The article itself was a bit disappointing because it focused on political issues. In my opinion the strength of HN in this regard is that it is both a "sjw cesspool" and a "haven for alt-right", as evidenced by the fact that a comment on a controversial topic can easily float near zero points while raking in both upvotes and downvotes. And even those who refer to it as "the orange site" still come back and comment. In other words, HN may be an echo chamber but it is a pretty big one with a lot of voices in it.
I assume that the mass upvotes/downvotes are exactly that.
both and neither. Partisan discussions, or even any kind of bitching at all ... are outright discouraged. I often step out of line in this regard and don't always agree, but I'm also confident that folk on "the other side" face the same kind of treatment. Though frustrating at times, I respect that it keeps things clean and helps cut out a lot of nonsense, of which the Internet has no shortage should I feel the need to go find some.
EDIT - actually upon some reflection I think that I would have to respectfully disagree, and change my opening sentence here to just "neither". Extremes of opinion that are "off topic" are not tolerated, and this is a good thing.
I'm not saying HN should allow ALL political discussion, but when technological issues inevitably and undeniably involve politics, either by influencing or being influenced, it seems a little cowardly that the general attitude of HN is "just don't discuss it" when the it in that case is core to the issue at hand, even if it happens to be political.
It is actually fascinating to know how much of this type of behaviour is visible to the moderators and how big of a problem it is (and of course they too can't see the full extent of it).
Lots of other commentators I've seen on here are experience pilots, engineers, etc. Maybe not Bill Gates money but certainly on the higher end of the bell-curve when it comes to education and pay.
I don't disagree that there is a lot of aspirational talk on here too -- they wanna get rich -- but again, it's the news site that's part of a startup incubator. What did you expect?
> Down the page, another user expressed disdain for the experiment. “The idea that we can carve out a space that exists outside of politics and ideology is delusional,” the user wrote. “Squelching political discussion won’t cause us all to transcend ideology, it’ll just make it impossible to discuss or critique a dominant ideology whenever one shows up in someone’s unstated assumptions.”
> “Of course it’s delusional,” Gackle replied. “And still we have to moderate this site.” Three days later, he announced that Political Detox Week would be coming to an end. They’d learned, among other things, that “it’s impossible to define ‘politics’ with any consensus because that question is itself highly political.”
Ignoring the discussion of both relationships and power leads to an anemic understanding of freedom and what it takes to enable it which leaves us unbalanced and brittle as a civil society.
The exercise of this privilege is a systemic, cultural mistake and the tendency of conversations to often devolve into tribalism highlights our lack of sophistication and maturity when it comes to these topics.
The echo chamber effect on HN is far worse than any comparable site, it's just not as obvious because there's zero transparency.
At least there are tons of 3rd party sites that allow us to see censorship in real time on Reddit. No such thing exists for HN.
I have no sympathy for the moderators here. I believe they moderate very arbitrarily and are accountable to no one.
For example, a rather good article explaining Bill Gates and Warren Buffet's concerns about cryptocurrency was removed.
Remember, Bill Gates is an excellent software engineer; and both Bill Gates and Warren Buffet know a thing or two about economics.
Example: The advice to get at least 8 hours of sleep at a regular time each night. This reflects:
- the economic privilege of not needing to do irregular shift work
- not having a chronic disease which interrupts sleep
- not being a parent
- having a regular place to sleep at all.
However, it is still a good idea for one’s physical and mental health.
Likewise, a community might reasonably decide that certain political discussions are too acrimonious to have productively. Even if this decision reflects privilege, it might be the only decision under which the community could survive without rupturing.
I feel inclined to agree with your second paragraph, but just don’t know if such discussions are actually productive.
Hacker News sort of splits between technology and politics so drawing a line is a bit tricky.
The empowered, or the disempowered?
AFAIK noone has figured out how to have a substantial political discussion, at scale. Until that problem is solved, it makes sense to just tune it out a bit.
BUT, and this is a big but here, there are a small number of discussions on HN where it can be argued that the politics involved in an issue are more important than the technology. Or, that the technology involved is actively shaping the politics related to it. Or, that the politics of those building the technology are informing the technology. And so on.
And I feel like the attitude here is one mirrored strongly in the tech industry at large, that somehow by not discussing it openly, we avoid the stains and the ugly realities of the situations we're involved in, and I'm sorry but that's just not true. Simply refusing to discuss the political angles of what we all do doesn't mean we're above it or beyond it, we're simply ignoring it, and ignoring politics can have catastrophic consequences.
In one sense it's a shame when thoughtful, evidence-based discussion is discouraged for being off-topic. But I suspect that's ultimately what makes those discussions possible; they're happening between relatively small numbers of discussants, in a space that doesn't draw in people looking for political debates.
Who do you think are these unprivileged people you are speaking off anyway and what do you think would hinder them at participation?
HN generally bans explicitly political opinion pieces, articles with overt political statements and articles primarily covering current political affairs (e.g. articles about something a US politician said). But even what is or isn't "political" in this sense is again down to the unstated biases of the moderators (e.g. what if the US politician said something about a well-known tech company).
A lot of articles that make the cut tend to be overtly about economics, but those are still extremely political. Universal basic income is political, climate change is political, how companies treat their employees is political, the "sharing economy" is political.
HN isn't free of politics, HN is centrist (with a neo-liberal bias, i.e. anti-regulation, pro-market). And centrism isn't an ideology, it's merely a compromise relative to wherever the current Overton window is.
Saying you don't want to talk about politics riles people up because in order to think of something you talk about as "non-political" requires you to be considerably aloof and far removed from the real-world impacts.
And for completeness sake: yes, even saying "when a company makes an economical decision that negatively impacts people that's not political" is political because it presupposes a laissez-faire capitalist worldview where the Friedman doctrine is unquestioned.
