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Comment by NelsonMinar | Hacker News Reader

The computer geniuses here at Hacker News have decided the main argument of this article are wrong. But among archaeologists ritual defacement is understood to be a regular thing that happens to art all over the world.

Roman coins defaced: https://www.coinsweekly.com/en/Defacing-the-past-damnation-a...

Teotihuacan icons demolished and destroyed by fire: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/sep/24/teotihu...

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I had to collapse about 8 threads to find the first comment of someone doubting the argument (in a polite way).

Your comment is popular because you are fighting a "easy-to-hate" minority that is only relevant because you made it so.

You make fun of a kind of HN commenter that you find typical. But if your comment is the most popular (#1 now), and assuming that people are upvoting you because they agree that it is indeed typicial, it means that this type of commenter is not typical at all. It is an outlier, properly undervoted by the real typical commenter.

So your comment being upvoted disproves itself. Quite a paradox (or just irony?).

The character of a comment thread can change quickly here. I don't doubt the possibility that it was an overwhelming opinion when the parent decided to comment on it, even if no longer the case.

So maybe the flaw is to over generalize the gist of the thread early in its history.

And on top of that, if GP didn't post this comment, then it might still be the prevailing sentiment in the comment threads. This is a case where making the observation that something is the prevailing sentiment can change what that prevailing sentiment is.

I don't know if this is true in this case, but I've seen it happen in the past. In some ways what you'd really like is a feature to go "back in time" in the comment thread and see how it developed, otherwise it can be difficult to appreciate coming in later.

It is also very common that the first few people commenting on a thread have a very different profile than the people that come later.

It's quite common that the top comment asks "why is everybody saying X", as if X was a widespread opinion. But then you have to scroll three pages down to find the comments being referred too, and they are usually heavily downvoted.

Check the comments on stories related to diet. You'll see all sorts of crazy pseudoscience being peddled. There are a lot of smart people here, but even smart people can be led astray.

...because somebody pointed out that the opinion didn't make a damn lick of sense.

This whole comment is semantics and not even the good kind. It's arguing to find an argument. It's good ammo for OP's next snarky comment though so I approve.

So you're saying that if I disagree with the parent, I should upvote him, to break the paradox?

Maybe other voters have already noticed the paradox, and taken appropriate action!

The old creation of grievances in order to exploit them trick. "If we can reframe the past to support our current ideology", "if we can manufacture fake victims", etc.

I'm reminded of this quote:

    "To witness is to ignore as little as possible. Because a 
    judgment so often impairs the ability to notice what 
    doesn’t conform with it, the witness chooses for the time 
    being to keep judgment at a distance."

From this great article by Salvatore Scibona posted the other day: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/opinion/sunday/internet-s...

>The computer geniuses here at Hacker News have decided

Don't do this

Like all "smart" professions, the practitioners tend to think their smart extends beyond their domain of expertise.

It doesn't.

I find most "smart" professionals I interact with are people, mostly like other people.

The internet is different of course, but if you're painting people with a broad brush based upon internet interactions, there are bigger problems than "smart" professionals saying dumb things.

It's a generality and it's useful for describing a group of people.

Do more of this

Same with postage stamps, here are stamps of Bosnia defaced after WW I http://www.stampio.org/2019/01/the-revenge-of-yugoslavia-on-...

Downvoted purely for the snark. It's irritating when an active participant in a website puts down the community that... they choose to be part of.

And then there's the Sphinx's nose! That's the canonical example of Egyptian statue nose bashing.

https://www.smithsonianjourneys.org/blog/photo-what-happened...

It was actually part of the Law in Rome, so-called Damnatio Memoriae, but it was inspired by the Greeks and probably by the Egyptians themselves:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae

The great thing about the geniuses here is they don't seem to think that Dunning-Kruger applies to them.

Isn't the argument in the article not that they were defaced due to "ritual defacement" but that vandals thought that by breaking the noses off, they were effectively killing the person in the after life, thus not allowing them to seek retribution for robbing their grave?

Breaking the nose to placate concerns about a supernatural phenomenon seems like the very definition of a ritual (placate concerns about a supernatural phenomenon) defacement (literally removing a surface feature from the face of a statue)?

I see it more as the ancient equivalent of disabling a car alarm when you're stealing it. They were robbing the graves not preforming a ritual. Their beliefs may have been supernatural but at the time it seemed logical to "kill" the observer of the crime. It wasn't defacement to send a message, it was practical and tactical as far as the robbers were concerned (according to this article's premise).

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