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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

If you died of the unregulated vaccine then the market would correct the situation by incentivizing grieving families to choose a more reliable vaccine from a competitor.

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I really wonder if I'm getting downvoted by free-market enthusiasts, the poor attempt at humor, or because it wasn't completely clear it was meant in sarcasm. Or maybe all three? I don't really care about internet points, but I'm always curious about such things.

I wasn’t sure it was sarcasm to be honest! I’ve seen more insane comments on HN posted with 100% seriousness and conviction.

I tried to keep it right on the edge... I find that provokes more critical thought than letting people "off the hook" with a more obvious comment they can automatically agree/disagree with. It's easy to dismiss examples as "absurd" when a concept is taken to its logical conclusion. It's the ones that walk right up to the edge, to the gray area boundaries of someone's conceptual framework, that make them consider what those boundaries are or should be.

Your comment is the same superficial “hey I’m just asking questions!” deflection that a lot of lazy intellectualism resorts to. “Maybe eugenics is a good idea because we can create a biologically superior human, we should at least discuss it!”

Considering it's a form of economics that a sizeable portion of HN think is best, it is not at all equivalent to randomly bringing up a topic that has long been held by most of society to be a bad idea and saying "just asking the question!".

It is broaching the topic in a way that doesn't automatically get upvoted by people who agree with it, or automatically downvoted by those who disagree.

I also wasn't asking a question. I was giving an actual example of the consequences of the economic system many HN'ers believe in.

No, his post require thought, which is not immediately obvious. Thus it gets ignored or dv.

It's just a reaction to the free market magical chimp thinking out there.

as another aside, this seems to be a problem with modern discourse in general. In multiple arenas I see pendulums swinging so far to one side or another that what might have been seen as satire or parody not long ago now has to be considered as someone's serious commentary on a topic.

Pendulums can't keep swinging further & further without destabilizing the entire fulcrum & structure. To stretch the metaphor further, I hope as they're on the down stroke this time around we can put a little bit of equal & opposite force against their inertia.

People post comments like yours and mean it, so sarcasm like that does not work in many places on the internet.

So yeah I'd guess that the reason is mainly 1 and 3.

Do people post comments worded that way and mean it?

"incentivizing grieving families"

It's usually dehumanized into something like "the market will adjust its behavior to reward manufacturers of higher quality products"

I did not try to say that it's impossible to identify the sarcastic nature of the comment, of course :)

You could add a /sarcasm to it for clarity, instead of posting a follow up comment

I think /sarcasm takes something away from it. If I put that there, people don't have to actually think about the comment and what I meant, or their own reaction to it. Using /s tells them automatically, and allows a reflexive response for/against the comment that short-circuits actually thinking about it. I'll risk the downvotes, they don't bother me.

But I am curious about why people downvote, hence my follow up. Clearly some people will downvote a thing they disagree with, or is flame bait. But will they downvote a thing they might agree with, but it also worded as flame bait? That sort of thing. I really am curious about the various behavioral patterns involved in awarding internet points.

/sarcasm is needed on the internet. Not everyone is a native English speaker, and even those who are have very different ideas around humor and written verbal queues.

Good points! I'll keep that in mind in what I hope is already a relatively cautious approach to that sort of comment. On the other hand, ditching all/most idiomatic English and subtleties is probably not the right approach either, or avoiding all cultural references because others might not understand-- I don't think you're suggesting that, it's just my observation that this issue exists on a spectrum and not a binary.

Edit: You're in AI-- what's the landscape look like for improving automated translation to detect sarcasm? As a problem domain, it seems like it would be a subset/cross-section of sentiment analysis & word-sense-disambiguation.

These days the biggest issue is getting a decent labelled dataset.

Once you have that you just fine-tune a BERT-dervived transformer neural network.

See https://paperswithcode.com/task/sarcasm-detection/codeless for some examples and datasets.

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