(Hopefully we don't need to talk about why any pretenses of a "meritocracy" or "only hiring the best" is political as these specters should have been cast out of most tech forums at this point)
People who show up for political debate generally do so with knives drawn; you hear from the loudest people with the most solidified views, and the stuff that rises to the top is playing to the crowd instead of engaging in extended discussions. But in a rec sports team, a movie club, or a tech forum, people aren't grouped by viewpoint and vitriolic arguments are a distraction from the original cause. So those places seem to breed conversations where people take the time to hear one another and avoid breaking down into pure tribalism.
I think the discussions here tend to be far more well informed than most political discussions, most of which amount to essays by people who don't even want you to be well informed.
This silly New Yorker article is a good case in point. It lists a whole host of complaints about comments here and links to exactly none of them, thus not even letting the reader check if they agree with the journalists assessment. They do of course link to the stories themselves, because those are written by journalistic allies, although the story link would be at the top of any linked HN page.
Literally, in a story about HN discussions, none of the links at the start of the story actually go to them.
I can only assume this is because so many of those discussions contain well argued, well written comments dissecting poor quality political campaigning that's posing as journalism, and Anna Wiener doesn't want her audience to be exposed to that.
And given her attitude I'm not surprised she doesn't want people to see the discussions here. Look at her list of complaints: "ill advised citations", "thought experiments abound", "humane arguments are dismissed as emotional". "Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions".
So this journalist literally rejects logic and thought as a basis for reaching conclusions! I mean, ill advised citations! This is a new concept I've never encountered before. It speaks volumes about the parlous state of the New Yorker that citing sources and using logic is considered bad behaviour. Why should such people be considered better informed than us when it comes to politics?
I definitely agree that tech lately is so intertwined with politics.
At first I was a little amazed that many negative articles and comments about these companies were being down-voted, just notice the latest article on the status of a pregnant employee at Google, where the discussion's focus was very quickly and conveniently moved from how said employee had been mistreated by Google to how bad it is that Google allows its employees to discuss freely on these topics.
I didn't understand how come these companies have so many fans on this website, but then I realized that some of these users' total comp largely depends on how those companies' shares behave. If I'm not mistaken a FAANG engineer with 10 year of experience has his comp at about 200k in actual salary and the same figure in redeemable shares, so their total comp can approach 4-500k, half of it in shares. As such, it makes perfect sense to downvote everyone that says bad and unpleasant things about your company, because your money actually depends on it. Not sure that there's anything we, the non-FAANG employees, can do about that.
If it matters I've been an user of this website for quite some time, I just wanted to mention that I'm neither powerful nor wealthy.
Another way of looking at it is that in that context, they are interacting as fellow members of their "rec team tribe" rather than as members of competing political tribes. (which they may also be a part of)
To take some old settled examples: sovereign immunity was a privilege to be taken away because everyone should be accountable under the law, but voting rights were a privilege to be extended because self-determination is good regardless of race or gender. Sometimes it's obvious what people mean, but sometimes it's very useful to be explicit about what's meant. I think "keep politics out of $X" extends across both categories.
To the extent that a space affects policy on some issue, banning 'politics' effectively empowers the people who benefit from the current state of affairs. As you say, it could still have a payoff worth the cost if some concrete good is being achieved, but I think it is a cost; in an ideal world people would be free to discuss both the current state of affairs and changes they'd like to see. But when spaces are genuinely divorced from any position on an issue, it seems like a privilege to share, to give more people the freedom and resources to at least temporarily step away from problems. Issues are harder to escape or forget for the people who are directly affected, so there is a privilege there, but I don't think the people harassing "rainy day moodboard" Tumblrs to post about Yemen are actually improving anything.
I'm not sure what the perfect balance is, but I appreciate that HN rules try to uphold that distinction. There's significantly more leeway to debate politics when tech engages politics (e.g. government contracts, codes of conduct, privacy), than there is to inject non-tech political discussion simply on the grounds that it's an important topic.
Is there evidence that arguing politics over the internet is causing a net improvement in the world? I'm inclined to think political discussions on social media are causing political dysfunction, not fixing it.
What happens if on the 17th, during a big ML conference, a prominent computer vision scientist was able to conclusively prove that x% of current facial datasets are majority white male and that this results in y% increase of false positive rates when identifying nonwhites as criminals?
What happens if on the 19th there is a report delivered by a special UN comissioned research group that issues that global warming has destroyed coral reefs in a way such that they will never recover?
What happens if on the 25th it is definitively revealed through a security report that voting machines were actively hacked to detect if the voter was registered female and made them vote for $party?
What happens if on the 1st Reuters publishes a investigative piece that explores how Microsoft has been delivering accurate censorship algorithms to China and the specific people behind it?
What happens if on the 12th a NIH paper is published unveiling definitive brain architecture differences between male, female, and nonbinary brains due to an innovative computer vision collaboration in MIT?
What happens if on the 14th a scientist who happens to be an assigned-female-at-birth nonbinary latin american publishes the definitive proof that P != NP? Also, this researcher takes 'they' pronouns, so commentors can either use "she" or "they" and both are political statements? (Or is it inappropriate to talk about the researcher and their/her work to discover this at all?)
That is to say- in the article, it was discovered that "what is political debate" turned out to itself be a political debate, because some things are obviously political, and other things are political just by existing and referring to it.
For example, here’s the front page from a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-07-07
I’m on mobile so I’m only skimming, but if you sorted that day list by upvotes, the 4th most upvoted story would be the one about a new African trade coalition (450+ upvotes). There’s also a 200+ upvoted submission about FBI/ICE having access to state driver license photos. And a bunch of other sub-100 upvoted threads that are political, or aren’t explicitly tech — e.g. forest kindergarten, FCC and robocallers, the Durian King. And this doesn’t account for the tech articles in which politics are prominently discussed, e.g. anything to do with the Boeing 737 MAX.
