One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN
is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview
becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence,
excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine
your priors.
I've seen something happening more and more on HN that bothers me.
When someone writes something that goes against what most people
think, the comments section gets filled with popular replies.
These replies are basically just reasons why you don't need to
think about changing your mind on this topic.
* He thinks most people dislike Mr. Beast, his company, and think he's popular only due to luck.
* He thinks this document makes good points, but that most people won't be able to see them due to what they believe about Mr. Beast prior to reading it.
For instance, much of the initial research into the harms of smoking was done in Germany in Nazi times. While the results were largely correct (and later confirmed elsewhere), it was much easier for tobacco proponents to contest or reject them on the grounds of the Nazi Germany origins.
[1]: https://davidsamson.substack.com/p/tribaltheory-002-tribalis...
It's a common phrase in the ratsphere (and its descendants).
Changing your mind is one outcome, but the implication is that it requires a complete reexamining of your worldview, as changing the internalized probabilities can have many effects on perceived likely outcomes.
- don’t sneer at the rest of the community
- don’t comment about the upvoting of comments
- don’t say hacker news is turning into Reddit (not explicitly the case here, but similar in spirit)
Yeah, some responses will be less thoughtful than others, but that’s what voting is for.
Considering we used a monumental wealth of nazi research, and the existence of operation paper clip. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190723-the-ethics-of-us...
Even though you’re correct that Nazi rhetoric impacted creating permissive tobacco policies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2736555/
To clarify, I think it’s because it’s an extreme example, that while technically perhaps accurate, misses that it’s a hard one for a reader to relate to effectively and misses a subtext of: shouldn’t any research from that source (of which what are the ethics of using it as well?) especially in a lens of 1940/1950, be subjected to extreme skepticism? Where additional replication may not be practical or possible.
Under a more rational angle, any promising results obtained by an enemy should be double- and triple-reproduced, because an enemy may be planting disinformation into it. But this is a bit more serious than somebody you don't like making a comment you would rather have made yourself, and you already agree with the point because you would make it yourself and are now in a bind. That's the kind of uncomfortable situation I initially referred to.
As a hypothetical, let's say you believe from prior experience that being mugged has a very high probability. Let's say 50% because it's easier.
Let's also say your friend points out that you've left your home hundreds of times this year and haven't been mugged. 50% seems like a ridiculous overestimate.
Reexamining your priors would involve not only changing your mind about the chance of being mugged, but changing downstream beliefs that might be influenced by that belief (such as what public policies you support).