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Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

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Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#121

Post by rsynnott »

30f0fn wrote: post #22
foldr wrote: post #8

Given the focus on arguments that are alleged to be purely semantic, it would have been helpful to have a good example of such an argument. He describes the debate over abortion as a canonical example. The idea here seems to be that the debate over whether a foetus is 'alive' is a purely semantic dispute over the definition of the word 'life'. This strikes me as simply a mistake. It's certainly very difficult to have…

Indeed. The disagreement over abortion is, roughly, whether killing a human fetus should ever be legal. The disagreement is hard to resolve because it’s not clear which principles to apply, so that arguments pro or con can take on a semantic flavor, but there’s nothing semantic about the underlying issue. (It might be that the author harbors some feeling that all ethical questions are merely semantic; this is putting…

I mean, I think there _is_ some semantic debate, in that there are always semantic debates about what is life and what isn't on the edges (see the endless rather tedious argument about whether viruses, or, more esoterically, mitochondria, are life whenever anyone brings it up), but it's largely irrelevant to the actual question.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#122

Post by narag »

names_are_hard wrote: post #106

To me a large part of the value of HN is the back-catalog. When I'm researching something I frequently do a site:news.ycombinator.com search on DuckDuckGo to see what HN users have to say about the topic. I've been doing this for a long time, only recently I decided to get over my fear of participating in the internet and created an account to comment now and then when I have something to say. And I can see how parti…

To me a large part of the value of HN is the back-catalog.

That's not a very flattering thing to say. I do the same as you. Yesterday I wanted information about Monero and did the site: trick with good results.

What I find annoying is the partisan chilling effect. Not just discussions about politics, that I try to avoid because I know it's doomed. But about anything. There is a front-page technical programming discussion where I started to compose a comment and gave up, thinking that it would be downvoted as hell, not because it's outrageus or false, just unpopular opinion.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#123

Post by foldr »

Ma8ee wrote: post #115
foldr wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says the following. "Trained logicians should know that semantic meaning is arbitrary...Abortion is the canonical example of [a semantic] argument: once you have decided what 'life' is, there’s really not much else to discuss. It’s not a political argument, not even in theory. It’s purely a semantic one." So the author does seem to be saying that the whole abortion debate is purely a debate over arbitrary…

> "Trained logicians should know that semantic meaning is arbitrary...Abortion is the canonical example of [a semantic] argument: once you have decided what 'life' is, there’s really not much else to discuss. It’s not a political argument, not even in theory. It’s purely a semantic one." Which is quite much exactly what I said. That a definition is arbitrary doesn't mean that it is unimportant. If I use one arbitrary…

>Those two things are the the same. What is the meaning of a word other than the "nature or essense" of the thing it references?

This is actually a vexed question in linguistics and the philosophy of language. I don’t want to get into it here, but the answer to your question is not in any way uncontroversial or obvious.

For me the idea that the root of the abortion debate is a disagreement over an arbitrary definition doesn’t compute, for the reasons I already gave. (Why not just introduce new words with commonly agreed definitions and be done with it?) But that discussion seems to be going round and round in circles.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#124

Post by Chris2048 »

netcan wrote: post #113

I've been thinking a lot lately about blindspots. They're easy to see in other people, and downright glaring when it comes to politics or other collective opinions. By definition, hard to spot in yourself. Objectively, they're likely to exist. In any case, I think most of us have felt what the writer here feels, about HN or some other forum. It's hard to know how much of it is internal to us & how much of it is the f…

> I've been thinking a lot lately about blindspots.

I think it works like this:

blindspots are so hard to see, but if they are inconvenient, they will get pushback. great effort will be spent creating counter-arguments i.e. arguments against, but not so much arguments for. Effort will be spent repeating them so these counterarguments will become well-known, and accepted.

Soon enough, there will be a lamp-shade effect; there are so many counter-arguments people will wonder if the value they see is something is real because they only hear talk of the harm of something, not the value; everyone thinks it's harmful, but no one speaks of the value. Soon enough, it becomes harder to defend something, and this means the path-of-least-resistance is to not defend something, or to attack those that try. Anyone defending it has to adopt a "contrarian" style and tone, and sometimes hedge a little with "provocateur" behaviour to give themselves an out in case things come back on them (I wasn't really serious, lol).

