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Just look at HN comment threads: Any truth that's inconvenient for the majority in the respective thread will be brainlessly downvoted. Killing the messenger is just as popular here (where all the smartest know-it-alls convene) as it is there (where all the ignoramuses reside).

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That's true of any large public community, almost by definition. It bothers me too, and I have to remind myself not to fret too much over things on HN that are true of humans in general: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The only way you could get different phenomena is with a small, closed community that would therefore be able to have locally different properties. Just like you need a closed system if you want different entropy.

Actually, this has an interesting consequence along the lines of PG's essay: when a novel/heretical idea does begin to be seen as true, this will probably happen first in small communities, not large ones. Moreover the small community probably needs to be elite somehow, or it won't have the standing to deliver the bit flip (heretical -> serious) to the larger community.

> The only way you could get different phenomena is with a small, closed community that would therefore be able to have locally different properties.

I run a private discussion group about quantum mechanics. It consists of only a few dozen physicists, and the exact same dynamic happens there. I observed the same phenomenon in the 90s with an internal discussion group at JPL. It was anonymized in the hopes that this would encourage people to speak freely and honestly. The actual effect was that it turned into 4chan. It was quite shocking to me at the time. Being small and closed doesn't help.

My claim is that it's necessary, not sufficient. I definitely agree it's not the latter.

I respectfully disagree. I don't think being small and private is necessary to prevent unpopular opinions from being shouted down. But it is a very difficult problem because there are some kinds of opinions that IMO should be shouted down (flat-eartherism, holocaust denial). The tricky part is distinguishing those from crazy-sounding ideas that potentially have merit. It's a hard problem, but I believe it has solutions that don't rely on exclusivity.

> I believe it has solutions that don't rely on exclusivity.

Does that mean you have a solution in mind, or you have some particular reason to believe a solution exists? Or is it just a general expression of optimism?

The latter is fine, but if you have either a specific idea for a solution or a reason to believe one might be possible, then I'd love to hear it! Every time I think about this, I give up, concluding that the current system is more-or-less optimal. Ideas are shouted down not for being bad in any objective sense, but mostly just for being too far from what is currently believed to be true. This is a cheap filter, which kills a lot of really bad ideas at the price of making it hard and slow to move the needle when really necessary to do so. But any alternative I can come up with seems to require re-litigating the holocaust, every single day.

In between. I have some half-baked ideas but not enough time to implement them. But in a nutshell the idea is to do a pagerank-type calculation to compute people's reputations so that not all upvotes and downvotes are weighted equally. Upvotes from people who have more upvotes count more. There are additional details to prevent some of the more obvious ways to game that system.

> Upvotes from people who have more upvotes count more.

While this will avoid the problem of "junk opinion democracy" (each voice gets one vote, whatever the expertise), this still wouldn't avoid the problems attributed to the scientific establishment, where authority is roughly proportional to impact/prolificness/citations.

The difference being that in what I have in mind, anyone can publish and anyone can review, so it would be more like Arxiv and less like Nature or Science. In the scientific world there are stringent filters in place before you are allowed to play the game at all. Also, scientific communities tend to be small, and they are dependent on each other for funding. That introduces politics and perverse incentives. (I used to be a researcher. The politics and incestuousness is one of the reasons I quit.)

Are you familiar with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato and similar work from the early 2000s? I still think this kind of thing has potential.

> I don't think being small and private is necessary to prevent unpopular opinions from being shouted down.

IMO when promoting your heretical idea you can safely ignore those who shout you down. You need to find the right people (at the right time, in the right way) at the beginning to grow your concept. HN as a whole may be too big for some things.

I think it's possible to simultaneously release your concept publicly and target folks who see the problem as you do, growing within groups where you find success.

Why should flat-earth or anything ridiculous be shouted down? If it's as ridiculous as you think it is, it should be trivial to win any debate. The reason people shout down heretic ideas is because they are true, so they have no choice but to shout them down, since they would lose an open debate.

> Why should flat-earth or anything ridiculous be shouted down?

Why are you still sexually molesting squirrels? Oh, you're not sexually molesting squirrels? When did you stop?

(Stop for a moment to think about that before you go on.)

I never said that "flat-earth or anything ridiculous be shouted down". In fact, I said the exact opposite.

