Comment by fatneckbeard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fatneckbeard | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Here is the problem people are having with this

Maggie Appleton on this blog literally says "Yancey Strickler's companion idea of the Dark Forest theory of the web".

I have a Dark Forest Theory of Hacker News. If I stay out of certain threads i dont get blasted. So i dont post in them. Hacker News is like Liu Cixin's dark forest.

i hope someone would say "as Fatneckbeard pointed out, HN is a lot like Liu Cixin's Dark Forest" not "Fat Neck Beards's Dark Forest theory of Hacker News".

I did not write 1000+ pages of books about this that became a world wide best seller and responsible for the phrase being a house hold word. I just pointed out they are similar. It is not my idea. It is not even my adaptation of an idea to a novel context. Im just pointing out something relatively obvious, because the original book is widely interpreted as an analogy for China's 996 tech startup culture by the Chinese readership which made it a success in the first place, so I'm basically making a pop culture reference. Even if I wrote a blog about it it would not make it my idea.

> Liu Cixin's Dark Forest

Liu Cixin did not come up with the Dark Forest theory. It’s been around for decades and many other thinkers and scifi authors had written about it before he did (nothing against him of course).

But that's missing the GP's forest for the trees (pun intended). Liu Cixin's work popularized the theory and phrasing by a massive amount both in comparison to the works that came before and as well as after.

The core point seems to be the flippant assignment of origination irrespective of the scale of contributions.

How is that not just as flippant an “assignment of origination”? Regardless of how Liu Cixin might have written the most popular treatment of the theory, he did not come up with it, and stood on the shoulders of many others who developed the idea over decades. I have no problem with giving him credit for popularizing the idea but calling it “Liu Cixin’s Dark Forest” is going too far.

Everyone knows the real originator of the Dark Forest theory was Chet, more specifically his cat.

(For those who haven't read Xtreme Programming, Chet would stumble into meetings that had degenerated into unproductive fingerpointing, and exclaim "Woops! My fault. WTF are we gonna do to fix it?", Even if he had nothing to do with it

Everything. Bad. Is. Chet's. Fault.

Also, anything good, is solely the work of Chet's cat.

Embracing this truth has greatly simplified my life.

If Chet did not, in fact, have a cat, then I must have fallen into another alternate universe again. Replace the animal in question with whatever you deem most appropriate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com