Five Geek Social Fallacies (2003) | Hacker News Reader

Five Geek Social Fallacies (2003)

plausiblydeniable.com

  > nearly every geek social group of significant size has at least one member that 80% of the members hate, and the remaining 20% merely tolerate.

I used to be part of a hacker space where the leaders had spent a huge amount of time and energy to make sure the place even happened at all, after others had failed. One member wasted a huge amount of everybody's time with multi-page forum diatribes about how they could do nothing right, asking for in-depth justifications of everything, and concluding that they should relinquish control (to the writer, of course) right now for being such terrible organisers. Just checked, and that space lasted eight years. I'm sorry it failed, but it basically couldn't function with that one user being tolerated.

It's a reason I love strictly moderated online forums like Stack Overflow or Hacker News - they are fine with down-voting, flagging, banning or otherwise discouraging the shitheads. Offline communities should be willing to adopt a similar policy: we're a community about X. Feel free to participate and discuss/showcase/etc X as much as you like. If you don't like how the community operates you're free to ~~STFU~~ make your own - an even better community would benefit everyone!

As a side note, there's often a lizardman[1]/troll contingent who are willing to support the hated member, because "every voice has to be heard" or because they just seemingly love drama.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

>Stack Overflow or Hacker News

Woah, those seem like two completely different things. Is it just me, or is SO like 100x more gate-keepery than HN? On HN it seems like you have to go pretty far off topic to even get more than a single down vote (or maybe get into a pretty heated or political discussion to get flagged). But it seems like SO has an endless supply of people nitpicking on things like the form of your question, so that a obscure/difficult question will fade away before anyone can even get a chance to answer it. I'd say SO is some form of malignant fallacy #1, where instead of just tolerating off-putting behavior, it actively selects for busybodies looking for drama.

Having contributed for many years now, IME there's probably less drama on SO (on average) than on HN. Sure, some people get disproportionately defensive when other people demand more information to solve their problem, or when people point out that (given the context available to the reader) there is probably an X-Y problem at work. OTOH, some people have seen the exact same question in so many guises that they crack, sometimes to hilarious effect[1], but often resulting in being curt. Overt rudeness, though, is less common than almost any other website I frequent, including many popular FOSS bug trackers, forums, and the like.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/96588

> Social fallacies are particularly insidious because they tend to be exaggerated versions of notions that are themselves entirely reasonable and unobjectionable. It’s difficult to debunk the pathological fallacy without seeming to argue against its reasonable form; therefore, once it establishes itself, a social fallacy is extremely difficult to dislodge. It’s my hope that drawing attention to some of them may be a step in the right direction.

Interesting idea, reminiscent of Motte and Bailey [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

Reply on news.ycombinator.com