Please read the paper before you comment
buttondown.email
buttondown.email
About halfway through a one-page article was this quote.
"If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first."
Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas.
Read the paper? You're lucky if they read the article
I always wondered what would happen if I incorrectly answered those questions - would they still pay me? But I prefer cash to the truth
This is natural if you follow the amount of effort required. Effort to comment ~ close to zero. Effort to go through an article worth several pages (or worse, a paper!) without dropping off is much, much higher.
(epistemic status: I am 100% projecting here. Maybe I'm broadly right though)
A person with an iron deficiency, will often have an urge to chew ice [1]. Ice does not have iron or help you absorb iron -- but brains are weird.
There are an awful lot of people who are lonely and want the sort of emotional and intellectual connection that they'd normally get comes from sitting by a fireside doing chores for hours. It takes effort and vulnerability to make friends with whom you can have 2-hours-long chats. It requires planning and intentionally-directing attention to maintain those relationships. Those who fail to plan and execute those actions will reach out in weird ways to try to meet that need. These will disproportionately be people who:
A. Struggle to sustain attention long enough to plan and execute what they really intend.
B. Fear that interactions with new people will end up with them assaulted, infected, or dead.
C. Feel trapped in some situation and unable to plan a way out.
D. Struggle to form an intellectual connection during opportunities for deep social interaction.
E. Have been in a situation where A-D was true and are falling into old habits.
I posit that the intellectual masturbation of people on twitter or other forums is a symptom of an unmet hunger for real intellectual connection with other humans.
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/iron-deficien...
And yes, I am claiming that a lot of feminist twitter is in column B. They themselves have been quite explicit about that.
As far as I can see, there's no indication on this page as to how frequently iron deficiency leads to ice chewing.
Huh? Are you saying that my source claims that chewing ice causes anemia?
So from that source you can't conclude that anemia "often" leads to chewing ice, it may very well be quite rare.
Abstractly, "A is often a consequence B" does not logically goes to "B often leads to A".
To use an extreme exemple, crossing paths with polar bears (chewing ice) is generally linked with dieing (anemia), but death is quite rarely caused by crossing paths with polar bears.
It also seems to miss the central point of my metaphor.
depends on the topic, an article isn't going to convince a political party supporter to switch sides for example.
Why not? Are you suggesting articles can't carry information that changes peoples opinions; that people are wedded too much to Party identity; or perhaps that only one article wouldn't do it?
...But it won't, not in today's American politics. There's no nuance left, it's us versus _them_, entrenched political warfare. If the article says something bad about my party it's either: _fake news!_ or a smear campaign by _them_! If it says something good about their party it's ____-wing propaganda.
You can state that you like strawberry marmalade and someone on this planet will threaten you and your family for that transgression. Problem is the net isn't as anonymous as before thanks to social media and some people without significant personality try to call your employer, who succinctly distances the whole company from strawberry marmalade to underline how important it is to have values.
Employees will be reprimanded and strawberry marmalade removed from the canteen.
All major News organisations know that only small fraction of their audience on social networks even click the link anymore and rest of them just make up what they wanted from the title and description. At least now I think, Facebook doesn't allow one to alter the title, description of the website they're sharing; for years someone who shares could change those as well!
I don’t think that’s correct, depending upon your definition of "social networks". People were complaining about people not RTFAing on Slashdot in the 90s.
If one squints enough, Plato's Cave could be a complaint (circa -375) about opinions via pale shadows of secondary and tertiary sources.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
Next 30 reads the title, read comments, and write some pretend skepticism.
Next 300 reads the title, view comments, upvote the strongest opinions, and share.
Next 3000 reads the title and immediately decide whether to share.
Somewhere from here and above, 3-4 people tries to plagiarize something in it just to get votes and/or because they have personal issues in forming opinions.
Rest of the million people after this point just applaud and share what’s being thrown at their faces.
I really like that idea.
Imagine an article on vaccinations--many who would be posting exactly the sort of nonsense you'd be hoping to prevent would wear their "understood 0% of the facts in the article" as a badge of pride, and others who agreed with them would interpret it as such.
I would not want to participate on such a platform forcing me to double check if my contributions were actually published or simply hidden away for some secret reason.
It's these pieces of accountability that go a long way to have users compliant with moderation.
You can create a comment section, but it needs a barrier like that and tight curation - no comments posted without approval. Which can be a problem because the commenters with "dissenting" opinions will quickly claim censorship and how the outlet doesn't tolerate opposing viewpoints.
A bit offtopic, but when YouTube first added comments, they quickly got into cesspool territory, exactly like you describe. However, these days, I find myself really enjoying YouTube comments quite often. Is this just me? Am I just watching more happy happy joy joy videos these days or did YT comments go from "the internet's awfulest" to "pretty neat" somehow? I feel like it's chock full of witty jokes, positive vibes, light entertainment, and the occasional weirdo just to balance things out.
But the migration of YouTube channels and comments to G+ linked identities was reversed[0], wasn't it? Not to mention that G+ has since been shut down.
Shouldn't that make the abortive effort irrelevant for the quality of YouTube comments today?
[0] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/07/everything-in-its-ri...
Facebook insists even more on having "real people" using their real names, often forcing them to vet themselves, yet at times it easily steals the crown in terms of "really bad user interactions" from YouTube comments.
Very likely much more related to the topic under which people are commenting: Non-political feel good fluff does not allow for much friction to be inserted, thus the tone of comments will be much more civilized and friendly.
But anything that goes into controversial, and particularly political, territory is bound to quickly escalate into a complete shit show, on YouTube and Facebook alike.
Which fits neatly into common communication strategies like focusing on similarities rather than on differences.
Music is nice and largely even positive—if repetitive (“anyone here listening to [90s band] in 2020??”)
This is a popular opinion - that there are some things that people should just not be allowed to say, anywhere, ever, and while I (sort of) understand the impetus behind it, every proposed cure is worse than the disease.
Before the web, the HTTP POST equivalent was an envelope and stamp and maybe some moderation at the receiving side. People should look into ways to limit comments / filter noise now that it is in abundance.
Google Rewards still exists, and as recently as a couple of weeks ago had a question in that format (though I am not sure if it was actually a nonexistent brand, and I don't recall enough about the question to look it up now).
The author, on page four of the comments: https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot...
> yak8998 wrote:
>> Haha, bravo Mr. Timmer. If IE search is working right, then apparently I am the first. I think its well over 90%...
