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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those cases where it's helpful, in fact indispensable, to remember that there is exactly one thing we're optimizing for on HN, namely intellectual curiosity: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... The fact that we have a clear guiding principle is my favorite thing about moderating HN because how the hell would one decide these things otherwise.

It seems clear that the community has genuine intellectual curiosity in discussing this topic. It's also a flamewar topic so we need to take the usual care not to end up in a flamewar; that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. This thread doesn't seem to be doing too badly. The OP seems like a substantive enough article to at least provide a basis for a good discussion.

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Not sure if this is too far down in your inbox, but I will write nonetheless...

> This is one of those cases where it's helpful, in fact indispensable, to remember that there is exactly one thing we're optimizing for on HN, namely intellectual curiosity...

Dang, respectfully, is it not true that "we are optimizing for" is a function of not only moderation, but the inherent (lack of) capabilities of rather feature sparse threaded internet discussions with upvotes/downvotes/flagging?

There's no doubt, "it is what it is", but perspectives upon reality that are limited to only how reality currently is overlooks how reality could be, such as if moderation here was not so good (a portion you seem to see clearly, as ample evidence exists elsewhere) or if the features of a forum were strategically expanded (a portion you may not see so clearly, since afaik there's not really anything much more sophisticated out there).

As you say in another comments:

> To repeat, lest anyone misunderstand: my remarks are limited to HN, which is the space I've observed enough to speak about. I'm not saying HN is an exception, and I'm not saying it isn't an exception; I don't know.

> Edit: two more points. First, I think there's a perspective bias here. We all assume that we're the smart one capable of making judgments about what the dumber ones might think, but literally everyone sees themselves that way. That shows not only that we can't all be right about that, but—more interestingly—that this entire line of thinking is invalid. It's a hard-wired unreliable narrator.

As you clearly know, human judgment (even that of intelligent people) is highly unreliable, and this unreliability is typically invisible to the individual. I believe that features could be added to forum software that could improve upon this situation, over and above the manual moderator moderation and downvote mechanisms that are currently our only defences.

> Second and last, if HN readers aren't smart enough to make up their own minds, then this place is fucked, so we might as well make a Pascal's wager.

Or, we could transform the fabric of reality, which is to some arguably significant degree composed of the forum software that facilitates communication between nodes (human minds) within this system.

Of course, I am not insisting that you do this, I am only offering it as an idea for your consideration.

I'm sorry but I don't understand.

At one point in the past there were no internet discussion forums, and then someone invented one and the world was changed.

At one point in the past there were no internet discussion forums with voting, and then someone invented one and the world was changed.

At one point in the past there were no internet discussion forums with threaded conversations, and then someone invented one and the world was changed.

Has mankind reached the pinnacle of what can be achieved with respect to the optimization of intellectual discussion on internet forums, or might there be a few different things that have not yet been tried, or even thought of (if large quantities of intelligent people set their minds to the task)?

EDIT: An additional wrinkle of complexity: what if someone builds one, and it takes off and becomes a powerful juggernaut in the domain of thought-shaping-at-scale, but the founders are evil, or can be converted, or displaced? We arguably see some examples of this already.

Ah ok. I feel pretty sure that there are other improvements to be made! But most likely any significant ones would come from somebody starting a new forum with a different set of initial conditions.

If those who currently run forums consciously choose to not consider expanding functionality to truly maximize the optimization of their goal (in this case, intellectual curiosity), this seems true by definition.

The problem with your argument is that what you call "expanding functionality" can easily have negative effects. If you have a specific idea that you're confident would help HN to optimize better for intellectual curiosity, I'd like to hear it.

I have many ideas, ranging from simple to extremely complex (some of which would require an entirely new platform).

A few examples (if ever implementing such things, I would do it in an "experimental mode" that can be enabled for specific threads):

- offer more options than simply upvoting & downvoting, perhaps something like a list of tags (epistemically unsound, speculative, smart, insightful, outside-the-box thinking, etc)

- When downvoting a user, offer/force the downvoter to provide a reason from a list (which could be voted on by others who agree/disagree), perhaps with the additional ability to provide specific reasoning. Some benefits of this might be for the downvoted user to actually have some insight into why they are being downvoted, it may make the downvoter put a little more effort into considering why they are downvoting, and it would provide additional metadata on conversations which could be used for a variety of things.

- Some sort "cultural mode" for threads of certain kinds, which might include things like "epistemic strictness". So for example, for culture war (politics) threads, it might be interesting to set Epistemic Strictness = High, meaning certain common behaviors would be forbidden, such as asserting imaginary beliefs as facts (mind reading, future reading, etc). Or, the same idea could be run under two threads, with opposite ends of the spectrum of a specific dimension...so if we were discussing the viability of nuclear power, one might have one thread for "extreme optimism" (the goal being to collect as large as possible set of why it is plausibly a good idea), and its counterpart could be "extreme pessimism" (why it is plausibly not a good idea).

Of course, some of these are better/easier than others, all of them are debateable from a cost/benefit/risk perspective, opinions would vary (a HN meta-thread seems like a fine approach for that...or as a general idea), etc.

My basic thinking is this: HN is an influential site, populated by intelligent and influential people, and the world has a lot of complex problems going on simultaneously (some people even think some of these problems are in the existential threat to humanity category). Considering this, is it possible that the HN Hivemind (a massive cluster of knowledge and skilled biological compute) produce some valuable new for humanity (new ideas, new ways of thinking, etc) if this cluster was orchestrated in a more optimal manner?

And of course: this is not your job. It is no one's job. And if hard jobs with no plausible economic return are not assigned to someone, they often do not get done, and humanity eventually suffers the consequences (with or without realizing why).

We've considered things like that over the years, but I think these and similar ideas suffer from a common flaw: people who disagree about X would disagree about reasons for upvoting/downvoting X or the level of "epistemic strictness" re X. So you'd just get the same arguments repeated at a meta level, which would not be a win.

I'm sorry to sound so dismissive; it's at least partly because I'm writing hastily. I don't mean to reflexively put down new ideas and I know it's all too easy to come across that way. At the same time, we're not going to add more metaness to HN because it actually goes against the core value of curiosity. Metaness has a peculiar attraction but it's not intellectual curiosity; I've sometimes called it the crack of internet forums.

re: epistemic strictness

You don't think HN users are capable of realizing when they are engaged in mind/future reading, even if it was an explicit rule? You surely know the userbase better than me, but this seems unlikely.

If you want nothing to change, so be it, but the idea that functionality changes cannot have an effect is very frustrating.

Correct. Not only HN users but humans in general—I just don't think we work that way. The way we work is that we have our preference on X and then we propagate that preference through every edge in our mental graph of associations from X.

One can imagine a user saying something like "Although I personally am against nuclear power, since this is the 'optimism' thread it isn't the best place for my counterarguments so I'll post them in the 'pessimism' thread instead". However, such people are so rare that statistically they may as well not exist.

> Correct. Not only HN users but humans in general—I just don't think we work that way.

I am curious if this is actually true (that humans are unable, with concentration, to realize they cannot read minds), but maybe I have an excess of curiosity! :)

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