zlacker

Sorry, I’m not challenging that requires a thorough breakdown. The challenge is the low bar of whether or not a topic has an overwhelming majority of opinion. Which you agree the evidence doesn’t support on a fairly casual glance and analysis of top voted comments and their responses.

>>Solace+(OP)
To be clear, my contention is that we should expect there to be no overwhelming or prevailing opinion, and that a quick look at the top-voted root comments and their subthreads seems to support this expectation.

For what it's worth, I think we're taking this discussion a bit too seriously, as the person you were initially replying to was being at least a little humorous and self-deprecating.

The parent comment they replied to made an assertion of the form HN's prevailing view on blah is X, and they replied to the effect of that's funny, my perception was that the prevailing view was opposite-of-X, which is a neat example of the hostile-media effect, and I think the commenter was aware of that.

It's interesting though, that it was the counter-point that you saw the need to challenge, not the original assertion :)

Do you assert that the prevailing or overwhelming opinion was in favour of one particular position? Can you provide evidence for that?

I'm very conscious that we could go around in circles on this :)

>>tomhow+L3
> Do you assert that the prevailing or overwhelming opinion was in favour of one particular position? Can you provide evidence for that?

I think like he's arguing exactly the opposite, as he's implied multiple times:

> The challenge is the low bar of whether or not a topic has an overwhelming majority of opinion.

> But I'm asking why the person posting believes that the HN community overwhelmingly believes X and their evidence for that.

>>sergio+q5
If they are of the view that there was no clearly prevailing position on that topic, then we're in consensus and we're all done with the discussion :)

>> But I'm asking why the person posting believes that the HN community overwhelmingly believes X and their evidence for that.

My read on it is that the person wasn't making an assertion of fact on this, they were making a wry observation that their perception of a prevailing view was the opposite of their parent commenter's perception of a prevailing view, thus demonstrating the hostile media effect in action.