>> "bananas"
> That was added after publication, so the first few dozen commenters wouldn't have seen it. Idea credit goes to our editor in chief, Ken Fisher, and it was put in by our managing editor, Eric Bangeman.
From that first comment mentioning bananas onwards, bananas are mentioned very regularly. A quick sample of a few pages suggests somewhere around 40% of the comments mention bananas.
The real explanation is also interesting.
I suspect that's what really happened. Would have been better if they included that note since publication time. The first comment with "Banana" then would have been the real indicator. Most others would have simply noted the keyword from the comments before reading the article, like you said.
From my own experience: when I comment on something that I haven't read it's usually because I'm more interested in the conversation around the subject than the subject itself. So, in that case, I have usually read the comments, and if half of them just randomly included the word "bananas" in them, I'm pretty sure that the convesation whould change to be: "wtf are ppl saying bananas all the time?"
But at least someone made some money.
... your common sense, your sense of logic, your spidey sense to detect BS trained since long time ago, your previous experience, or the fact that you are yet a expert in the topic.
Or just your curiosity and desire to participate in the conversation, that is the correct motivation. To take a chance to improve your knowledge about a topic shouldn't be regulated by a pass.
Everybody wants their paper turning into a breaking new / symbol of authority or just cheat in the citations game, but this is not how it happens most of the time. Most of the time it is just published and nothing happens. Nobody will rush to read your hard work. Is just how it is
Consider how accurate the senses of a person that speaks without observing are. Existing is not license to proliferate otherwise there would be no notion of a cancerous cell, these would simply be another part of the organism. Uninformed opinions are the cancer of public discourse. Uncontrolled growth of irresponsible and subjective thought.
Yes. Personally I don't see a problem with that if you are trying to achieve a certain level of good response.
Maybe an alternative would be to let the presence of the "magic" word/phrase alter the ordering of the comments displayed to other users, or even "shadow delay" responses without it for fifteen minutes.
Works way better than I expected.
Instead of being clever, you’ve simply overestimated the importance of your ad in people’s lives while simultaneously optimizing for inexperienced people who’ve never read a job ad before and don’t know they are BS.
Playing king-in-the-castle with people’s lives by rejecting them over some bizarre game where you assume bad intent doesn’t sound like “respect” to me.
I don't think this idea of yours is as clever as you imagine it to be
Why? don't look for reason while analyzing the behaviour of the average internet user:-)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
I think it's just called "journalism" these days. I find it hard to find publications without clickbaity stuff like this.
I WANT to read the paper. Most of the time the article gives no link to it though.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120205012403/http://www.inform...
It really made me much more conscious about seeking out and reading original sources, rather than relying on interpretations and summaries from journalists, bloggers, etc.
Good times when I got 'bananas' in my mailbox.
In a big subreddit you easily get 30 top level comments before first comment says that link does not work or is fake. Discussion goes on and on without pause. People treat the title as a writing prompt. One of the best writing prompts is pseudo-philosophical techno-bro life or business advice. Anything with quantum physics in the title works too.
For this article, I tried to read it after reading a few comments, but got bored.
HN used to be good. Recently, I have seen groupthink taking hold, hostility toward dissension, and opinions are not that knowledgable and educated on controversial topics. The HN quality of discussion is not that different from themed serious subreddits.
Give Reddit a chance, find subreddits in your area of interest.
I love that HN has not made any changes to its UI for a long time and a fast and convenient reading experience remains top priority on HN. If there are more HN-like forums, that would be something I would be interested in.
My /. id (JSG) is ~18K but is only so large because I lurked for a few years before signing up. sigh
Even back then I have always used identifiable IDs on forums, those are my initials and here I use surname + initial and do so on everything internets these days.
Am I mad?
Can it be monetized ?
But just having a forum with “evergreen threads” where people talk continuously about perennial topics, doesn’t seem to work out very well, as people tend to get bored of topics when nobody’s saying anything new.
People might want to participate in them, but they won’t bother if there’s no expectation that their comment will be seen, let alone replied to. Nobody wants to post to a “stale” thread; it’s a waste of effort. And, in a vicious cycle, nobody wants to read other people’s posts on a “stale” thread either, because “thread necromancy” is almost never done by someone with something of value to contribute.
“Post a link and comment about it” sites have stumbled upon a fix for the problem of perennial discussion topics becoming "stale": by having individual threads focused on news articles relevant to these perennial topics, rallying points are created, giving people an excuse/justification to resume the larger ongoing topic of conversation within the comments of the individual news item, with the expectation that others will also be doing so.
The news itself is important to this process, as it offers a promise that fresh content (i.e. comments with a novel thought backing them) might be injected into the ongoing topic due to the news; thereby giving people a reason to check out this particular resurrection of the topic, even if they’ve read previous threads “about” it before.
But it really only has to be a promise that someone else is going to contribute novel thought to the conversation. Most people don’t want to be the source of the novel thought themselves. They want to participate on one of the existing sides of the topic, using what they already knew about the topic going in. They want to try out a “famous” debate for themselves. (And, if there's something new to know, they seemingly want to learn it by being told off by someone who has read the news, and so now knows something they don't.)
So the news article itself has about the same effect on the volume of commenting on a site like this, as public news regarding a company’s value has on the volume of trading in a market. A dose of “the real thing” certainly causes a surge—but so does the expectation of it, whether you actually end up getting the real thing or not.
And, just like speculating on a stock doesn’t require any insider knowledge, commenting under one of the “traditional” positions on such a perennial topic doesn’t require that you read the news that prompted the resurrection.
You can't have a stock market without real signal; and yet the market will always be composed mostly of traders with no access to (or desire to access) real signal. You can't have a perennial discussion without news; and yet the comments will always be composed mostly of people who have no desire to access the news.
Many people seem to mistake the social purpose of these “post a link and comment on it” sites as actually being purely for discussing the content of the link. It’s possible to use such sites this way, but it’s not incentivized by the UX compared to the alternative discussed above. You usually need stringent community moderation if you want people to focus on the news itself.
A free UX design idea: if you want to build “a discussion forum for news topics in a domain”, then rather than endlessly cloning the Reddit/HN model, try building a hybrid of Reddit with a traditional discussion forum. I.e.,
1. start with a traditional discussion forum (thread-list view with threads sorted by last-posted time);
2. make it so threads aren't “bumped” to the top from regular posts in those threads;
3. add a special “news link” type of post, that users can make, which does bump the thread.
