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Comment by burkaman | Hacker News Reader

This is a really weird way to look at conversations. Clearly your comment was useful, because you said what a lot of people were thinking, and prompted a very helpful explanation from a subject matter expert. Had you stayed silent, rayiner might not have felt any need to comment, and everyone would have been worse off.

Discussions are not supposed to be competitions to discover who is the smartest or most correct.

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Exactly. Moreover, comment scores do not capture information about truth values, and displaying them would seem only to encourage people to confuse them with something which does. It doesn't matter whether 'rayiner's comment has a higher score than that which prompted him to write it - what matters is that both the erroneous interpretation and its correction by a domain expert are there, publicly visible, for anyone to read and evaluate.

If anything, I'd argue that it's almost more worth going the other way, and hiding scores on one's own comments as well. I don't really know what purpose they serve.

>I'd argue that it's almost more worth going the other way, and hiding scores on one's own comments as well. I don't really know what purpose they serve.

I've never thought of that idea. I think I like it!?

>I don't really know what purpose they serve.

Ego.

> Discussions are not supposed to be competitions to discover who is the smartest or most correct.

Exactly! This is why I upvote people I'm arguing with.

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