What an incredibly weird exercise in mind-reading you're doing there. Really, an extraordinary mis-extrapolation from his actual statements in that thread. The irony, it burns.
> You don't think HN users are capable of realizing when they are engaged in mind/future reading, even if it was an explicit rule? You surely know the userbase better than me, but this seems unlikely.
> If you want nothing to change, so be it, but the idea that functionality changes cannot have an effect is very frustrating.
dang:
> Correct. Not only HN users but humans in general—I just don't think we work that way. The way we work is that we have our preference on X and then we propagate that preference through every edge in our mental graph of associations from X.
> One can imagine a user saying something like "Although I personally am against nuclear power, since this is the 'optimism' thread it isn't the best place for my counterarguments so I'll post them in the 'pessimism' thread instead". However, such people are somewhere between vanishingly rare and unicorns. Statistically they may as well not exist.
I can see how you might (correctly) take exception with a strict interpretation of "wholesale" in my comment, but is it not true that he is asserting at the very least that people cannot stop engaging in mind/future reading, and that functionality changes cannot have an effect (as well as other things if you read the discussion)?
And as for mind reading: how is it that dang has obtained accurate knowledge about the maximum potential of many thousands of people, in the future, under conditions that have not been tried?
If one is considering it using logic rather than heuristics, yes.
Full conversation is here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581414
Another funny/ironic part....one of my suggestions was:
> Some sort "cultural mode" for threads of certain kinds, which might include things like "epistemic strictness". So for example, for culture war (politics) threads, it might be interesting to set Epistemic Strictness = High, meaning certain common behaviors would be forbidden, such as asserting imaginary beliefs as facts (mind reading, future reading, etc).
So when dang wholesale dismisses the idea that improvements can be made (essentially, a claim that HN as it is today is 100% optimal), if this claim was made in a thread with "Epistemic Strictness = High", his comment would have violated: Mind Reading, Future Reading, and Omniscience (which I forgot to include in my comment). I simply cannot see how (well, actually, I know exactly how it is done) one could believe that literally disallowing certain types of comments would have zero effect, especially considering (as you say) that we already have guidelines.
Generally speaking, I find it utterly bizarre how resistant people are to the idea that we distinguish between reality and (certain types of) fantasy in our discussions.