This community doesn't seem to have the capacity to discuss religion.
Edit: ok you guys, message received. I won't do it this way again.
Edit: ok you guys, message received. I won't do it this way again.
You're right that I should have written something longer and not in haste. But I'm a bit surprised by the strong reaction to that one; it's atypical. Perhaps to some readers it felt like a disparagement of their own view on religion—which of course it was not.
Personally I like to avoid such threads. You can't really be understood, whatever you contribute.
I know you do a lions share of work dang, but I think you were a little to fast here. Good comments were being posted (and pushed below you comment) as you wrote that.
Same for stories: the ranking is determined by votes, flags, software, and moderation. Users are the most important factor, but alas not a sufficient one. Without moderation, the system gets into unstable states and can't stay within its mandate.
Personally, I'm not religious and I tend to view the tech world through that filter. I forget that some tech people might have other philosophical or religious beliefs.
At some level, I assume that Tech people are smart, and thus don't believe in religious.
This is obviously untrue, so now I'm curious to see if people's religious beliefs, or lack of them, impacts the tech work that they do.
i.e. is there any crossover in the venn diagram of religion and tech, or are they entirely isolated from each other.
Historically, religious groups sometimes funded purely scientific endeavors. Of course, sometimes religious groups went after science that was inconvenient to belief... But both actions indicate a precedent.
The problem is that, just like fires in a city, flamewars aren't cost-free. It only takes so many before users don't want to be here anymore—except users who like flamewars. That's how internet communities destroy themselves, so trying to contain that risk is a big part of what we do.
At the moment, anything related to Richard Stallman seems to bring out the worst in a lot of people. And anything related to a particular gender isn't likely to go well.
And to be fair to HN, what tends to happens is that the initial set of low-value comments gets replaced over time by better ones. Even the worst of threads can have good conversations in them, it's just sometimes difficult to find.
To be specific about this site: on HN we have a clear mandate—intellectual curiosity—and a set of principles based on what serves that (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Discussion that stays within those guidelines is welcome, and conversely, when it isn't able to stay within those guidelines, we intervene. There are different degrees of intervention depending on how badly the guidelines are being violated. But intervention, or moderation, or whatever you want to call it, is indispensable. The system doesn't reliably stay within the guidelines on its own.
2. Or the academic community formed by the Abrahamic faiths? Did you reserve some expectation that secular scholars in academia are about to pop in?
3. And if people cannot discuss these matters, are they to receive the truth from a better source? Which source should we receive it from?
4. If most discussions never reaches into data-driven conversation, does that put them all in the same bin for you? Aspirational speech, perhaps?
To get substantive discussion of religion, you probably need smaller groups that have a certain amount of cohesion. A group can be cohesive even if it disagrees. But a large group with weak cohesion discussing a provocative topic is probably always going to plummet to lowest-common-denominator quickly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284379
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284381
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284266
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21284355
You're right that there's a sore spot for me, but it isn't religion—it's long experience with how wretched HN threads become as soon as religion is mentioned. But I should have been more careful and not posted hastily and vaguely.
If I hadn't intervened by posting and doing other standard moderation things, though, the thread would likely have become more of a flamewar. These things don't self-correct; would that they did. I made this case more complicated by posting in a way that stirred up additional waves—it was not a splash-free dive, like we usually try for. I was distracted and my irritation managed to grab the steering wheel.