(Bonus ideas: scrape the news-links and so render the news-link's content inline in the thread. Have automatic "threadmark" navigation between the spans of posts delimited by these news-item posts. Make clicking the thread in the thread-list view navigate to the newest news-item post. Require moderators to approve news-items before the bump triggers, to avoid "redundant" bumps, to in turn increase users' faith in bumps translating to a real renewal of discussion.)
I imagine such a UX would work much better as a way to explicitly run continuous long-running discussions of news topics, as refueled by news links. One core benefit is that what would on Reddit be “previous threads” would on this forum be “the same thread”, and so people would (hopefully!) feel much less of a reason to recapitulate the exact same posts.
You might think that I'm making a strawman argument, because I'm certain you wouldn't like the interrupting GPT-12 butler either. However, the UX you proposed would sometimes feel just as constraining.
Participating in arguments, even if they aren't novel, is a cognitively enriching experience. Reading but not participating in those very same arguments, while enriching in its own way, is not a complete replacement. Furthermore, I feel that in order to argue at higher levels of abstraction (which new fields are biased towards), you should first participate in discourse at every preceding level of abstraction. Reddit and HN allow for that. They're not perfect, but I don't think that enforced meta-threads would be an improvement.
All that being said, I think that your "bonus" idea of hyperlinking discussion to relevant excerpts in the article, inline, can be singularly transformative.
Just yesterday an article that went in depth on all different kinds of atmospheric water harvesting was filled with comments on how this was 'debunked', despite some of the methods being used in practice (notably fog harvesting).
Moreover, the article was discussing emerging changes in the technology and the hurdles they would face (it's almost always energy!) but none of the comments seemed to discuss that at all.
In the Usenet there was custom of writing summaries. Article writer would direct the discussion.
> Authors of articles occasionally say that readers should reply by mail and they'll summarize. Accordingly, readers should do just that---reply via mail. Responding with a followup article to such an article defeats the intention of the author. She, in a few days, will post one article containing the highlights of the responses she received. By following up to the whole group, the author may not read what you have to say.
>When creating a summary of the replies to a post, try to make it as reader-friendly as possible. Avoid just putting all of the messages received into one big file. Rather, take some time and edit the messages into a form that contains the essential information that other readers would be interested in.
>Also, sometimes people will respond but request to remain anonymous (one example is the employees of a corporation that feel the information's not proprietary, but at the same time want to protect themselves from political backlash). Summaries should honor this request accordingly by listing the From: address as anonymous or (Address withheld by request).
https://legacy.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/zen/zen-1.0_6.html#...
1. Flagging sources of information that are known to use clickbait tactics, stupid popups and generally low effort content. Paywalls can also be labeled as such.
2. Niceties like showing original title next to the updated one, or page title next to the submission title. I want to know what the original title was so I can appropriately shame the individual into trying to clickbait a boring topic onto the front page.
3. Downvotes should need to be justified and reviewed. A “I disagree with this comment because it offends me” is not a valid reason to bury good commentary. Happens too frequently. Remove showdead etc altogether.
4. Limited number of new seats for posting/commenting. Read-only for general public. Remove accounts that are regularly submitting garbage to the front page (happens more frequently than you think).
This community has degraded over the years and it’s easily seen in most high volume commentaries. A lot of it is emotionally charged nonsense with people being “convinced” of things with nothing to show where they obtained such strong convictions.
Dan shouldn’t moderate, he should outright ban, and in the process push the low effort armchairing to Reddit and other sites.
HN is first and foremost a vehicle for YC ventures to post their stuff anyway.
While I can understand people are optimistic that this site is somewhat more “intelligent” or “knowledgeable” about particular subjects compared to other sites, the range of that subject matter is so narrow that in majority of categories you’re more likely to find higher quality, insight and volume of posts elsewhere. Namely Reddit.
Well, there's a small chance you'll update the submission to point to a working link in the future, and that some of the comments refer to that...
Most users clicked the "I have read and agree to the Terms and Conditions" and only a handful actually contacted the developer. They did receive the money though.
Maybe people just didn't want to play their stupid game and didn't mention bananas even if they'd seen the message?
There was a rumor that one teacher didn’t read submitted essays. I decided to test this by applying the jargon translator from Dilbert’s Desktop Games (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert%27s_Desktop_Games) to my essay. The translator output was painful to read: for example, it replaces “mother” with “female parental unit”. I added a paragraph on the third page asking him to call me if he was still reading the essay. I never received a call but he later said that he had lost the essay so the results were inconclusive.
Massively reduces the number of messages you get from time wasters who just mash "can I have this?" or "is this still available?" to get in first, who will then ghost you because they've taken an extra half second to decide they don't want the item after all[2] so you spend time writing replies that achieve nothing.
Probably means some genuinely interested people get redirected to trash too, but if the item is worth having there will be enough responders to make this not matter. If you see no responses after a time, maybe then check your trash to see if there are any there worth responding to.
[1] those services attract much spam, always have a specific address for each that you can turn off once the junk starts flowing in
[2] as it isn't the right colour, or the right size, or you can't deliver, or will deliver but can't conveniently offer collection, or they completely misread the subject line, ...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot...
The test was supposed to be about your ability to read and follow instructions, few people in my class passed the test. As soon as the test started you could see people poking holes and writing things.
I'm not an automaton. You didn't tell me at the beginning that the point was to follow every single thing exactly to the letter. Of course I could play that game, but you spend my entire career as a student telling me to happily skip problems and go on the next and then you want to act as if it's a problem with me that I engaged in the test in good faith.
But why should question 10 be the only one you follow?
"Read all the questions" is the only direction you have. There is never a "skip 1-9", except in number 10, but why would you start with that one?
It's a decent idea, but needs better execution.
Therefore, if you follow the instruction, you end up reading question #10 following the process, within the time it takes to read all the questions.
Now, that instruction might seem controversial, but it really isn't. If you have the time, its a good idea to read content well, before dealing with it further.
I suppose you are saying that no one ever told you to actually take the quiz, but that is pretty stupid if you follow that in every other situation. It's a set up, designed to make people look stupid.
In my feed, the highest signal to noise ratio comes from people who aren't commenting on any and every trending topic. Instead, they're busy doing real work, away from Twitter, only occasionally checking in to share something. Likewise, that's how I try to structure my own engagement.
