Now you can argue that this is why the parent post is a flamebait, but since the sole fact that Cuba is such a small, socialist country is why this vaccin is interesting in the first place, you may as well ban this vaccin from being discussed on HN entirely.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
> you may as well ban this vaccin from being discussed on HN entirely
I'm sorry, but that makes no sense to me. The situation seems rather simple: non-flamebait, non-flamewar discussion of the vaccine story is welcome. Flamebait and flamewar, about this story or any other story, is not.
And separately: in the last 5 years i took a break from the Silicon Valley and spent most of the time in Latin America, traveling and learning Spanish. Check my IP history. Had to deal with the medical system and with the so called "Cuban doctors" in various countries. The original comment completely distorts the factual truth about Cuban medicine.
Original comment invited political flaming by throwing in the "great showing" jab at the end.
> I fail to see the "invitation" to flame honestly.
Many people will end up interpreting "A great showing for a small, socialist island nation under decades of embargo by hostile anti-communist forces." as "A great showing for a nation being oppressed and bullied for decades by the big bad US and its bully friends". And, well, the knee jerk reaction is to defend yourself if you think someone is accusing your country of bullying another country for no reason.
Do you? Agreeing with parent implies that you consider your own comment to be highly inflammatory (and implicitly against HN code of conduct etc.). If that is the case, you can take it down or edit it with an apology.
NOTE: I'm not saying I agree with parent, just pointing what seems to me to be a logical necessity stemming from your agreement with parent.
The problem with your logical inference is that you're applying binary logic and human interactions are profoundly non-binary.
I can't really imagine the amount of effort you have to put into keeping HN on track. I thank you for that as well.
I do however want to mention that the US cultural context is not always that apparent for a non-American (such as myself). My comments were made taking into account strictly the GP and your comment, not any pre-existing cultural context. Back where I'm from (broadly speaking the EU) simply mentioning that Cuba is socialist or that the embargo is anti-communist doesn't come across as particularly controversial or flame-bating.
I wrote about that here if you (or anyone) are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
I can say that in my case confronting people with wildly different political opinions has pushed me to become more dispassionate/detached in my replies, as well as to focus on the substance of the argument. I have started taking things more literally (which is probably what lead to our present conversation) and providing more precise and detailed rebuttals.
All of this I consider to be intellectual progress on my part, so to me HN has provided challenging and fruitful waters to swim in. For that, again, I am grateful :)
Did they edit their post because there is nothing even remotely ideological or controversial in that statement?
> A great showing
This part is subjective, so perhaps is the most problematic, but I don't think we normally react negatively to calling scientific achievements "great".
> for a small,
Factual.
> socialist
Factual (although I would have expected "communist").
> island nation
Factual.
> under decades of embargo
Factual.
> by hostile anti-communist
I think even pro-embargo folks would be ok with this description.
> forces.
Small problem here maybe?
The problem with the flamebait sentence I was objecting to was twofold: (1) it was political rhetoric of precisely the kind you would read in a political publication or hear in a political broadcast, and (2) it took the thread on a generic ideological tangent, that is it replaced the topic of Cuban work on covid vaccines with a much larger, more general, and more inflammatory one. Yes, it's related; the word "tangent" implies that; but that's not enough. It reliably leads to much worse discussion, and predictably did so in this case. I've been trying to explain this to HN for many years:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
There's nothing different about the moderation practice in this case—it was utterly routine. But two things were different: (a) I wrote more hastily than I usually do and didn't calibrate my language very well; and (b) something about the specific question of Cuba appears to land differently with HN's internationally distributed community than most subjects do.
However, the funny thing is that there was no ideological flame war in response to the comment. Why? Because there was nothing there that anyone even disagrees with or find inflammatory.
In fact, the only reactions have been to your (in my opinion) overreaction.
To which comment? If you mean the original comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27654110), that's quite wrong. The flamewar reactions were why I replied in the first place. Some of them are dead and/or collapsed now.
I sense that some people may be taking my comments as if they are expressing a perspective on the topic of Cuba. I'm not. My comments are strictly limited to internet forum dynamics, since that's what it's my job to deal with.
I assure you I'm not thinking from "the US perspective on things", but very much internationally. I believe this is a case of people in different parts of the world not understanding each other, and underestimating how differently the same statement can land elsewhere. (I wrote about that here, if anyone's interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.) Of course it's easy to take the position, "The fault lies with the others; my perspective is the valid one," but the problem with that is that it's a recipe for flamewar at scale. That isn't in any of our interests because it destroys the capacity of this place to remain interesting.
