Because you could trivially modify the statement to be "for the people who live in a jurisdiction where copyright law applies, why do they X" and it would be clearly the spirit of the question (and even that is imprecise).
The net effect of your means of conversation isn't a more cogent conversation. Instead, by causing everyone to over-specify their statements you force conversation with you to be only for the things that can be fully specified for low cost.
This is only your loss. Some people will not talk to you because they know you'll just be looking to say "gotcha", not help arrive at the truth. When most people bring up ideas with others they're looking for meaningful invalidation or corroboration with the net effect of refinement of the idea.
It's often popular, so you'll amass karma on HN, but I don't think you'll find it productive when improving your worldview. Forums like this have a wide variety of people with a varying degree of sophistication in a subject. You can appeal to the people with the least sophistication in the subject and be very popular. But you'll annoy the people who are skipping unnecessary steps. This is fine, but you'll end up moving the forum in the direction of less sophistication.
If a maths analogy will help: imagine that you are in a group of first year maths students talking about the reordering of terms of a sequence. To the more advanced students, this means we are talking about a convergent sequence and specifically a bijection from N to N. Since it's a conversation the details are elided and these students are already making the assumptions that are, to them, obvious. Objections that their statements are untrue for some divergent sequences will simply lead to those people being left behind when the next chat happens.
In practice, on the Internet, some people just aren't told where things are spoken about. I only tell you this out of love. Good luck.
> The net effect of your means of conversation isn't a more cogent conversation. Instead, by causing everyone to over-specify their statements you force conversation with you to be only for the things that can be fully specified for low cost.
under-specifying is also a problem, especially when the framing is a bit sloppy. it leaves a lot of room for weaseling about what was or wasn't meant, and people end up talking around topics and not arriving at some kind of understanding.
it seems to me that the problem here is the question, which seems to be poorly rendered given the context it was presented.
> Because you could trivially modify the statement to be "for the people who live in a jurisdiction where copyright law applies, why do they X" and it would be clearly the spirit of the question (and even that is imprecise).
...but I responded to that too, and that's the most important part of my comment. Most people in the USA clearly don't recognize copyright law as legitimate. It is flouted everywhere by everyone.
GP seemed to assume that refraining from breaking copyright was important to most people; it isn't.
The net effect of your means of conversation isn't a more cogent conversation. Instead, by causing everyone to over-specify their statements you force conversation with you to be only for the things that can be fully specified for low cost.
This is only your loss. Some people will not talk to you because they know you'll just be looking to say "gotcha", not help arrive at the truth. When most people bring up ideas with others they're looking for meaningful invalidation or corroboration with the net effect of refinement of the idea.
It's often popular, so you'll amass karma on HN, but I don't think you'll find it productive when improving your worldview. Forums like this have a wide variety of people with a varying degree of sophistication in a subject. You can appeal to the people with the least sophistication in the subject and be very popular. But you'll annoy the people who are skipping unnecessary steps. This is fine, but you'll end up moving the forum in the direction of less sophistication.
If a maths analogy will help: imagine that you are in a group of first year maths students talking about the reordering of terms of a sequence. To the more advanced students, this means we are talking about a convergent sequence and specifically a bijection from N to N. Since it's a conversation the details are elided and these students are already making the assumptions that are, to them, obvious. Objections that their statements are untrue for some divergent sequences will simply lead to those people being left behind when the next chat happens.
In practice, on the Internet, some people just aren't told where things are spoken about. I only tell you this out of love. Good luck.