Seems like a solid mix to me, even as at least a third of the tech-focused submissions don’t interest me (e.g. Lisp and RaptorJIT). There’s enough political content for that day that if I wanted to read only non-tech HN threads, I’d have my fill.
You can't argue with results. The comments on this site are superb. I probably read the comments 3x more than I read the base articles. Take a look at the comments on MSNBC, Fox News, or even the Washington Post. It's shrill emotional blather.
Actual abuse, trolling, etc deserves to be downvoted into unreadability.
This is absolutely not true. The best postings on hacker news are cool technical stuff that doesn't have an ounce of political.
And yes, there are plenty of articles with a political lean but they are really the least interesting ones here because you can read those anywhere else.
I'd much rather read about the guy who built his own video card than what (non-technical) thing Uber is doing this week.
> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—
> hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—
> often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate;
> thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as
> emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify
> broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data,
> but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be
> ancillary concerns. The message-board intellectualism that might
> once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an
> intellectual style all its own. Hacker News readers who visit the
> site to learn how engineers and entrepreneurs talk, and what they
> talk about, can find themselves immersed in conversations that
> resemble the output of duelling Markov bots trained on libertarian
> economics blogs, “The Tim Ferriss Show,” and the work of
> Yuval Noah Harari.For example, I often downvote uninformed and highly opinionated financial comments because working inside the industry gives me a different perspective. Also there’s a self selection effect: Those who hate Google probably won’t work there.
Moreover, the less popular a company is, the more they are going to have to pay you. For example in finance Goldman almost always pays below the market rate, because they are the best at what they do and everyone wants to work their. So I think employees of FANG actually have an incentive to spread and promote bad news about the company, to an extent (they don’t want to depress the share price, though).
The "ill advised citations" is a bit weird one :-)
"the likelihood of short sleep increased with greater poverty"
Poor people are much more likely to work irregular shifts and night shifts, which have a serious impact on sleep.
Users themselves get tired of bitcoin flogging and bitcoin bashing, over and over again. Variety is the spice of life.
Got down-voted down to the abysses.
Obviously, the article was an anti-trump article.
In one sense it's a shame when thoughtful, evidence-
based discussion is discouraged for being off-topic. But
I suspect that's ultimately what makes those discussions
possible;
Thoughtful, evidence-based discussion should never be discouraged or deemed off-topic - no matter how sensitive the topic. ( People reading this, even 10-15 years on, might find the mores of this age whimsical, at best. )
The only reason one might find thoughtful, evidence-based discussion off-putting is to be on the good side of David Geffen in the hopeful attempt that he or she might be might be invited to luxuriate on his super-yacht, one day.
There's never a better reason than that to be economical with the truth.
The difference would be that there would be at least one day per month when unpopular opinions could be voiced without (potentially) being censored. The most important unpopular stories of the previous month would get some discussion, whereas currently they get none.
It's passive aggressively accusing HN commenters of wrongthink and of abusing unreliable tools like "data" and "logic" to counter "humane arguments" (read: emotional arguments).
It basically dismisses the role of data in debate by suggesting that it is malleable or selective--we've all probably encountered this type of weaselly thinking, one that demands proof for an argument and, when provided, attacks the source as biased or the data as flawed. You can argue for pretty much any position when you embrace a brand of anti-intellectualism which believes that all data is fake/flawed and reality is subjective.
If you strip it down, the author is basically saying "I wish these annoying nerds would stop thinking so much and get onboard my bandwagon."
Off-topic has nothing to do with the sensitivity of the topic or the current social mores. It has to do with not being on topic.
> The most admired arguments are made with data, > but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data > tend to be ancillary concerns.
That's a concern I often share: "the data" can so often be a "winner's history".
"I find it disagreeable that well thought out, logical and data driven conversations on topics with which I disagree are supported."
HackerNews comments in general are concise and to the point. Logical, well-reasoned arguments aren't a part of modern politics or journalism so to this writer it seems like some curious fantasy world. Luckily new online media like Young Turks, Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro have actual discussions instead of sound bites or roundabout intellectualism like the New Yorker. I'd take the recent hour-long Bernie Sanders interview with Joe Rogan over anything on CNN. Corporate media puts a spin on every discussion and it almost always makes things worse.
> ...dismisses the role of data in debate by suggesting that it is malleable or selective...
The points she makes are rock-solid. That said, I still do enjoy HN immensely and can tolerate the warts and libertarians.
The real proof that they do their job though is that I can still occasionally fine deep insights here that just aren't available in other places.
> prefer debates be governed by [cherry-picked data] instead of whose argument is the most "humane"
There's a time and place for humane arguments and, in the absence of complete "data" (whatever THAT means), that may be all you have. At the end of the day, we're all emotional creatures and this often justifiably dominates considerations of human affairs. Not everything can be boiled down to problems in first order logic.
The structure of Hacker News just makes it very favorable to muddy the waters until the story disappears. And I think they correctly call that out in the article.
That's not wrong though. Reality is a social construct.
I don't mean to limit it to Apple, the mods have a heavy hand.
It is near impossible for a group to have a rational discussion about politics or religion. So it is better to just avoid the topic on a forum that values, pleasantry and support of one another as core values.
EDIT: to be clear, I don't think you did it intentionally, and it was a minor thing, I just found it amusing to spot it.
EDIT2: to be even clearer, I'm referring to the implied fact that WP commenters are better-informed than the other two groups (on which I don't have a strong opinion).
