First: Haha, voted up for humor.
But if I can be dour for a moment: presume we live in a universe where it's not self-explanatory. What is the cautionary tale we can extract from this? That time spent thinking about optimizing happiness isn't time spent experiencing it?
Voted down for brevity and lack of content. I believe the community aesthetic is that we strive for multi-paragraph top-level posts, rather than single links or slashdot-style paragraphs.
I have no objection to two categories - top-level posts which are candidates for being promoted, and those that might be amusing if you're bored.
However, I'd prefer that the latter not win karma.
You're right -- it's not an argument. It's a historical observation. If there is an implied conclusion in there, my intent was that it be something like, "It's a little unfair to vote something down on aesthetic grounds when the original (and still AFAIK most explicit and authoritative) statement on the community aesthetic allowed such posts".
Okay, this reveals my misconception of your comment, but here again I disagree for pretty much the same reason and with the same reply: aesthetic judgment is very important (as in: it's an aspect of preference, and beware trivial inconveniences). It's only something to discard if opinions differ so wildly as to make the negotiations worse than dropping the matter.
My comment was addressed only to what the community aesthetic is (was?), and not what it ought to be. I deliberately phrased the comment in the past tense to allow for a response like "well, maybe we should change that standard".
I don't see how a post written by a single author that didn't reflect the actual practice or survey of opinion can serve that purpose.
It's only something to discard if opinions differ so wildly as to make the negotiations worse than dropping the matter.
But Johnicholas didn't negotiate, but instead made claims about a consensus aesthetic. Cyan contradicted this false statement.
No, but that's not an argument
I disagree. It had a premise and an implied conclusion - it was clearly an argument.
If you meant that it's not a good argument, you did not provide a very good argument for why that would be the case. I could just as well argue that you should not eat bananas, since bananas sometimes contain poison and explosives.
How often does top-level planning get things horribly wrong, and how do the alternatives fare?
Hm, I wrote that under an assumption that everyone already knew the fact stated in the comment, since it was repeated a number of times before, so the comment could only be an appeal to availability of whatever weight the bare fact of there being a post like that has.
Incidentally, formalism has a way of losing track of the original intent, which is at odds with the intent of signaling ability to handle rigor.
It's not an argument about ought, but it is an argument about is. Johnicholas did not merely make a claim about his preferences, but asserted their universality. It's fine for him to try to change the aesthetic, but I think he should be shot down if he tries to change it by making false claims.
Lore Sjöberg's Life-hacking FAQK
Pretty self-explanatory. Also available as a podcast.