Please don't post like this. Your comment got upvoted to the top of the thread, of course, and sat there accruing mass, choking out interesting discussion. Now that I've marked it off topic, consider that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22968349 is now the top subthread. That's the difference between HN functioning well and functioning poorly.

Most of the damage is caused by the upvotes and replies, but that's what happens when you post something trollish to an inflammatory topic.

Edit: on closer inspection, 22968349 is not so great either because if there's anything interesting to discuss about blood irradiation, it's probably not related to Covid-19.

You know, It's pretty frustrating to be accused of trollishness about a simple opinion which is sincerely held, widely shared and well-founded. If an older relative of yours told you to irradiate your blood against a virus and try ingesting some disinfectants, wouldn't you worry about their mental state at least a little bit?

To be honest, baiting people into discussing this quackery is the actual troll here and I'm genuinely interest why people take the bait. When the media does this, the simple explanation is that they're optimizing for ads. Great, that makes sense, but what's happening here? It's not like this is an astro-turf either, the discussion looks back-and-forth. Is asking people for introspection trolling?

When you call me a troll, you're not calling me a troll in the classical sense of someone posting crap to get a rise out of people. What you're trying to get at is something more subtle - the way a person has an allergy, this particular community has outsized reactions from otherwise very benign opinions, and that I should be aware of these allergies and know not to post them here. But these are not obvious allergies at all and very much at odds with a place that considers itself a place to satiate your intellectual curiosity.

> To be honest, baiting people into discussing this quackery is the actual troll here and I'm genuinely interest why people take the bait. When the media does this, the simple explanation is that they're optimizing for ads. Great, that makes sense, but what's happening here?

I imagine it's a feeling of "I'm smart enough to rise above partisan politics" or "I'm smart enough to go against the status quo." In other words, people who believe they're smart enough to avoid getting manipulated, when in fact it's not a matter of smarts at all.

Right, I'm using the word "trollish" in the sense of the effects the post had. That's the only thing that can be observed and the only thing that matters for moderation: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (I was careful not to call you a troll; this is about posts, not persons.)

"Asking people for introspection" is a skewed way of describing your original comment. If that was your intention, you should go about it in some way that isn't guaranteed to start a flamewar. I don't think these "allergies" are in any way obscure.

Ditto for "very benign opinions". If that was your intention, you should not be breaking the site guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: I realized that it might be helpful if I mentioned the other aspect of why I posted what I did. You have a long history of breaking the site guidelines. We've asked you many times to stop that. If this weren't a longstanding pattern I'd probably have reacted differently, but it is a longstanding pattern, so please fix it.

It is not the only the only thing that can be observed or that matters for moderation. You prioritization of civility above all else is being exploited by trolls, something I've pointed out on many occasions.

This paper goes into considerable detail about how the suppression of disputes actually fosters an increase in bad behavior by preventing community members from repelling raids by trolls. By not allowing anyone other than yourself to call out bullshit, you're soliciting more of it. You acknowledged above that this is an inflammatory topic but you are spending your efforts on restraining the very people pointing that out.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3178876.3186141

My point there was narrow: originally the word "troll" referred to intent (the intent to derail discussion, or whatever). But we can't observe intent, so that isn't a useable concept for moderation. If you try to moderate a site like HN and use the word "troll" in that original sense, people simply reply that it wasn't their intent to wreak havoc, as if that settles the issue. Actually it doesn't settle it. If someone starts a flamewar and the thread goes to hell, does it matter if they intended to? The house has burned down either way.

After a while it dawns on you (me) that whatever someone's inner state is when they post doesn't much matter anyhow—what matters are the observable effects that a post produces. Those are what we react to and base moderation on. When I say that a post was trollish I mean it had that sort of effect on the thread, intentionally or otherwise. I was hoping that linking to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... would make this point clear and that I could get away with just referring to it, but maybe not.

This is a narrow point since it's about the use of a particular word, but it's a word that gets a rise out of people (ironically, I suppose?) and tends to make them feel like they're being personally deemed a "troll", when the point is about posts, not persons. I mostly use the word "flamebait" as a way to just avoid the issue.