People can have a productive discussion on the veracity (origins/malleability are not good reasons to ignore data by themselves in my opinion) of the data, other data can be presented to support or contradict the original point, and in a perfect world perhaps both sides would come away a little more aware of an issue.
I'm saying there's benefit to moderating off topic discussions regardless of the nature of said content.
Really? Do you really think that a strength of HN is that it is a haven for the alt-right? This is shocking and extremly scary to me. The alt-right wants me to die. Is this site a haven for those who want to kill off people like me? That's abhorrent. I agree that HN is a haven for the alt-right but I do not think that is a GOOD thing! From Wikipedia,
> The alt-right ... is... white supremacist, white nationalist, white separatist, anti-immigration and sometimes antisemitic movement based in the United States
I do not think that it is a strength of HN that it is a haven for the modern day Nazis of the world. I think it strictly devalues the site and reduces conversation quality here dramatically. Those people do not argue in good faith, they flag climate change articles so we cannot talk about good solutions to real problems facing all of us, and they also convince the moderators to ban discussion of Russia's cyberattacks here. The moderators cave their policies to white supremacists and hard-line rules that minimize the points given and comments written about Russian cyberattacks.
That HN is a "haven for [Nazis and racists]" is decidedly not a good thing.
Not unobtrusive but at least, a lot of the time, they leave a comment to let everyone know that they changed what users posted, when they hide posts, etc. The main problem is when they don't (it feels more like the content is being censored or tailored to their views then).
why don't you strive to be a "good" member? Try autogenic training! (why not?) If you say, "Life is suffering. Life is not happiness. Best you figure that out now." it will influence/overtake you. Try the opposite :-)
No, it's not. The alt-right uses anonymous web boards like this one (but not HN to my knowledge) to coordinate and celebrate mass shootings that are directly admitted to be race-focused and white-supremacist-led. (Edit: The alt-right does use HN to spread hate and their "ideology", but I have not seen direct specific calls to violence here)
> Groups labeled "white-supremacist" rarely even contain a large number of white people.
I don't see how this is relevant at all. Being white has nothing to do with being a white supremacist. There are lots of non-white white-supremacists in the world. You're using logical fallacies like whataboutism and appeals to false authority instead of debating anything of substance.
HN allows (and frequently features) political discussion in those contexts, so while I agree that it would be a problem if your description was accurate, I can't agree that the description is accurate.
I'm trying to be charitable here, but it's difficult not to conclude that you're setting up the data as never being sufficient e.g. "whatever THAT means" in order to support humane arguments over data based arguments.
This happens equally on both ends of the political spectrum, and I would not entwine "coordinate" and "celebrate" so closely. If you have any real exposure to these communities you recognize any "celebration" as a performative stunt by losers (for lack of a better term) who have few other outlets for asserting self-worth. I've never witnessed a crime being publicly coordinated online.
> Being white has nothing to do with being a white supremacist. There are lots of non-white white-supremacists in the world.
Do you take it all these people are uncommonly virtuous martyrs? Authentic mental handicaps totally lacking self-awareness and logical consistency? I'm genuinely curious what you think the story is here, because I've always found this observation interesting.
No, it doesn't. The left is not a racist, hateful group and they do not coordinate and perform mass shootings. This particular problem is not shared equally by both sides.
Also I'm not advocating for cable news, I think for profit news is generally terrible.
> The nice thing about having discussions based on fact...
Things are different, however, in discussions about human affairs, political, inter-personal topics, social movements, historical interpretations, art, design, music, aesthetics, business and other topics in the human experience. These discussions DO EXIST on HN. And NO, sorry, pure facts may not be enough or might be incomplete or out-of-reach for that subject-matter.
You fail to recognize that the "left" is as wide and disconnected as the "right", and they both host dangerous and despicable morons.
Looked it up, it means "social justice warrior", defined by Wikipedia as "a pejorative term for an individual who promotes socially progressive views, including feminism, civil rights, and multiculturalism, as well as identity politics".
You missed a third: “this is a product of a particular pattern of life experience which not everyone shares, and people should be mindful that it is not universal”.
IME, when a particular comment is described as coming from privilege, to the extent there is a “should” point along with the “is” point, the “should” point is about recognizing the different lived experience that the privileged comment disregards, not about resolving the difference in experience by universalizing either the privileged or unprivileged experience.
You own argument seem much more a moral one though. For one it doesn't even say what you said it says. For example:
> accusing HN commenters [...] abusing unreliable tools like "data" and "logic" to counter "humane arguments"
Actually says:
> humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational
It doesn't say that human arguments are countered with data or logic. That statement is never made. It doesn't imply it either. If it was to be read as implied it would still be logic and data used in incorrect ways. So it seems hard to favor data if you don't even look at the text at hand.
Instead you seem to pretty much make a "slippery slope" argument, which if not outright is at least close to a moral argument. That questioning data dismisses the role of data, and that this leads to anti-intellectualism. Therefor we shouldn't question data in this way. That is, they are morally wrong to do it. Instead of the less moral argument that misuse of data is what leads to people questioning it.
You also back this up with all kinds of appeal to emotion from it being "a smug, flowery dismissal" to "basically saying I wish these annoying nerds would stop thinking". I don't see that reading as factual. If anything the article seems to argue that people should start thinking. One could argue that their reasoning for why people isn't thinking is incorrect, but that doesn't change the actual meaning in relation to thinking (that they think people should be thinking more). So again you are not arguing the text, but your moral conclusion from the text.
The more critical reading of your comments would simply be that you don't see the problem with data and therefor you don't understand the article's concerns nor the problems with your own comments. Which is pretty much what the article argues people don't do after observing this very forum.
I have a hard time even reconciling your one sentence in this comment. Because you are essentially saying that you rather have flawed data than a humane or morally superior argument. But that again seems very much in itself like a morally superior argument. It rests on that data is always better than a humane argument. Even when incorrect, and potentially more incorrect, than a humane argument.
