Comment by abletonlive
6 months ago
I struggle with this a lot so thanks for the hint. I don't entirely agree that good points stand on their own. It's often easy to anticipate the criticism to your point. When arguments are text-based and responses have a tendency to span hours or days, it can be useful to short circuit the argument by just calling out the anticipated criticism. This of course can sometimes lead to comments such as yours, where we go off into a meta side-argument. Or, if you anticipate badly, you unintentionally put even more focus on the anticipated criticism than your original point.
> It's often easy to anticipate the criticism to your point.
You can head off a lot of criticism by not making your point competitive with other reasonable points. I.e. additive to understanding, not subtractive.
Otherwise, you are actually creating the competition between points that you wanted to avoid. And creating your own distractions from your own point.
But ideas are not always additive. It's okay that ideas are competitive and it's okay to try and shut down bad ideas. Easy to find examples. If someone was proposing to extinguish a group of people, would you try to "add" to the conversation?