Re:Law of Jante
by paulddraper on Saturday September 30, 2017 @07:08PM
(#15375457)
If you oppose genercism, you cut the thread too late; it's the previous one that discusses large vs small communities ...with zero support or examples. The comment you refer to was the more specific one on that subject.
I considered that, but your comment was the one that really unmoored from the specifics. The parent comment was still tied to the topic, and pretty obviously not intended as an attack on small towns.
The site guidelines say "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." Had you followed that, I bet you wouldn't have reacted the way you did. It's doable but it takes a conscious effort, one that many users (including me) have had to make.
It's up to each of us to prevent this, just like we don't light cigarettes at gas stations or let campfires smolder in dry forests. That's not hard. I feel like Smokey the Bear.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
May I suggest ten close readings of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15374168 (once for each comment currently in this off-topic subthread) as a good example of what we do want: substantive, grounded in experience, civil, teaching something new.
Edit: I want to add something about the mechanism at work here. Not to pick on you, but as an illustration for everyone.
If we look at the path taken by this subthread, what can we say about it? It gets consistently more generic. That is, it starts with something specific (a self-observation of Scandinavian culture), swaps that out for something much more generic (small towns: good or bad?), goes to more generic and inflammatory things (gang violence) and then to informational heat death ("Religions can inspire peace or war").
So we can sum up how to avoid the unwanted this way: Don't go generic. Note that that's not the same thing as "don't go off-topic". Going off topic can be fine if the direction is interesting. The trouble with the generic is that's predictable and seductive, producing not only the uninteresting but a lot of it.
(I might come back and add more here. If there's one point I wish I could effectively communicate to the HN community this thing about not going generic is it, because it makes the difference between interesting and lame discussion.)