Comment by Emma_Goldman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Emma_Goldman | Hacker News Reader

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>"It's true that there's an asymmetry in that it's much easier for the people making positive comments not to break the site guidelines. In a way that's not fair—but it applies to all threads equally, regardless of whether the topic is monarchy or something else. It's also an unfairness we can't do much about—it's intrinsic to the problem of how to operate this forum."

Why are positive but controversial comments fine, but negative but controversial comments bad? Why is what's positive and negative defined solely in relation to the thread being posted in?

What if Vladimir Putin had a heart attack and dropped dead tomorrow. Certainly, that would be far more historically consequential than the death of the Queen. It would therefore have even better claim to being posted on HN.

Would you only allow positive comments on that thread? Comments that eulogized Putin as an emblem of stability and moral authority? Would you freeze or delete any comments that questioned that response?

I say this not to be facetious. It's a more extreme example, but I don't think it's qualitatively different. Clearly, it doesn't make sense to allow only positive comments regardless of the subject. When it's highly ideological and contested - as is true of both Putin and the Queen - that just arbitrarily empowers one side of the debate and infuriates and alienates the other half.

I honestly think the only fair response - short of superhuman feats of moderation - is to delete the thread.

Why are positive but controversial comments fine, but negative but controversial comments bad?

That's not what the comment says, though. It doesn't say anything about 'controversial', just that positive comments more readily avoid running into guideline trouble. Maybe it helps if you replace 'positive' with 'boring and anodyne', since the mechanism still applies. Boring and anodyne comments usually don't require as much moderation.

But it is what happened in practice. The Queen is controversial: whether you laud her reign or question it, that's true. The whole point is that praising the Queen as a 'moral authority' is not anodyne.

As far as I can see, the PG principle that Dang refers back to is disanalogous. PG was speaking about the valence of comments - whether they were nice or mean - not whether they supported or opposed an ideological position.

But it is what happened in practice.

Only if practice includes arguing against things that weren't said. Dang didn't say controversial, I didn't say praising the Queen as a moral authority is anodyne. You can work your way back to whatever conclusion you like that way, but don't substitute your own reasoning for that of your interlocutors.

Practice refers to what's done. I am really trying to have a good faith conversation here.

PaulHoule posted that the Queen was a 'moral authority'. I replied setting out a few reasons why that might not be true.

What did Dang do? Tell me off and detach my subthread, while the original comment from PaulHoule still stands.

Clearly, that's telling me that positive but controversial comments are fine, but negative but controversial comments are not.

That is replicated across the entire thread. Praise of the Queen is controversial (my interpretation) but allowed (moderation in practice). Criticism of the Queen is controversial (my interpretation), but disallowed (moderation in practice).

Your comment looks like a close call. The "moral obsequiousness" thing was probably too sharp and personalized, and if you're arguing that someone who is being broadly mourned is unworthy of warm regard, you probably want to make that point in more than just two sentences. As your statements get more controversial, they need to be written more carefully, because you have to consider more than just the impact of your ideas on the world, but also how your writing will affect the thread: even if you're absolutely right and making an important, intellectually curious point, if the way you writes it starts a 30 comment slapfight, you've done more harm than good.

I think if you'd written this comment on any other day, it wouldn't have been singled out, and also that there's a colorable argument that you got swept up in a bunch of really awful comments that happened to express the same sentiment.

But also: you could have just put more effort into it. As it stands, the comment you're talking about could be persuasive only to someone who takes your word on things, because it doesn't support any of the arguments it makes.

(I don't care at all about QE2 other than to say that I once made a joke about the death of Princess Diana in a bar in Calgary a few months after the event, and that is a mistake I won't make again, so there might be something to the idea that being casually and curtly dismissive of the Commonwealth's feeling about the queen is a poor arguing strategy.)

I appreciate you taking the time to write this thoughtful response. I am sympathetic with some of it, and certainly I could have been more diplomatic.

>"But also: you could have just put more effort into it. As it stands, the comment you're talking about could be persuasive only to someone who takes your word on things, because it doesn't support any of the arguments it makes."

No one reads long walls of text, not least in threads with >1000 comments. Concision is a great virtue in nearly all communication. I would say two things to the refrain that I didn't 'support' any of my assertions, and that my post 'could be persuasive only to someone who takes your word on things'.

First, they are a form of 'immanent critique'[1]. Anglo-American society recognises some basics moral and political norms. These include the idea of equality and that people shouldn't be privileged because of blood or race, the idea of liberty and that one people should not coercively rule another, and the idea of democracy and that a people ought to choose its own government. I made some simple observations to the effect that the British monarchy egregiously violates all three.

In this sense I don't need to argue for my evaluative premises because they're all bromides within our gestalt. But if you juxtapose them with some basic facts about the monarchy, suddenly it becomes obvious that there's a catastrophic contradiction. I am working from premises most people accept to a surprising - but I think obviously correct - conclusion.

Second, this same burden of 'support' is not being applied to those on the other side of the conversation. The person to whom I was responding said nothing to support their assertion that the Queen was a 'moral authority' other than that the Queen didn't succumb to personal scandal. A standard that lots of very bad people meet.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanent_critique

Two things.

First: I laughed audibly at the idea that "nobody reads long walls of text". Long walls of text are practically a cheat code on HN.

Second: most people who write these kinds of "concise" comments are not engaging with dialectical reasoning; they're just dashing off sneering barbs. Clearly, you're getting pattern matched with them. If you had merely added the reference to "Immanent critique" in your original comment, as an explanation for why it was so curt, you'd have escaped that filter!

Obviously, the burden of support isn't applied to people expressing warm thoughts about the queen, because virtually none of them are barbs. They're called "bromides" for a reason!

You can write excitatory arguments, and even give HN heartburn in the process. But you have to do so carefully (or at least sparingly, taking pains not to join a chorus of rhetorical capsaicin), or you're going to get caught out the way you did here. Provocations (in any direction) generally need to earn their keep here, which is usually as simple as some kind of demonstration of good faith in your writing --- it doesn't need to be a wall of text (though if you're angling for Internet points, that'll help).

>"Obviously, the burden of support isn't applied to people expressing warm thoughts about the queen, because virtually none of them are barbs. They're called "bromides" for a reason!"

Let me just cut to the chase and say that I fundamentally disagree with this. One version of what you're saying is that controversial agreement needs a lower standard of proof than controversial disagreement. I see absolutely no reason for that. Western thought is built from Plato on the idea knowledge is arrived at only through dialectical criticism - not the asymmetrical favouring of agreement.

But, maybe that's not what you meant. Perhaps you meant that disagreement is more liable to be a 'barb' - to be 'provocative', as you later say - than disagreement. From a functional view of managing HN to minimise conflict, the less provocations the better. First of all, what is and is not provocative is relative to the person. Deifying the Queen is provocative to me and, evidently, many other people in the thread. My provocation, if you want to call it that, was not the first in the chain. Yet it was singled out. The other thing is that if you take this conclusion to its logical conclusion it will simply end up enforcing and consolidating the opinion of the majority, against any dissenting minority. Again, to go back to basics, Socrates was put to death exactly because he called into question the settled views of Athenian society.

Category error. I don't think controversial arguments have different standards of proof for validity. This isn't a debate society, it's a community. It has norms grown over the last decade that allow it to continue growing by welcoming anonymous newcomers without burning itself down. Your comment was, reasonably, perceived as rancorous. We have an immune system tuned to rancor. Its response to your comment was allergic rather than immunologic, but I don't blame the pollen when I step outside and need to blow my nose, if only because there's no point in doing so.

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