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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

"Results may vary" is not an acceptable methodology for the US Government, when millions of lives are potentially at stake.

Ed: among the ways millions of lives could be lost: losing control of our nuclear arsenal or nuclear materials due to haphazardly firing people responsible for maintaining them. Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and deleting inconvenient data. Starvation and disease from ceasing aid around the world. There's also the wars likely to result from the collapse of trust in the US as a security partner, but I suppose it's not correct to blame that on DOGE per se, even if it's an extension of the same principle.

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> Bungling the response to the next pandemic, due to haphazardly firing people, cutting science funding and deleting inconvenient data.

That’s possible, however, it’s possible it’ll give a chance to remove autocrats who have suppressed the scientific method in favor of their prevailing opinions or preferences.

There will be a painful period but it could rejuvenate the systems.

But consider, what if we rejuvenated our health infrastructure in a way that isn't blazingly incompetent? Suppose you learned enough about the systems currently being smashed to specifically fire the "autocrats" and leave the competent people? Are you seeing where the importance of detail comes in?

This seems circular, since your opinion, views, thoughts, etc., are what the opposing factions are rejecting ( or de-legitimizing) in the first place.

People disagree with my opinion, therefore it's circular? Interesting logic.

Did you read the remainder of the comment?

It seems pretty clear to me at least why it would lead to circular arguments.

At this point, I've presented a handful of fairly straightforward hypotheses about cause and effect. They could be wrong, but it's on you to show that they're actually self-referential. There is no amount or kind of other people's opinions that will make them so.

Your opinions do not automatically turn into credible “hypotheses”…?

There is no such mechanism.

If there was then the vast majority of political debates on HN wouldn’t even exist.

Who said a hypothesis is automatically credible? Not me.

If they’re not credible… then why would any one care…?

Readers are just going to assume it’s random noise, or at least indistinguishable from noise, from a rando on the internet.

That's equally true of all internet comments. None of us here on HN have or are claiming automatic credibility. We just make arguments that make sense to us. Feel free to close the tab if you don't find any value in this activity.

So then what makes your opinions “hypotheses”?

Sufficient chimpanzees with keyboards, or an LLM, can also type out every comment you’ve ever written, including the last few.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypothesis

I clearly don’t think your opinions match the definition found in merriam webster… or else I wouldn’t have asked.

You don't think his comment is "an assumption put forward for the purposes of discussion"? That seems a fairly low and generic bar for a comment to reach...

Truthfully, I hold those ideas a little more confidently than purely "for the purposes of discussion", but I suspect you at least understand that the real-world usage of "hypothesis" is quite broad.

I'm kind of tickled at the idea that a "hypothesis" is some hyper-specific thing with trappings of "credibility", and that anything less would be an insult, like we're not all just a bunch of nerds arguing on the internet. It's also kind of sad, though. This is why computer people need liberal arts education.

Still seems closer to noise/LLM ravings than substance.

Are you ever going to directly answer the previous few questions?

I did, comprehensively, but you're apparently not smart enough to understand.

Are those who downvoted enough to grey your comment out… not “smart enough” either?

I don’t think the parent meant that interpretation, as that would also apply to the output of sufficient chimpanzees bashing keyboard and LLMs too…

Which would be practically meaningless without some attached non-zero credibility.

I mean, we're all chimpanzees bashing keyboards around here, at least till proven otherwise

Yeah, hence why I asked… otherwise anyone on HN, including me, could say their opinions are hypotheses too, to be taken just as seriously as the parent’s.

You still don't know what a hypothesis is, after I linked the dictionary definition.

This is still indistinguishable from meaningless noise, since your opinion can’t ever outweigh anyone else’s opinions…

Sometimes people (e.g. US voters) will only learn by running into a wall. How all exactly will turn out is hard to tell and frankly maybe we better don't know. I'm tending to the conclusion there's no way around the movement of the big picture, the shifting of geo-political order in the world.

Certainly, global trust in the US is already gone. That's locked in for the foreseeable future.

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