Sam Altman and the Internet lynching problem | Hacker News Reader

Sam Altman and the Internet lynching problem

danieltenner.com

22 pointsggurgone11 comments

It was a thoughtful piece, swombat, but it looks like the censors (human or automated) have manipulated its ranking.

This article has 10 points in just 38 minutes and is on the second page. In contrast, "Standing desk experiment and consequent knee injury" has only 5 points after an hour. The standing desk article is on the front page and this article isn't.

Yep... Not sure why that is to be honest. I've emailed dang about it but no response yet!...

Guessing no response yet?

I was away all day and only just saw this.

The post got a ton of (what look to our system like) ring votes and was flagged by an algorithm.

This is over thinking it.

What keeps a fight going is that two parties want to have a fight, they can't tolerate that somebody else gets the last word. If you refuse to get involved some other fool will get battered bloody.

The trouble with a long post like that is that it has a huge surface area and inevitably there is something that can be taken out of context and then the fisticuffs continue.

Rule 1 is don't get involved, but if you do get involved look at the methods (not the words) of s.i. hayakawa. You don't make rational arguments but you devise zingers of various sorts. One of the best is the falacious argument that requires your opponent to leave their world view to refute.

That sounds very interesting as a method... do you have some examples?

Sorry, but 'why men tend to react to statements like “men are rapists” by saying “hey, wait a minute, not all men are like that.” Because it’s of course true – the majority of men are not rapists, wouldn’t dream of being rapists, abhor rapists, would cut off social ties with anyone found to be a rapist immediately, etc. But since option 1 is totally not available (rapists are indefensible) and option 3 feels intuitively like a bad choice in the long term, many men will pick option 2, and make the obviously true statement that “hey, you’re exaggerating quite a bit there, not all men are rapists”.'

doesn't really answer it. The missing quantifier in "men are rapists" reads as "all" not "some". To suggest that of course the person uttering the statement meant "some" is to suggest a want of familiarity with the English language that I find unlikely. And of course, prefixing "some" makes it all less exciting, doesn't it?

"Black people are thieves" illustrates pretty well why the "some" cannot be taken for granted, even when it's logically evident.

Have a read through Scott Alexander's article if you still need more convincing: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapo...

Perhaps my own ear needs adjusting, for I can't tell whether you are agreeing with me or not. For the record, I agree with you, the "some" cannot be taken for granted.

Stop.

"Weak Men Are Super Weapons" is truly worth a read. It's not one-sided, it doesn't pick fights and it's quite fair to both sides.

Smearing language on a subset of a group can rapidly cause long-term smearing on the larger group and it's completely expected and fair for innocents to want to protect themselves from the effects of this.

I'll quote from the article:

    So the one problem is that people have a right not to have
    unfair below-the-belt tactics used to discredit them without
    ever responding to their real arguments.

    And the other problem is that victims of nonrepresentative
    members of a group have the right to complain, even 
    though those complaints will unfairly rebound upon the
    other members of that group.

I strongly recommend that everybody in the tech community reads it.

It's not enough to just look at what people believe, take offence and respond before understanding them. You have to treat people with respect and be careful not to unduly tar each other with the same brush.

It is possible that your rank was reduced because of a detected voting ring. That would be my guess, of course I have no idea if there is an actual voting ring or not.

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