You deleted your other comment replying to me, I'm not sure why-- there was nothing wrong with questioning how I initially chose to respond, so I'll paste what I was writing back to you on that topic here:
Your original comment said 1) you didn't see an appeal for trust and 2) went on to make broader statements that trust isn't necessarily required when considering an opinion (on it's merits, independently of high/low trust, was my interpretation of what you wrote)
#2 Does not modify #1 in a way that would prohibit fair treatment of #1 when considering it alone. #1 is a straightforward question about the content of the article.
I didn't choose to address #2 because I agree, trust is not a requirement when considering someone's reasoning. In agreeing with you, there wasn't much for me to add.
I deleted my first response, because on further reflection it seemed you were more intent on defending your position, than having a friendly dialog.
In friendly dialog, it's quite common to make agreements equally clear to disagreements.
In addition, ghosting your conversation partner's agreed to points is indistinguishable from ignoring points you simply don't have a good retort to. If you were profusely nodding in agreement while reading parts of my comment, that was unfortunately invisible to me.
In addition, my original post had the phrase "particular appeal for trust", followed by the very relevant sentence "Not mentioning anything about non association would have seemed weirder." You also ghosted that in your response.
So you simply ignored my entire larger implication that it's not worth talking about the trustworthiness of the author of the OP, since there's no tangible evidence one way or the other.
That seemed to be what we were having, up until this reply from you where you seem to accuse me of conversing in bad faith or rudeness. My apologies if that was not your intent and I am reading too much into this accusation of ghosting. I even took the time, after seeing your reply before deletion and trying to address its contents, to still reply elsewhere to let you know, in essence, I found the deleted comment to be valid and deserved a reply of its own. Far from ghosting you, I un-ghosted your ghosting of me! :) Okay, now I'm having a bit of fun with the "ghosting" idea because I really do view this as a friendly dialogue as well, and I hope you take it in the spirit intended. So let me explain myself further, both in my original original comment and in reply to what you've written here.
1) My original comment: I merely chimed in to reply to the author of the linked article, who felt personally attacked by the previous comment by someone else, to give a perspective of why someone might be skeptical of their motivations. As you say there is no tangible evidence either way but the circumstances of their post-- new domain, anonymous, first-post... those do provide grounds for an inference that the blogger might not be authentic. I am being very careful to say might, because it is that benefit of the doubt that the harsh comment directly accusing sock puppetry failed to give to the author, an accusation I think was over stated and inflammatory. I attempted to temper that harshness with a less accusatory view, and thereby begin engaging the author-- if they chose-- in a more level headed conversation. They kindly took up that implicit invitation and I tried to provide a more thoughtful reply regarding the contents of their blog post than the original accuser did.
2) You replied to this by addressing only part of my comment-- that about the appeal for trust-- rather than address my underlying claim about why a person might be skeptical of the motives of the author. You ghosted me on that point! (again I jest) I don't see anything wrong with you choosing to only address the portion you disagreed with-- if I was mistaken in reading an "appeal" into the author's post then why not discuss that mistake before moving on? As you say, it's a dialogue, there's no need to assume I considered it ended and wouldn't engage in more depth on that or other points if you were willing & continued to reply.
3) Now I'll explain why I didn't consider the "...would have seemed weirder" context necessary to explicitly address when replying to you: We were then discussing whether or not an appeal had been made, and that is a question that is wholly separate from the question of it being weird to not make such an appeal. The appeal for trust can be there (or not) regardless of whether or not its absence would would be strange. Its existence is independent from the issue of it being expected or normal to include it. "...weirder" may be relevant in the broader conversation regarding the pragmatics involved (I use that in the linguistic sense of meaning) and logical inferences that might reasonably be made or not made by the author claiming a lack of conflicts of interest.
Side note: I hope you don't see the above dissection as adversarial. I am dissecting my own responses to explain them further, and dissecting yours in an effort to put what you wrote into my own words, in my own understanding, to make it clear what my understanding was, in case I did not accurately interpret your intended meaning. I enjoy questions of pragmatics & meaning in discourse, intended message vs. received message. In that vein, we've opened up 3 topics much different than the author's enterprise linux argument. I think we can leave that to the side as we pursue broader questions of meaning and trust. I'll be a little more comprehensive in this reply because we arrived at a point where you believed that my lack of a longer response implied something unintended, but in future replies I may address more narrow aspects of things when I think some particular point would be useful to discuss before moving on to others. That leaves, as I see it, 3 primary claims or questions with the first two pertaining to implied meanings in discourse, a fun topic. The 3rd is a question about the role & utility that trust fills when presenting ideas, claims, etc. Any content I don't list below I have interpreted to be premises in support of one of these claims. In the interest of brevity I will only address one of the following claims here, and we may choose which to pursue afterwards.
