I think what’s often going on here is that saying “Actually, X happened because of Y” is a kind of status attack, trying to say that unlike the replier, the OP doesn’t even know about Y, so they hardly know what they are talking about. So it’s deployed by people who are trying to discredit the OP and/or their argument, or lift themselves and/or their own argument above them.
Thinking more, I think it’s also often generated out of cynicism, when people have basically given up on the idea that a problem could be solved, and they are explaining to you some premise they have about why that is, but they don’t really want to explain the whole thing in one big wall of text.
Yeah, I think the generous way to interpret the objector in this dialogue is as saying “I think you are underestimating how hard this problem is to fix”.
It’s not just that B is responsible instead of A, but that B has different constraints than A. Maybe you don’t see any constraints on A that would make the problem hard to solve. Yes—that is because the problem’s constraints are on B instead!
I think “the fact that you’re even complaining about X generically rather than explicitly X modulo B’s constraints this means you’ve thought about it less than I have” is an unfortunately common condescension.
I think what’s often going on here is that saying “Actually, X happened because of Y” is a kind of status attack, trying to say that unlike the replier, the OP doesn’t even know about Y, so they hardly know what they are talking about. So it’s deployed by people who are trying to discredit the OP and/or their argument, or lift themselves and/or their own argument above them.
Thinking more, I think it’s also often generated out of cynicism, when people have basically given up on the idea that a problem could be solved, and they are explaining to you some premise they have about why that is, but they don’t really want to explain the whole thing in one big wall of text.
Yeah, I think the generous way to interpret the objector in this dialogue is as saying “I think you are underestimating how hard this problem is to fix”.
It’s not just that B is responsible instead of A, but that B has different constraints than A. Maybe you don’t see any constraints on A that would make the problem hard to solve. Yes—that is because the problem’s constraints are on B instead!
I think “the fact that you’re even complaining about X generically rather than explicitly X modulo B’s constraints this means you’ve thought about it less than I have” is an unfortunately common condescension.