But there is a real problem with flat-eartherism and related conspiracy theories in that they cannot be combatted by reason. If you repeat a meritless claim often enough people will come to perceive it has having merit and being worthy of serious consideration despite the fact that it has no merit. And it's particularly effective if you cloak the meritless claim in a facade of intellectual inquiry, as I did above. And it's extra effective if the meritless claim is emotionally charged. (Those poor, innocent squirrels!)

If such tactics go unchallenged it can cause real problems.

..so just challenge them when confronted. Flat earth stuff is intelectual inquiry and not a loaded question like your example about squirrels. It can be easily proved wrong, so just do it.

You've obviously never tried to confront a flat-earther or their kin. You should try it some time. It's enlightening and scary and every bit as emotionally fraught as my example. And when you get to the climate-change deniers and the holocaust deniers, it stops being funny too.

You obviously neither know what the backfire effect is nor why you should engage in open debates, anyway. I've talked to people believing in god before, so I know what it's like to talk to a wall. And I've talked to flat-earthers. They are fun and have interesting arguments that nicely intersect with the NASA conspiracy nerds. I came to the realization that I don't know enough about earth to counter the arguments of the flat earthers. Same with the holocaust deniers, really. But the debates were interesting and I gained new perspectives. Climate change stuff on the other hand I've never debated anyone about, since I already know that I know nothing about how this is supposed to work. No idea why CO2 is bad or why it's bad that it gets warmer a few degrees. I wouldn't mind it getting warmer. Maybe the South Pole would become a continent people can live, then. Not that I have noticed any climate change the past couple of decades I've been alive. Highest temperatures I remember are from over twenty years ago, which was about 44°C. Nowadays the hottest I recall are like 38°C. But then they changed the term from global warming to climate change for a reason, I guess.

There are several Reddit communities that seem to do a rather good job of maintaining order, via thoughtful rules and enforcement. Some of the undesirable behaviors mentioned in this thread could be added as new HN guidelines.

How effective this might be is one of those things you don't know until you try it.

Care to propose any specific guidelines?

I think it's useful for me to first explain why I believe HN would benefit from some new guidelines. The polarized, tribal behavior that can be witnessed in any thread that has any sort of identity related angle to it (politics (and therefore economics), religion, gender, etc) is probably not the best that the above average intelligence and rationality of folks who frequent HN can come up with, but when it comes to such topics, in this respect it seems we are little different than the average discussion on /r/politics.

Of course, we're not unique in this way, but this sort of behavior is starting to cause major problems in society, and it seems to me all communities should be taking notice where it happens, and do what they can to figurr out:

a) what the nature of the problem is

b) how might it be improved

The current guidelines, if followed as written, might eliminate the majority of this behavior, but much of that would be the product of restraint, of people "biting their tongues". Maybe there are some new guidelines we could add that might both improve the quality of discourse while not requiring self-censorship.

If you pay attention to such conversations, what you'll often notice is that two people are arguing passionately about what they think is the same thing, but really they are arguing about unique perspectives upon the same thing. They are trying to discuss a multi-dimensional problem with only a very small subset of differing dimensions, and they are completely unaware of it.

What specific new rules we need is tricky, but the type of rules I suspect should be along the lines of:

- when asserting criticism, try to ensure your statements are adequately objectively correct (resilient to reasonably pedantic criticism)

- when replying to someone who is wrong, pause to observe your emotional state - are you replying to what they've actually written, or perhaps to a heuristic-powered interpretation of what they're saying?

- realize that stereotyping people by categories other than just race and gender is harmful, not only because it's not nice

- be careful to not speak in a manner that suggests you have the ability to read people's mind or see into the future ("oh those people", "all they want to do is", "they will just", etc)

- aim for epistemic humility:

(a) a posture of observation rooted in the recognition that (a) knowledge of the world is always interpreted, structured, and filtered by the observer, and that, as such,

(b) pronouncements must be built on the recognition of observation's inability to grasp the world in itself.

This sort of thing. Exactly how any guidelines should be written and enforced I'm not so sure.

At the very least I hope you can consider whether this is a problem on HN (and keep this in mind during moderation), consider the idea that conversations that happen here and elsewhere have a way of rippling out through the world, and consider whether we all have a responsibility in contributing what we can to building the kind of society we want to live in.

If we could distill some of that into a simpler and more concrete form, I could see it being helpful.

Yes, that's the thing. Well, I will keep thinking on it. Hopefully you'll find yourself moderating with a new form of curiosity about what makes everyone on here tick, and what is going on under the covers to make them behave the way they do.