Such labels are a part and parcel of in-group/out-group psychology. In 2019, by analogy, we should all be wary when people are starting to probe those "ports." I'm pretty sure that I've been seen as both by different people at different times, though recently on HN I've been spending a lot of energy defending a particular principle. Going way back, I'd been pre-judged as a woo-woo hippy, a yuppie, and all sorts of different things since.
If we take a step back and look at the broader arc of history, what we have to be wary of are narratives which attempt to paint entire groups of people as morally inferior threats. (For a variety of reasons, including world view.) These narratives always precede the great evils of history. These narratives always deserve great skepticism -- we should always "follow the money" and see who benefits from the pushing of the narrative. We should ask who stands to gain power.
I definitely want to give credit to dang and sctb for making it that way. It could have gone differently. In particular, the no-politics argument is basically a fancy way of saying "nothing that challenges the status quo please". [1] I really appreciate them trying to keep the forum in a state where these discussion can at least happen. I would have left long ago if flagging had continued to be used to kill topics.
[1] See, e.g., Prof Ichikawa on how skepticism gets misused to defend the status quo: https://twitter.com/jichikawa/status/1134323822096658433
I try and avoid the latter, to the extent humanly possible.
I would agree with this... with caveat. The comments on this site are superb when discussing highly technical topics within the STEM sphere. However, the comments here tend to trail off to not much more insightful than average population for the following:
* Lifestyle posts (keto diets, IF, cold therapy, supplements, probiotics...)
* Drugs (microdosing LSD, ketamine therapy...)
* "Identity" politics (female-in-tech topics become a hotbed of debate, much of it not insightful)
* Nuances in economics or international affairs
At least IMO unless you can broadly anticipate that it's a subject that most commentors have significant education on, the discussion generally falls to either spitballing or anecdotes, neither of which are more insightful than a general public.
You should look into the beatings of the Marines going to a dance by members of Antifa. The Antifa assailants said vile, racist things to their non-white victim.
they do not coordinate and perform mass shootings. This particular problem is not shared equally by both sides.
There are calls for arming on the Far Left, and documented cases of their acquiring and training with weapons, while planning for conflict. The Dayton shooter thought of himself as Antifa.
How often do you hear "I didn't know that, and it's a good point" in political discussion? When hypothetically, there's no reason you should hear it less frequently than in scientific discussions.
One of the great casualties of modern political debate is that citizens mimic professional politicians, in that the sole mode of discourse is argumentative.
When in reality, if I'm faffing about on HN I would much rather learn something than "win."
It's not like dang steps in at the end of every debate to award the winner a gold trophy.
I feel like at less than ~ 3:1 "citizens":stranger ratios, any conversation spirals down. Because someone inevitably takes the bait, responds to stupidity, and there goes the thread.
Friend will click, ad revenue will be generated.
There are two fundamentally different sources of truth: ethical consensus and physical data.
They are ultimately incompatible, in that only a single option can be your ultimate source of truth. Albeit other(s) can be valued to some degree.
The issue they took, and I would take too, with that portion of the New Yorker article is that it attacks the idea of physical data as a valid, supreme source of truth.
Consequently, the rhetorical paraphrasing of the passage into the comment dismissing nerds seems on point.
Objectively, the humanities has a poor track record of getting pissy and taking cheap shots at science as a viable supreme source of knowledge.
If the fundamental nature of short-duration comment consumption is antithetical to fact checking, that's certainly a problem.
But it's still superior to uncited points, as it is ultimately verifiable.
In a choice between the two, I'll take the ill (claims appearing more supported than they are) for the good (inculcating a culture of transparent citation).
I think most people would accept that thoughtful, evidence-based discussion should be discouraged while sitting in the front row at an opera, or in the midst of a professor's lecture.
What I'm describing is similarly an issue of logistics, not content. I'm not making a claim about sensitive topics, and I'm certainly not proposing dishonesty or the suppression of uncomfortable truths. The problem with off-topic content is simply that: it's off topic, and on a forum thread or the top of an HN post it makes on-topic conversation more difficult to conduct. Forked-discussion settings like Tumblr and Twitter are closer to a conference than a lecture, and can sustain popular off-topic discussion with less derailment.
The relevance of politics and sensitive topics is only in my second point, that places like HN which center on non-political topics can create particularly good discussions. I largely agree with you, I'm endorsing the fact that HN doesn't ban politics or sensitive topics; the rules of avoiding flamebait, grandstanding, and excessive derailment help to prevent pointless yelling while preserving good political discussion around the margins.
(As an aside which risks being off-topic: why David Geffen? I've never seen someone use him as their go-to example of sucking up to a billionaire.)
Reproducibility crises or statistical hacking news articles are evidence of success. In a less-introspective system, those self-reevaluations didn't even happen!
Viz, the 300+ years it took for a shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric consensus.
> ... it [the cited paragraph] attacks the idea of physical data as a valid, supreme source of truth.
It attacks the idea of using glib, incomplete, or poorly examined "facts" as the basis for a valid argument.
If you want to say that poorly vetted "facts" are a basis for "supreme truth" and, further, that you can only choose that or else some kind of mushy ethical considerations... that's your prerogative, but you're wrong.
I'll bite.
Data can do a lot to improve discussions about history, politics and business.
I'd also argue that data can improve discussions about seemingly subjective things such as design.
> And NO, sorry, pure facts many not be enough or might be incomplete or out-of-reach for that subject-matter.
In fact I'd say that I'm close to saying those are the only discussions worth having about certain topics.
If I like a design and you don't that brings us nowhere. If either of us can bring some data and say 72% of the testers prefered it strongly, - but colorblind people struggled with it - that is something that might give both of us some value and might lead to better results.
