651–660 of 812 posts
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I thought it was a Chinese name
Related: My daughter's second grade teacher was Mrs. Emily Chewning, of Scottish extraction. She told me that when the first parent-teacher conferences happened, a number of parents were surprised at her appearance: kids always referred to her as "Miss Chew" and from the sound of the name, parents assumed she was Chinese.
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I think that people tend to perceive HN as overwhelmingly believing whatever the opposite of their opinion is any time there is a significant debate on something. Unless there is overwhelming support for our own position, we feel that we are in a hostile environment.
Part of helping to work against this is to challenge and ask for genuine evidence with an open heart. I don't want to assume that that is what the poster is believing, but it also clashes with my understanding of reality.
My assessment of that thread is the same as it always is when a thread gets a huge number of comments: sentiment fits a roughly normal distribution, with the mean position being something approximating "this is a really difficult question and either course of action has significant risks and pitfalls", and every step away from the mean point of view placing increasing importance on one particular aspect and decreasing importance on the other aspects.
If that weren't the case, there wouldn't be a huge number of comments, as we would quickly find consensus and move on to the next topic.
If you look at the top three root comments on this thread:
- The first one [1] points out that different standards are applied between 8chan vs Facebook/Twitter/etc, and disagrees with Cloudlfare's decision on free speech grounds. But then many people disagree and debate this position.
- The second one [2] asks a neutral question about Cloudflare's exposure to legal liability for content on its platform if it is making decisions about what content is allowable or not. Then people discuss that question.
- The third one [3] acknowledges the complexity of the topic, devoting each of the first two paragraphs to what the writer considers to be almost-equally meritorious but opposing points of view, then concludes that on balance the Cloudflare decision is right. But then many people disagree and debate that position.
To properly answer your challenge, one would have to examine all 1400+ comments and classify them by their level of support for/against the Cloudflare decision, which is somewhere between impractical and impossible.
But from my scanning through the comments, I don't see any "prevailing" or "overwhelming" position emerge, and I see many of the commenters wrestling with the inherently vexed nature of the issue.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20610548
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I agree. The article makes it sound like logic and humanity are disjointed, and like the most loved arguments people make here are based on impersonal data without considering ethics. I think this place is exactly the opposite. Try a logical argument in a popular reddit thread, or find the humanity in random communities. More often, arguments without focusing on what's logical creates biases and hurts a lot more feel…
Yes, this is the point I was trying to make. The article criticizes the nature of the discussion here, and I think it is fair to say that the criticism is tied to negative stereotypes about engineers. Often this is framed as "punching up", because engineers have a lot of financial potential and business influence, but it ignores the fact that in "middle class" society (most people reading the New Yorker are probably…
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I understood this to mean the power of appreciating the societal consequences of technology, and the responsibility of educating others about those consequences, both positive and negative.
That's not power, that's a curse!
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She was deserving of credit. She did great work, and so did dozens (hundreds?) of others on that project. She wasn't deserving of the level of credit that the media gave her when they cast her as the star, visionary, and quasi-leader of the whole enterprise. Nobody was ever against Katie. They were against the way the media handled the story - by slanting the story to advance a political agenda that had nothing to do…
'Nobody was ever against Katie' is a bold claim not at all backed up by the thread or the harassment she received which was addressed by her colleagues. It seems like rather than own up to the fact that yes there were people that were remarkably awful to her and attempting to downplay her contributions it's easier to just blame the media. It's frankly disgusting.
99+% of the people who were critical of that situation, including me, never did anything against Katie. I don't have numbers but I suspect 99% also had nothing against Katie opinion-wise either. It's entirely against the notion that one person should be selected for media celebration entirely based on their genetics. That's wrong, wrong, wrong and I'll argue against it proudly any day.
What's disgusting is the media's taking this insignificant background noise 1% and making the entire story about it, specifically in order to distract from the criticisms leveled against them.
It's about the constant refusal to even address the media's choice when they elevated her. A refusal that is still going on in this thread.
Was it right to elevate her like that solely because of her gender? Or did the media do a wrong?
However, I disagree with these nuance-avoiding characterization of participation and discussion.
Eg, the article makes participants in Boeing crash discussion, seem inhumane and devoid of 'outrage' that the authors of the article were expecting.
On the other hand, the article is not analytical enough (or purposefully avoiding) mentioning the potential causes, that make moderation of a technical forum difficult.
As I had noted somewhere else in my posts, this forum allows a disproportionaly high number of one-sided article submissions.
It is those type of submissions, by often high-karma users
(eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jbegley )
that continue to create selective-outrage, counter-selective-outrage arguments, and overall high stress, low technical information content discussions.
And cause continuous moderation stress.
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Isn't that still an improvement over the alternative though? If the fundamental nature of short-duration comment consumption is antithetical to fact checking, that's certainly a problem. But it's still superior to uncited points, as it is ultimately verifiable. In a choice between the two, I'll take the ill (claims appearing more supported than they are) for the good (inculcating a culture of transparent citation).
I'd honestly argue that it can be worse. If someone cites a claim with a bogus citation and no one chooses to challenge it, then that becomes something that's not just an opinion, but something that's viewed to be scientific fact. For example have you ever been in an argument where you recall reading a paper or statistic, but don't have it on hand? What if that statistic was a false correlation drummed up by a highly…
I can make a claim without a citation, or attribute it to "some article I read awhile ago". No one can verify my original claim. Someone may attempt to dig up another citation refuting it, or find a suspect source making my claim, but these are inefficient ways of fact checking. And if I wanted to be a dick, I could claim that wasn't what I was talking about / my original source.
I can also cite my claim. In this case, 99% may accept it at face value, but 1% may fact check my citation and loudly pronounce it doesn't conclude what I said it did. The 99% then gain the benefit of an erroneous report.
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I saw parent commenter as making an epistemological argument rather than a moral one. There are two fundamentally different sources of truth: ethical consensus and physical data. They are ultimately incompatible, in that only a single option can be your ultimate source of truth. Albeit other(s) can be valued to some degree. The issue they took, and I would take too, with that portion of the New Yorker article is that…
> The issue they took, and I would take too, with that portion of the New Yorker article is that it attacks the idea of physical data as a valid, supreme source of truth. But I doesn't say that. Throughout the paragraph the emphasis is on the recklessness. "hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper _recklessness_" "_Ill-advised_ citations" "_thought_ experiments" "logic, applied _na…
Shout out to dang! You're doing a great job! Thank you! Strict moderation is the reason HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet. I wish good moderation was a skill that more people learned - would you ever be interested in writing a guide or teaching a class on moderation?
Thanks dang for doing a great job.
This article does seem to get at the essence of HN, appreciative of dang and sctb's humanity while not ignoring the problems. Personally, I would actually consider it an excellent demonstration of the fallibility of one of HN's favourite tropes, Gell-Mann amnesia. If there's one critique that I believe is paramount it's that HN has, due to its readership, an ethical obligation that goes beyond making discussions all…
I don't think Hacker News is diverse enough for most political conversations to be useful. There's biases just because we're heavily skewed towards engineers, but there's subtler problems too. For example, how everything gets filtered through the Californian perspective. Hacker News cannot solve all the world's problems. Not even all the problems related to technology. It's ok to focus on the things we can do effecti…
I can't say I know what that is, but are you sure about this? The HN community is overwhelmingly not in California, and comments about California seem to me to skew to the critical and negative.