It's also odd because Kell only specifically accuses the Snively/Laucher talk of committing two of the "seven deadly sins", and that isn't one of the two.
I think he took Stephen Kell's post as a direct response to their talk when in fact Stephen Kell's post was about the entire culture around static typing and their talk is only one small piece of it.
Yes, and the interesting thing is to me this exactly demonstrates the problem that is being pointed out by Kell (for the community in general) and by me (for Snively in particular).
What I feel this blog post demonstrates is that if you are somewhat critical of something Snively says, you are met with a barrage of arguments that counters everything you said in all the ways he could possibly find to disagree with them. That motivation will always lead to some ridiculous and only remotely relevant disagreements, which are now being pointed out here and over on Reddit.
This blog post feels like it was written in anger: the enemy must not just be refuted on some points: he must be destroyed. His credibility must be tarnished by showing he didn't get anything right.
I think I understand this, because I used to do this. I stopped because I wondered why I was so often getting into ridiculous, irrelevant, arguments about things that I didn't even care about but that just came up in a discussion. Proving the other wrong in any way became more important than finding an answer to the question before us.
I've been guilty of this too. The funny thing is, if you actually want to win an argument that's exactly what you shouldn't do. If you respond to everything the other person said, and refute each of this points, then inevitably somebody will come along and take one of your refutations of an unimportant issue and point out a factual error in your refutation. Even if you are 100% correct, somebody will come along and misinterpret one of your sentences. At this point you've lost the debate, because now the entire debate is focused on that small point that you got wrong, and it can be difficult to steer it away from that onto the more important issues.
No, if you want to win an argument you should do exactly the opposite. You should find one weakness in your opponent's argument, and then make a bulletproof refutation of that. You may think that because he made other points that are wrong it's better to point out all the ways in which he is wrong, but that's a bad strategy. Inevitably you will be wrong or misinterpretable in one of your many refutations and then you've lost.
Both of these strategies are of course detrimental to having a productive debate ;-)