The in-person agreements linked below have been a helpful guide for interactions. They have some of the sentiment of your original thread, and would need to be adopted for the web. For example, how would one encourage folks to comment (make space / take space)?

http://www.emergingsf.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/EBMC_Ag...

Could you give me some examples?

Gender issues and workplace diversity.

"Gender issues" and "workplace diversity" are vague topics, not "truths" or even specific ideas we can discuss.

We all know what truths and specific ideas those terms encompass. Stating them brings a flurry of downvotes. Even pointing in their general direction gets downvoted.

People claiming that their ideas about those areas are "truths" can lead to a lot of downvotes, yes. Those people then claim that others are "suppressing the truth". They never seem to even consider the idea that their "truths" may in fact be mistaken.

Pretty much every comment on every subject comes down to someone claiming that their ideas are truths, though, and not every comment gets downvoted so much.

Not every wrong idea has a history of being contradicted so frequently, either.

Pointing out the environmental impact of having biological children is always unpopular here. A lot of HN-ers are pretty attached to the 'three kids and a white picket fence' lifescript.

Interestingly advocates of veganism (which has a similarly massive impact on your carbon footprint) are much more welcome, but I guess for most people the drive to reproduce is more inherent that the desire to eat meat.

Maybe because children are somewhat ingrained in us a species. Also, just because an idea is unpopular doesn't mean it is good.

Yes - it's not surprising to me that few people are willing to consider adopting or living a 'childfree' lifestyle, only that the suggestion that doing so is an extremely effective way to reduce your carbon footprint is received so poorly.

I would suggest that whether an idea is good and whether it is popular are mostly orthogonal, but also that encouraging people who aren't certain they want kids to not do so is, from the perspective of someone concerned about climate change, a good idea.

If the solution to a hard problem is that obvious and people aren't doing it then it's not really a solution and/or you haven't correctly identified the problem.

Those comments are unpopular because most people can see they're just smug self righteous twitter tier mic drops.

Maybe I wasn't clear; I'm not talking about comments on random threads about climate change suggesting it could be solved easily if people just didn't have kids. I don't think it's unreasonable, though, to suggest not having biological children if someone asks how they could lower their carbon footprint.

> If the solution to a hard problem is that obvious and people aren't doing it then it's not really a solution and/or you haven't correctly identified the problem.

I don't see how this is compatible with the observed reality that individuals make choices that are not best for society (whether due to rational self-interest/incomplete information/behavioral factors).

I suppose you could say there's room for that under redefining the problem, like "The real problem is that people refuse to employ known solutions to those problems."

That salvages the argument, but deflates it as an argument against talking about the known solutions: discussing them is part of the solution to such a meta-problem, directly, by leading people to employing them; and indirectly, by leading to insight on why people aren't employing them yet.

The former is hazardous (and verylittlemeat spoke against it): people fight for their views on the internet, and it degrades discussion more than it reaches people. The latter has leverage and is potentially highly impactful (i.e. the kind of discussion I come here hoping to find).

Many of the opinions downvoted on HN fit the same mold. They're what I call "if you're an alcoholic just stop drinking" arguments.

They're totally reductive and really just serve to stroke the speakers ego or shame others rather than actually address the issue.

I agree; it's sort of an escape hatch. There's no problem I can't solve if you always give me "Redefine the problem" as one of the options!

I mostly don't downvote anti-having-children(?) comments (I just ignore them), but I think most of them are counter-productive because, as others say, the desire to have children is ingrained to a lot of people, so not having children is a really tough sell. In light of the climate emergency we're facing, it almost sounds like deliberately advertising a wildly unpopular plan, detracting from other actionable plans with much higher chances of being accepted.

And the (not always, but frequent) I'm-holier-than-thou-because-I-transcended-ape-instincts vibe doesn't help.

Suicide is also a good solution from a climate standpoint. If you're seriously considering life choices which directly impair your reproductive chances you already lost the game.

> Pointing out the environmental impact of having biological children is always unpopular here.

1) Because you're treating an idealized version of "the environment" as a terminal goal.

2) The people most likely to agree with your argument are precisely the ones who should be having more kids.

Who should be having more kids? And consequently, who should not?

I didn't say anything about how anyone should have fewer kids. However, intelligence and political attitudes are highly heritable, so when smart educated middle class people (regardless of race or country) decide not to have children so that they can do their small part to "save the planet", what they're actually doing is their own small part in helping ensure that the next generation is turned over to people who are less intelligent and don't share their political beliefs.

