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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Please let's not rehash tedious generic flamewars here. Science vs. humanities is a classic of the type—extremely worn and predictable. It's up there with cyclists vs. drivers and cats vs. dogs. This kind of thing just gets people riled up to repeat the same old points more angrily than before*.

Edit: as an example, we got from your comment to "you're an insufferable cunt" in 3 hops—and you contributed 2 of them. Obviously that comment was completely beyond the pale, but the more important thing is not to go into such flamewar territories in the first place.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

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>but the more important thing is not to go into such flamewar territories in the first place.

It may be more important to you, but I don't care. For me, truth is important, and I wrote the truth.

It's important to the forum, given what we're trying to optimize for.

People often use the word "truth" (or "facts") as if it were a sort of trump card, but if you think about it, being true is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for a good comment - I wrote about this recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32697044.

There are infinitely many truths—they don't select themselves. People have to do that, and the selection process has to do with their own motivations, not truth.

Once you've selected a truth, there are infinitely many ways to express it—including how/whether you're going to take other people into account, how to encode your emotions in the expression, and so on. These also don't select themselves—you choose them, and again that has to do with your own motivations, not truth.

There is also the question of how perfect your access to the truth is, or to what extent you might be mistaken. Other people have very different ideas about the truth than you do (I don't mean you personally, of course). How lightly or tightly you hold that possibility is super important for conversation and again, has nothing to do with truth per se.

>There are infinitely many truths

Obviously not.

Let's start with this: there are infinitely many integers, and truths about each of them.

It's possible for a piece of advice to be commonly repeated, vehemently hated, and absolutely correct...

Indeed, but it's still off topic here. The high-order bit is how repetitive something is. That's what we want to avoid:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

This follows from the organizing principle of the site:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

In fact, tediously and/or angrily repeating correct things (or things one feels to be correct—a distinction without a difference for internet purposes) is the thing commenters should most avoid on HN. It's the root evil, relative to the mandate of the site.

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