Okay. How did farmers survive before the industrial revolution? Your point that they’re better off does nothing to hurt my point that poor people don’t need IT workers to survive.
It might not undermine the strict, literal interpretation of your words (and that is questionable; you did say ‘They’d still pick food, and they’d be fine’ which is different from merely saying that they’d survive, somehow.) But it does undermine the more general point that poor people are less dependent on the rich people than the converse.
Seeing as the statement ‘societies can survive without IT’ is trivially true but not very interesting, it was reasonable for Konkvistador to guess some interesting generalization of what you actually, argue against it and expect that it will bear on your opinion. If he failed you could have ignored him or explained why it didn’t work which would also provide everyone with more information about your picture of the world.
Pointing out that Konkvistador didn’t address your literal point isn’t very helpful. It is an illustration of what happens when you treat discussion as a game in which points are scored by saying anything that contradicts the literal meaning of your opponent’s statements while avoiding classical logical fallacies. You’re going to say a lot of boring things because they’re technically true and you can’t have your opponents scoring points against you, right? There are no points. There are no winners. No one is playing that game with you. (They might be playing a different game—one of fighting for social approval. But around here, being enthusiastic about adversarial debate is a sure way to loose at that.)
Okay. How did farmers survive before the industrial revolution? Your point that they’re better off does nothing to hurt my point that poor people don’t need IT workers to survive.
It might not undermine the strict, literal interpretation of your words (and that is questionable; you did say ‘They’d still pick food, and they’d be fine’ which is different from merely saying that they’d survive, somehow.) But it does undermine the more general point that poor people are less dependent on the rich people than the converse.
Seeing as the statement ‘societies can survive without IT’ is trivially true but not very interesting, it was reasonable for Konkvistador to guess some interesting generalization of what you actually, argue against it and expect that it will bear on your opinion. If he failed you could have ignored him or explained why it didn’t work which would also provide everyone with more information about your picture of the world.
Pointing out that Konkvistador didn’t address your literal point isn’t very helpful. It is an illustration of what happens when you treat discussion as a game in which points are scored by saying anything that contradicts the literal meaning of your opponent’s statements while avoiding classical logical fallacies. You’re going to say a lot of boring things because they’re technically true and you can’t have your opponents scoring points against you, right? There are no points. There are no winners. No one is playing that game with you. (They might be playing a different game—one of fighting for social approval. But around here, being enthusiastic about adversarial debate is a sure way to loose at that.)
I don’t think we had ~7 billion farmers before the industrial revolution.