Just turn on showdead in your settings. I also see very often comments that have died for no apparent reason (they are not inflammatory).

I find anything critisizing SV or YC company gets immediate downvotes, as do most critical of china, israel, and saudi arabia (or any company funded by them, lookin at you softbank). While there are more Indian, UK, and Canadian commenters who will actually argue, they seldom downvote. Oddly, most americans will go above and beyond to disparge their own nation more than any other (free speech is empowering!).

More people lately seem to downvote out of disagreement rather than to keep a thread in check. I thing requiring a comment to downvote would be a huge step forward in the quality of discourse.

This is not to pass judgement on any subset on the HN or general communities. Just apparent trends that have I have noticed. I could very well be victim to my own (american) bias.

> More people lately seem to downvote out of disagreement rather than to keep a thread in check.

Downvoting out of disagreement has always been endorsed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

You may disagree that it is a good choice, but it is not new phenomenon.

That typically means they're shadowbanned. I can usually figure out why by a quick look at their comment history. Even people who like to toss bombs throw the occasional dud.

Advocating for Nationalism is a typical example. Or restrictive immigration policies.

These seem to be considered by many to be synonymous with racism.

Can you give some examples where those "truths" have been downvoted?

Unironically, my very comment above (as well as others in this thread, the topic of which is heresy!) is gathering downvotes as we speak, despite it being technically correct. Normally this would bother me, but this time I find it pleasing because it illustrates the point.

My intuition is suggesting to me that your inclusion of "truths" in quotation marks suggests you are primed to expect me to reply with some things that I believe to be true, but that are false. Obviously I am speculating, but I find thinking about the nature of communication in fine detail to be extremely interesting.

Also, pardon the delay in reply as I'm quite sure my account is flagged and rate-limited for participating in flame wars, or more specifically, holding incorrect beliefs in flame wars. I believe this latter point because it takes two to tango in a flame war, and if you pay attention when warnings are handed out for such offenses here on HN, you may notice a pattern of the person receiving the warning is the one who holds the heretical view, despite many people being participants. I say this mostly as just an interesting aside, but I believe it does to some degree fairly illustrate the possibility of bias that exists on HN, including at the moderation level. Since the degree to which my speculation is true is not knowable, casual dismissals must not be based on pure logic, but rather a mixture of conscious logic and subconscious heuristics. Sometimes what's so easy to see in others, is near impossible to see in ourselves - such is the nature of the human mind.

As for some examples of what I'm talking about:

Here is a person taking the definition of Fascism and applying it to Nationalism:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21504768

Here is a person who seems to believe they can both read minds and predict the future (but apparently can not defend the facts they have learned during those exercises):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21501182

Here is a person who believes that it is impossible to love one nation more than others. Knowing such a thing would also require mind reading abilities:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21501200

More mind reading, and the stating of opinions as if they were facts (this is very common):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21500900

I mean, on one hand this is just people being people, nothing to lose any sleep over. On the other hand, this isn't /r/politics - is it asking too much that we strive for a higher standard of thinking and discourse here on HN? And furthermore, it might be worth considering if this sort of behavior might be counter-productive to the speaker's goals in more way than one.

So I've read each of these threads. Seems like you were engaged in particularily divisive topics with those that have strongly held beliefs. For what it's worth, I found your thoughts to be the more reasonable stance.

Strongly held beliefs are perfectly fine. Presenting opinions (or information derived from reading of minds or the future) as fact, is not - in my personal opinion that is, my opinion is clearly not shared by all others on HN. Perhaps the ends do justify the means.

Try advocating for open borders, an end to Capitalism and the dissolution of the Nation State. This, too, is beyond the pale for the bulk of Hacker News readers.

Likely because the discussions around them are pretty vapid. Open borders and the dissolution of the nation state are at odds with having any kind of social safety net, preventing violent mobs from taking over, preventing the remaining world powers from taking over, etc.

Ending capitalism hasn’t worked anywhere, ever. What are the logistics of that even if it doesn’t involve violently forcing people to stop trading goods and services directly? Who sets prices, who sets salaries, who decides how ore from mines is used and how electricity is divided?

In all of the posts I’ve seen advocating for those things, none include anything resembling intellectual curiosity. It’s always just a quip in response to the revelation that some people have less than others.

