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Comment by zappo2938 | Hacker News Reader

Reddit too. I just wrote 500 words without using any logical fallacies backing up my assertions with scientific studies from trusted sources, why does my comment have -12 points without a single person taking the time to refute my position in a comment?

I believe managed, licenced hunting in Africa supports conservation efforts, there is no reason ever to spank or hit a child, all children should be vaccinated, and pitbulls are dangerous.

So, most people have unfriended and/or blocked me on Facebook. Now I live in a bubble. I'm not bothered by people who don't agree with me. I'm bothered by people who can't debate these topics without getting riled up. The African hunting topic ended with someone threatening my little sister. I can understand the business decision behind letting people live in a bubble.

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Most people argue and make appeals to emotion not logic.

I have noticed this myself. I think it mostly comes from not knowing what or how to make an argument. For instance if I state a argument such as

Premise 1: All men are mortal. Premise 2: Socrates is a man. Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is a mortal.

To refute my argument someone would have to demonstrate how my first two premises or my conclusion was wrong. Usually everyone just bashes the conclusions but never refutes the premises of the argument.

It's charitable to assume, like other commenters did, that your comment was totally fine, but I have to ask - what was the tone of it? And how did it happen that people actually unfriended you on Facebook?

The other potential reason is that you posted it to the wrong community. There are, unfortunately, groups of people who get the more angry the more you try to back up your point with science. Best to avoid those. They can be convinced, but it requires a lot of work and careful dancing around their egos.

> The African hunting topic ended with someone threatening my little sister.

What the hell. Who are these people? :o. I'm sorry this happened to you and I totally support staying away from such groups.

The problem is that my ideas through the Reddit algorithm sink to the bottom and RES will automatically hide them if they fall below a threshold. This is another case of an algorithm creating an opinion bubble. As for being unfriended on Facebook, people are passionate about not getting their children vaccinated. I lost a couple friends over that. One woman posted a picture with text that said, "My parents spanked me and I turned out fine." I donated money and time to do Facebook marketing for a charity concert for a local homeless non-profit last year. They do awesome work getting people off the streets where I live, but they are weird. I didn't know the women well but my response about her being a recovered heroin addict and not being fine ruffled a lot of people's feathers. That ended with a bunch of people unfriending me too.

Uh, I see. Yeah, Reddit has this problem; I've noticed new subreddits often changing the top-level comment sorting order to counter exactly that effect.

I can see how the issue with that woman could cause some opposition - if I understand it correctly (she told she turned out fine, you pointed her out that in fact she didn't), I can see myself being in disagreement (depending on the full context). But unfriending over things like that? This surprises me. Their loss, sadly, they chose to form a bubble around themselves.

Thanks for responding with details!

I just wrote 500 words without using any logical fallacies backing up my assertions with scientific studies from trusted sources

This is why you're getting downvoted. That's not how you convince people.

I think that might be the crux of the issue. Convincing people and making a logical argument aren't the same thing and are only tangentially related.

The former requires a level of emotional intelligence and coercion in addition to any logical arguments. Why? Because people are people and they will only resent you if you just mechanically present arguments even if you're 100% right. They will look for any reason to say you're wrong even if it doesn't make sense. That's why sometimes, it's just not worth participating in some arguments. Context matters.

The candidates in the current US election cycle demonstrate this quite well.

Just out of curiosity why do you think children should never be spanked? Do you have children?

I'm not going to say that spanking isn't an effective way to discipline a child. I can also understand if a 3 year old walks into a street to feel like spanking the child. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that other forms of discipline for small children are more effective at correcting behavior and children who are spanked are often more violent towards other children with other developmental and learning problems in school. Also, what we can do is look at how adjusted, happy, and successful people are in life, whether they are a doctor or lawyer with their own practice, divorced, in jail for violent crimes, or if they have a drug or psychological problems and compare that to whether they were spanked or worse as children. What we discover is that people who were not spanked or spanked very sparingly for example only in the case they walked out into the street do much, much better in life. So if you have children and want to play the numbers game, it might be worth while to explore other ways of disciplining your child. Not only do they work, but they have better long term effects on the child.

Just out of interest, what is the overwhelming scientific evidence? Is it causal or just correlational? Because I can imagine tons of reasons why children who are often spanked have more problems in school - not least, reverse causality - that would not imply you should never spank your child.

I actually don’t think that there is any evidence of mild smacking being a major problem. Child abuse (beating of children is very bad), but measuring the effects of a rare and relatively minor event in a child’s life is very hard.

