>> Then when you are told about it, you’d make up excuses trying to explain
>> why it is totally normal.
> That's a pretty incredible rhetorical device. "If you
> disagree, you're fundamentally incapable of reasoned
> thought."
No, that's not what Zed's saying at all. He's saying that people often respond to valid criticism of things they know well by justifying the behavior being criticised.
Ie, people mold their way of thinking to suit their existing tools. Since they're familiar with how things are, they have problems seeing what could be.
It's not an ad-hominem attack at all. Think of the academic who has no idea of how to teach because he knows his subject so well he can no longer see it from the perspective of an outsider.
Except, do you doubt its truth? Humans are rationalization engines. Communities will go to great lengths to prove that everything about their culture is good.
I not only doubt its truth: I know for sure it's false.
If I disagree with someone, then I often still grant that their opinion is the result of reasoned thought. In such a case it's the underlying assumptions that we disagree on and those assumptions are usually not amenable to reasoning.
A programming example is bracing styles: I have my preferred one and a colleague has his preferred one. I have my arguments and he has his arguments. In the end, it comes down to what each of us considers to be 'best readable', which is an entirely irrational consideration. We get along very well, despite our differences (and of course, for each project, we settle upon a style, based on exterior considerations like: what would be consistent with this clients' codebase).
Another example is religion: I'm a staunch atheist and my girlfriend is a Christian. 'nuff said.
That's not an example of what he's talking about. He's talking about people creating reasons to explain away a real problem in a way that preserves reputation or personal peace-of-mind.
What he's talking about is the pattern you get when you speak to an Alzheimer's sufferer who is trying to pretend they have nothing wrong. They can be extremely convincing to you and themselves for a while making up excuses for why things are the way they are. Eventually they exhaust (rapidly, if you make them reload context) and the facade falls away.
Programmers do this stuff all the time. "Oh it has to be this way because ... [some bullshit reason that doesn't explain why a customer has a reasonable objection to the software cracking its head doing a double blackflip when they asked it to step forward]". Is it reasonable to the educated impartial observer that a piece of enterprise software should crap itself on a null pointer exception and start silently failing? Not remotely. Will you find programmers defending their software when it exhibits such behaviour? All the time.
This is exactly why people who learn multiple programming languages/paradigms are so valuable to these types of conversations. The problem is that reasoned and experienced thought gets thrown out with the speculative garbage.