"Discussions around them are pretty vapid," he said, before diving into the most well-worn cliches on the subject.

You could do some deeper reading. It's intellectually dishonest to eschew a subject for your own superficial understanding of it.

1. https://crimethinc.com/books/no-wall-they-can-build 2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/187149.Open_Veins_of_Lat...

I have, and the two links you provided are perfect examples of the detached quips I’m speaking of. A whimsical rehash of Marxist ideas without any relevance to how it should work (you’ll notice this is how all Marxist books function) and a book about Mexican migrants that does nothing to address what replaces the positive features of a nation state in the context of fully open borders.

> a book about Mexican migrants

No, it's primarily about the people of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Just one of many trivially falsifiable positions you hold.

Anything seen to be advocating specifically for the benefit of white people is often seen as heresy around here, though there are pockets of positive sentiment.

Saying anything positive about online advertising is a ticket to downvotes.

Try posting Rushton and Jensen and see what happens.

I'll slightly disagree, and say that the optimum comment (in terms of receiving supportive comments and not being downvoted to oblivion) seems to be against the grain, but not pushing it too far.

I assume this is because those comments sometimes get people from both ends of the "debate" supporting them, or at least not voting them down.

Downvoting is the correct reaction to heresy. For every Darwin or Galileo there are many thousands of kooks. Downvoting doesn't silence people -- you can still see them at the bottom of the page in grey or worst case by turning showdead on.

> Downvoting is the correct reaction to heresy.

Even if it's correct?

I feel like I must be misunderstanding you.

> Downvoting doesn't silence people

It can get you flagged by the mods for "starting flamewars", which limits your ability to post.

If I understand brianlarsen correctly, the point is that if you downvote 10,000 heresies, one will be correct[1]. The others will just be cranks. And the one heresy that will be correct... well, this is HN, not the Royal Society. If the correct heretic is depending on not being downvoted on HN to get the word of the newly-discovered truth out, that's probably not an optimal publication strategy.

[1] All numbers made up on the spot.

> If I understand brianlarsen correctly, the point is that if you downvote 10,000 heresies, one will be correct[1]. The others will just be cranks.

> [1] All numbers made up on the spot.

This is the (or a) problem, at least as I see it.

I'm not proposing that we entertain all sorts of crazy ideas, but I don't think it should be controversial that HN adopts a culture of not saying things that are not true. An example of this is the habitual posting of opinions (often axiomatic beliefs, but not always) in a manner that makes them appear as fact.

Reducing the frequency of this would indeed require some effort, but HN is unwilling to even include it in the guidelines. I find that interesting and more than a little ironic considering PG's essay on the matter.

or worst case by turning showdead on.

This isn’t true anymore. Accounts get locked, not merely whisked to the shadow realm.

that's by design - popularity is not a good judge however. A better system would be to provide upvote/downvote buttons to only a small, random subset of users in each topic.

or maybe a firing line approach: everyone has upvote/downvote buttons but not everyone's work

How would that improve the situation?

- discourage brigading

- discourage mob behavior

- prevent particularly biased individuals from skewing every discussion

- adds stochastic variety to the biases of the group

I don't see how approximate popularity is better than popularity for the first three factors. It would achieve the 4th in individual threads, but amplifying randomly-selected niche viewpoints in different threads adds up to the same biases across threads (unless the selection of blessed users is thread-independent, in which case the community has a randomly-selected group of first-class citizens).

Is this where someone brings up the Dropbox comment again?

That's a natural consequence of the human condition, coupled with a libertarian outlook when creating moderation tools. A downvote can never be presumed to mean "this is objectively wrong", always "this is subjectively objectionable"

A good exercise in knowing thyself, examining your own prejudices and improving the world around you because of that critical introspection. Unfortunately, this process must be repeated near-constantly to bring about perfection, and few people have the time for that (or are willing to make the time for that)

If PG actually meant a single word of his essay, he'd fire Dan Gackle and he'd radically change how HN moderation works.

But, as per usual, Paul Graham is full of shit. He is interested in challenging other people, but he is absolutely and totally unwilling to be challenged in any material way.

And heaven forbid you challenge any aspect of one of his most highly valued portfolio companies... lol... you'll be banned right out of this place.

because Paul Graham absolutely LOVES declaring some things heres and he LOVES to suppress speech.

He just wants to be the one who declares what is heretical and what is not.

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