"I'm going to try to paraphrase your concerns that the privacy fears are overblown and we're just losing something valuable, I hope you don't mind, please tell me if I got it wrong:"
"I'm going to just rewrite your argument" is not a valid form of debate. Please don't do that, ever.
I'm not so sure if you're correct. I was polite, and I wanted to know.
When you're on the Internet it's hard to know where people are coming from. I can see now how I misread him, I wish I didn't, but I did. How else do I find out politely what the terms of a debate are in a public forum? Is it truly better to not attempt at true comprehension of a person's words? Is it all just throw-away, a comment on an aggregation site?
And this was a tough thing to ask politely, simply because I had a presumption which was wrong. But I tried to do it right. I think the response I got back was pretty clear, the OP knows the fundamentals of the privacy debate, he/she has an opinion on the privacy issue itself, and the OP is not too offended by my best take on a gentle nudge at the bias question, a pretty safe guess from that is that he understands the questions of bias as a safety net for intellectual thought rather than as an offensive gesture.
I didn't know all of that, and so I asked. That's all it takes.
It's hard to communicate well online. It's this new thing for the human mind, without a 100,000 years of conditioning. Every day I log on to Hacker News for two things: It's shockingly educational in many disciplines; and I want to learn to communicate so I can better participate in society in a positive way. What a challenging place to do it. In the process I've found out that my communication needs a lot of work. I've been lurking since '88 and lurking didn't teach me communicating, what gives ;-).
But I'm pretty sure I took a reasonable tack here. Listening comprehension, interest in knowing what people really mean in short form communication, and trying to find out why people say things that we disagree with seem to be critical needs in this complex medium.
I voted him up because I'm taking him at his word that his goal is to paraphrase, and that I wasn't very clear in my initial writing. If both speakers have equal opportunity to respond, saying back in your own words what you think you are hearing is a great way to reach understanding. If nothing else, it made me reread what I wrote to see if I could state things more clearly.
"I'm going to just rewrite your argument" is not a valid form of debate. Please don't do that, ever.