The very fact that that post had a lot of comments with, collectively, a lot of upvotes is proof that HN is not what it used to be. :/
Perhaps more than a glance is appropriate before flagging items?
"I was probably also influenced by the quality of the discussion."
Wouldn't down-voting the particular comment(s) you don't like be more appropriate?
Perhaps, but I don't think so in this case. The main reason I flagged it was not the 'paradox' but because it's not a direction I want to see HN going. If a rabbi and a priest walk into a bar, I'd flag it regardless of whether the punchline is hilarious. I'd agree that the moderator should take more than a glance.
Wouldn't down-voting the particular comment(s) you don't like be more appropriate?
I can't really assess 'appropriate', but it certainly wouldn't have been as effective. Knocking a 'funny' comment down from 16 to 15 points wouldn't have even been noticed, whereas using the flag to call it to the attention of a moderator for review had the effect I hoped for.
I don't know the submission volume of HN, but I'd guess it's sufficient that a glance is all one can afford.
1) "random process" was undefined.
2) There was no limitation given as to choosing nothing or more than one answer.
3) At best the discussion might have been amusing, but that's just trolling IMO.
PS: I thought about it for a while before flagging it.
> A paradox is not an interesting thing.
> It's just a sign that your assumptions are wrong.
That's not true for unexpected results, which are often incorrectly called paradoxes, but it does seem to be true for real paradoxes. They have led to major innovations and advances in math.
The discussion I had with Ray was years ago now, and I don't remember the details, but I think you are mistaken in dismissing paradoxes as "just a sign that your assumptions are wrong."
Additionally, all the objections you raise can be clarified and the problem made more precise, losing the pithiness, but without losing the paradoxical nature. "Random process" can easily be defined clearly, and you can add the limitation about choosing exactly one answer.
For a basic paradox like "This sentence is a lie" there are more options than true or false. Other things are best answered with "your asking the wrong question" etc. But, once you walk though the basic options paradoxes are just another example of the same thing.
PS: Yellow void toe air zen bubble toy 4:72 PM lisa. Not all collections of words have meaning.
Paradoxes in the true mathematical sense are useful in mathematics, and I thought that many here on HN would find that they sufficiently provoke their intellectual curiosity to be regarded on topic.
However, clearly you disagree, so clearly we disagree. I found the submission interesting, the discussion less so, and wish the inappropriate comments had been flagged/killed to allow the interesting and contentful discussion to flow. That's not what happened.
People complain that HN has jumped the shark, and the submissions are of poor quality. Personally I think it's the inappropriate comments that are dragging HN down, the insistance by so many to add largely content-free and insight-free comments. And yes, I admit that I've done it too.
PG says that the greatest threat to HN isn't the poor quality of submission, but the poor quality of comment. Perhaps submissions should die less often, and comment be killed more often.
Perhaps not. I don't have solutions, but I do know that this submission was a paradox, and that some true paradoxes are of interest and use in formal mathematics. Others aren't - it would be interesting to know if this is the former, and that's what I'll be exploring with some of my colleagues over the next few days.
Good reply, and good points. It's probably a better paradox than I thought at a glance.
But while one doesn't want to throw out too many babies with the bathwater, at least with fruit trees, it's often better to prune too much than too little. You might get less fruit this year, but you end up with a stronger tree and better root system.
In this case, I think the better solution would be to make a page about the paradox, and link to that. It's hard to know, but I think a more fully fleshed out blog post about the paradox might have produced better discussion.
So, don't read to much into Gödel, you also can't prove 1 + 1 = 2 except by making an equivalent assumption. Yet, that does not mean what you think it means.
PS: I don't think HN has jumped the shark, but I do try and keep it clean. IMO, it was fairly close to the acceptable line but to close to the HN equivalent of a funny cat photo, (hey look a paradox how cute), but a longer post taking about a well defined paradox and it's implications would have been acceptable and had a much cleaner discussion.
It may also be that I just didn't get it. At a glance, it looked like a semantic game rather than a worthy paradox. Why should one presume that a multiple choice question has one and only one correct answer?
I was probably also influenced by the quality of the discussion. When I started reading, the top voted answer was "It is answerable... with a swift kick to the balls of the person asking it", followed by geek jokes about this answer. This didn't seem like a good start. Perhaps I should have flagged only this response, rather than the whole post.