DukeLeto7 Some of us prefer our speculation to have some grounding in reality.
But apparently, some of us are satisfied that the speculation merely be plausible or interesting. I don't think this speculation was particularly doing the thread any harm and I don't think it merited giving the speculator the third degree.
DukeLeto7 You then asserted that I hadn't proven the hypothesis impossible. That's incredibly bad epistemology, and a bad way to approach thinking about things. I thought about posting that sentence originally, but decided it would be pompous,
If one's only assertion is that "it will continue to be a possibility", rather than "we must assume it is true", it is relevant to point out that it is still possible.
Do we even have a reason to believe that Maize wouldn't think harder about a weighty real-world matter than a pet theory for a video game plot? One that isn't a mere assumption? One sufficient to warrant this many paragraphs of lecture and bringing down the mood of the thread, despite your own implications that it's important to read the room?
DukeLeto7 I didn't address it because Decanter explicitly refuted it by quoting the actual dialogue.
Is it still strawmanning if you build my post up to be more conclusive than it was? Is there a word for that? All I did there was provide some evidence for my point that it wasn't likely, which I explicitly disclaimed as not being definitive proof, which I believe implies it isn't a refutation at all.
Occam's Razor is a useful tool, but it is fundamentally a tool for making assumptions and not for proving things. By way of analogy, it does sometimes turn out that the reason you've never seen a black swan is that they're all hiding on an unknown continent where all the wildlife is a bit weird.
I don't believe Maize's theory is likely and in that vein there are responses I could give to Maize's arguments since I last posted... but there's no point since they're supposedly gone.
DukeLeto7 you've interpreted my acerbic tone as an insult, and utterly ignored the content of that criticism.
Now, I'm not going to pretend that my tone can't be grating. I go into every conversation with the presumption that I'm the smartest guy in the room, and it's condescending. The reason I do that is because it has almost always proven to be true.
Before I read this, I was going to say something about how it can be easy to come off as rude or condescending in text where tone is hard to reliably convey. Perhaps the insight you're missing is that having a rude, grating, and condescending tone can cause people to think you are insulting them (if we assume that having such a tone is not a form of insult in itself), and thus is poor communication if you don't mean insult. Or perhaps you haven't realized that it's unwise to condescend, lest you be wrong and be cut no slack for it, or lest you simply annoy people that you'll be interacting with in the future.
Ironically, by being habitually condescending when you don't need to be, you provide evidence against the idea that you're the smartest guy in the room.