ASML reports fire at its Berlin factory

I just had a huge thread of others repeating over and over that I was wrong, without actually addressing what I wrote. That's why the thread got so huge.

The one thing I'm aware of that you can do, to help dampen the nationalistic emotions and flames that spring up around this topic, is to scrupulously make your comments as factual and as neutral as possible. If you let your frustrations leak into your posts in any way, readers who disagree will take that as license to respond with 10x of their own.

This isn't easy to do, but it does help. It's not, unfortunately, a sufficient condition to avoid getting flamey responses on this topic. I wish it were, because it's a big problem and becoming worse. (I even made a specific list of moderation comments about this because the issue comes up so often: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod. There's no other issue I've felt compelled to do that about so far.)

Bad as the situation is, though, I would not underestimate the persuasive power of a commenter who's able to keep their cool and stay flamebait free in everything they post on a divisive topic. It's a judo move in the end because the ones who respond with flames effectively single themselves out as not having good arguments. But the judo move only works if you preserve the asymmetry—i.e. if both parties are flaming, then they're discrediting themselves equally and it's a wash. If only one party is, then the other one wins by default. It doesn't feel that way in the moment (I feel the tug to respond-in-kind as much as anyone!) but when you go back and look at those threads later once the ashes are cold, it's quite clear.

Edit 2: There's one other thing you can do to dampen flaminess and increase the persuasive power of your own comments, although it's not always easy either. That is to find some point of relational contact with the person(s) you're arguing with. The most straightforward way to do this is to find something to agree with in what they're saying; or, failing that, to find some way of supporting the positive intention behind what they're saying.

The reason this works is that when people are arguing, they're inevitably arguing on two different channels simultaneously: (1) disagreement about the topic—that's the obvious one; but also (2) what each person thinks of the other. When the disagreement in channel #1 is so stark that neither party can find anything to agree with or respect in what the other person is saying, it inflames channel #2 and starts to feel like a struggle to defend one's self against attack. In other words, it starts to feel like a fight to the death (this is absurd on the internet, but this stuff all relates to hard-wiring from long ago). Survival instincts start to get engaged. When people feel like their survival is at stake, they'll resort to literally anything. In internet forum threads, that means lots of the worst kind of flamewar, including "are you being paid to do this" and much worse.

However. In a way similar to the 'judo move' I mentioned above, you can turn this to your advantage—and not only to your advantage, but everyone's advantage, by finding ways to reduce the pressure on channel #2. That's what I mean by "finding some point of relational contact". If you can do this, you're basically sending the message "I don't want to kill you" on the side channel, or—less melodramatically—"I'm not trying to vanquish you, I just want to find the truth together". When people negotiate that successfully on the side channel, the discussion on channel #1 (the actual topic) magically becomes more meaningful and interesting. But of course it has to be done with subtlety—not in the manipulative sense, but just in a way that genuinely respects the other person and allows them to feel heard and save face.

This is stuff we have a lot of ways to take care of automatically in person, without even realizing we're doing it, but because things like tone of voice and body language aren't available online, it's easy to fall into the worst interpersonal situations very quickly. Part of the challenge of developing a good forum culture (which is what we want to do here) is developing a new set of techniques that can map what we do instinctively in physical space into virtual space, in a way that leads to more complex and more interesting conversation. I don't think this is easy at all, so I don't think it's so terrible that it's taking us decades to get there. I do think it's a good idea though.

--- original comment: ---

Honestly I think the only thing it really made sense to do with that one was to remember and practice this site guideline: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) ...which is our euphemism for "please don't feed the trolls", which strikes me as probably the wisest thing the internet ever said.

The reason I say that is that there literally wasn't any information in the comment to rebut—just a smear ("are you paid to do this") and a bunch of name-calling and innuendo. If you try to rebut it, you're forced to go to a non-factual, name-calling level just because there was nothing else there.

Of course it's frustrating, not least because it takes time for enough flags to build up and/or moderator attention to get attracted, but in the end the system takes care of these things fairly easily. You can always email hn@ycombinator.com in egregious cases to speed that process up.

(Separately, in case anyone feels I've been too harsh here: I don't mean to pick on chx - it's easy to make these mistakes when emotions are high. But important to learn not to.)

I think that to a significant extent it's not actually absurd for such political debates "to feel like a fight to the death". Death is the currency of politics; the reason for the anti-China propaganda in the US and the anti-US propaganda in China is specifically in order to facilitate organized killing, because organized killing is how states stand or fall; it's what distinguishes the state from other forms of organization.

Even in arguably less consequential cases, like what happened to my friend Aaron or to Julian Assange, successful political factionalism can provide the factions who have control of the state with the opportunity to kill their individual enemies. (I can't count how many people I saw repeat the argument that Assange should give himself up to stand trial for rape, a trial everyone can now see was never in the cards.) At a scale in between, we have the drug war, which enabled Nixon, Biden, and their allies to imprison tens of millions of hippies and black people (who were inclined to vote against them) and strip them of voting rights. This directly killed many of them, forced others into violent prison gangs, and reduced their ability to organize politically to resist further damaging policies. And of course political debates over the death penalty and healthcare directly determine who gets to live and who has to die.

Even when there's no state, there's factional violence, so politics still determine who lives and dies.

So I don't think the humans are necessarily wrong when they feel that their lives are at stake in discussions about these divisive topics. No individual forum thread will, probably, determine their survival (though the HN thread where Aaron begged for help and mostly got told to suck it up might count as one) but the aggregate shifts in public opinion that emerge from the discourse will, ultimately, kill many of them.

In a broader sense, though, nobody's survival is at stake, because everybody who posting on this thread, every human alive today, is going to die. Their survival is a lost cause; their death is only a matter of time, and none of them has very much time left, a few decades at most. So the survival instinct, strong though it is, is the most futile of all human instincts.

So let's say that we have a democracy by that definition, for example Myanmar — a big garment exporter — in 2020 or so. The 2020 elections were described by international organisations as "free and fair".

Should the result of the coup d'état that happened shortly after those elections be that not only do the garment workers lose their right to vote in future free and fair elections, but they also lose their jobs when the factories are closed due to foreign countries introducing their "don't trade with non-democracies" policy? Do we think that would improve or worsen the situation?

It's not an easy choice when human lives hang in the balance. My view is that allowing authoritarians to entrench themselves for years, generations, possibly centuries is by far worse. We know that democracy is a fragile state of affairs. It rarely occurs without a violent overthrow of the elite and often doesn't last very long. Despotism, on the other hand, is common and long lasting because it is unabashed about cowing people through violence, torture, murder, blackmail, and all the other evils you can imagine. If we want to keep our freedom we must continually resist all attempts to take it.