Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident

There are many (some strikes, some protests):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings

* https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/childrens-crusade

* https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/media/demonstrators-attack...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877

> if you are asking if violence is OK to fight violence, it always is. I guess I personally did not think that needs justification but 100% you can (and should) fight violence with violence

I wasn't asking that, but you were (sorta) vis-à-vis the justification question ;) My main point was to say that it seems strange that a crowd of folks that consider themselves "thinkers" would simply table the discussion of the use of force. I do not like discussions tabled simply because they seem indecent - that tells me they're probably important to have.

But to your point: if it is ok to 100% use force against force, why? If a federal agent were to show up at someone's door to and force them into a labor camp, where they would probably meet their death slowly - if the person decided to try to use force to fight the federal agent and take a chance on a better life than the camp, would their use of force be justified in your eyes? And taken a bit further and sort of building on the first example, what is the difference between someone using force against an employee of a company pursuing a goal whose technology is being used to aid in the use of genocide against others for reasons _the company can justify_ (money) but they can't? Are they not complicit in the devaluation / loss of other people's lives? In Grug's terms, "why ok for us to hurt people if we think we right, but not ok for people to hurt us if they think they right?" (or something like that)

You seem to be making quite a few false assumptions about HN moderation—for example, that we left the current thread on the frontpage. In fact we downweighted it the same way we downweight other flamewars.

HN has had many major frontpage threads about Israel/Gaza. We haven't been suppressing the topic. I gather that you feel it should have more representation than it does, but that is a different issue; everyone feels that way about the topic they feel strongest about. Incidentally, the people on the opposite side from you believe that we're nefariously suppressing things in exactly the opposite direction, and direct their ire at us in much the same way that you have. (To put it crudely, we get hammered for antisemitism from one angle and genocide from another.)

You seem to be assuming that I'm not aware of what awful things people post in those threads. On the contrary, I'm sickeningly familiar with them and have banned many accounts for breaking the site guidelines there. If you know of a case that we missed—entirely possible, since we don't see everything—I'd like to see links. But you shouldn't assume that the moderators must be on the opposite side of an issue from you, or have no human feelings about it, when you happen to see something bad on HN. The likeliest explanation is simply that we haven't seen it yet.

There are many ways for a thread to be bad. You're right that people hurling tribal abuse at each other is one of those. However, even in the worst of those threads I don't usually see people justifying or celebrating specific violence against specific persons, and if I did see that, I would intervene. I think what shocked me in the current case was how the thread quickly turned into a mob dynamic with commenters vying to outdo each other, no doubt feeling that it is just fine to do that—indeed, righteous—because the object of the rage was $rich-ceo.

What I was saying is that a mob dynamic like that is not ok on HN even if the target is $rich-ceo. It's not "you can't do this on HN because the target is rich and powerful". It's "you can't do this on HN to anyone, even if they happen to be rich and powerful".

I gather that you won't believe me, since you've built an entire case on assuming the opposite. All I can tell you that it is a deep misunderstanding. I've intervened in many such threads many times, regardless of who it was that the commenters were celebrating harm to, or attempted harm.

As for the notion of treating one incident of failed violence as more important than mass slaughter of children, I agree with you that that would be grotesque.

Dysfunctional political systems tend to break the states monopoly on violence.

That's not really accurate in terms of how we moderate stories with political charge on HN. I've written about this many times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you or anyone want to understand how we actually approach this, all the information is accessible through those links.