When people have 50 Tweets per day or more, it's unlikely that they're taking time to really think and engage. It's more about rapid fire comments designed to get the most engagement.
I mean... that's beautiful, because I created a second twitter account just so I can follow a select few people for the pretty much the same reason you gave without having to worry they're getting lost to the noise.
No comments section, but instead a "I'd like to get in touch and chat sometime" button which helps schedule a video chat.
No retweets, shares, engagement metrics.
Indieweb is a good idea but again, difficult set up for the average person.
Automattic made its fortune by developing and hosting Wordpress for people who are not tech savvy and wanted to have its place to write.
I agree, there's a market for something that plugs the gap. But if it's not as easy as social media, it won't get the adoption these days.
> if it's not as easy as social media, it won't get the adoption these days.
I think that is backwards. Starting a blog is as easy as starting a Facebook account. The problem is that a blog does not give you the "engagement" of a social network and therefore can not compete for your attention against the very fine-tuned engagement machines of Facebook et al.
At the end of the day, content production in social networks follow a Pareto distribution. A small percentage produces the majority of the content and the rest is just there to share or produce noise. If you remove the tools that produce noise, you remove any reason for the majority to join. If you remove the strings that pull the noisy majority, you don't have a "social network". This is why my feeling is that "a social network with no engagement" is an oxymoron.
It's not the ease of creating the site, it's the ease of directing people to view / subscribe / communicate through & return to it & that is a very difficult problem to solve if you do not simply approach as a standard social network.
I guess to me there's a niche for smaller scale networks, which would suit those with lesser engagement needs. Most people want to comment & subscribe, I'd say that you could cut almost all other social network features and it would work to a degree.
You can still comment and subscribe on a blog, can't you? RSS is dead is only a figure of speech.
You can still have a blogroll on your site, can't you? Remember FOAF? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOAF_(ontology)
My point is that we don't need to wish for a "Social network with less features". We just need to embrace technology that already exists and that has been ignored by big tech because they don't have much to gain by adopting it.
The technology exists, but it's making it super easy to sign up for completely tech illiterate users that's the problem.
I actually think tech-literacy on a wider scale is probably worse than it was 10 years ago because people stopped using the wide web and starting logging onto facebook and nothing else.
I think that techies gave up on it. Even techies want to chase metrics, taking whatever shortcuts they can to build an audience, "growth hacking" and that includes playing the game by the rules of Big Tech.
As an example: I am working a lot with the blockchain/web3 community the past years and every company/project uses medium for writing their articles, have a strong Twitter presence and rely on Reddit for forum announcements. Nowadays it's getting worse that a lot of projects are adopting Discord for group chat. If even the uber-techies and supposedly defenders of decentralized are giving up on fundamentals of the web, why would the non-techies?
It's great because I can just see what people I care about post, and you can arrange it so that the people who post infrequently but that you really care about will be in your face when they do post. I find it soothing, and I can't wait for a proper mobile release.
I quit Twitter recently due to the massive adverse impact it was having on my mental health. It essentially ended up personalizing every major bad thing happening in the world. I feel like I live on a significantly more peaceful planet since I stopped.
But I do miss the tech side, I used to follow a load of interesting people that I no longer see. I will add them on this!
Thank you for this observation.
I never "got" Twitter, it's a rapid fire barrage of random remarks and unless you spend a lot of recurring time on it you won't be able to follow what's going on. In my opinion anyway, my GF is really into it.
i'm on twitter because i think there are some pretty funny people on there. so i only follow people i think are funny, and i actively block any type of content at first sight that kind of annoy me. worked out pretty well for me so far.
Interesting. Do you have some specific heuristic for identifying those people?
The original Tweet thread was a math nerd who jokingly, and not incorrectly, illustrated how it was mathematically possible for 2+2 to sometimes be 5. The argument may have been weak, and some people may not have found it convincing, but it was a mathematical argument, meant as a joke for a small Twitter audience.
Through the Twitter telephone, many retweets and steps later, the original argument - considered, funny, valid, perhaps weak - somehow transformed into "2+2=4 is a mere social construct, and 5 is a valid answer" - which, yes, would be a disturbing trend if that were actually the argument. Thus the unduly passionate took up "2+2 is 4 not 5" as a political rallying cry. People I otherwise respect as rational began tweeting this.
It became complicated because there are always people who believe dumb things, like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct", and as always with the unduly passionate, extreme opinions are held up as examples of dangerously typical. The author of the original thread was bullied by a mob.
It's complicated even further by the existence of an actual replication crisis in academe, in part driven by post-modern ideological pressures; there is actual loss of academic freedom even for the tenured.
But the lesson at the end of the day, to my mind, is that articles about whatever goes on over at Twitter, such as this one, such as this my post here, are always going to involve mobs of people being shitty, because the nature of the medium. Maybe they are as inevitable as "mobs of people are gambling in Las Vegas"
So most of the people on Twitter are already behind them, but then they want to try and do jokes on a brand new human medium that lacks a lot of information from face-to-face communication.
And then they get upset that someone didn't get their joke.
I'm not sure how widespread this was. I may be friends with an abnormally high number of radical leftists who like abstract algebra.
This was all mildly irritating, but the worst thing was when some of them said 2 + 2 could be 5 in modular arithmetic.
The whole thing was pointless and stupid. It was perfect Twitter.
If you move away from modular arithmetic and the numbers 2 and 5 being in any way related to their standard meanings, you can of course redefine them to mean whatever you want (e.g. rotations of a cube or whatever) and then you can make 2+2=5 work. But I suspect no sane mathematician would do that, it would just be totally confusing.
It's possible there is some deeper structure out there in which you can reinterpret something like 2+2=5 to be actually useful, though But I doubt it.
So in a sense, it's true: You can construe a mathematical world where 2+2=5, but doing so reduces either the whole affair to a triviality (everything is equal to itself), or is just deliberately using confusing notation.
I think there's probably an interesting argument in here about how on the one hand languages and structures are man-made and arbitrary (nobody decreed that 2 should be the symbol denoting the concept of two-ness), and yet on the other hand, how once you fix meanings and rules, the mathematics is fixed and not up for debate, and also how just changing standard meanings without good reason would annoy even mathematicians.
So in terms of a productive discussion, saying 2+2=5 without context and then backtracking and saying "well but I'm talking about Z/Z (or R/Z, see uncle comment)" would be kind of annoying and it's not generally what mathematicians do.
