I’d expect a bit more nuance on Hacker News. What I wrote is not provocative by being offensive or hurtful to anyone. It’s provocative by introducing an idea that intelligent, educated people cannot come to a consensus on in a purely intellectual way.
And yet you yourself have been passionately engaged at length in the very debate you say doesn’t exist. The evidence abounds here from your own comments that it is not purely about the triviality of my comment. In fact, your first objection was about whether you thought I owed you additional data before I’m allowed to make the statement that I made. Moreover, there are plenty of other comments engaging in discussion and debate that clearly go beyond a mere discussion of triviality but rather actually engage with the concept.
That's fair. I'm trying to point out that the degree to which your statements illicit an emotional response from someone, by any means, has no bearing on the validity of that statement.
