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Comment by blazespin | Hacker News Reader

"We are following it step for step".

Really? Top voted comment on Hacker News? Yikes. Things have really gone downhill around here. Stick to tech, folks.

"During the early 1920s, for example, prices dropped a total of 20%. And during the worst years of the Great Depression, from 1930 to 1933, prices fell a total of 25%"

I mean, the title of the article was even : "Food Prices Soar Globally"

If you want to be a doomer, than at least compare it to the stagflation of the 70s, but honestly, that's probably not accurate either.

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That was in regards to following the diary step for step - Farmers plowing food back into the fields, enactment of minimum wage laws, booming house prices followed by a massive crash with nobody attending auctions, booming stock market with massive unemployment.

The snark in this comment is completely unnecessary. It is better for everyone if you make your point in a more constructive manner.

Rant incoming.

I, for one, appreciate it. This thing on HN where you have to beat around the bush and phrase your sentences objectively and in a general way, when everybody knows that you are just talking about a specific instance, saying things like "if you [x] then someone may respond [y]" when it is clear that someone literally said [x] so you can just say [y] in reply.. All that stuff is incredibly tiring to read IMHO. If you just want to call out someone's bullshit you should be able to do so in a straightforward manner and in a tone that corresponds with "calling out someone's bullshit".

If we could just be a little bit more honest here I think it would be an improvement.

While I somewhat agree with the sentiment of your comment, one of the reasons I believe Hacker News is so civilized is because the arguments are always very rationalized. That is, it is easy to point out faulting logic.

Following up with your example: If someone simply states [y] then the context of where [y] came from is lost and the discussion turns into a person saying [x] and a person saying [y], which is a step too close to becoming Twitter.

While I agree it can sometimes be a bit tiresome to read and write, I say this significantly improves the overall quality of the conversations.

It isn't normally clear that someone just said [x]. HN is united only in interests; the usual crowd has a pretty broad range of cultural backgrounds and there enormous room to misinterpret people without body language. Twitter has sentences, HN has paragraphs. It is an improvement, but it isn't really a suitable format for discussion.

And in that vein, the most reasonable interpretation of the thread ancestor is "look, we've been through this sort of thing a couple of times in the last 7,000 odd years of recorded history - why does this all seem to be surprising to the people in charge and catching them unprepared?".

We know we've been here before, and it isn't that crazy to say the current state of the world looks like the prelude to WWI or WWII. Reading books like "The great depression: A diary" is a pretty decent idea. It would have been much more helpful if old mate had argued why there were similarities. Maybe with coaxing they would have. "Yikes. Things have really gone downhill around here. Stick to tech, folks." does not encourage anything half as productive as looking to the past for answers. There are bigger problems afoot in 2021 than tech.

I understand your position, it is definitely more natural to answer less analytically and more emotionally.

But this is commonplace elsewhere on the Internet and you can see the results. Too often the argument deteriorates into ad-hominem mud flinging.

HN is pretty rare in its analytic culture. I appreciate it and enjoy the difference from Twitter, Reddit et al. enormously.

It is important to realize that we cannot really read the minds on the other side of the screen and a lot of our assumptions what somebody really wanted to say are just prejudice.

I didn’t really read it as snark. It has historically been pretty shocking here to find a top comment so confidently wrong and just seemingly totally made up (farmers going bankrupt just like the Great Depression.. because food prices are going up?), and it’s fair to directly call it out. It wasn’t done in any particularly mean way as best I can tell.

> It has historically been pretty shocking here to find a top comment so confidently wrong

You should not be shocked by that, because every comment starts out as the top comment, votes only affect how quickly it drops. If you come back a few days later and the top comment is still confidently wrong, maybe you can be shocked then.

I promise to moderate my shock as a function of time spent at the top.

When posters assume competence within a domain that they do not have and make predictions with absolute confidence that they have no evidence for, it damages the greatest quality of this board, which is open intellectual discussion. When bullshit get called out in a snarky tone its in the defence of that quality.

Okay but this was the start of some pretty dark times, so I think it's necessary to be historically accurate here which is not the case. The great depression followed the first more or less industrialized war, also the geo-political situation was a completely different one.

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