I believe it's not moderators job to decide what is a lie and what is not, if you see a lie, write a truthful comment refuting it, that way you can convince people instead of trying to silence.
codesushi42 didn't say it was. It said the system you describe still allows lies, myths, and misinformation to spread. The only mention of moderators was in the context of chastising the poster who calls the misinformation out.
> if you see a lie, write a truthful comment refuting it, that way you can convince people instead of trying to silence
The tools you referred to are tools to silence, so you are "trying to silence" every time you flag or downvote a post. As for refuting the misinformation, I regularly see posts doing this downvoted while the misinformation is upvoted[1]. This is particularly true in discussions on contentious topics. Thus, I'm not nearly as certain as you are that these tools would protect HN from a sufficiently dedicated group.
[1] At least once, because I downvote it and the comment remains black.
My point is that people casually browsing this place are going to be infected by the misinformation and spread it to others. All while the mods overfit on whether someone's response wasn't polite enough, which in a lot of cases is biased to begin with.
Stack Exchange is a much, MUCH more reliable source of information than the horse shit I see pranced around here on a daily basis. Their moderation system actually works because it empowers knowledgeable users.
Maybe some example would help me understand what you mean. Could you link to some clear misinformation on HN that wasn't convincingly refuted elsewhere in the thread?
Look up some accounts (jlawson) and you will find they consistently post right wing BS here.
Or just search HN for eugenics and see all the crazy claims made...
Plenty other examples, but due to ignorance, like someone giving a long convincing explanation of the thermodynamics behind the efficiency of steam engines which sounded entirely convincing. But was complete utter horse shit once researched, and no one refuted it. But it was upvoted plenty.
Political opinions from across the right-left spectrum, if presented in a civil and substantive way and without fake facts, are not against the rules here. Extreme opinions tend to get downvoted pretty quickly, though.
If you outlaw this, people like me (who think inflicting stupidly and ill-health on their children by withholding these technologies is morally wrong) will just fly to Singapore. Even if you could enforce this, not every country will. 5+ standard deviation increases in many traits is on the table
Nope, 5+ std deviations is not on the table.
+5 SD change in intelligence (ie, average IQ of 175) would be amazing, but it's not obviously impossible. So it's "on the table" in the sense that cities on Mars are "on the table". It's not prohibited by any known laws of nature, and some experts are working on it.
There are lots of actual lies in circulation, so I encourage you to reserve the use of the word for things that are demonstrably false, not just ambitious claims that one might be skeptical of.
Stretching the truth like this is lying, whether you like it or not.
HN is not a crowdsourced knowledge base like stackexchange or wikipedia, to expect high percentage of accuracy on all posts, it is place of conversations and having people with different viewpoints makes it more interesting. For the thermodynamics example did you post the correct version after researching? Or maybe you found it too late when conversation have already moved on? Unfortunately that's the way all conversations work in real world too, best arguments come after it.
I am not saying that hn voting is the perfect system, but it is way better than the system where moderators check if comments are true or "right wing BS" because then instead of discussions you'd get echo chamber of everyone agreeing with moderator, and it's not guaranteed that it will be left wing echo chamber you wish for.
Obviously we don't chastise users for correcting misinformation. We chastise them for breaking the site guidelines. How could we do otherwise?
There's an important insight here. Correcting misinformation is when it's most critical to follow the site guidelines. That's not so easy, because misinformation can be irritating and even triggering. But if you react to it with name-calling, flamewar, personal attack or things like that, then you discredit your comment and—if your position is correct—you discredit the truth. Then you're not only making HN worse, you're making the world worse.
The thing to try to remember is that while you may not owe the other commenter any better, you owe the community better, and you owe the truth better. The one who knows more has more responsibility.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...