People don't need to change their views in order to take this into account, but they do need to adjust to the presence of other people. Across the kind of differences that we're dealing with in a large international community like this, that is not easy.
> Cuba actually has 5 vaccine candidates, and 2 of them have greater than 90% effectiveness. A great showing for a small, socialist island nation under decades of embargo by hostile anti-communist forces.
Which part is ideological boilerplate? Is it false that Cuba is a small, socialist island nation? Is it false that it has been under decades of embargo? Is it false that the forces that are imposing the embargo (mainly the US) are hostile to Cuba and anti-communist?
NOTE: You should not infer any agreement or disagreement to GP from my comment. I simply find it to be literally, factually correct. If it isn't please point me to sources that invalidate any of the factual points I mentioned.
And yes, it's a perfect tactic to sink any topic on a site with any kind of automoderation.
You cannot properly discuss anything moderately controversial if any topic can get framed, and sunk as "flamebait" because moderately controversial topics are "flamebait".
People have heated discussions about matters of ideology, that's the very obvious truth of life.
The more important is the matter, the more, longer, louder, and more emotionally people will argue.
There's also no evidence that anybody said that as a "discussion sinking" tactic. On the contrary, the simplest explanation easily applies: people responded to flamebait with more flamebait, which cascaded into flamewar. This is one of the most common phenomena that exists here, and one doesn't need sinister constructs to understand it.
This goes along with the view that the forum would be a peaceful and productive place if only those people (the ones I disagree with) were moderated and banned, and therefore it is the moderators' fault when flamewars happen on HN. Much as I'm deeply interested in improving as a moderator, I don't think this view is realistic. In fact the solution is in the opposite direction: less blaming of the others, more effort to see one's own contributions more clearly. Needless to say this applies irrespective of political or ideological or geographical identification.
(And yes, I need to do more of this too - for example it's clear that I could have handled this particular case much better. I was hasty and (ironically?) a little inflamed myself, not because of anything to do with Cuba or vaccines but because I didn't want to spend a second afternoon in a row dealing with a really nasty political flamewar. As a result I created a meta version of the same thing. Such lessons are expensive, which is fortunate.)
p.s. I see that your replies are getting rate-limited. That doesn't seem fair, so I'll turn that off for now. In return I'd appreciate it if you'd refrain from this sort of destructive comment in the future: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26848534. That's why we rate limit accounts. Actually you've done so much of that that we could easily have banned you and a rate limit was a mild response; but I don't want to throttle anyone from responding to me in a discussion about moderation.
"oh no"
(You're not really engaging the points raised and I find the low-key threat hilarious, so no, I won't be responding further.)
Personally, I hope this is one of the rare times when communist authorities tell the truth. Or hopefully Cuba 2020 has a different relation to the truth than Eastern Europe 1980. But count me skeptical until independent trials confirm the results.
People that lived under a communist party regime learned the hard way that communist regimes engage routinely in fake data. From 99% elections to the incessant claims that the quality of life is superior to the "decadent capitalist West", when reality on the field looks like this: https://dustyoldthing.com/inside-soviet-grocery-store.
I will mark this off-topic now (which downweights it on the page) and we'll see how good or bad the other comments are, but at the time I'm typing this, it doesn't matter how good or bad the other comments are, or whether this thread even has any actual comments about Cuban vaccines, because the flamewar you started has filled it with low-rent internet flaming about (god help us) communism, Israel, and who knows what else. Such flamewars have nothing to do with the mandate of this site. They convince no one of anything, except how right they are and how aggrieved they are and therefore how justified they are in doing whatever they want to the other side.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Edit: I'm getting the feeling that I may have left some people with the impression that I lack sympathy for Cuba or admiration for the achievements of Cuban researchers. Not at all. I think this is a great topic for HN to discuss. In order to be able to discuss it, we need to avoid flamewar and to avoid flamewar we need to avoid flamebait. That's all I mean, and I see that I put it in an excessively flamey way myself. Sorry!
If you don't see how the GP comment is flamebait, that might be because you're not aware of how large and geographically/politically/ideologically distributed this forum is. What to some readers reads as a bland factual statement is guaranteed to land with others as an outright provocation. That is obvious to me because I deal with these divisions in this forum every day. But I can see how it might not be obvious to others, and that's no doubt why my comment came across as excessive. Perhaps this was conditioned by spending the bulk of yesterday dealing with political flamewars on HN.