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Comment by sethc2 | Hacker News Reader

Why was this flagged?

I don’t even necessarily agree with the author’s arguments and conclusion, and honestly I have no clue what to think with all the information I hear that is constantly changing from the various tribes. But when something gets flagged simply because he advocates for ending the lockdown, I go from thinking the lockdown is probably necessary and trust the decision is made for reasons I don’t understand, to thinking like the paranoid conspiracy theorist that this is just a totalitarian power grab, and figure the need to suppress dissent means that it is more likely his position is the right one. If the ideas he is presenting are so stupid then people can decide that for themselves and don’t need some moral busybody protecting us from thinking for ourselves by flagging anything that states the opposite of what their tribe thinks is true.

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This is not a great place to start...

    > I’m a software / site reliability engineer 
    > based out of Santa Barbara, California.

Given the stakes, we should have a preference for Coronavirus articles written by experts. It's fine for authors to trash the WHO or to disagree with the government, but they should have the chops if the rest of us are going to upvote them.

I'm disappointed with the HN community. The past few weeks, most of the medical articles to hit the front page have been written by dabblers.

> I'm disappointed with the HN community. The past few weeks, most of the medical articles to hit the front page have been written by dabblers.

Honestly, that shouldn't be surprising. AFAICT, the only way in which the HN community exceeds some random subreddit is in thinking highly of itself.

HN itself combined with hckrnews.com provides an okay enough ui and mix of random interesting articles that makes it still beat out reddit for me.

I still trust HN content more than other sites. The average age here is probably a decade older than Reddit, and people here value rationality, even if we sometimes fail to exhibit it.

That's a good point. The stated goals or objectives or values of a community or collective actually do have significant impact on the behavior of that community. It's too bad that HN generally doesn't recognize that when looking at things like Google's "Don't be evil".

As an example, Amazon is fairly well-known in the industry as having a set of principles and with the fact that those are often described as having been weaponized to support people's positions. I actually think that weaponization of principles or slogans or mottos is not uncommon. Different principles, though, have different flexibility on how far they can be used to justify things (i.e "focus on the user" has different flexibility than "move fast and break things" or "don't be evil").

The HN community doesn't think anything. It's a collection of millions of people. Some of those people think highly of HN, while others think poorly of it and are not shy about saying so, including on this site. I'd caution against making generalizations based on what you happen to notice here, because it's mostly the things we dislike (for example, people thinking too highly of themselves) which stick in our memory and our craw.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Huh, the point of the bias towards noticing things that we dislike is interesting, and there's good research backing it. I don't think that it necessarily affects much the comparison of one community against another, though, as one wouldn't be particularly more susceptible to it than another. Still, it likely means that the negatives are not as pronounced as they are perceived to be.

> The HN community doesn't think anything. It's a collection of millions of people.

You could say the same thing about r/The_Donald. And it would be true there, too. But communities, including HN, do often tend to have particular inclinations and behavior as a group, even if there are many individual members who diverge.

> But communities, including HN, do often tend to have particular inclinations and behavior as a group, even if there are many individual members who diverge.

And I'd rather see people seriously discuss the groupthink of those communities rather than just dismiss it due to the fact that it isn't completely universal.

That's a good point about there being meaningful differences across different communities. It probably has to do with what it is that defined the community in the first place, which tends also to be what holds it together. I think you're on shakier ground here, though:

> I'd rather see people seriously discuss the groupthink of those communities

It's difficult to discuss that seriously because there's so little objective basis for the claims people make about it. Perceptions vary wildly, and the claims tend to be grand and dramatic. If you hear enough of them, it becomes unmistakeable that they're not really about HN; for one thing, they're so contradictory.

Do you see any substantive issues with the content or are your objections primarily around the authorship?

I'm looking for people to poke holes. And so far I've just heard a lot of, well, that.

Which I agree with, I am not an expert, and have not (I hope) pretended to be one.

    > Do you see any substantive issues with the content

I'm a programmer. An article about epidemiology could be riddled with substantive issues, and I would know none the better.

Don't sell yourself short! If you've got a brain, you have the potential for insight :)

(For what it's worth, I agree that it doesn't make sense to participate in a discussion like this without at least having done some background reading)

I think a really common danger here us people think they have more insight than they actually have. It's easy to take some data and draw conclusions from it without realizing the limitations of the data or the full scope of the complexity we're dealing with.

There have also been many articles by experts. I'd be careful about making general conclusions based on what you remember, because most of us are far more likely to notice and remember the things we disliked (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

More importantly, though, there may be a misunderstanding about what HN is. It's an internet watercooler, the purpose of which is gratifying curiosity and having curious conversation. Inevitably that involves dabbling, speculating, and getting things wrong. That's part of what people do when they converse. Does that have downsides, especially in a crisis? Of course it does. But I don't think it would be a solution to try to stop the community from hammering this out.

More here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22578300

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22973700

Yes, but it’s not the moderation here I have an issue with. It doesn’t bother me at all that programmers write and submit posts about medicine. What I would like to see is our peers submitting and up-voting more articles by experts. Expertise comes in many forms, to be sure, but, as readers, we should be checking the background of certain kinds of posts before we boost them.

> It's an internet watercooler, the purpose of which is gratifying curiosity and having curious conversation.

Alternatively: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzOv14fA-BI

"I don't know anything about zoology, biology, geology, geography, marine biology, crypto zoology, evolutionary theory, evolutionary biology, meteorology, limnology, history, hepatology, palaeontology, or archaeology, but I think ..."

That's funny, but not because other people are idiots. It's that we all do it.

Out of curiosity, do you know if it being flagged means it's now invisible to others? Or is "flagged" the intermediate state between a normal submission and a dead one?

Not sure. All I know is I saw the article on the main page, navigated away and when I came back it was gone. I searched for the title and then found it but it was flagged.

I was thinking of sharing on Facebook but I'd probably get banned, even if i still feel we should probably keep the lockdown for a little bit longer, because apparently the moral authorities have decided it is off limits to suggest we should end the lockdown or even discuss whether we should.

It's the latter. It's possible for a submission to get so many flags that it also gets killed, but the software doesn't do that once there are lots of comments.

That seems like a pretty good algorithm.

Not if all the comments are versions of "this article is wrong".

Glad to see this no longer appears to be flagged. I'm curious if anyone knows what HN's process is for unflagging an entry. How do they decide what remains flagged?

In this case I e-mailed hn@ycombinator.com to inquire about why it was flagged, and Dang jumped in and lifted the flags after quickly scanning things over to check that it was legitimate.

Basically, users flagged it. I think the explanation Dang gave me in his e-mail reply is almost certainly correct, and it doesn't contain anything sensitive so I'll just share it here:

> All I can tell you, though, is that users flagged it. We don't know why they flag things, and can only guess. My guess in this case is that it's a combination of some users having covid-story-fatigue, and other users disagreeing with the view in the article. As you know, this question has become politicized and is getting more polarizing as we go forward.

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