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Comment by fullmoon | Hacker News Reader

You’re also most likely doing it because you’re getting something out of it: You’re exhibiting your own knowledge, you’re looking for validation, or want to demonstrate your own superior morals.

I don’t mean you in particular, but sentences with “one most likely…” are rather hard to read IMO.

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Responding to this cynical take will quickly devolve into an argument about whether altruism is "real", so let's skip to the end where we agree that however this tendency evolved, people do in fact do things with no intrinsic motivation beyond making the world a better place.

Maybe this is a good use of AI for auto moderation. Save everyone time rehashing the same argument path for recognized arguments by providing the conclusion that the discussion is ultimately leading to. Seems like a good fit for a Black Mirror episode.

Humans are perfectly good at recognizing rehashed arguments without the need for AI. The difficulty is that the current crop of social media platforms focus on ephemeral discussion and provide poor tools for "linking" a discussion to an isomorphic one that happened earlier. The incentive structure is such that they would rather you go ahead and rehash the argument. Yay, engagement!

Or, somewhat less pejoratively, you want to advance a hypothesis to see if it will stand up to public scrutiny.

If the intent to advance a hypothesis for public scrutiny was declared explicitly, indicating the basis for forming the hypothesis (or where it was found, if not originated by the hypothesis-advancer), then I think there would be interactions with experts rather than an avalanche of non-experts repeating slogans (with no indication of how or where they found the adage).

That sort of transparency may make the difference among a set of choices including "that's so ridiculous it's not worth replying", "that's ridiculous but maybe both parties (and other readers) might learn something from the discussion of why it's ridiculous", and "we can take this seemingly-ridiculous hypothesis somewhat seriously and determine where and how it goes wrong, and whether a more formal exploration (in the sense of 'write it up as something approaching a draft paper') might be fruitful".

Experts can learn in a good faith ELI5/ELI12/ELI25 discussion, sometimes about their own field (e.g. the expert might arrive at some personally-useful intuition while explaining some technical procedure), but more often about how to communicate more effectively with nonexperts.

More pejoratively, advancing an unusual hypothesis in a field that one does not understand, leaning on a third-party idea that one does not disclose, and treating the unusual hypothesis as requiring disproof is unlikely to be fairly described as "good faith".

But the scientific method applies to all aspects of life, not just science-y things. When I wrote "Or... you [might] want to advance a hypothesis to see if it will stand up to public scrutiny" I was actually doing just that: advancing a hypothesis to see if it would stand up to scrutiny, specifically, the hypothesis that one reason one might engage in a discussion on the internet is to advance a hypothesis to see if it will stand up to scrutiny.

(So far, so good.)

n=1 I’ve certainly commented to see how well my arguments hold up.

Improving the world is getting something out of it. That's in one's own interest by itself.

I would like to hear more about your thesis that arguing with people you don't know on the internet improves the world. :)

We already did this bit. From the top of this chain:

>I think you are 1) providing readers with a more useful angle, and 2) not giving the wrong impression to a candid reader that this take is somehow a consensus.

Do you think a tight election could be swayed by the actions of people online? Do you not think what people do online influences the decisions of politicians and policymakers? Unfortunately, engaging online is intertwined with the political process at this point.

I don't appreciate the sarcasm but I think it's obvious that you improve the world by, for example, correcting falsehoods and criticizing bad behavior, not because it effects the target (although I suppose there's a tiny chance it might), but for the rest of the audience, some of who may not know better or just may not have even considered it beforehand. Every little bit counts.

That’s a very… nihilistic view. I don’t get anything from this comment, apart from killing 2 minutes while on the loo.

> exhibiting your own knowledge, you’re looking for validation, or want to demonstrate your own superior morals.

Speak for yourself please. On most forums nobody is going to praise another for their knowledge. Additionally most people are anonymous.

All popular internet discussion places are built on likes, upvotes, and other superfluous praise signals.

Yes, if the internet of today is about anything, it's about people getting praise for something.

There seems to be quite a bit of behavioral and evolutionary psychology that claims all actions are initiated by emotions. So the emotional payoff is the real driver, even when people pretend to be above the non-virtuous fray (which is itself a status signaling mechanism with an emotionally validating payoff)

Most, sure. But I have learned more from astoundingly good HN comments over the last dozen years than any other site on the internet.

I love that our local celebrities, as such, are such not for battle but for their euclididation.

Do you think most users here post comments for those reasons?

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