The internet has made defensive writers of us all

Is there a way to use comments as an editorial device? A wiki-like solution, combined with a MS-Word Track-changes features, where you can make changes, and leave comments and it all shows up on the same page? Like with the health care article example, the first 90% of that seems like pure fluff (when it isn't making a false or misleading or questionable statements), essentially padding added to a high-school report to meet an arbitrary length requirement. The real meat and the potentially interesting content is then almost lost in the shuffle. A professional editor would request a complete rewrite. You should be telling us more about DPC, which is new, interesting, and potentially very valuable.

It's not just the downvotes. They don't help, but it's also the responses.

There is a major psychological effect from getting attacked for stating an opinion you might hold to heart. As an avid reddit/hn commenter, I feel it often.

I don't really care if someone disagrees with me on something minor, but if it's something I truly believe is important and I see people disagreeing with it left and right and downvoting anything in line with that opinion, it makes me feel weakness and despair.

Weakness: I am overwhelmed by the people disagreeing with me. I can't answer everybody. Not because I don't have the arguments but because it's pointless, won't lead anywhere and will achieve nothing but make me look insane. The "hivemind" effects makes widely-held opinions even stronger and minority opinions even weaker. Alone, I am powerless to counter that.

Despair: Let's say someone thinks gays/black/women/whatever shouldn't [have some human right]. You truly believe that's wrong. If someone says to me "I think women shouldn't have the right to vote" and is impossible to convince, I feel pretty awful about it. I feel like that person is contributing in making the world worse, and I live in that world.

Now what if that's not about some minority-held opinion, but about something far more widespear? What if it's, for example, similarly insensitive and disgusting comments about islam/muslims? I don't just feel awful being around that person, I feel crushed by the amount of people who would agree with it. I'm quite afraid of what happens when such opinion is widely held. I feel like I'm looking at a lifetime of awful and I feel crushed by it.

My fiancée is a muslim. This is empathy kicking in. Not everything affects me that way, but I'm far less likely to comment on something I don't hold to heart.

But yes, I do enjoy HN because the hivemind effect is far more limited. The hidden downvotes and sorting algorithms are a million times better than Reddit's. It's not ideal, but it's still an excellent place to have discussion and a "good enough" place to have debates.

There is no correct race, you just need to do your homework. Plenty of white people write about race. You just have to have a sound argument, based in actual study of race. If you're just going to regurgitate ancient stereotypes then yeah, people will criticize you. If you are unable to have a conversation about your views with a person of another race you probably haven't done enough homework yet.

If you don't want to take the time to do that, that's fine. But don't churn. And don't blame other people.

I'm a white male and I feel totally confident expressing my opinions on race and gender, including opinions that go contrary to mainstream feminist and anti-racist positions. You might be surprised to learn that women and people of color are not unified in their beliefs about race and sex.

But that's only because I've taken the time to listen very carefully to criticism, to listen particularly carefully and gently when someone is telling me something that seems wrong, and do my own research. It's not just a matter of watching the world go by and having an opinion.

This has been turned into art by professional media outlets. That's the whole point of almost every single article they publish - the more people they can outrage or offend, the more people read and thus the more ad money flows in.

> It is very disheartening when you take the time to write something thoughtful and you get no response at all.

Scott Alexander explored this topic in [0]. He also laments the fact that the posts he considers most valuable are read the least, while his most controversial ones are also the most popular. He even has a nice graph of it[1].

[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/

[1] - http://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/sschits.png

I absolutely love the "belief tags" / "epistemic status" annotations. Gwern stole his "belief tags" from[0] (I link it because there's a cool article there worth checking out), and Scott Alexander has also adopted them.

This sort of matches the way I personally thing about information and my own opinions. Back in my head I always have this feeling of "degree of confidence", of how sure I am about what I'm saying, and it's often hard to express it in the speech itself. It fits perfectly as meta-data / qualification. Saying once, "this is a thought I'm playing with, I'm not sure either way" beats having to qualify every sentence with "maybe".

Also, I have most fun reading arguments that sound totally convincing to me but are tagged by author as something he doesn't have high confidence in. I end up having to figure out how this smart guy just convinced me of something he himself isn't sure about.

[0] - http://webcitation.org/6DuYcqyQ3