I think this is one of the fascinating and difficult aspects of maths:
On the one hand, once you fix your axioms, there is no way in hell you can avoid the conclusions - they might be hard to find (sometimes even impossible to find), but if you find and verify them, they are unmistakably true. This can turn off some people that are more used to thinking about everything being just shades of gray and there always being multiple valid opinions. Maths is the subject where you can't just make up your mind, the evidence when you're wrong is deafening.
On the other hand, real maths can also turn off some of the more OCD-ish kind of people that think maths is all about the one single truth and everyone agreeing about everything, whereas maths is infinitely malleable and you can say things like "what if the parallel axiom is wrong" or "what if negative numbers have square roots" and even if it sounds silly, you can create proper maths out of it. If you've ever seen people with only high school maths knowledge arguing passionately online about the correct order of operations or whether the square root of -1 is i or -i (or, in another context, Grammar nazis), you know the kind of people I mean.
I think even really high profile debates suffer from mismatched-axioms misunderstandings, such as the abortion debate. For instance, I think a lot of people have very different definitions of what constitutes a person. You're probably not going to have a meaningful discussion about abortion if you disagree about that, you probably have to argue about the definition of personhood first.
I think your characterization of maths is spot-on and most people don't understand what "mathematical truth" means. But my impression is that the 2+2=5 guy understands all of this (I think he was a maths PhD student too) and his point was completely valid, including its application outside of mathematics. The reactionaries who caricaturized his argument, however, don't understand any of this and believe he was making a different point entirely, namely that all truth is relative and that every person's point of view is valid. Of course, this misunderstanding is on them.
So yes, in many cases, laying out the assumptions carefully is a good idea, I agree. I just didn't think 2+2=5 was the best example.
If so, then the argument he makes is totally braindead. He doesn't even consider special algebraic structures or anything. He's just coming up with the most obvious observation ever: if your mathematical model doesn't match the reality or asks the wrong questions, then the results are worthless. This is probably obvious to any high school student but that's certainly no reason to run around and say that 2+2=5. In any case, there is zero mathematical insight there, he doesn't even make a mathematical argument for it, and the "I am a former mathematician" part only serves to distract from that fact.
I could go onto an entire different rant about his infinity argument and how mathematics seemingly haven't figured out how to work with infinity "naturally" (I don't know what he means by naturally, but they certainly have figured out how to work with it precisely), but let's leave it at that.
It amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms, aided by the fact that the largest userbase on twitter seems to be political extremists of both left & right. It's created an environment where making a comment like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct" is now somehow acceptable to the left.
The platform literally exists to make things look like they're a bigger deal worldwide than they really are. It's dangerous.
I quit twitter a while back - when I was on the platform, all my news consumption revolved around it. I was deeply concerned about the state of the UK and the US because of the constant stream of political propaganda from both sides.
Since I quit my brain feels like it's been completely freed of political dogma and I'm in a significantly better mood generally. I've not missed the trending page, that's for certain.
The biggest issue is the loss of academic freedom you alluded too, mainly & ironically being pushed heavily by the 'Twitter Left'. Twitter is like a heavily left leaning version of /pol/ these days.
I'd like to be clear that I would consider myself on 'the left', to be a progressive person & I am absolutely aware that the extremist cesspit that is twitter does not represent the genuine left, much as it doesn't represent genuine moderates or genuine conservatives.
It's the most extreme weaponized propaganda & rent-a-mob tool thats ever existed in human history.
It is like unleashing a neural net that amplifies whatever it sees in a image but fed with white noise IMO. And then it just keeps on spiraling in on itself.
The vast majority of the world never sees or hears any of it.
It causes delusions of grandeur across the userbase.
I've seen commenters here claim that the majority of all human communication and interaction takes place on and is controlled by a few social media silos.
The fact twitter has so much political sway in the real world is appalling considering how small the user-bases are relative to populations.
We find ourselves in a position where the media can use twitter to amplify opinion and provide a false sense of majority to implement political pressure.(See cancel culture)
Unfortunately, "Twitter users react to..." is an entire genre of news article these days, even on otherwise-reasonable sources like the BBC.
Doubtful, given how popular it is among people and ogranisations that carefully measure the RoI of their marketing & outreach operations, and constantly adjust balance of their efforts among 2, 3, 4 different communication channels (YT, Insta, mail, in-person events, topical forums, old style media, etc.).
A more fitting hypothesis would be, "Twitter opened up a couple new paradigms of influencing people". The paradigms are complex, opaque, and subtly inter-related; quite hard to grasp for people that aren't fully "in the loop". That's why there appearance of chaos and, at the same time, we see highly organized action emerges from this chaos.
I guess my main point with that quote is that it amplifies things (sometimes organically viral, sometimes engineered) and then places them all on the same level. So the userbase starts to believe that something that trended on twitter is just as globally important/well known as the genuine world news story that trended beside it, because it's all in one pot.
That's dangerous.
> Doubtful, given how popular it is among people and ogranisations that carefully measure the RoI of their marketing & outreach operations, and constantly adjust balance of their efforts among 2, 3, 4 different communication channels (YT, Insta, mail, in-person events, topical forums, old style media, etc.).
I'm not sure why you think that the two are incompatible, or opposed.
I don't mean to suggest that marketing is entirely meaningless, but surely the ROI of any particular marketing effort is largely independent of its meaningfulness?
Part of that comes from the kind of frustration Hillel Wayne voices here:
> People will offhand use famous quotes to support their arguments, when the context the quote was given in has nothing to do with it.
I spent a lot of hours in high school debate listening to people misattribute quotes or misconstrue them to mean the opposite. This was frustrating at the time but in retrospect this was a valuable lesson -- if EVERYONE is gonna say that Voltaire said that thing about disagreeing with what you say, what else is everyone wrong about?
I'm also pretty sure I had this idea reinforced by an Asimov book where he argues that intellectual societies decay as they begin to rely on secondary-source research (going to the library and reading what people have written about others' experiences, instead of going out there yourself and looking at stuff). But I can't find the source now, ha ha.
For example, with the Knuth quote, both interpretations can be valuable? There are people who need to be told "don't optimise yet", and there are people who need to be told "there are critical times and places to optimise, and you probably shouldn't just breeze past a 12% execution time improvement".