I'm so happy I don't see the world this way. This type of worldview is so tribalistic.
Positive discussion is frequently derailed and halted by the "alt-right" presence on HN. Their presence here should not be welcomed, much less seen as a strength of the community.
Flagging is frequently used to kill topics still. Climate change articles are still flagged mercilessly, before any discussion starts and without regard for the high-quality of the articles.
dang as a moderator has specifically said that articles about Russia hacking elections are penalized prior to any votes or comments starting (edit: I believe this particular issue is done by the 'moderators' themselves manually or through a filter, not through user-flags. they are not just moderating discussion, they are filtering which topics you see in the first place, on their own).
The discussion here is framed by people who do not want to talk about certain interesting Hacker and Startup related issues, like global climate change or the stability of democracy with technology.
Flags are a common tool used by the community here to shape the discussion before it starts, hiding topics entirely from view that the community would otherwise vote and discuss.
It's one thing to downvote something that's factually incorrect, mean-spirited, ect. But downvoting a post that expresses a well-formed, but subjective opinion? I used to just ignore opinions that I disagreed with; and only downvote flames and things that were factually incorrect.
That, IMO, is how I interpret how the “Eternal September” plays out here: When people penalize opinions instead of facts and flames.
This is still prevalent. The mods are simply resistant to this. I don't even think it's necessarily a bad thing, but HN is hardly exempt from being an echo chamber—it's just one I enjoy, and one that seems to pride itself on being vaguely more open minded (to serious discussion) than the average community.
How about people who are sick of the silly ass and mostly irrelevant toxic political bullshit lizard men and their PR firms use to drum up electoral turnout? I'm here for the 1337 h4x0rz, not what some blue haired SRE ops ding dong or buzzcut f35 engineer thinks about Todays Issues as defined on TV.
Anyway, hats off to sctb and dang, who do a great job despite the wanking that is allowed on here.
Those two points can't be construed any other way than as anti-intellectual. They were cheap shots, and the author should have known they were a cheap shots.
That those points are somewhat incongruous with the subsequent assertion and surrounding piece doesn't mean they're any less anti-intellectual.
] "The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns."
And indeed, I'd say that prefacing the immediately above (defensible) with the prior claims (indefensible) is the reason this entire comment thread exists.
The author could have made a much stronger argument about poor citation and fact checking, but they instead chose to include what feels like knee-jerk humanities logic horror, substantially muddying their point.
For example have you ever been in an argument where you recall reading a paper or statistic, but don't have it on hand? What if that statistic was a false correlation drummed up by a highly politicized thinktank?
This is why it's so important to not leave potentially misleading or outright wrong citations unchallenged. This is sort of how the 'vaccines cause autism' claims can quickly spiral out of control. It requires people to behave earnestly and not mislead with their citations.
My opinion of “ad tracking is not harmful” obliterated whenever I express it.
"Yelp brings value to its users" was obliterated a few days ago.
But I doesn't say that. Throughout the paragraph the emphasis is on the recklessness.
"hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper _recklessness_"
"_Ill-advised_ citations"
"_thought_ experiments"
"logic, applied _narrowly_, is used to _justify_"
"data, but the _origins_, _veracity_, and _malleability_ of those data [...]"
And that is also in line with the conclusion that "message-board intellectualism that might once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an intellectual style all its own" and "can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots". The critique here is essentially that people don't have scientific literacy.
That people on hacker news think they can be rational, dispassionate and authoritative but that their recklessness with citations, logic and data (and their dismissal of other arguments) suggests they can't.
That is the argument.
All of this is questioning the substance of the arguments made, not the substance of such arguments made correctly. The entire point is that they aren't made correctly. You might even read the paragraph as acknowledging that it once worked, when it impressed observers.
> Consequently, the rhetorical paraphrasing of the passage into the comment dismissing nerds seems on point.
You can argue anything you want, but the argument here was made from a basis of facts. If the commentator wants to concede that their argument isn't based on the text itself, then they and you might have a point. But instead the rest of the argument isn't very believable. Which is the logic behind my argument in the first place.
> Objectively, the humanities has a poor track record of getting pissy and taking cheap shots at science as a viable supreme source of knowledge.
Again not relevant to the facts at hand. Especially since again they aren't making those statement. Otherwise we can bring anything into the discussion, from nationality to sat scores.
A minute later I go back to the home page and it was wiped out without a single discussion comment.
I don't see any reason why this type of articles should be taken down, they are scientific in nature and highly relevant.
Things like climate change denial should have no place in a site like Hacker news, it's unbelievable.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm curious how you came to know that. Do you have some way of seeing who downvoted what?
I'm not sure they are calling themselves alt-right or match that description. They are also not coordinating attacks but posting their manifestos and celebrating is correct.
I could of course be wrong and I know that the alt-right movement has been mired with white supremacists and others from the start but I did like the description when it at least on surface was not about that but a different take on the dominant version of the right-wing in the US; similar to the tea party movements or difference between socialism and democratic socialism.
As far as Antifa assault involving ethnic intimidation goes: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/alleged-antifa-membe...
It's hard to know the context. The last time I remember I was asked for a citation, I found the Washington Post article I was going to refer to was paywalled. It's now available to me again.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/in-the-united-states...
Most likely the specific observation you're referencing was that in the last 2 years of the chart (2016, 2017), if you go down to the bar charts for left wing and right wing violence, you'll see that there are 11 incidents of right wing violence for that period and 17 incidents for left wing violence.
More generally, in terms of incidents like vandalism, threats, and assault, there are lists going into several 100's of incidents for the past several years for the far left. If you want to find them and analyze them, that sounds worthwhile. There were tons and tons of such incidents on YouTube, seemingly endless. However YouTube seems to engage in suppression of videos that go against certain political agendas.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story...
