Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

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    One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN
    is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview
    becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence,
    excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine
    your priors.

I genuinely do not know what you're trying to say here. For funsies, I tossed this into Claude 3.5 Sonnet with the prompt "Translate this into 7th grade English" (which is roughly Mr Beast's core audience?). Here was its response:

    I've seen something happening more and more on HN that bothers me.
    When someone writes something that goes against what most people
    think, the comments section gets filled with popular replies.
    These replies are basically just reasons why you don't need to
    think about changing your mind on this topic.

Assuming this is a reasonable analog to your original point, I would say that this definitionally what a mainstream response to contrarianism looks like.

I think OP is saying:

* He thinks most people dislike Mr. Beast, his company, and think he's popular only due to luck.

* He thinks this document makes good points, but that most people won't be able to see them due to what they believe about Mr. Beast prior to reading it.

Most people find it incredibly annoying when somebody they don't like makes a good point. Often they would rather reject the good point to avoid agreeing with the despicable author if it. They value long-term group identity / loyalty higher than any particular good point [1].

For instance, much of the initial research into the harms of smoking was done in Germany in Nazi times. While the results were largely correct (and later confirmed elsewhere), it was much easier for tobacco proponents to contest or reject them on the grounds of the Nazi Germany origins.

[1]: https://davidsamson.substack.com/p/tribaltheory-002-tribalis...

I think using the example of Nazi research weakens greatly the point you’re trying to make.

Considering we used a monumental wealth of nazi research, and the existence of operation paper clip. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190723-the-ethics-of-us...

Even though you’re correct that Nazi rhetoric impacted creating permissive tobacco policies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2736555/

To clarify, I think it’s because it’s an extreme example, that while technically perhaps accurate, misses that it’s a hard one for a reader to relate to effectively and misses a subtext of: shouldn’t any research from that source (of which what are the ethics of using it as well?) especially in a lens of 1940/1950, be subjected to extreme skepticism? Where additional replication may not be practical or possible.

Exactly, exactly, people feel it very uncomfortable to lean on results of Nazi researchers, no matter what objective scientific truth this research may have uncovered. It's like "objective" and "scientific" wane and disappear, because "Nazi" and "truth" are utterly incompatible in the post-war Western culture. We're lucky Nazi-tainted scientists did not discover something fundamental.

Under a more rational angle, any promising results obtained by an enemy should be double- and triple-reproduced, because an enemy may be planting disinformation into it. But this is a bit more serious than somebody you don't like making a comment you would rather have made yourself, and you already agree with the point because you would make it yourself and are now in a bind. That's the kind of uncomfortable situation I initially referred to.

I think it’s basically “HN is extremely hostile to iconoclastic ideas”

How about even more basic "HN is arrogant."

Bonus points for a self-referential comment! :-]

Reminder to look at the twitter user "shithnsays"

They're talking about Bayesian priors. Basically prior assumptions about the likelihood of a subject.

It's a common phrase in the ratsphere (and its descendants).

Changing your mind is one outcome, but the implication is that it requires a complete reexamining of your worldview, as changing the internalized probabilities can have many effects on perceived likely outcomes.

I also do not understand what you’re trying to get at with “internalized probabilities” etc. I understand the importance of this sort of jargon to the ‘ratsphere’ and all that (https://www.reddit.com/r/sgiwhistleblowers/s/nLaIGJbWAI), but that doesn’t make it any more intelligible to me. I guess that isn’t the point.

The goal is to update beliefs in all areas when they change in one spot.

As a hypothetical, let's say you believe from prior experience that being mugged has a very high probability. Let's say 50% because it's easier.

Let's also say your friend points out that you've left your home hundreds of times this year and haven't been mugged. 50% seems like a ridiculous overestimate.

Reexamining your priors would involve not only changing your mind about the chance of being mugged, but changing downstream beliefs that might be influenced by that belief (such as what public policies you support).

Maybe it's exactly the wide support for irrational but mainstream views is what concerns the author. I mean, that's what you'd expect from a conversation in a random bar, but maybe HN used to be somehow different.

I've been here for awhile, and my take is that HN both now and in the past has an unusually high signal to noise ratio, which does not mean it has little noise. It's just that noise is the default state.

GP's post is also the top voted post, and most of it is complaining about downvotes and criticism which don't exist yet on his hypothetically valuable summary. If there's anything distressing about HN culture, it's this being an acceptable comment type period.

Agreed. This sort of posting is against the HN community guidelines:

- don’t sneer at the rest of the community

- don’t comment about the upvoting of comments

- don’t say hacker news is turning into Reddit (not explicitly the case here, but similar in spirit)

Yeah, some responses will be less thoughtful than others, but that’s what voting is for.

What, contrarianism is to conform to HNs cynical attitude, and the mainstream response is to criticize that attitude?

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