HACKER Q&A
📣 O__________O

Response to Vihart’s kindness before reasoning video


Possible misunderstood Vihart’s recent video, but when I shared in on HN yesterday, while it got 13 upvotes, no one actually commented on the topic of the video:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394050

Anyone able to expand on the strengths and weaknesses of kindness before reasoning? Or clarify what Vihart intend express if for some reason I misunderstood it.

  👤 zaphar Accepted Answer ✓
Sometimes it's not possible to know the correct answer to something because you are missing critical information, but people are really good at rationalizing a plausible answer to the question. Taken to the extreme this causes controversy where none need exist. The example problem she is talking about highlights how there are any number of perfectly consistent and rational patterns to observe but to truly know the actual answer you need the creator of the problem to explain it because as presented there is critical missing information.

A little bit of empathy and kindness allows you to consider the fact that someone else's explanation has just as much plausibility as yours and can avoid lashing out or diminishing someone else's analysis.

I don't know for sure that this is what Vihart meant in her video but it is how I understood it.