Live data from Hacker News

PG on trolls

paulgraham.com

101–110 of 190 posts

Re: PG on trolls

#101
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Commie Day Care" Adequacy troll was far superior, imho. And it was all much better when it was at k5.

I wasn't impressed by that one. The Hacker troll strikes a nerve because it's frightening. It's all too easy to imagine somebody really being that stupid, and too easy to imagine them becoming influential. The Daycare troll reads like just another ineffectual wingnut.

Fair enough (hence the upvote), but I judge trolls in part by the quality of the fish they catch. Obviously with Adequacy, this becomes an interesting game. But the "Kid's a Hacker" was awash with fanboys trying to out-"get it" all over each other. At least Commie Day Care's second-level trolls were _genuine_.

Re: PG on trolls

#102
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reminds me of the physicist who wrote a fake post-modernist paper and submitted it to a journal and got it published.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_Affair

Also, a couple of French TV show hosts pulled the same trick with physics instead of postmodernism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair

Re: PG on trolls

#103
post #65

The Reddit thread is kind of sad. http://reddit.com/info/68zz4/comments/

On a possibly-explanatory note, the article did call them all trolls... (And on a recursive note, a comment on the Reddit thread now links to the parent comment, which links back to the Reddit thread, and so on...yay stack overflow!)

People who tend to like pg's line of thinking also tend to migrate from Reddit to here... so in Reddit remain the people who mostly disagree with pg.

Re: PG on trolls

#104
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I had more votes to downmod you into prominence! J/k, I upmodded (for agreement)

Heh, it'd be funny to have the most negative karma on YC. The only reason I care about karma is cuz I want to change my header's color. Only 15 more points to go! Once there, I'll stick a post on the front page and get downmodded into oblivion.

Couldn't you achieve that much more easily with a Greasemonkey script?

Re: PG on trolls

#105
post #39

"Often users have second thoughts and delete such comments." @PG, I've always wondered, are you able to see all the comments that I've posted and then deleted two minutes later? And if so, is this an acceptable way to send you semi-private messages?

"Paul Graham sees all the comments anyone has posted anywhere. What's more, he knows all the comments they will post in the future, too."

"...and has already categorized them using Bayesian filtering."

Re: PG on trolls

#106
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, it'd be funny to have the most negative karma on YC. The only reason I care about karma is cuz I want to change my header's color. Only 15 more points to go! Once there, I'll stick a post on the front page and get downmodded into oblivion.

Couldn't you achieve that much more easily with a Greasemonkey script?

Yeah, but where's the achievement then?

Re: PG on trolls

#107
post #100
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I should rephrase it as morality's goal maximises happiness. What would you propose as an objective moral goal? Do you recommend anything by Popper or Deutsch specifically?

Deutsch only has one book out, which is very good. My only warning is that half of it is sort of off topic (physics, virtual reality, computation, time travel). But that's ok, because of the density of ideas fit into each chapter. http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-Impl... Popper has lots of books. Maybe The Myth of the Framework is a good choice. As I recall, it has content from lectures he gave…

Yeah go ahead.

Re: PG on trolls

#108
post #58

I wonder if trolls can be categorized automatically. Caveats and all, trolls are characterized by their participation in negative-karma two-person conversations and down-voting of their comments by a diverse and changing set of users. A simple learning algorithm should zap the predictable ones. Trolls are nourished by attention and early detection and removal should nip that behavior in the bud.

I've thought a lot about that. I wouldn't be surprised if current spam filters would work unchanged. There are not enough trolls on News.YC to make it worth investing time in such countermeasures, but it would be an interesting experiment to see if you could use statistical filtering techniques to detect trolls in some large public corpus like Digg or Reddit or Slashdot comment threads.

I don't think that would work; you would essentially require a filter that could actually understand the subject matter, in order to determine whether the purpose of the stated opinion was to bait people's responses. For example:

"I've thought a lot about that. I would be surprised if current spam filters could work unchanged. There are not enough trolls on News.YC to make it worth investing time in trying to write it in Lisp, but it would be an interesting experiment to see if you could use C++ programming techniques to detect trolls in some large public corpus like Digg or Reddit or Slashdot's comment threads."

Re: PG on trolls

#109
post #107
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deutsch only has one book out, which is very good. My only warning is that half of it is sort of off topic (physics, virtual reality, computation, time travel). But that's ok, because of the density of ideas fit into each chapter. http://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-Impl... Popper has lots of books. Maybe The Myth of the Framework is a good choice. As I recall, it has content from lectures he gave…

Yeah go ahead.

To any disagreeable people reading this: please bear in mind that if you say the following ideas are incorrect, and that therefore I am incorrect to say morality can be approached objectively ... you will be contradicting yourself, because you will have made an assertion about the objective truth of the matter (that I am, in fact, mistaken).

So some good goals, in my opinion:

Long term: open-ended knowledge creation

Medium term: cure aging, invent self-replicating nanobots, win war on terror, write important book, invent AI

Short term: make a sandwich, be kind to one's children, quit smoking, make a useful product, solve a problem you were having, learn how to play Mario Galaxy well

None of these are (I imagine) especially odd. That is because we have to start where we are. We already have goals. Most of them are good goals to pursue, for now. In the event we decide we want something better, or see a problem with them, we should seek to make (gradual) improvements. So, nothing revolutionary here. In fact, while I think most people are mistaken about moral philosophy, I don't have a problem with most of their actual ideas about how to live day to day. We have the most peaceful, cooperative, and effective civilization ever to exist; or, in other words, we have the most knowledge of morality that has ever existed. Average people have this, and use it in their routine lives.

Can we do even better? Of course. But most of my suggestions are not about changing one's goals, but instead about changing how one tries to accomplish them. So, for example, it is very important to enjoy criticism. This is common knowledge, but people still have trouble with it, and often don't fully understand the reasons it's important. To sketch out my answer, criticism stabilizes true ideas (because they withstand it better than their rivals), while an environment without criticism does not differentiate truth and falsity. And criticism is a means of error correction. Error correction is the only way to reliably achieve any goal. There is no way to reliably come up with the right approach, initially, so anyone who wants to consistently succeed has to be able to find and correct errors.

Why do people dislike criticism, anyway? They take it personally. They hear that they are mistaken, or bad, but they want to be right. That is an irrational and ineffective attitude towards life. If you want to be right, the only path forward is to be willing to change what you are, until you are what's right. And whether you are criticized or not does not change whether you are mistaken. It only changes whether you find out about it. That is a gift. Instead of being mistaken and ignorant, you have a change to change your mind.

So to tie this back to what I was saying earlier, one of the common points for the best way to accomplish many different goals, is to enjoy criticism. Alternative approaches such as disliking and avoiding (some) criticism are immoral, because they sabotage achieving one's goals. The more distasteful you find criticism, the less reliably you can accomplish what you want to.

To add to this, we could go through all the different attitudes which are important to learning and problem solving in general, and list them as important pieces of morality. They are all fundamental to how we should live.

Post reply on HN