I personally hate so-called "identity politics" because it gives people a personal, group-identity stake in things that not only bias their perspective, but often add a strong emotive current to topics that fuels the creation of stigmas and taboos as above.

> This was how I "got sick of philosophy" at Uni.

I did philosophy at uni. OMG stay away from the continental stuff. The (often American aka logical positivists) stuff that intersected with logic and mathematics was great though, although much of it seemed to be a study in semantics/language/meaning.

Check out Rudolf Carnaps "philosophical nonsense" stuff:

  Such metaphysical sentences—into which we can be misled by the logical shortcomings of natural languages—are revealed to be pseudo-sentences by logical analysis. They are nonsense, in the sense of not having any theoretical content; they are not answers to any coherently expressible questions.
TBH, I think the answer to such things might be: revise the traditional list of fallacies. what a task this would be though..

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#125

Post by narag »

Rochus wrote: post #120

So someone stopped visiting HN ten years ago. Is this really worth a post on HN and more than a hundred comments? Personally, I can't understand the statements of the person concerned; what bothers me more are those posts that don't contribute anything relevant to technological development. Basically, I find HN very helpful and both a good source of information and inspiration. The discussions are also generally quit…

It's interesting for me, because I didn't realize at the time that the things that bother me now were present then. The author seems to be more sensitive than me like ten years more.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#126

Post by usr1106 »

That is from 2010.

Does anybody have the facts handy? How many posts per day now and then? Velocity of the front page? Comments per article?

HN has an API, so it's probably not difficult to get some data. But I have a day job and several hobbies already...

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#127

Post by henrik_w »

names_are_hard wrote: post #106

To me a large part of the value of HN is the back-catalog. When I'm researching something I frequently do a site:news.ycombinator.com search on DuckDuckGo to see what HN users have to say about the topic. I've been doing this for a long time, only recently I decided to get over my fear of participating in the internet and created an account to comment now and then when I have something to say. And I can see how parti…

Ditto for looking at older posts/discussions. I usually use https://hn.algolia.com/ when searching Hacker News though.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#128

Post by goto11 »

narag wrote: post #122
names_are_hard wrote: post #106

To me a large part of the value of HN is the back-catalog. When I'm researching something I frequently do a site:news.ycombinator.com search on DuckDuckGo to see what HN users have to say about the topic. I've been doing this for a long time, only recently I decided to get over my fear of participating in the internet and created an account to comment now and then when I have something to say. And I can see how parti…

To me a large part of the value of HN is the back-catalog. That's not a very flattering thing to say. I do the same as you. Yesterday I wanted information about Monero and did the site: trick with good results. What I find annoying is the partisan chilling effect. Not just discussions about politics, that I try to avoid because I know it's doomed. But about anything. There is a front-page technical programming discus…

Do you have some examples of quality technical comments (conforming to the guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) being downvoted to hell? (Not disputing you at all, just curious for some concrete examples.)

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#129

Post by rjtavares »

gherkinnn wrote: post #15
LeCow wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto. On Reddit even a percieved differing opinion results in hate mail, insulting and shouting. It's one of the reasons I never signed up to Twitter.

Twitter has to be the worst major platform. It is a rollercoaster of misery, disgust, and annoyance. And there isn’t even a proverbial nugget in the turd to make it worth it.

But there is, as long as you stay within people with 5k to 50k followers, particularly in niche fields, and use mute words often.

Re: Why I stopped reading HN (2010)

#130

Post by Chris2048 »

tom_mellior wrote: post #9
httpsterio wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the best thing here is active moderation weeding out the most negative and unhelpful comments, trying to keep the discussions civil. It's hard and requires a lot of effort but HN is a good example of what it can look like at best.

It could be better. Slashdot has (or maybe had, I haven't checked in a while) a way of associating votes with tags. So upvotes could be tagged "insightful" or "funny" or whatever, and downvotes tagged "flamebait" or "off-topic" or others. Especially for downvotes I would often be interested in this kind of quick feedback.

former link site "sensibleerection.com" had similar, where votes for category, and votes for value where separate.

As such you could get +20 flamebait, for a popular or welcome flamebait post,

or -10 funny, and so on - the tags where not inherently good or bad.

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