Re "prioritization of civility above all else", that's not my view at all and it's a misrepresentation of how we moderate HN. If you said "prioritization of intellectual curiosity above all else", we would actually have something to discuss. Maybe you disagree that that should be the goal? Maybe you think we do a shitty job of it, in this case or even in every case? All that is fine, but being argued with about something that we neither think about nor try to do feels weirdly disconnecting.

"Not allowing anyone other than yourself to call out bullshit" strikes me as a bizarre thing to say. Users do that on HN all the time, which is why the site survives. We ask them to do it while remaining within the site guidelines, which is not only possible but more effective.

That paper looks interesting!

Dan, when you keep saying things like 'HN is not for internet ragewar', manually moving the top comment because it's contentious, and saying users should know better, that's the prioritization of civility I'm talking about.

In terms of "prioritization of intellectual curiosity above all else" then you are just opening the door to disingenuous bait posts, glib hyper-pedantry, sealioning, and various other trolling tactics. Of course HN exists for intellectual curiosity, but if that's the only mode of operation then it can be gamed, and it is.

Search on 'guidelines' in this thread and you can see people using the 'good faith assumption/strongest possible interpretation' guidelines to bait others. You're arguing that bullshit is called out on HN all the time, but you shut down people doing so in anything other than polite terms.

Regarding that paper, I urge you to pay particular attention to the comparison of successful vs. unsuccessful defensive strategies, and the fact that successful ones are correlated with higher use of anger words. Your antipathy to flames is what the posters of flamebait rely on to deploy more and more of it. Even if you kick accounts that regularly post flamebait, there's little cost to creating a new one and resuming the practice.

Much like forests, the occasional fire can significantly improve the quality of the overall environment. If you suppress fires so diligently that brush is allowed to build up, then the result can be catastrophic. In this metaphor, the brush is bad-faith discussion and wilfully fallacious arguments.

I think you need to be a bit more hands-off about this and accept that a certain amount of conflict and aggression in fact contribute to sustainability. While that might deter some obscure-but-interesting posts like the one today, the fact is that they will be just as interesting on their merits if posted in a week or two after the news-of-the-day focus has moved elsewhere.

I don't think you're characterizing HN accurately. If you want to convince me, I'd need to see more convincing examples.

The lesson in this case is not that a generic flamewar about Trump belongs at the top of the #1 thread on HN. If the argument is that I shouldn't have moderated that, I disagree and am pretty sure the community would disagree.

Rather, the lesson in this case is that, because the topic was attracting attention because Trump, this was the worst possible moment for HN to be discussing ultraviolet blood irradiation. A curious discussion was not possible. Thus I downweighted the submission off the front page at the same time as I moderated that flamewar.

I think your fire analogy is off. A better one would be fires in a city, and those don't promote quality. Quite the opposite.

We've been having this argument for several years and there is more trolling than ever. In past email conversation i've given you examples of people organizing on 8chan to target threads here. You always end up saying you need more convincing examples. Fine, if you want to wallow in toxicity at source go look at kiwifarms.net or /tech/ forums on imageboards for examples of both targeting HN stories directly and general discussions of waging cultural warfare in the social space around technology.

I think your fire analogy is off. An occasional conflagration in a highly-populated city doesn't do anything to promote the quality of the environment. Quite the opposite.

Since I made an explicit analogy to a forest, rewriting it to be about something else kind of makes my point for me.

> In past email conversation i've given you examples of people organizing on 8chan to target threads here

When? I don't remember that, and I just searched the email archive and didn't find it. I found a mention of 8chan, but not with examples, and certainly not with links to people organizing to target threads here—which is hardly something we would be disagreeing about. Obviously that's abusive.

Hold on a second. You said you emailed me examples. I ask when, because none of your emails contained anything like that, and your response is "Do you really need to be spoon fed?" That doesn't seem right.

I can't find anything about HN at your third link. The others don't seem to contain much, but I'll take another look tomorrow.

(p.s. HN's software autokilled your comment for what I hope are obvious reasons.)