Neither of these lessons are "wrong". The main wrong thing is probably attributing the intent of the first to Knuth, which uses his status as an expert to (falsely) back it.
I think Scott Alexander from SSC wrote something about opposite pieces of advice (eg. telling college nerds to "get out more" and telling college partygoers to "buckle down and study more", because neither of those can be universal pieces of advice), but I don't feel like searching for it rn. It's a good read though.
Yes, it's true that different people might need to hear different things at different times. If you're trying to tell someone not to micro-optimize ahead of time before profiling, then quoting Knuth is appropriate. If you're trying to tell someone not to optimize at all (let's say you have a valid reason for not optimizing at all), then its disingenuous (or at best ignorant) to use the Knuth quote.
This helps in a few ways:
(1) Improves communication. When I use a quotation, some readers or listeners will know the whole context (or think they do). If I use it in a dissonant way and explicitly acknowledge the contradiction, that part of the audience will be more likely to trust that I have understood the person I am quoting. I won't be dismissed as ill-informed or as deliberately misinterpreting my sources.
For example I might say "yes, this part of the code is hard to read. Here is the deal. Knuth said that premature optimization was the root of all evil, and that you should understand what your code's slow parts are before you try to optimize it. But in this specific case I cannot easily modify my code after I deploy it and cannot easily test it on all kinds of real-world data I am expecting it to encounter pre-production, so we are defensively making this function very complex but also very performant on a diverse variety of inputs. That is why this function is so complicated up front."
(2) Improves understanding. For audience members who don't know the original context of the quotation, explaining it will help them learn something new. I thought the idea was interesting enough to quote, so probably it's worth at least a footnote about what the idea originally meant? Often if you beyond the one sentence there is a rich tapestry of prior context that is worth understanding. Humans spread our thoughts via the fragile web of written language and reiterating what has been said before can help reinforce those links and make our knowledge more durable.
For example I might say "You may have heard that Knuth said that premature optimization was the root of all evil. But it's worth reading the full three paragraphs from his paper, 'Structured Programming With Go To Statements' (1974), because he develops an entire nuanced argument that today is settled wisdom in software engineering practice. He argues that optimizations can be a great idea on the core inner loop of your program, even if they significantly hurt readability and maintainability. This still holds true with complex networked software -- you should always know what your system's slow inner loops are and you should be willing to go to unusual lengths to speed up the slowest parts. Here are some ways that distributed tracing can help with that…"
(3) Knowing what the original author was getting at seems to help me form my thoughts better.
In particular, reading the whole paper before I quote it helps me avoid re-discovering an idea that Knuth already had, and it helps me think more clearly about "given what he knew then and what I know now, what are the next logical steps? What can we learn?"
Overall the rule of thumb I use of reading/watching an entire work before quoting from it is … not for everyone. It can be exhausting. But it helps me learn and (I can't prove this) it feels like it improves the quality of discussion.
"First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation."
Lord Dorwin raised his eyebrows and took a pinch of snuff hurriedly. ‘Why, whatevah foah, my deah fellow?’
‘To get the information first hand, of course.’
‘But wheah’s the necessity? It seems an uncommonly wound-about and hopelessly wigmawolish method of getting anyweahs. Look heah, now, I’ve got the wuhks of all the old mastahs – the gweat ahchaeologists of the past. I wigh them against each othah – balance the disagweements – analyse the conflicting statements – decide which is pwobably cowwect – and come to a conclusion. That is the scientific method. At least’ – patronizingly – ‘as I see it. How insuffewably cwude it would be to go to Ahctuwus, oah to Sol, foah instance, and blundah about, when the old mastahs have covahed the gwounds so much moah effectively than we could possibly hope to do.’ Hardin murmured politely,
‘I see.’ Scientific method, hell! No wonder the Galaxy was going to pot.
[and then, much later, Hardin says:]
‘It amounts to a diseased attitude – a conditional reflex that shunts aside the independence of your minds whenever it is a question of opposing authority. There seems no doubt ever in your minds that the Emperor is more powerful than you are, or Hari Seldon wiser. And that’s wrong, don’t you see?’
For some reason, no one cared to answer him.
Hardin continued: ‘It isn’t just you. It’s the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin’s idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject – written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weigh the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don’t you see that there’s something wrong with that?’
I have to assume that Asimov was thinking about the course of history from the classical period through to the Enlightenment here, as it is conventionally told. Back in the day, the Greeks etc actually looked at things, and thought about them, and wrote down what they came up with. Some of it was good (mathematics), some bad (biology). But then at some point that stopped, and people relied entirely on the books the Greeks had written. Aristotle was the ultimate authority on natural science for centuries. Until the Enlightenment came along, and people started doing experiments and observations and exploration again.
I'm sure modern historians will fall over themselves to tell you this isn't true (it leaves out the Arabs, for a start, but it probably isn't even entirely true of Europe), but that's the story of history that Asimov would have known.
I’d make all these little toy apps where my family had to type in the right word to continue. Eg “Who is the leader of the autobots?” => “Well done. Transform and roll out!!”
It strikes me we could encourage better discourse with one word locked comments that the writer of the post draws from the article.
“New research and on the impact of race on tenure”
Per the article, what % of tenured professors identify as people of color in 2019?
What do you think of something like this?
Micro quiz questions, one up on ‘are you human’ to ‘prove you read one key thing’
example : captcha/captcha-like services.
I've written well-thought out responses and comments on various forums and communities , and finally when asked to identify all the buses or traffic lights I quit the process.
Why? Is it because the comment isn't worth while? Is it because some moral repositioning enticed me to not to go through with the comment?
No.
Clicking every bus increases friction, I may not be all that motivated to begin with -- this friction pushes me over the edge and I close the tab. The captcha/whatever process may have succeeded in the job of fighting spam, but it also lost my comment to the ether.
I contend that gatekeeper systems like pop-quizzing the reader, and to an extent captcha-likes, are not necessarily a good gauge for content quality but rather of poster motivation.
Captcha doesn't stop spammers, it sets the bar higher -- requiring spammers to harbor a larger motivation in order to create the systems needed to circumvent captcha-likes.
A pop quiz would not hinder someone filled with vehement hate from posting a comment -- they'd skim the text, cherry pick the answer, and proceed to post the hateful or incorrect comment.
A community filled with people who post due to a large motivation seems like a bad thing.
Adding a gateway, like your example with the CAPTCHA, would only reduce that chance of my posting further.
