** Try to avoid insults like
fake quote> They are a bunch of liars _or_ morons
in spite you think they are a bunch of liars _and_ morons
** Avoid oneliners
Try to expand the explanation to 3 or 5 paragraph. Explain clearly what they did, what they claim and the difference. I try to use a ELI25 level (the reader has a technical degree, but not in the subject).
** Explain if it break some physics rule
Some articles make claims that break a physic rule. Some even give a wrong explanation about how they are somehow not bounded by the rule. Explain what they are breaking it. Try to give a high level explanation (like it breaks the conservation of energy) and a low level explanation (exactly in which part they are miscounting the energy).
** Expect to make a few mistakes.
I always make a mistake in a detail. Luckily most of the time someone will make make a comment fixing it. Acknowledge the error, thanks the comment, and remember it
** If it's bad enough it will be reposted :(
The good part, is that you can reuse your comment, with all the fix contributed by other users, and perhaps improve it a little.
In the age of twitter, you expect paragraphs? Your comment is longer than a lot of news coverage, or at least, what passes as news coverage these days. You can try to be the change you want to see in the world, but this is like arguing with a fence post. As the audience becomes predominately younger, the trends of the times will come with them. You can "educate" till you're blue in the face, but being the internet, it's not going to listen.
Because in my experience a large portion of the HN crowd comes here for the civil and nuanced debate.
> To a first approximation, the internet is wrong about everything anyhow, so for sanity's sake we all need to learn how to let go. Believe me, I know that's not easy, but it's what we all have to do if we want a forum that doesn't suck.
It's about a personal insult in that thread, but I think it can be extrapolated to comment length. I agree that many news coverage are bad, or just a copy&paste of the press release. It's difficult to change the world, but at least we can try to have a nice discussion here. And part of the trick to get a nice discussion is to encourage comments of the correct length, not too short, not too long.
Just yelling "bullshit" certainly is, and hn has a bit of a positivity bias, nonetheless, comments that say something is BS and explain why are usually reasonably well recieved.
Interestingly, it also has a bit of negativity bias. This means that any story, however anodine or ground-breaking, will have:
- a group of people using some motivated reasoning to show how obviously terrible the thing is and how clever they are;
- a group of people arguing that the thing is the best since warm water and is going to solve everything (if only reality would behave).
This makes a lot of discussions simultaneously very interesting and utterly depressing.
If you unconditionally accept bullshit but require an explanation in order to reject it, then you're going to wind up believing a lot of bullshit.
Generally i go with the imputus is on the person making the claim. I want the original person to back up their claim before i will care, but i also want anyone counterclaiming BS to also back up their claim before i care.
Also in an ideal world you shouldn't just passively consume arguments on the internet, but do actual reading on the subject. Neither side on an internet debates actually owes you anything.
I disagree, the person trying to convince you of something always owes you an explanation.
Actual reading on something, while a good thing, never resolves an argument because you can't replace the person you are arguing with's premises with a generic premise from somewhere else and come to a reasonable conclusion.
Oh definitely not. I’m happy to make one post explaining my position… then walk away.
I discovered and internet superpower… it doesn’t bother me if you are wrong.
Nope, nobody owes you anything on the Internet.
You shouldn't believe them, of course. But you need to have the tools to figure it out for yourself.
If a comment explains why something is bullshit in a way that readers can learn from, and is reasonably free of extraneous noise such as personal attacks, fulmination, and so on, that's a positive contribution. The trick is to (1) add correct, relevant information, and (2) avoid poisoning the ecosystem—like a healthy immune system that can go after pathogens without destroying normal cells.