Why pretend that Trump _isn't_ spreading damaging misinformation during a pandemic? I don't see why HN needs to have some false sense of neutrality to be "functioning well".

What HN needs in order to function well is not be taken over by political rage-threads, which are not about intellectual curiosity (for one thing, they're all the same).

Don't you see how if:

* An ignorant authoritarian with an obvious agenda sets the discussion topic

* We discuss said topic without mentioning his ignorance, authoritarianism, or agenda

The topic effectively becomes "laundered"? Much like OP, I've seen this over and over again. Trump (or similar) says something batshit insane, a "well, maybe..." topic gets bumped to the front page, political discussion gets culled from the thread, topic gets somewhat normalized. And so the koo-koo express keeps chugging towards the cliff.

I partly agree but would put it differently. When an obscure topic (like ultraviolet blood irradiation) is connected to some trigger in the daily news, people will end up arguing about the daily news rather than delving into the obscure topic. So from an HN point of view, that's the worst time for the topic to appear. HN should be countercyclical instead. This case has made that even clearer to me than it already was.

At the same time, HN is not for internet ragewar and users here should know enough not to feed those flames.

This thread might make me quit visiting this site.

Don't worry, you can replace him with another old man with dementia come November.

Please don't take HN threads even further into political flamewar. That's going the wrong way down a one-way street.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Do you actually know he has dementia, or are you just speculating?

I have no idea on his current mental capabilities, but I want to remind everyone that is trying to diagnose him that he has a well documented and lifelong battle with a speech impediment. Stammering, stuttering, or mixing up words is more likely to be a sign of that condition than of dementia.

He's been way worse than he was in 2008.

Speech impediments can often take a substantial amount of effort and concentration to combat. They also aren't necessarily something that is overcome and then you are "fixed" and never have to think about again. They can often resurface when tired, stressed, drunk, or otherwise not at peak mental ability. The guy is obviously 12 years older than he was in 2008 and is likely more stressed and working harder as presidential nominee than he did as a nominee for VP. Like I said before, I don't know his mental capabilities and maybe there is some underlying problem there. However lots of the evidence I see can easily be attributed to that previously disclosed condition which by itself provides no indication of a lack of intelligence or coherence.

He seems to have trouble reading off a teleprompter and making a complete sentence. It seems intermittent.

Seems consistent with his speech impediment, no?

They don't. All of the "evidence" here is cherry-picked clips where Biden stumbles for 2 seconds within an hour-long speech. Even now, Biden's a far better speaker than all the people snidely passing these clips around.

We shall see about that in the debates.

He certainly does not appear capable of coherent thought or speech which is a little concerning given the job he is applying for.

And that's the sad state of the US right now. Still can't believe how the media black listed Bernie unless it was to discuss anything negative, no matter how minute.

Who is also rapidly approaching 80. It's really sad that the whole political establishment in the US is so old. Pelosi, McConnell, Trump, Biden. And they don't let young people come up. With "young" I mean 50 and still at the peak of their abilities and not going downhill.

They're just bartenders afterall.

He is, apparently, now claiming he was being 'sarcastic', thus indicating that he also has no idea what the word sarcastic means.

> There's tons of people like him, you don't have to waste your time on them.

Unfortunately, the broader 'you' (society) _kind of does_; I know this is nonsense, but lots of people don't, and when he's promoting dangerous behavior that's a problem (see chloroquine).

This "famous person" was selected to serve as the head of state by the citizens of the country with the second largest nuclear weapons arsenal. His pronouncements have the force of official public policy.

That may be, but neither the size of one's nuclear arsenal nor "official public policy" turns pseudoscience into an effective treatment.

> His pronouncements have the force of official public policy.

Your periodic reminder that the US is not in fact a dictatorship, and that random ex-cathedra rambling by Trump does not have the force of law.

Just because some of his trial balloons are abandoned to drift away on the winds of public ridicule does make it OK. What of the fact that his tweets are often followed up with orders that do have the force of law?

> country

Is that the US or Russia?

(Light hearted comment for a non serious thread!)

