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Comment by nkurz | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a moderator, but I flagged it because it's not a direction I want to see HN moving. "Ask HN" type posts are tricky --- I'm worried if we start by allowing posts that are intended solely as conversation starters, we may soon end up with a front page full of popular quotes, dumb jokes, and one-liners. Had it been a link to an external page I wouldn't have been moved to act.

It may also be that I just didn't get it. At a glance, it looked like a semantic game rather than a worthy paradox. Why should one presume that a multiple choice question has one and only one correct answer?

I was probably also influenced by the quality of the discussion. When I started reading, the top voted answer was "It is answerable... with a swift kick to the balls of the person asking it", followed by geek jokes about this answer. This didn't seem like a good start. Perhaps I should have flagged only this response, rather than the whole post.

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I flagged it for similar reasons. It's not the kind of content I want to see on HN, the comments sucked, and it really wasn't anywhere near as interesting or clever as it seemed to think it was.

The very fact that that post had a lot of comments with, collectively, a lot of upvotes is proof that HN is not what it used to be. :/

"It may also be that I just didn't get it. At a glance, it looked like a semantic game rather than a worthy paradox."

Perhaps more than a glance is appropriate before flagging items?

"I was probably also influenced by the quality of the discussion."

Wouldn't down-voting the particular comment(s) you don't like be more appropriate?

> Perhaps more than a glance is appropriate before flagging items?

I don't know the submission volume of HN, but I'd guess it's sufficient that a glance is all one can afford.

It might be argued that a glance is enough to move on and ignore it, but not enough to flag it. Flagging it implies that it's been assessed and found inappropriate, not simply that you didn't find it interesting.

Perhaps more than a glance is appropriate before flagging items?

Perhaps, but I don't think so in this case. The main reason I flagged it was not the 'paradox' but because it's not a direction I want to see HN going. If a rabbi and a priest walk into a bar, I'd flag it regardless of whether the punchline is hilarious. I'd agree that the moderator should take more than a glance.

Wouldn't down-voting the particular comment(s) you don't like be more appropriate?

I can't really assess 'appropriate', but it certainly wouldn't have been as effective. Knocking a 'funny' comment down from 16 to 15 points wouldn't have even been noticed, whereas using the flag to call it to the attention of a moderator for review had the effect I hoped for.

To my mind it's the comments that should be flagged, not the item, if the item follows the guidelines but the comments don't contribute. I would like to see a small change to the site, wherein the "flag" link can be found on comments, no longer requiring clicking on "link" then on "flag".

A paradox is not an interesting thing; it's just a sign that your assumptions are wrong. But, it was not even an interesting paradox.

1) "random process" was undefined.

2) There was no limitation given as to choosing nothing or more than one answer.

3) At best the discussion might have been amusing, but that's just trolling IMO.

PS: I thought about it for a while before flagging it.

  > A paradox is not an interesting thing.
  > It's just a sign that your assumptions are wrong.

That's an interesting position to take - Ray Smullyan might disagree with you. When I was discussing it with him the conclusion I came to is that there is something deep in a good paradox that helps us understand logic, math, thinking and reason.

That's not true for unexpected results, which are often incorrectly called paradoxes, but it does seem to be true for real paradoxes. They have led to major innovations and advances in math.

The discussion I had with Ray was years ago now, and I don't remember the details, but I think you are mistaken in dismissing paradoxes as "just a sign that your assumptions are wrong."

Additionally, all the objections you raise can be clarified and the problem made more precise, losing the pithiness, but without losing the paradoxical nature. "Random process" can easily be defined clearly, and you can add the limitation about choosing exactly one answer.

At best you have proof though contradiction: http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~larryc/proofs/proofs.contradict...

For a basic paradox like "This sentence is a lie" there are more options than true or false. Other things are best answered with "your asking the wrong question" etc. But, once you walk though the basic options paradoxes are just another example of the same thing.

PS: Yellow void toe air zen bubble toy 4:72 PM lisa. Not all collections of words have meaning.

"This sentence has no proof" (and add all the difficult bits about formal systems, what you mean by proof, and the containing of enough complexity to model arithmetic) is a paradox, and it's led to some very interesting mathematics. (I observe that Goedel said that any true paradox could be used as the basis for an incompleteness theorem.) Yes, it's also led to a lot of cranks spouting huge amounts of nonsense, but that just proves that people will insist on misunderstanding things, and then loudly demonstrate their lack of understanding.

Paradoxes in the true mathematical sense are useful in mathematics, and I thought that many here on HN would find that they sufficiently provoke their intellectual curiosity to be regarded on topic.

However, clearly you disagree, so clearly we disagree. I found the submission interesting, the discussion less so, and wish the inappropriate comments had been flagged/killed to allow the interesting and contentful discussion to flow. That's not what happened.

People complain that HN has jumped the shark, and the submissions are of poor quality. Personally I think it's the inappropriate comments that are dragging HN down, the insistance by so many to add largely content-free and insight-free comments. And yes, I admit that I've done it too.

PG says that the greatest threat to HN isn't the poor quality of submission, but the poor quality of comment. Perhaps submissions should die less often, and comment be killed more often.

Perhaps not. I don't have solutions, but I do know that this submission was a paradox, and that some true paradoxes are of interest and use in formal mathematics. Others aren't - it would be interesting to know if this is the former, and that's what I'll be exploring with some of my colleagues over the next few days.

I found the submission interesting, the discussion less so, and wish the inappropriate comments had been flagged/killed to allow the interesting and contentful discussion to flow.

Good reply, and good points. It's probably a better paradox than I thought at a glance.

But while one doesn't want to throw out too many babies with the bathwater, at least with fruit trees, it's often better to prune too much than too little. You might get less fruit this year, but you end up with a stronger tree and better root system.

In this case, I think the better solution would be to make a page about the paradox, and link to that. It's hard to know, but I think a more fully fleshed out blog post about the paradox might have produced better discussion.

Gödel's incompleteness theorems are proof though contradiction which as I said can be interesting. (Or I should say they are part of the set of proofs though contradiction.) However, the paradox is not interesting it's just paradox = bad assumption.

So, don't read to much into Gödel, you also can't prove 1 + 1 = 2 except by making an equivalent assumption. Yet, that does not mean what you think it means.

PS: I don't think HN has jumped the shark, but I do try and keep it clean. IMO, it was fairly close to the acceptable line but to close to the HN equivalent of a funny cat photo, (hey look a paradox how cute), but a longer post taking about a well defined paradox and it's implications would have been acceptable and had a much cleaner discussion.

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