From a purely pragmatic perspective; conversation is a tool for getting what you want. There exists a spectrum from simplicity to complexity; and favouring one over the other is really just a case of the grass seeming greener on the other side of the fence, imo.
There are situations where it pays to simplify your point, and situations where it pays to get deep and dirty. I wouldn’t hesitate to guess which type of situation is more commonly encountered, so it seems to me that there’s no readily applicable heuristic for this problem—you just have to take each conversation as it comes.
Is this comment intentionally trying to do the exact thing the OP was talking about for comedic effect? Or is it just an accident? I think it’s actually a pretty decent comment if it tried to do this intentionally.
I understand what the OP is saying—adding complexity to the model helps win arguments. On the other hand I might also accept the strong statement ‘people tend to ‘oversimplify’ things’, or the weak statement ‘people do not always overcomplicate things’, and from the second statement it follows that adding complexity isn’t always a bad thing, and so whether or not it’s right might very well be a judgement call. (This is my understanding of Lou’s comment.)
Sometimes people start conversation around weird ideas whose merits (aside from being interesting to talk about) aren’t clear, and you might not too many of your conversations hijacked by memes that you find to be weird premises… On the other hand, it’s also polite/sometimes useful to interact with other people’s model/s.
From a purely pragmatic perspective; conversation is a tool for getting what you want. There exists a spectrum from simplicity to complexity; and favouring one over the other is really just a case of the grass seeming greener on the other side of the fence, imo.
There are situations where it pays to simplify your point, and situations where it pays to get deep and dirty. I wouldn’t hesitate to guess which type of situation is more commonly encountered, so it seems to me that there’s no readily applicable heuristic for this problem—you just have to take each conversation as it comes.
Is this comment intentionally trying to do the exact thing the OP was talking about for comedic effect? Or is it just an accident? I think it’s actually a pretty decent comment if it tried to do this intentionally.
I understand what the OP is saying—adding complexity to the model helps win arguments. On the other hand I might also accept the strong statement ‘people tend to ‘oversimplify’ things’, or the weak statement ‘people do not always overcomplicate things’, and from the second statement it follows that adding complexity isn’t always a bad thing, and so whether or not it’s right might very well be a judgement call. (This is my understanding of Lou’s comment.)
Sometimes people start conversation around weird ideas whose merits (aside from being interesting to talk about) aren’t clear, and you might not too many of your conversations hijacked by memes that you find to be weird premises… On the other hand, it’s also polite/sometimes useful to interact with other people’s model/s.