To the degree it bothers me, it's more "Not this again" than "How dare you?"
It reminds me a lot of that "could God microwave a burrito so hot even he couldn't eat it?" meme I remember being popular a long time ago. There's just enough substance in that statement to grab people who never heard it before (and it's not like it isn't funny, either), but it subtly breaks the community down over time as the bar for "meaningful and insightful contribution" sinks lower every time someone posts it.
It's still low-effort even if it's done serially; sure, write a long post through a book if you must, but you only get to burn that bit of social capital once. Blame the tech if you must- the unwritten community rule that you need to have iterated upon your past thoughts can't reward effort if that effort is higher than just being limited to the conversation at hand is not helped by the fact this is a significant limitation of the Reddit-style discussion forum- but these are the only tools we have so this'll have to do.
It doesn't hurt that (like the above meme) HBD and Dajooz get bonus points for being argument-terminating in and of themselves- they're prescriptive arguments, not descriptive ones. Which is the meta-level justification for the "no enforcing consensus" rule anyway- sure, at the end of the day, all arguments are prescriptive (or else we wouldn't be making them), but you aren't allowed to make them directly because the entire point of this place is, well, seeing how a prescriptive argument might arise.
Put another way, there's no game of chess if you resign in the first move because you're playing black, and it's pointless if your community exists to study gameplay strategies- even if black loses every time, it's still a case study in how to play white. Ignoring it "because black loses" is not just boring; skipping to the end misses the point entirely.
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Notes -
It reminds me a lot of that "could God microwave a burrito so hot even he couldn't eat it?" meme I remember being popular a long time ago. There's just enough substance in that statement to grab people who never heard it before (and it's not like it isn't funny, either), but it subtly breaks the community down over time as the bar for "meaningful and insightful contribution" sinks lower every time someone posts it.
It's still low-effort even if it's done serially; sure, write a long post through a book if you must, but you only get to burn that bit of social capital once. Blame the tech if you must- the unwritten community rule that you need to have iterated upon your past thoughts can't reward effort if that effort is higher than just being limited to the conversation at hand is not helped by the fact this is a significant limitation of the Reddit-style discussion forum- but these are the only tools we have so this'll have to do.
It doesn't hurt that (like the above meme) HBD and Dajooz get bonus points for being argument-terminating in and of themselves- they're prescriptive arguments, not descriptive ones. Which is the meta-level justification for the "no enforcing consensus" rule anyway- sure, at the end of the day, all arguments are prescriptive (or else we wouldn't be making them), but you aren't allowed to make them directly because the entire point of this place is, well, seeing how a prescriptive argument might arise.
Put another way, there's no game of chess if you resign in the first move because you're playing black, and it's pointless if your community exists to study gameplay strategies- even if black loses every time, it's still a case study in how to play white. Ignoring it "because black loses" is not just boring; skipping to the end misses the point entirely.
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