. Sadly, your admission that you didn't intend to address the lede of the story indicates that this might be exactly what's happened.

parent yowlingcat 7 years ago

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