OK it sounds like you are actually of the belief that spanking should be rare, rather than never. In this I agree, but I do think from personal experience that spanking is a useful "thermonuclear" option to stop dangerous behaviour in young children. To give you an example, I once caught one of my children at the age of two inserting objects into electrical power points. I gave him a good spank on the bottom and he never did it again. It is possible that another solution would have worked, but when you are dealing with a two year old playing with electricity do you really want to take the chance with another options? If spanking is rare children quickly learn that to get a spank means they have crossed a no-go threshold.

My limited personal experience of the results of disincline (of all kinds) is that inconsistent or random discipline from a parent is worse than almost all others. Children who live in fear of being disciplined for what appears to them to be for no reason, or where their actual behaviour plays very little role in affecting the discipline they experience, fair far worse. It is really hard as a parent, but being consistent is critically important. No means no.

I strongly agree with this author: Spanking and Child Development: We Know Enough Now To Stop Hitting Our Children[1]

> Spanking remains a common, if controversial, childrearing practice in the United States. In this article, I pair mounting research indicating that spanking is both ineffective and harmful with professional and human rights opinions disavowing the practice. I conclude that spanking is a form of violence against children that should no longer be a part of American childrearing.

My stance is consistent with the recommendations of the American Psychological Association [2] and the American Academy of Pediatrics [3].

The issue is can we have a discussion about it without unfriending each other on Facebook building protective bubbles.

[1]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768154/

[2]http://www.apa.org/about/policy/corporal-punishment.aspx

[3]https://www.healthychildren.org/English/family-life/family-d...

Yes this is one of the reasons I spend far more time on HN than Facebook.

Imagine there are giant creatures(like 5-6 meter tall) and they are proportionally stronger than you. They follow you everywhere and(though they wash and feed you) they also sometimes hit you with their huge palms?

I have quite a good memory of my childhood and my complaints about it are not over the occasional smack I received, but of the arbitrary and inconsistent nature of the punishment I received. Like the powerless everywhere, children are strong advocates of justice and rules and they absolutely hate inconsistent and arbitrary displays of power.

It's always a failure of parenting. It's abusive - it's an abuse the the rights of the child. It's ineffective.

You always hear some fucking idiot saying "my child ran out into the street, so I hit him". Hear the useless parent put their child at risk of harm by not teaching the child about road safety, by not providing adequate supervision in a dangerous situation, and then punishing the child for the parent's lack of skill.

"I hit my children" is no different from "I hit my spouse" or "I hit my employees".

It is not ineffective. I don't have to smack my children now they are older, but when they were very young reasoning with them was not an option.

I think we can avoid false emotional comparisons between spanking a young child and beating your wife.

>why does my comment have -12 points

Some views are unappealing at an emotional level without much reasoning coming in to it?

I wrote a long comment with some questions, but decided it was too wordy and wanted to just say this: I have some ideas about addressing some of these issues, and one of the things I haven't been able to figure a way around is in the differences in user ability or desire for interaction or level of effort.

Therefore, I think that a good next-gen social media website is going to have to offer multiple levels of interaction depending on the level of the user themselves.

For example, some users want twitter level interaction. <200 character headlines, <200 character comments

Others want a bit of expansion, maybe some commentary, but nothing too cumbersome or technical.

Another group wants citations for everything, but may not want discussion too extensively.

Yet another group wants extensive discussion that flows ideas back and forth, and educates all participants.

Another group wants both citations and discussion (I know it's hard to seperate, but bear with me).

To me, the fundamental mistake is that we are throwing all users of all types into a pool of mediocrity, to the point where perhaps trolling is somewhat limited, but excellence in discussion is also limited due to interuptions of the limited trolling. The troll doesn't want to and generally can't participate in the lengthy discussion.

So my proposed social media site works in two ways:

1) Stories are segmented into expected level of complexity. Eg, there is a twitter version of a story, a short paragraph version of story, an article version of story, and an extensive version with citations version of story. Any user can access whichever level they choose at any time... but...

2) Posting, instead of arbitrary points which tend to be about liking vs disliking arguments despite things like reddiquette, is about two factors.. quality of comment (upvotes but no downvotes for comment quality) and logical strength regardless of position, handed out in a slashdot style random mod distribution to those who opt in to participate in logical analysis of comments...

Users all start with limited commenting and submission capabilities. As a user shows they are adding value though, they get more priviledges, and conversely, as trolls troll, they get temp and perma-bans based on level. (so a troll can still troll the twitter level comments, but not the citation level comments)

What do you think about a system like this, or do you have any other ideas on how to defeat this kind of warping of the social media world without excluding the users who just want to make pun threads all day?

The bottom line is that I want a way to encourage and reward logical and rational discussion and debate for all levels of users, but allow users who wish to remain stagnant to at least participate in the way they so desire.

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