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Comment by DrNosferatu | Hacker News Reader

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DrNosferatu·

It’s a very fair question - why all the downvotes?

- Never heard of the replication crisis in science? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis]

This “quickness to put the knives out” is an unfortunate - but very prevalent - response pattern in HN.

Hypothesis: could it be a protection mechanism against the discomfort of cognitive dissonance?

- Why so or why not so?

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Its getting downvoted because its using weasel words to make a non-falsifiable statement, which is annoying rhetorically. Depending on which side you are on, you can either claim there are other fields the opponent just haven't thought of, or you can claim that a specific mentioned field isn't a "real" field (e.g. flat earthers would fit, but i don't think that is the sort of thing that is meant)

By definition, the replication crisis wouldn't apply, since it is a crisis because people in those fields are asking the question. Hence those fields would not qualify for the grandparents point.

The downvotes are because the comment is not contributing to the topic at hand. It tries to derail the topic by saying the same applies to other unrelated things. And then it also fails to materialize that unrelated claim by not mentioning which other fields they are referring to or giving any evidence for the claim.

It's a modern HN thing, back in the day downvoting was reserved for really obviously off topic stuff, like spam. Now people use downvoting like on reddit, as an "I'm angry and I disagree" button

Back in 2008, pg said:

> Downvoting has always been used to express disagreement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347

He's wrong, also it's pg...

Aren't we better off if valuable, unpopular opinions are freely expressed?

Otherwise there's a bias to only say what's popular.

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