Any topic this widespread is going to produce many copycat and follow-up articles that add no significant new information, as well as many sensationalized articles that don't provide a basis for substantive discussion. Users tend to flag those. If they didn't, climate change wouldn't simply be the most-discussed topic—it would be practically the only topic on HN.
There are also cases of bad flagging, where a particularly substantive article didn't get the discussion it deserved, but these are not nearly as common as people jumping to the conclusion that a topic is being suppressed when they run across a flagged submission. Checking HN search is an easy way to vet that logic (though not as easy as not vetting it). Frequently it turns out that the story has already had significant attention. If, after checking that, you see a particularly substantive article getting flagged, you are welcome to let us know at hn@ycombinator.com. We sometimes turn off flagging in such cases.
Everybody feels that the topic they consider most important is under-discussed on HN. Actually, every important topic is under-discussed on HN, because frontpage space is the scarcest resource we have: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... There's no way around this on a site that exists for curiosity, because curiosity withers under repetition.
When someone says they are afraid of flying, you show them facts of how safe commercial flight is compared to driving. You don't just quietly sit by while they try to pass legislation making flying illegal.
By who? Do you seriously read an HN comment that states something you didn't already know with a citation you don't bother to click and then just go forward assuming it's scientific fact?
I don't even take publications themselves as scientific facts until they have been reliably reproduced or provide ample evidence.
There's plenty of climate change reporting about the web. I just don't care to see HN lists articles that are ultra hot topics. You just get the same comments over and over again.
HN should work towards having thoughtful discussions and providing useful contributions. It shouldn't be about tolerating particular political views or not. That shouldn't be the mod's job.
PS My original comment here is being downvoted into oblivion. One of my points is made by this gesture.
Breadth of experience and background matter. And if sufficiently broad, will cross boundaries of endowment or empowerment, and hence enter into political realms.
> HN should work towards having thoughtful discussions and providing useful contributions. It shouldn't be about tolerating particular political views or not. That shouldn't be the mod's job.
I agree and I'm confident the previous commenter would as well. The only piece of nuanced disagreement I have is about the involvement of moderators. I agree that ultimately it's the users that need to do work towards providing useful and thoughtful discussion, but moderators do have a crucial role is fostering and maintaining that kind of culture.
You replied in depth to every part of my post except that part. Please explain why you have filters on conversation topics but pretend to be impartial moderators.
Does HN have an automatic mechanism to reduce the visibility on stories relating to Russia's physical and digital attacks on American democracy?
This is contrasted to denialism which denies claims out of hand. This is not based on scientific data, but gut feeling or motivated reasoning.
Dr. Ichikawa is thus describing denialism in his tweets.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeptical_movement
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism
edit: Here is an article on the distinction from one of the strongest figures in the skeptical movement, Steven Novella. It even focuses on the topic of climate change.
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/skeptic-vs-den...
I actually love that: Rogan gives you the rare chance to observe his guests in a somewhat relaxed environment, at least more relaxed than the endless battlefields of Twitter, and slightly less fake than magazine interviews. If anything, I wish he would insert fewer of his own opinion.
I feel that questioning and defending opinions works much better in text form, anyway. I keep looking for good, honest debates on video, but usually it's just people trying to pwn each other with eloquence, with no time for fact-checks.
No, HN does not "have an automatic mechanism to reduce the visibility on stories relating to Russia's physical and digital attacks on American democracy". Those issues have received tons of discussion on Hacker News, just like climate change has, just not as recently. If you're talking about something I actually said as opposed to simply making things up, I'd like to see a link—whatever I did say, I wouldn't have put it that way.
That doesn't mean we don't have automated penalties, a.k.a. write software to do things on the site. We rely on software because it would be impossible to do this job without it. There's a lot of software; it does a lot of things. One thing it does is downweight classic flamewar topics. That includes nationalistic flamewars (edit: and partisan flamewars), which there were a lot of about Russia in the last couple years, though the storm of that has shifted to China in recent months. If you're alluding to something I actually said, I imagine that's what it related to.
If you're shocked that some submissions are downweighted by HN software, you may need to realize that this site is curated and has never pretended otherwise. Some submissions are even killed by software outright. The downweights I mentioned are mild and have plenty of opportunity to get overridden, whether by software or by moderators; in fact we do that all the time when we see a substantive story being affected by them. That's one reason why all the topics you're complaining about being suppressed have actually received major, regular discussions on Hacker News.
Sure, here you go. I would never "make things up" and lie on HN, that's despicable and I do not appreciate being accused of such trash by the HN mods.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20192283
That is a well researched story on the NYTimes on an underreported topic that is mostly technological in nature. You claim it got a "software penalty" as opposed to being flagged.
I cannot imagine any interpretation other than what I described, that there is an automatic penalty applied to posts that you personally don't like or have personal expectations from outside of the community's voice.
How am I to interpret your comments without assuming that you have software that flags content and penalizes it by topic when you state that the software penalty happened "because this topic is unfortunately more likely to lead nationalistic flamewar"
I do not understand.
Edit: I cannot see these posts without being logged in as me. Have you hidden this particular discussion from public view? Am I shadowbanned? For what purpose?
Your account is being affected by software penalties that it incurred earlier in the day when you went for full-out ideological battle in this thread. HN has software filters based on past activity by trolls, and after looking at how they were operating on your comments, I believe they were operating correctly. What you're trying to do on this site is not what we want, not what the guidelines call for, and most importantly, not what the community wants. That's where we take our cues.
I see that in certain other topics as well, such as discussions of the 737 as mentioned in the article.