Please don't add nationalistic flamebait to partisan flamebait on HN. Adding damage to damage doesn't lighten hearts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry.

This was me throwing peanuts at a thread that I had hoped would get flagged into the abyss anyway, and already by my reading contained a lot of ironic Friday afternoon eye rolling. A certain sense of gallows humor here, I felt.

I can see my comment is pretty damaging if it gets any actual views (which I didn’t expect it to, but that’s no excuse!)

In another setting it might make a good womp womp dad joke — as intended — but not here.

After he lost the popular vote. Other elected representatives selected him.

That isn't how the Electoral College works these days. It varies by state, but generally each candidate chooses their own slate of Electors who are loyal to the candidate, and upon winning a plurality of votes, that candidate's entire slate of Electors are made, by state law, the Electors for that state.

It's important to note that in no possible way can Electors be considered elected representatives. This often isn't even public information available prior to the election, and your ballot contains none of the names of these Electors. Your vote for presidential candidate A, is really a vote for presidential candidate A's slate of chosen and loyal Electors.

This is in contrast to Federalist 68, which describes a system whereby non-politicians chosen by the people from among the people, at a state level, are to become the Electors for that state. The intent was to make the College both a deliberative body, and external to state politics.

In practice, Federalist 68's vision of how the Electoral College would work never happened. Early on in the country's history the president was indirectly chosen by state legislatures choosing the Electors.

In any case, what we have today are arguably the absolute worst people possible chosen to be Electors: party loyalists. In most states they are even required by law to be non-deliberative, i.e. not vote their conscience but strictly for the candidate who selected them. Since none of the details of how the Electors are chosen or the process they use to make decisions is constitutional law, the states can change how it works.

I’m confused, can you clarify you are referring to?

Edit: In what way was Trump “selected” and not elected by the rules laid out in the constitution?

Edit2: So not selected, and yes entirely by the rules we’ve always used.

In the US, the public doesn't vote for the president directly. They elect electors for their state who then vote for the president. This system is called the electoral college and the net result is that a candidate can win the popular vote (the majority of voters voted for them) without winning the presidency. This has happened many times in US history, and it happened most recently in 2016.

Well, only four times:

1867: Tilden (4,288,546) - Hayes (4,034,311) - Hayes wins. 1888: Harrison (5,443,892) - Cleveland (5,534,488) - Harrison wins. 2000: Bush (50,456,002) - Gore (50,999,897) - Bush wins 2016: Clinton (65,853,514) - Trump (62,984,828) - Trump wins.

To further confuse the issue, 2 Republican electors and 5 Democratic electors _voted for other candidates_ in 2016, though it wasn't significant in the end.

In the American electoral system, you don't technically vote for the president; you vote for the electors who elect the president. This almost never matters, except quite often.

That's not how it works. The ramblings of the president do not have any legal force.

As the head of the executive branch, that's exactly how it works.

Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted. Public statements in the official capacity as president are absolutely policy statements for the executive when they aren't affecting independent bodies like the Department of Justice. The Department of Health and Human Services isn't an independent body, and so the president's statements in a damn press briefing are policy positions.

This is like saying that a CEO's press statements somehow aren't policy positions of the company.

Many people have been trying to figure out if that's true or not.

Like all the times the President has announced a new policy on Twitter, but none of the people who would be responsible for implementing it knew about it or understood the specifics of what he actually wanted to happen.

You don't actually have to listen to this person if the things they say are reliably without merit. Our nuclear weapons have nothing to do with the situation, and I don't imagine there is any risk of that situation changing.

He also won, with fewer votes than his competition, while only half of eligible voters cast ballots.

You're allowed to view this person as illegitimate. Sometimes the situation necessitates that we do that.

> He also won, with fewer votes than his competition, while only half of eligible voters cast ballots.

I don’t think that’s right. The presidential vote count in the 2016 election was 304 Trump to 227 Clinton [0]. And all 50 states voted. What system are you going by?

> You're allowed to view this person as illegitimate

Yes, you are. The constitution grants all sorts of protections from the government for ideas right or wrong. However... If you are using said constitution’s rules for how STATES vote for president, not people vote for president...

