The Great Trap for All Americans | Hacker News Reader

The Great Trap for All Americans

nybooks.com

61 pointssamclemens39 comments

  New England was never a “slave society”—where slaves
  performed the bulk of labor—but it depended heavily on
  slavery nonetheless, due to its economic entanglement
  with the Caribbean. As a crucial supplier of provisions
  to the sugar islands, New England, one captain
  observed, was truly “the key of the Indies without
  w[hi]ch Jamaica, Barbados & the Caribee Islands are not
  able to subsist.”

Something that, we should note, still occurs to a degree today. At the end of the last century it was an outcry over sweatshops in, particularly, impoverished countries. These past several years over where and how our electronic products are produced. Deliberately or not, wealthier nations and people are still exploiting poorer nations and people by a similar dynamic as New England and the Indies.

Indeed, just finished the book "Cod" which gives some fascinating details for one example of new England (and also "nonslaving" European countries) indirectly profiting of the slave trade

I think this article touches on a very interesting philosophical paradox of human nature. It's hard to state pithily, but I'll try. We're all slaves to something or someone (Bob Dylan's "Gotta Serve Somebody" comes to mind). There's no way to escape that... a well-functioning society is made up of laborers serving other people (if you disagree, you haven't made any money). So in a sense "freedom" comes from voluntary service.

The escape mechanism from this generalized view of slavery is competition. Yes, you have to serve someone, but if you have a choice of who serve that gives you leverage, because if one master mistreats you, you can go serve a different one.

But maintaining competition is not easy because there's a positive feedback effect: once an entity starts to accumulate disproportionate power, they can then use that power to effect political change that makes it harder -- or even impossible -- for others to compete. In network-based markets where the value of the product increases with the number of people using it, the positive feedback effect is even stronger. It's a hard problem, but crucially important.

Why not cooperation? Competition lets a market — something not known to have human values — decide how you can serve. With cooperation, you work together with other humans and can decide together the best way to serve each other.

Of course, scaling cooperation, and especially decision mechanisms is hard. Markets are great at scaling at least (well, until externalities crop up), but they definitely aren't the only solution! (especially in a world with realtime worldwide computer mediated collaboration systems)

> Why not cooperation?

Because of the prisoner's dilemma.

Scaling cooperation is impossible because for a given person, it can only work within that person's trust network.

That would only imply that it is difficult, not impossible.

Good point.

Solidarity my friend.

What the article is about, is the history of Slavery in the North-American continent since the time of the English Colonies. The actual content is pretty interesting, from a historical point of view.

The headline was meant to highlight a crap shot the author takes at current American society; everybody claims that every perceived slight to their dignity is equivalent to an actual attempt at their freedom.

However, that is not what this piece is about and you will do yourself a diservice if you skip it because it is 'click-baity'. Just trim down the first 2 paragraphs and the last one and you will filter out the noise without any lose of the actual signal.

>Just trim down the first 2 paragraphs and the last one and you will filter out the noise without any lose of the actual signal.

No. It's not the readers' responsibility to approach an article and then have explicitly filter out the casual outrage-baiting and thinly veiled, poorly informed political advocacy which is par for the course in most online media. If they want us to read their articles, they can damn well not insult our intelligence in the process. Until then, there's plenty of other things to read.

We live in an age of abundant, easily vettable information. By your presence here on HN I would assume in fact that you are a rather well-educated person, which is why I figured I'd respond to something on the internet.

Sadly the abundance of information out there, not to mention the seeming biological inability for humans to think in a purely rational way ( https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Bias ) means that it's very difficult not to encounter some noise in scholarship. If you cannot read past even open bias to engage with a reading critically and openly, you handicap your ability to gain new knowledge (even that which may disagree with a reading's thesis!) and to respond to the misconceptions and biases of those who do not read or think critically. This advances ignorance or apathy over knowledge and does a disservice to free-thinking citizens the world over, especially in a democracy if you're so fortunate to live in one.

Now no one can force you to engage in a discussion or debate you'd rather not be a part of, and it's perfectly normal to not find interest in historical questions and essays. But to dismiss a scholarly reading on the basis of whether it has bias at all, rather than the more reasonable basis that said bias is not identified, not minimized or not properly segregated from the argument in question, is irrational.

There's a difference between having the ability to tune out noise when you come across it, and deliberately seeking it out -- or not avoiding it if you are warned in advance.

Furthermore, this type of noise in particular is generally an excellent hint that the actual "educational" content is going to be less educational and more propaganda.