1 my claim) A person stating that they don't have a conflict of interest is asking for a certain baseline of trust. (actually I do address this in the above #3, but I am open to discussing my interpretation)
2 your claim) "ghosting your conversation partner's agreed to points is indistinguishable from ignoring points you simply don't have a good retort to."
3-a your claim) Trust is not strictly required when evaluating the opinions or ideas of another person. As such, 3-b your claim) Trust is not worth talking about in circumstances where direct evidence (as opposed to inference) is not present.
I welcome you to correct or amend or add to any of the above if you think I have not adequately covered things, and otherwise will choose to address #2 as I believe it important to do so before continuing:
I disagree with #2. I think its assertion goes against a fundamental guideline in discourse-- the principle of charity, i.e., given multiple interpretations of an argument a person should first consider the best and strongest. As such, while the absence of a reply to each and every particular point, premise, claim and sub claim might be interpreted as a person's failure, their inadequacy, their inability to form a coherent response, that may just as easily not be the case. A person may ignore some aspects of a comment for multiple reasons, including but not limited to reasons of preference (they're not interested in other aspects) practicality (keeping things brief so that participants do not have to, as I have done here, inundate another participant with large walls of text to be digested all at once when doing so in smaller pieces is also possible [look at the length of this! And I'm not even trying to response comprehensively to all aspects of what you wrote, leaving off claims #1 and #3 for future conversation]) or far myriad other reasons. As the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of an absence and there a other plausible and more charitable interpretations to be made.
That's all I have for now, see you in the next exchange?
First of all: Thank you for taking considerable time to compose your thoughtful in-depth response.
I honestly didn’t think, that my first point had ignored anything in your first post about trust, but I see now that I misinterpreted your intent in that post. And so I happily concede that I inadvertently “ghosted” that intent (I’m glad you appreciated the weird sense of enjoyment I had in appropriating that term into an uncommon context - and that you ran with it in your response!).
Your point about mentioning the less charitable route in my thoughts is valid, yet in my defence, I typed up that post articulating why I had deleted the other post. So I shared what were originally intended to remain private thoughts, not to attack, but to explain the post deletion. In my mind, deleting that post had been the more charitable thing to do. But when you took it upon yourself to resurrect it in some way, I thought it would be more charitable to explain the deletion very honestly - including my up to then private thoughts - rather than to stay silent and making the ghosting permanent.
Sharing those previously private thoughts was intended as an act of charity, much in the sense that spouses or friends explain to each other why they were angry, rather than keeping it to themselves. And since this forum doesn’t have private chatting, our exchange is now ingestible by all of those present and future ML/AI bots for better and worse :-)
Human (and pretty much any) communication is indeed a long and deep topic that much smarter minds than mine have not “solved”. Suffice it to say, that it’s a miracle that it ever works at all.
And in this specific case - somewhat counterintuitively - our disagreement also unearthed underlying common ground in carrying the conversation into philosophical meta-topics far removed from the original RH/IBM and Oracle.
On the old Slashdot we probably would have been buried in off-topic ratings. Here on HN (for unrelated reasons) we’re buried under a long flagged and dead post. Douglas Adams would have been able to spin that fact into an entire chapter, if not into a full book!
Thanks again for your investment of time and emotional energy. I appreciate that very much and also look forward to future exchanges! Warmest regards from this anonymous coward!
>I didn’t see a particular appeal for trust in the OP
It's implicit within the statement that they don't have a conflict of interest. Trust is precisely what conflicts of interest are about, where their presence often (maybe not always) introduces the need to be more skeptical of the person's motives, i.e., less trust.
Sometimes it’s interesting to read or hear from someone with a high trust score.
Other times it’s interesting to read or hear a line of reasoning without - or even negative - trust score.
Only going by trust arguably is one of the fundamental problems with tribalism and echo chambers.