I was consciously trying not to misunderstand you. I can't parse what you said in any way except "this guy is a nutcase and should be denied praise since he's ill."
I mean, how would you want to be treated if your genes were a little less signal and a little more noise?
Your two posts where you are re-stating my opinion in your own words should qualify as a strawman-like attack, so willful misunderstanding is a fair charge.
This kind of illness bleeds into a person's personality. Mental illness is a complex spectrum, not a boolean value. The more a person's capacity for reasoning about the world is compromised, the less relevant it becomes what that person wants. Clearly, if losethos would get what he wants, we'd all die a horrible death. Let that sink in for a second. So to answer your point: if I was a thoroughly crazy person, what I want would be irrelevant.
Of course, all of these points and counterpoints between us are somewhat dancing around the actual issue. So I'll come out and say it: I don't like that dude. For me personally his views outweigh the programming things he does. Your opinion differs. You write off what you don't like as noise, and cherry-pick the things you like for praise. Both viewpoints have certain merits.
However, when you summarize my point of view as
> You're disappointed that a cool project is #1 on hacker news?
you crossed the line into outright misrepresentation by using a polemic sound bite designed to distort the meaning behind the original argument. Yes, I personally am disappointed this is #1 on HN. Yes, it's a cool project. However, it should also be exceedingly obvious that I'm not disappointed because a cool project is featured prominently. And you did the same thing again with
> "this guy is a nutcase and should be denied praise since he's ill."
Yes, that guy is a "nutcase". And yes, he should be denied praise. But once again you imply a causal link between those statements where you know is none: I don't want to deny praise because he's ill. I want to deny praise because he's an asshole.
You did this maneuver two times. There is little reason to doubt you're trying to ridicule my argument by faultily restating it.
But let's put your rhetorics aside. This all is based on my personal opinion about losethos. You have a different one, and at the time of writing this, it is shared by at least 139 people. Be happy about that. It means you're probably right.
My intent wasn't to misrepresent you. It was to clarify you. I have no interest in making people look bad. I'm interested in the truth. Thank you for clarifying that, and I'm sorry if I was being uncharitable.
I'm sorry if I saw intent where there maybe was none. But I hope you see how it would look that way to someone when you paint a picture like that. Also, reading intent in forum posts is hard, especially if you don't know the person. So let me restate that those two conclusions you drew about my motivations are false, but the end result is probably pretty close anyway.