De-clickbaited headline: "The great trap for all Americans is prejudice"

It seems that baity titles become less so when the content is as highly predictable as nybooks.com. If a reader is comfortable sitting down to what they can reasonably expect is a book review, they might not feel so cheated when it's about prejudice instead of, say, economics.

The principle behind letting a title like this one stand where not everything is spelled out is that it encourages a quiet, reflective approach. This is a highly desirable quality for Hacker News in that it supports the gratification of intellectual curiosity, which is why we're here.

If a set-up question can be simply answered, it's clickbait. I don't care who the hell's written it.

I hear the same complaints from an 84 year old friend with greatly diminished eyesight who gripes about this all the time in newspaper headlines. Teasing titles which reveal nothing and force the reader into the story. He's among the few subscribers the paper has left, and is about all out of fricks to give for their shoot.

This is clickbait.

The fundamental problem with clickbait, and the reason it draws so much rightful ire, is that it is deliberately contemptuous of its reader.

HN should fix the title or flag the post. Fixing the title wins my vote. Particularly as you've already troubled to write an excuse not to.

I support you and Dan having absolute authority to decide which direction you want to take HN in, and which policies to set in order to achieve that goal, but for what it's worth, I respectfully disagree with this decision.

I'd explain why, but TeMPOraL already did so perfectly in the insightful second paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12746980, every word of which I agree with.

Is every intriguing headline called clickbait now?

It's not like they said "9 great traps all Americans fall into. Number 3 will blow your mind!"

The headline was clearly written to get people to say, "Hmm, a great trap? And it affects all Americans? I wonder what this trap is. Some kind of alligator, maybe? My brain will not allow me to get any work done until I find out the nature of said trap."

Literary-journal article titles have been clickbait of this nature since before the Web existed. Buzzfeed has nothing to teach the NYRB.

This is true; before it was bait for clicks, it was bait to get you to pull the magazine off the rack.

Different technology, same user-hostile purpose.

I wonder what the line between "user hostile" and just regular writing is. In English class I'm pretty sure we were told to do things similar to this (get the reader's attention).

There's a difference between not boring your user after he decided to read your piece, and tricking your user into reading your piece.

Hemingway didn't spend a lot of time trying to get the readers attention as far as I can tell.

Agreed. This is definitely not a clickbait title. An article title doesn't have to recap the entire contents; it should be a hook to get the reader interested. Clickbait is something more than that.

>This is definitely not a clickbait title

That's subjectively defined so I'm not sure how you can be authoritative judge here.

I think it is clickbait, and I think the people here are pretty smart and completely understand why this is relevant given current events. (By relevant I do not mean accurate)

To be honest, most people on HN/reddit focus wayyyy too much on titles these days, so much so that the only comments in this thread so far are about whether it is clickbait. Yes clickbait is a problem, but I also think we should make exceptions of the sort for known reputable sites. If every website was forced to use a dry and descriptive title, I'm not sure the reader would be better off. (I always found old-style titles to be peculiar: "A, or a B on C in the D of E for a F of G") I think it's only fair to make accusations of clickbait after reading the article and concluding that the substance doesn't match. "5 best horror movies of all time" tells you exactly what you're going to get, while maybe "you won't expect what happens next!" might not. I understand that titles might not give you all the information necessary for a persn to decide if they should click a link, but the comments help to give some of that context. (though they also lead to people commenting without reading based off other's conclusions, and a hivemind mentality)

I wouldn't consider "5 Best Horror Movies" to be a clickbait title - it tells you exactly what you're going to get. The title of this article is a pure clickbait, IMO - it's designed to arouse curiosity and does not reveal what the article is about.

I guess it depends on what you believe article titles are for. I believe they should first and foremost be a tool for readers to decide whether or not to look at the article at all - therefore they need to accurately tell what the article is about. Sadly, most publishers consider headlines to be a marketing tool (with implicit assumption that the article is interesting for everyone).

I think it's more subtle than that. The main theme here is slavery, but not with a focus on prejudices that justified it; more with a focus on how enmeshed it became in economies and societies and cultures (including some that we don't tend to associate with it), and something about what the idea of slavery has meant to people.

Could you rephrase that in the form of, "The great trap for all Americans is ________"?

'The great trap for all Americans is clickbait'

I'll advocate for adopting the "savedyouaclick" standard of `${title} | ${completed_description}`

ex: "The Great Trap for All Americans | Prejudice"

Thanks. Now I can comment my opinion on the topic without having to read the article!

More importantly, I can skip this article without rewarding the headline style.

Please keep sarcasm and strawman arguments off HN.

We'd have to stop linking to most online journalism if we did that.

The Empire of Necessity was a very interesting book.

"Comments" is clickbait in this instance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com