Comment by tomhow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tomhow | Hacker News Reader

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The main purpose of HN is to be a place for discussing things that appeal to intellectual curiosity. This is pretty much the opposite of topics that “everyone has lots of feelings” about.

Moderators and longtime top contributors to HN come to recognise that these regular dramas about politics and culture wars bring out the worst in people, and lead to the very worst discussion threads we see on HN, precisely because “everyone has lots of feelings” about them.

It’s not wrong for people to have strong feelings about these topics. They're important issues, we get that, and that's why we try to be at least somewhat accommodating of discussions about them.

But when they routinely turn out to be the worst discussions we ever see on HN, and start to turn HN into something very different from what it is intended to be, we think that maybe these discussions should happen on the many other places that want to attract and encourage them, and not so much on this little corner of the web that’s trying to be something different.

Can you elaborate on how feelings about a subject and intellectual curiosity are mutually exclusive in your world view?

This is an article about a conservative tech company producing an AI that pushes their conservative talking points. The only common trait in these so called ‘low quality’ threads that the HN staff feel the _need_ to call out is that conservative look really bad. The tech is still just as interesting to discuss.

Dang wrote about this general issue a few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992992

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996035

To me this is the most significant point:

What happens in flamewars is that when people encounter material they strongly disagree with, these systems get activated and rapidly produce aggressive and defensive responses that have to do with self-protection, and nothing to do with thoughtful consideration of the material, things one might learn, points where one might be wrong, curiosity, playful interaction, and so on. When survival is at stake there is no time or space for the latter sorts of reactions. But it's the latter that we want on HN—they're what the site is for.

I have my own experience over several years undertaking various forms of subconscious work, and from that experience have become very aware of the way emotional reactivity and sympathetic nervous system activation are antithetical to curious, reflective exploration of topics.

The evidence can be seen right here in this thread: how many insightful, reflective, curious comments are there in the entire thread? How many commenters are even attempting to comment in that style, or favour that style of cognitive processing of the topic?

I guess you are right, this thread is filled with low effort, emotional posts which clearly illuminate biased views. [0] Hopefully some one with years of experience in ‘forum talk’ will be able to realign this misguided soul. Until then, let’s flag anything that makes Elon look bad so we never have to talk about it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44009199

Looking over the comment histories of your multiple accounts over multiple years, your activity mostly involves political/ideological battle. That is, you comment mostly in politics and culture-wars-related threads. It's not wrong to have strong feelings about politics and other important issues in the world; that's normal and understandable, and we all do.

What is wrong is to repeatedly use this website for a purpose other than its stated purpose and in breach of the guidelines, then when engaging in discussion with the moderators about the site's purpose and moderation approach, poison the discussion with these kinds of accusations and barbs.

The topic of biases and agendas has been raised countless times here over the years [1]. We're routinely accused of being biased in favour of one side or the other, or when that won't stick, of being "status-quo-ist" or some similar kind of “centrism” neg, none of which we can defend ourselves against without fuelling someone else's accusation of some other form of bias.

All we can do is keep explaining and demonstrating that the one thing we're trying to optimise for is intellectual curiosity. And in a world where it seems every major media outlet, social media platform and political actor trades on getting everyone riled up every day, we think it's important that there can be one corner of the web that isn't all about getting people riled up all the time.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870

And when moderators repeatedly make biased comments on political threads it’s… supposed to be ignored. Got it.

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