Compare the cause-and-effect of both the situations. One can send someone to jail for life and destroy their finances, reputation etc... the other can hurt someones feelings.
Contending the latter should be addressed before (or even comparatively) to the former is what I take issue with.
Do you really think Paul Graham doesn't know the difference between someone being insulted on Twitter and someone being threatened with federal prison time? You don't think maybe it's you that are missing something, and not him? Because if my response to something he wrote depending on him not noticing the difference between prison and twitter, I would worry that I was missing something. No, wait, I wouldn't; I like giving him shit.
The actual objection here, the reason why pg's comment is "fallacious and ignorant", is a bit fuzzy. People have pointed out a difference between HN users and federal prosecutors, but not why that difference is important. I can only think of one possible line of reasoning, but it's unbelievably hollow. Are you sincerely arguing "It's OK for me to be an unsympathetic asshole because I don't send people to jail"?
>The actual objection here, the reason why pg's comment is "fallacious and ignorant", is a bit fuzzy
Because he is suggesting that "someone said someone else's code was bad" is a more pressing and concerning issue than "the federal government threatened to destroy the life of a young man and drove him to suicide over a trivial non-offense".
>Are you sincerely arguing "It's OK for me to be an unsympathetic asshole because I don't send people to jail"?
I can't imagine how one could make an honest, good faith attempt at communications and come to that conclusion. It seems more like you are deliberately looking for a strawman. I am arguing that pg can in fact make a fallacious and ignorant statement, even if he is aware of the difference between two cases he is comparing.
> Because he is suggesting that "someone said someone else's code was bad" is a more pressing and concerning issue than "the federal government threatened to destroy the life of a young man and drove him to suicide over a trivial non-offense".
As someone once said to me: I can't imagine how someone could make an honest, good-faith attempt at communications and come to that conclusion.
What pg said, albeit more politely, is that calling out federal prosecutors for lacking sympathy when you don't exhibit any yourself is rank hypocrisy.
No, that is not what he said. He very clearly, and completely explicitly stated that we should concern ourselves with this trivial non-issue before we concern ourselves with the serious issue. The only reason we could need to address one issue before we dare to consider another, is due to the overwhelming importance of the issue.
Stop trying to pretend he said something other than what he really said. His words speak for themselves, you don't get to invent an absurd justification to pretend they mean something else. You can read the post yourself, it is still there.
He has no way to know if the people calling out the federal prosecutors have sympathy or not. There is no hypocrisy in Bob saying the prosecutors did something wrong while Joe (who Bob has never met or heard of) is saying Sally wrote some bad code.
The probability that he, or any other decent, civilized person, would make that comment is very, very low. Let's admit that parent, GP etc. are trying to pick on pg and move on.
If empathy were a limited resource that demanded to be spent only in descending order of the seriousness of the potential injury, then you might have a point.
Time is a limited resource. But fair point, as one could spend less time being unsympathetic towards others and instead spend it more valuably being empathetic towards legitimate causes.
Why is this a before/after situation? The people addressing one issue are a completely different group of people than the ones addressing the other. And what is keeping people from addressing both at the same time? And which one is closer to us that we can have a more direct effect on?
This idea that we shouldn't try to address problems in the HN community because there are problems elsewhere in the world is ridiculous.
Contending the latter should be addressed before (or even comparatively) to the former is what I take issue with.