But as you indicated, it is a small barrier to a motivated, angry, agenda/conspiracy-fueled commenter.
At the limit, this could lead to knowledge getting concentrated to small groups of people? :shrug:
This sentence sent a shiver down my spine for some reason.
Two ideas:
1. ‘Verified’ comments sort to the top.
2. Unverified comments go 50% grey.
Eg “Wait whys my comment gray? Oh actually I’ll answer that verification question to push it up”
a.paper ~ a.comments {
display: none;
}
a.paper:visited ~ a.comments {
display: inline;
}https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Privacy_and...
I guess it can't be observed from a script? That would be a neat way to get potentially sensitive info.
The closest you’ll be able to get is a JavaScript click handler on .paper revealing .comments. If you do such a thing, you should probably only hide the comments with JavaScript in the first place, so that users with JavaScript disabled can still see them.
I have gotten good results from including these in my expository writing. Having the reader stop and go through actively using the material at even a basic level seems to really help them integrate and retain it. They're multiple choice questions embedded throughout the text.
There's no reason you can't force everyone to correctly answer them before being able to comment. That being said, writing good incremental questions like this is actually quite a bit of work.
And, of course, the more honest and balanced discourse we can have the better. This is one of the reasons I appreciate HN over other social media.
After all, if you're a politician, you want to get re-elected - so appeasing voters is much more important than appeasing people who can't vote. And appeasing demographics where 90% of people can vote is more important than appeasing demographics where 50% of people can vote.
So any type of testing to be allowed to vote - high school graduation, reading, IQ, current affairs - would be quite detrimental to the people who don't get to vote.
But a problem that you described could be addressed by counting invalid votes as 0.5 instead of 0. That would be fair — you didn't care to inform your decision, so it doesn't count as much as one's who did.
Unfortunately that doesn't solve the problem - because spending money in the town with lots of people with a full vote will produce more votes than spending the same amount of money in the town with lots of people with half a vote.
> Just ask them how much percent a candidate is going to increase/decrease <xyz> in their program
Everyone knows whether they feel happier, healthier, more successful, and whether they've got more money in their pocket today than they had 4 years ago.
Why is a candidate's policy on tariff rates on steel imports from Canada more important than that?
>Why is a candidate's policy on tariff rates on steel imports from Canada more important than that?
Not more important. Important thing is voters would better realize what a program actually is and in future elections vote a little more for programs than for candidates to be sure that their votes count as 1. It is $subj idea — "please read on the paper before you comment". By looking for tariff rates you have to read the paper at least until these numbers.
Ed: as a politician you also cannot be sure if that town would or would not read their plan this time. You can agitate them to do that and convert 0.5 to 1 for you (and not for others). Isn't it a positive feedback all things considered?
This is a real problem. I'm guilty of not bothering to read the paper many times. I instantly look for the easily digestible reviews or comments that other people made. I'm part of the problem. Damn.
The press release DOES have a very “machine learning ‘discovers’ trivial thing people already knew” vibe. The actual paper doesn’t - it’s not trying to “rediscover” anything, it’s just building on existing work, there’s none of the arrogance in the press release that’s triggering everyone on Twitter. The press release taints the actual research, which is a sadly common pattern, and I think a fair bit of that lies with the writers of press releases, not just the readers.
[1]: They probably have but I can't say.
I don't think it's about being human, I think it's because HN is a BBS where people can get points by chatting, which also happens to link to articles which you can read if you feel like it. Of course this is how it ends up.
On this current account, I don't really care about overall karma, just per-post karma. I try to post simple but defensible points when I get early top-level timing, and I put effort into upvoting people that I agree with rather than adding on yeah-me-too posts for more karma. But I'm punished for not playing by the rules of the game; I can't downvote or vouch or any other useful features, so (-1, flagged) is a common fate.
In the design circles that I frequent, we often consider Conway's Law for social communities. The API of HN, including the rules, generates the shape of the conversations. The shittiness of discourse here is inherently due to the low-quality rules just as much as the lack of meta-moderation.
Once upon a time, there were two main characters on Twitter in a single day: two escaped Llamas and a dress.
And it was actually not a bad thing.
Maybe we could try repeating that occasionally instead of accepting that it's a lousy world full of lousy people and that's all it will ever be.
In private interactions, either chatting or RL, I quote "facts" without references, discuss papers I never read, and in general do things just for the act of communication, knowing I'm often wrong, and knowing the other side knows to take me with a grain of salt.
However, in public discussions you can't afford this liberty. Stating a wrong fact in a public discussion may cause a diffusion of false information which is almost impossible to undo.
I think most people are aware of this difference, and even in the academy the accuracy required in private conversation is not as harsh as the accuracy required in a public forum.
The problem is that for many people, Internet discussions feel like a private conversation. Hence I see even people I highly appreciate throwing the accuracy standard out of the window, and making public Internet comments as if it was a pub conversation over a drink with some friends.
I had to have a conversation with my wife over this yesterday. She ran into the office in tears because opposing protestors were standing off with guns as if it was the American revolution.
The reality of the situation is a couple people had paintball guns but that’s not what she saw.
What she had seen was a tweet about a tweet referencing another tweet that in turn referenced a video.
While I know this example is extreme, it really opened my eyes to just how far we have come.
When I worked at a newspaper a lot of work went into headlines and pictures, in relation to the rest of the copy. We knew what we were doing, and we also knew what are readers weren't doing.
Any abstraction or simplification runs into the risk of having its underlying meaning changed. It is our duty as humans to be willing to chase the core of truths or to change our minds given new evidence pointing to truths.
It was said well in Hamilton - "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers
Also, i hate that it's called Chinese Whispers... I digress.
Small detail: We call it “téléphone arabe” in French, which means Arabic phone.
For the record, I did read the article, but my life is not significantly richer (or poorer) for having done so.
A classic technique for reading scientific papers, is to read the abstract, then the conclusion. If they motivate us to read the rest, then we do so.
What I often do here, is first check the comments, and see if I want to go and read the OP. If I do that, I’ll generally read it all; unless it’s really painful.
As a prolix author[0] (and commenter[1]), I’m fairly familiar with low reader engagement, and I’ve learned to do good abstracts/intro sentences that hook the reader.
I’ve also learned not to lose too much sleep over whether or not people read my stuff (spoiler: they don’t).
I write for my own satisfaction. It would be nice if others enjoyed it, but I won’t live or die by the opinions of others.