[0] https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/2016

Edit: I’m confused by reaction, where is the incorrect part here?

Edit2: Oh, the reaction is emotional. I see

I think it's pretty clear "votes" meant what's known in the US as "the popular vote," not "electoral votes," particularly since it's impossible, under the US election system, to win the presidential elections with fewer electoral votes than the opponent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia...

But that’s not the voting system we use. So, no, Trump didn’t win with fewer “votes” if we’re at all being intellectually honest about what votes matter.

This site is all about intellectuals being honest and arguing in good faith using the steel man method right?

Edit: “Stop” what? Are the rules of this site not steel man arguments with intellectual honesty? I’m genuinely confused and not trolling at all - where I have posted something incorrect? Because Dang, if the content isn’t correct, why is the post now flagged? If it’s correct info and -10 or so... isn’t that a problem that creates an echo chamber?

Please stop.

Occam's Razor: people are just found this curious at this point in time.

no need for conspiracy theory that a cabal of trump supporters are jumping on to find a theory backing his absurd clamis.

> as soon as a certain famous snake oil peddler starts yammering about his n-th insane theory

You mean Donald Trump or Michael R. Hamblin? Because if it's the first (as a comment downthread implies) then I must've missed a big story, and if the second, then I personally haven't heard this name before.

I'm guessing most HNers are like me: drawn to interesting ideas that seem to make sense on the surface. Here, UV light is a known and powerful disinfectant (and seemingly very much underused in this pandemic), ionizing radiation is commonly used in medicine, and applying it as a blood filter sounds like a plausible idea - so overall, sounds like a compelling reason to check out the article and the comment section.

>ecause if it's the first (as a comment downthread implies) then I must've missed a big story

Yeah but it was more like a slow news day than a big story. Yesterday President Trump said this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHkzqejFKbM

And the media reacted as expected.

Oh, I see. Thanks for the missing context!

Look, nobody is convinced that this was posted here in good faith, nor do we have any reason to believe that people like you who are pushing for a "discussion" about this are motivated by anything other than supporting Donald Trump's declarations.

If this technology were effective, we would already be using it. This isn't some secret cure that we forgot about - it's an ineffective treatment that we did away with.

Focusing on this topic isn't for the benefit of COVID-19 patients during this crisis - it's for the benefit of Donald Trump's reelection as he gambles on snake oil cures for this virus.

So maybe ask yourself what you care about more: Human life, or politics?

He asked a question, he didn't peddle a theory.

A function of these press conferences is that he is communicating to the American people. Not the time or the place to "ask questions" about "injecting disinfectants" or spitballing with his advisors.

Edit: Apparently he was being "sarcastic". Unbelievable. https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1253736546534141963

(Following a discussion of viral half-life on surfaces when exposed to UV):

"So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that hasn't been checked but you're going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting."

There was more about possibly injecting disinfectants but you get the drift. As of a few minutes ago he's saying that he 'asking a question sarcastically to see what would happen.' https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/494519-trump-say...

I'm reminded of this cartoon: https://www.lovethispic.com/uploaded_images/29513-What-Troll...

He asked a question about an unsubstantiated theory that nobody was talking about in the medical field.

Even if he was "normal" politician, we shouldn't be listening to politicians about medical advice, and they shouldn't be pushing pseudoscience contrary to what medical professionals and virologists are saying.

Asking loaded questions about pseudoscience, that implies that there is some sort of promise in it, absolutely counts as peddling it.

Ok boomer, keep wearing your facemask that will keep you safe. Surely

Please don't respond to a bad comment with a worse one. That's in the site guidelines also: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Ever thought that perhaps presidents get a quick rundown of what potential cures the US government is looking at? And this is fairly standard practice, and as mentioned below there might be some legitimate ideas to use UV.

The fact that he went off script and talked about things that aren’t confirmed and are speculation is not good, but he did say it was speculation.

Yes he should be more responsible in his comms as president, but your attitude of automatic dismissal and thinking he’s an idiot is exactly why he managed to get elected under the radar.