Along with intellectual curiosity, I think it's important to cultivate intellectual humility, and they go together. A lot of what we think we know just by reading the news isn't all that well-founded, so asserting a strongly-held opinion isn't justified. I'm reminded of a cartoon about collecting questions, rather than answers:
http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park
So, if you're wondering about downvotes, overconfidence might be a reason, or at least for one downvote.
Your community wants a safe space for Nazis to spread hate. Is that really what you want?
Thanks again.
I can make a claim without a citation, or attribute it to "some article I read awhile ago". No one can verify my original claim. Someone may attempt to dig up another citation refuting it, or find a suspect source making my claim, but these are inefficient ways of fact checking. And if I wanted to be a dick, I could claim that wasn't what I was talking about / my original source.
I can also cite my claim. In this case, 99% may accept it at face value, but 1% may fact check my citation and loudly pronounce it doesn't conclude what I said it did. The 99% then gain the benefit of an erroneous report.
Thanks. You've captured my intention very well.
This is exactly why fact based discussions not only don't work, but don't happen on hacker news. Because you can just say something different. And that is how it always is. Someone posts a citation and someone else goes out of their way to debunk it. Then they just say something else. Next time no one bothers. Because the point isn't to have a fact based discussion, but to not be questioned on an already existing view. And that is what the article correctly caught on to.
To now say that SJW is a perjorative is weird. Sure, many of the people using the term happen to really dislike SJWs, but how can a self-selected name ever be a perjorative?
> state[s] that well-executed, fact-supported, scientific arguments are a superior (or even valid) form of policy debate
We both agree that the article goes on at length about the recklessness of fact-based arguments on HN.
Furthermore, I point to two direct quotes that I characterize as anti-fact and elevating non-factual or (debatably in the case of the latter) semi-factual methods of discussion to the same level as fact-based discussion.
You decline to provide evidence rebutting those two points, and instead cite the "emphasis" of the surrounding paragraph as a reason those two points should be ignored.
Does that accurately describe your position?
On the other hand, major announcements like the latest UN report frontally calling for a diet change are still allowed on HN, so there is some filtering going on - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02409-7
Many of the same comments that we read each time is that its not clear that the weather is changing due to human action, or that its not clear if stop eating animal products would help that much, etc. which shows that a lot of people are still misinformed about the topic and in a state of denial.
However the colloquial, general meaning is still that of scientific skepticism. That's what comes up when you search skepticism on Wikipedia, reddit, or various definitions. That's also what is reasonably being referred to in a Hacker News post; a community that often subscribes to the same values expressed in skepticism.
Unless you know this professor and can put his words in their appropriate context, then the whole thing reads as decrying an entire movement of scientifically-minded people.
To elaborate:
* To get the obvious one out of the way: it's something you need sufficient free time, money and knowledge in order to even do, so the author likely comes from a certain amount of privilege which colors his experience.
* Building a video card is in itself only possible due to the existence of open standards and free access to the relevant information, which is absolutely political.
* The act in itself is to a certain degree anti-consumerist because it's likely driven by a desire to understand rather than merely use the technology.
* Building a video card that actually works will likely require some reverse engineering and working around proprietary restrictions, which may enter DMCA territory. So it's willfully doing something legally questionable if not downright illegal, i.e. protesting the laws in question, which is absolutely political.
Everything is political. If you don't see the politics it's only because you agree with them and think they're a no-brainer.
You may see a cool hobby project but try to explain the project to a non-technical person and you might find that you're carrying a lot of preconceived notions of what the world is like, how it functions and what is acceptable or not. That's all politics.
If everything is political then the word political has no meaning.
Lower income and educational attainment was associated with more sleep complaints. Employment was associated with less sleep complaints and unemployment with more.
Rates of sleep complaints in African-American, Hispanic/Latino and Asian/Other groups were similar to Whites. Lower socioeconomic status was associated with higher rates of sleep complaint.
The word "political" doesn't have no meaning, unless you take it to be understood as purely binary (i.e. "there are politics in this or there are not") in which case it's indeed a useless qualifier because, as I explained, there are always politics in it if there are humans involved. So yes, "x is political" is a useless statement because it is practically tautological in most situations where it is uttered -- but the same is true for "the Earth isn't flat", yet that's a perfectly sensible thing to say when dealing with Flat Earthers, just as "everything is political" is sensible to say when someone claims it very much isn't.
You seem to have a very narrow definition of the word "political". I'd be interested to hear what you think that is.
EDIT: It's also important to understand the distinction between "x has no meaning" and "x is no useful distinguishing quality". "Political" in my book means "involves politics", "expresses politics", "manifests politics" or something to that effect -- which applies to everything humans do, including what humans write, especially when they write about other humans. That's meaningful. But the qualification of something humans do as "political" is indeed useless just as qualifying water as "wet"[0] is generally also useless, because if those qualities are always present for everything in that category (i.e. all water is "wet", all human communication is "political") there's nothing the presence of the quality distinguishes any of those things from (of course water is "wet", hence why we don't talk about "wet water" and just talk about "water" instead, with the implicit understanding that because it is water, it is also wet).
[0]: Using the colloquial definition of "wetness" here. There are other definitions according to which e.g. soapy water is "wetter" than pure water but that's not generally what a layperson means when they say something is wet (i.e. is covered or soaked in water).
That's an interesting take since I refuted your points. You simply added a bunch of potential political concepts to something that wasn't political and then claimed it was.
> You seem to have a very narrow definition of the word "political". I'd be interested to hear what you think that is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics
> "Political" in my book means "involves politics", "expresses politics", "manifests politics" or something to that effect -- which applies to everything humans do
If it applies to everything that humans do then there is no "involves politics" or "expresses politics". A human taking a shit isn't expressing politics no matter how hard the struggle is -- so I've just refuted that obviously over-broad point.