Don’t get me wrong; I do care what others think of me, but it isn’t a principal driver of my life.
I have great respect for good tech writers. The world needs more of them.
A lot of what I write is basic information. It needs to be complete, clear and concise; not great literature. A simple ToC is useful in these cases, and good information architecture is important.
If I really want others to read my stuff, it’s incumbent upon me to write short, brutally-edited, articles, with clear, succinct, paragraphs, “hooky” abstracts, and conclusions that encourage people to go back, and read what they missed.
Basically, my experience is that it’s my job to write stuff in a way that encourages reader engagement, and to lead them to the important components of the document.
I'd say that should be a basic LifeHacker rule; regardless of whether or not it's scientific.
Completely agree.
My Twitter is fine because I only follow people who don't do this.
If anyone knows anything else similar then I would like to know about it
Then people will start linking you papers that are only tangentially related to the question at hand and get offended when you actually go and read the paper and point out that the paper has (almost) nothing to do with the actual question at hand.
Once you dig into it, you find it is far from the last word in validation in a modern world and very often an argumentum ad verecundiam
As explained, in depth, in "Why I don't publish in Peer-Reviewed Journals".
https://risk-monger.com/2020/07/31/why-i-dont-publish-in-pee...
Please read the article before commenting....
The article itself is a bit of a straw man: one example of a bad peer review dismisses the whole process.
Other articles are similar. For example one talks about how "green parties want 100% safety", which simply isn’t true.
Some are click bait like "if there is no Corona vaccine, how about we ask anti-vaxxers how to deal with this?" And gives some generic advice that every doctor also says while neglecting that the core argument of anti-vaxxers often goes like "vaccine is bad for you and you actually should contract a virus because it makes you stronger in a natural way".
Stopped reading after having found too many of these fake arguments in several posts.
First read the article, then read the comments, and spot who didn't read the article. You may have to scroll down / go to the more section, as the people who are way off base didn't get upvoted as much as the ones who actually read it.
If there was no misunderstanding, would he have even bothered to read or even know about the paper at all? The bad use of the paper was probably his primary driver of engagement. Otherwise at best you would see the source or original tweet, think "Oh that's nice" unless you have a serious interest in linguistics, and move on.
The darkly cynical thing is that as the flood of information grows, the value of that information lessens as opposed to its ability to create a happening and drive engagement. You can say the sky is blue all you want, and it's true, but people will mill about the person who says the sky is green because they can interact with it, if just to disprove or mock the person and use it as a "gathering place" like the author himself did.
I mean, this is how flat earthers exist. The idea is rubbish but it creates a space that people inhabit.
First question are we commenting on the media article or the research paper?
It'd be interesting to have a site were to comment or vote you have to mark if you read the article and separately if you read the paper.
I don't think users are entirely to blame; this is what the app incentivizes. So for Twitter I don't think there's much hope in asking people to read articles. It's like wondering why people aren't reading your 8 paragraph Instagram caption- that's not why people use the app, and the app does not encourage using it in that way.
However I do empathize with authors who dedicate years of their life on academic work, only to have someone post it to Twitter with a 1 sentence jab and that be the most common level of familiarity with the work their "readers" have.
This a 100%. Applies the same for code.
Asking people to invest their time to actually read extensive information about what your try to say, with no perceived additional benefits to them is just hubris.
Pick your audience or tailor your message to your audience. Don't blame the receiver.
Fundamentally, there aren't too many people who can meaningfully comment on most papers. The alternative to commenting before reading the paper is almost certainly reading the paper and then not commenting because you don't really have much to add. So let's assume some people do start reading the articles? Well, they're just going to say less. There's a thousand ways to have an easy and wrong take on a paper. If you want good reasoned discussion about papers you're better off looking elsewhere - for example, The Weeds podcast from Vox, where they actually take a white paper, read it, think about it and discuss its implications. You can disagree with them and talk about how effective they are at engaging with the topic (or as is often the case you can get irrationally angry because you don't like their politics), but fundamentally it's a much better venue for having that sort of nuanced and informed discussion than 140 characters at a time mixed in with the sewer that is twitter.
https://copinthehood.com/2020/07/26/history-isnt-bunk-part-1...
And sometimes (usually?), people will truly not understand what a paper is about, and that makes it even harder to figure out which comment is which.
I mean, it obviously won't work in case people share it on twitter, but could reduce people from talking bullshit in the comments section.
"They also do a literature review of existing work in word meanings, making in very clear they were building on the existing work in anthropology and linguistics. "
:)
I don't see the title being "Read the abstract before you comment."
edit: Didn't see the Scihub link admittedly, but come on. "Yeah just do the illegal thing."
Out of interest, how many lines even of the article did you read before you decided to post this? Because it can't be many.
It says something about the sad state of affairs that the universally agreed answer here seems to be "yeah just pirate it, nobody cares, everyone does it."
The lowest value contributions on HN are inevitably those that use a headline to air personal grievances vaguely related to the subject of the post (“Apple releases new cure for diabetes”, top comment: “Let me tell you why I hate the touchbar.”) the second lowest are those that clearly read the headline and ran with it, without reading the content that utterly contradicts what they imagine the article would contain.
Not having read the article / not discussing anything in the darn article should absolutely be grounds for criticism.
Drives me mad. Any Hacker News discussion has an extremely strong push towards the same couple dozen topics that anyone can relate to, and commenters who drag the conversation in that direction for no good reason are doing the thread a disservice.
1) Please read the article before you comment.
2) If you haven't read the article, please refrain from commenting.
It wouldn't accomplish much, but it will at least prioritize engagement over politeness, as the current rule does. And yes, both of those are the same thing but I feel it's worth mentioning twice.
Nothing in the rules discourages downvoting people who didn't read.
Writing an article about bad habits in cyberspace where the title of your piece vaguely calls to mind some guideline in some forum and appears to contradict it is not somehow a violation of that guideline.
As someone with eyesight issues and a demographic outlier for HN who, thus, sees life different from most people here, it's sort of common for people to think I didn't read something when I did, I just missed a detail or I did, I just have a different education and life experience and see something different in it.
And that's one of the reasons you shouldn't say that to someone directly. You are assuming something ugly, basically.
But talking about how reading the article before expressing your opinion is a best practice is unrelated to that detail of etiquette.
And what about this article, which is about the tweets dunking on the tweet about the press release?