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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

The article refers to a very specific form of toxic communication commonly known as heckler's veto.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler%27s_veto

The problem is more pervasive and frequently more subtle than the specific discourse context the article illustrates. A counter example is software where an open source project typically requires no funding or approval to initiate, but equivalent initiatives in professional settings are frequently vetoed due to the emotional insecurity of a select few vocal participants. In the world of software this is frequently referred to as Invented Here Syndrome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here

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I'm rather sympathetic to the issue in general, but it's comical coming from Loeb.

He's been steadily pushing into at the very least fringe territory, and at the worst outright pseudoscience and quackery. He's mad people are pointing that out. That's what this all stems from.

That's superficial and bordering on ad-hominem.

When your work is as a scientist, and you want to be judged as a scientist, your work being pseudoscience is not superficial. That's like saying pointing out your accountant is facing tax fraud charges isn't germane to his work as your accountant.

What qualifies Loeb's work as pseudoscience (which is different from erroneous science as pointed out in the paper and blog post he reacts to) ? The thematics he chose to explore. He could have worded his paper differently, totally burying the extraterrestrial tech hypothesis he had in mind and there would have been no repercussions. Your opinion is driven by the semantics of the topic at hand and its success relies on the fact it fits into two heavily imbalanced classes. Of course I can go around and tell people they don't have that super rare disease: that doesn't mean I'm not a crank too.

Still waiting for you to delve into the details of the argument against Loeb's claims rather than using broad and easy categorization (which etymologically means accusation).

No one owes you an explanation, you're not 'waiting' for anything. You approve of Loeb's crank turn of late, that's fine, but you don't get to waste the time of others on demand.

fuck you I think Loeb is wrong, but you're just dumping your shitty easy opinion without putting forth any argument.

> Heckler's veto

Often motivated by https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome.

> A counter example is software where an open source project typically requires no funding or approval to initiate, but equivalent initiatives in professional settings are frequently vetoed due to the emotional insecurity of a select few vocal participants.

Is that true, though?

"Equivalent initiatives in professional settings" require resources being allocated to projects that bear no relation with company goals. By definition, this means these types of projects require a company to fund a project that is not aligned with the company's purpose. Why would anyone pay for something that they don't need or want or care about?

Resource allocation is not silencing or vetoing projects. Just because your employer doesn't pay you to work on your pet project that does not mean you're being censored.

That is half true. There absolutely is a cost to initiating any change, but that is a one time cost. Some changes can yield dramatic increases in productivity or reductions to costs further down stream. If there exists proper discourse that takes this into consideration then in all fairness any veto presented is certainly not toxic.

When internal initiatives are killed or directed for purely selfish motivations, such as comfort attainment then it certainly becomes toxic. This is why I believe the scenario is exceedingly pervasive, especially in software, because comfort attainment is typically not just the primary consideration, but the only consideration.

> That is half true. There absolutely is a cost to initiating any change, but that is a one time cost. Some changes can yield dramatic increases in productivity or reductions to costs further down stream. If there exists proper discourse that takes this into consideration then in all fairness any veto presented is certainly not toxic.

I'm sorry, I didn't understood a word of what you tried to say. I'm even suspecting this is machine-generated word salad.

Translation: there are times when a veto is warranted, but other times the effort to build software custom fit to your problems is worth spending the time to make. More often than vetoing for any valid reason, they do it so they don't have to give up software they are comfortable with.

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