> When I ask ‘what did I say that made you thunk that’, can you explain why you rarely answer?

Okay, sure. When you ask me to try and justify why I think you hold your position, I interpret that as a distraction (hopefully a good faith one). I don't want to argue on a meta-level about why I got confused about your comments, I want to know what you believe. I'm frustrated that you keep trying to dig into "why are you confused" instead of just clarifying your position.

My feeling is we could have skipped this entire debate if you had sat down and made an extremely straightforward checklist of your main points, consisting of maybe 5-10 bullet points, each one to two sentences max. This is a thing I've done multiple times now about my beliefs/positions during this discussion. If we get mixed up about what the other person is saying, the best thing to do is not to dive into that, it's to take a step back and try to clarify from the start in extremely clear language.

You looked at the final checklist and said "this looks like just a blunt attempt to win some argument of your own". I looked at it as a charitable invitation to step back, write 10-20 sentences instead of 15 paragraphs, and to just cut through the noise and figure out where we disagree. If your checklist doesn't overlap with mine, fine. It's not bad for us to discover that we're arguing past each other. What's bad is if we spend X paragraphs getting frustrated about meta-arguments that have nothing to do with Apple.

I don't want to debate language or start cross indexing each other's comments, I want to debate ideas.

So when you tell me that I'm wrong about what you believe, I look over your statements and try to reinterpret, and I move on. Very rarely is my instinct to sit down and try to catalog a list of statements to try and prove to you that you do believe what I think, because I take it as a given that if you tell me that I misinterpreted you... I did.

So I accept it and move on.

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Yes, we could get into a giant debate about "what makes you think I think that". That might go something like:

> You seem to think this will help keep people from attacking encryption,

> What have I said that makes you think that?

And I could reply by linking back to one of your previous comments:

> "Most people just want reasonable solutions and aren’t going to be persuaded by either extreme. If you make an argument about creeping authoritarianism they’ll say ‘child porn is a real problem, and that risk is distant’.

> If you offer them a more privacy preserving solution to choose as well as a less privacy preserving option, they’ll likely choose the more privacy preserving option.

> Apple is offering a much more privacy preserving option than just disabling encryption. People will accept it because it seems like a reasonable trade-off in the absence of anything better."

Which to me sounds quite a bit like: "offer a solution that doesn't target encryption, and then these people won't target encryption because 'most people just want reasonable solutions'".

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But what's the point of the above conversation? I already know that you don't interpret those 3 paragraphs about a "privacy preserving option" as meaning "a proposal that will stop reasonable people from attacking encryption." Because you told me that's not what you believe.

So how weird and petty would I need to be to start arguing with you, "actually you did mean that, and I have proof!" Is it any value to either of us to try and trip each other up over "well, technically you said"? I'm not here trying to trap you, I want to understand you.

Honestly, the short answer to why I rarely reply back with quotes about "why I think you said that", is I kind of interpreted "what makes you think I think that" as a vaguely rude attempt to derail the conversation and debate language instead of ideas, and I've been trying to graciously sidestep it and move on.

- I'm happy to debate privacy with someone

- I'm happy to listen to them so I can understand their views better

- I'm not happy to debate whether or not someone believes something. I think that's a giant meaningless waste of time.

I don't think that means you're operating in bad faith, but I can't think anything I would rather do less than spend all day going back over all of your statements to cross-reference them so I can prove that... what? That I misunderstood your actual position? I believe you, you don't need to prove to me that I misunderstood you! Let's just skip that part and move on to explaining what the actual position really is.

It doesn't matter "why I think you said what I said", it just matters that I understand you. So why get into that meaningless debate instead of just asking you to clarify or trying to reinterpret? I don't care about technicalities and I don't care about "winning" against you, and I interpret "justify why you thought I thought that" as a meaningless distraction that only has value in Internet points, not in getting me any closer to understanding what your views are.