Ah yes, I remember this article. Oddly enough, this is a major reason why I still enjoy browsing HN. There are few places left that cover a variety of topics while also encouraging this open style of discussion.
Someone needs to do a deep cognitive study of how memes, especially in image form, affect cognition during discourse. Whatever is going on it seems obvious that their presence immediately reverts people to a juvenile junior high level of discussion at best.
They also seem to lead to the development of this kind of obscure signaling culture hive mind. I don't even know how to describe it. In Star Trek TNG they called it the "borg songs," the sort of emotional-cultural carrier wave that pervaded the Borg collective.
Meme-dominated sites like 4chan immediately turn me off. I find that whole style creepy and culty and gross and it feels like some kind of soft mind control technique. I felt this way long before 4chan became "Stormfront for nerds," but the fact that this style if discourse would create an environment compatible with that way of thinking doesn't shock me at all.
Sometimes people are really cool. Sometimes people are fools. The fools make good points sometimes. The cool people can be the worst. The roles are fluid. I've had my fool moments.
dang, who I assume is a cyborg driven by several different mods, generally makes good calls. There aren't many places online where I feel like I can point out a problem to the mods and not worry about being called an idiot. Or banned.
You could even argue that being "apolitical" actually means that your political opinion is that the status quo is acceptable, which other people may disagree with. For instance, some people believe that selling water is unethical because it's a basic human need which you should always have free access to -- saying that the status quo is acceptable means that you don't think that for-sale water is unethical. There's nothing wrong with that opinion, but it is an opinion (and a political one at that).
Make a polite, clear-headed enough argument for something like eugenics and people will upvote you. It's troubling, but I can make a pro-socialism post under the same conditions. It's an uneasy peace.
I agree with this. I see Cultural Hegemony (domination-justification stories) being very strong in unexpected places. Family members or close friends who indirectly benefit from the artificial scarcity mechanisms (in SV especially Intellectual Property) that make up the various social class realities of rentier capitalism [1]. What seperates me and a mother of three in Bangladesh, who is getting paid starvation wages making the designer clothes I wear [2], is that I was lucky enough to have been born in the global North, in an upper-middle class family. I was able to grow up on the inside of the fort, and benefit from a rich inheritance [3].
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706668
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22705507
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13110004
Sorry if that sounded snarky—I don't mean to pick on you personally, and I don't disbelieve you. But the perception is explicable by the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
How can we know for sure we are right or even on the good side, whatever "good" means?
From that perspective, the lowest common denominator is that bad is what harms humanity, e.g. by disregarding human rights. Human rights then becomes the new frame of reference, meaning that something can't be good if it's not within that frame.
The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns. The message-board intellectualism that might once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an intellectual style all its own. Hacker News readers who visit the site to learn how engineers and entrepreneurs talk, and what they talk about, can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots trained on libertarian economics blogs, “The Tim Ferriss Show,” and the work of Yuval Noah Harari.
Not sure whether to agree or disagree.