The reply is pretty tasteless. Especially:

> Suggesting you should have aborted the 20-week fetus based on unusual skull appearance? Suggesting that the meningitis was a result of some malpractice?

Don't ask people sarcastic questions on a subject like this. You wouldn't do it in real life would you? It's a real person who just shared a harrowing experience with a child, not talking about the latest "Rust framework for DeFi Widget Spinning".

Common sense and basic social skills would tell anyone this was someone talking about a related experience with thier child, not a calculated rebuttal meant to talk to some exactly overlapping point presented in the article.

Honestly the exchange captures the core of HN: You can be as nasty as you want as long as you're not direct about it.

I am not asking sarcastic questions, and my comment is not intended as any kind of attack. Please read my tone as 100% earnest, just confused. And I hope the top poster will accept my apology that I didn’t phrase my comment to make that clear enough.

The tone of voice in the top-level comment reads to me as extremely aggressive/aggrieved, like they had been personally wronged by someone (not just a victim of a tragic accident). But I don’t understand where that anger is being directed toward, or what precisely they are trying to say, so I am asking for clarification. Are they upset at doctors? the hospital? genetic test providers? themselves? Or perhaps I was grossly misreading the intended tone.

I am not judging or criticizing them: having a chronically sick kid must be a horrible traumatic experience, with no easy answers. I am sure I would be incredibly upset too, under the circumstances. I am just trying to figure out what they are trying to say.

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Separately, I’m sorry for the “It sounds like your specific problem” part, which is phrased insensitively; clearly they have much bigger problems than this one. I didn’t mean it that way. I’m just trying to point out that taking a genetic test with zero false positives wouldn’t have made any difference to the top-level poster.

The entire comment you've written seems hellbent on attributing this person's anger to some specific entity... did you take 5 seconds to ask yourself what the goal of that is? Is the goal to find out what they're angry at so you can invalidate their pain over (what you seem to understand is) a terrible situation?

"Oh you're angry at the doctors? Well doctors can't read the future."

"Oh you're angry at the tests? Well the tests are perfect."

I mean, I don't know why I'm asking when it's exactly what your first comment tried to do. And for obvious reasons they didn't appreciate it... after all what does it add?

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You think this person doesn't know tests are imperfect?

You think they don't know what false positives and false negatives are?

Or you think they know and it's still a terrible situation, and any article about the inaccuracy prenatal tests would have reminded them of their traumatic experience that at least somewhat involved the inaccuracy prenatal tests, even if the inaccuracies involved are not exactly the same

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And I mean, let's consider hypothetically they don't know for a second! Or let's say your goal was for the benefit of another reader. You're going to be the one to inform them of these things and then... ???

I mean seriously, someone reads an article that causes them to recall their child's birth which they described as a living hell. I think it's safe to say:

a) the point was not asking HN strangers to tell them why they're upset with the wrong thing

b) they likely understood their situation was not 1-1 with the article's situation

c) they commented anyways because they were venting. And not an off-topic venting anyways, they didn't say "I hate prenatal tests that are false negative" they showed hatred for inaccurate prenatal tests which doesn't prescribe a direction and is pretty fair???

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And yes I get HN's love this place to be as sterile as an OR, but it's not every day we get an article that has this level of personal implication, so what exactly does anyone lose just letting this person vent without trying to police their emotions or "correct" their anger?

If this was a website about prenatal care it'd be one thing, but posts about prenatal care make up: 0.0024% of all posts on this website. 47 mentions out of over 1 million stories.

Honestly I'm shocked this even needs to be said though. This is all covered under basic social skills, but then again maybe I'm being inconsiderate of the fact that certain personal situations can affect the ability to pick up on non-verbal cues and implicit social expectations

To that end, in the future: Never, ever, ask someone if they wish they had aborted a child they had.

(And before you rush to say you didn't, don't even ask it implicitly.)

If they feel the need to share an opinion on that they will. It's certainly not for you to ask, and even less so for you to ask an internet stranger.

I didn’t understand what they were trying to say (e.g. who is supposed to be "burning in hell") and asked for clarification. Asking people to clarify when their statements are confusing/ambiguous is a pretty normal part of human conversations, and is not as a general rule intended as an attack.

Nobody has a secret agenda here. Nobody (except you?) is attacking anyone, correcting them, telling them they are wrong, policing them, threatening them, insulting them, putting words in their mouth, invalidating their feelings, ....

You seem to be really dramatically upset about this. I don’t really understand why (I assume you are grossly misunderstanding my intention – e.g. “hellbent”?!), but I am sorry to have deeply offended you. I sincerely hope you feel better soon.

The passive-aggression will only get you so far... here's the comment you seem to have already forgotten replying to:

> Anyone trying to shickle a few dollars from the medical system to provide "pre-natal diagnosis" without sound science - they can come burn in the same hell I live in every day.

Where's the ambiguity?! How much more clear could this be?

> Anyone trying to shickle a few dollars from the medical system to provide "pre-natal diagnosis" without sound science

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Or is it that you don't understand why someone would be angered by people pedaling prenatal diagnosis based on unsound science for personal gain? And doubly so someone who experienced so much pain after these types of tests failed them?

> You seem to be really dramatically upset about this

So you can pick up an emotional cue! (Well... actually you still seem unsure despite me being very clearly upset, so still have some ways to go.)

Yes, I'm very upset I had to tell what I assume is a grown adult that casually asking people if they wish they had aborted their child is not ok!

And as I write that I have to say: if you actually do have some medical situation that affects your non-verbal skills, then I do apologize for being harsh.

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Otherwise if you really want me to feel better soon, stop with the flimsy runabout and be better.

You are repeatedly making very strong, incorrect (quite aggressively insulting) claims about my intentions based on your own invented assumptions, despite having been told directly that you were incorrect.

You now claim that actually I am lying about what my intentions were. You insist that I was previously intending to be insulting and cruel and that by (a) apologizing for being insensitive and (b) denying that was my original intention I am being “passive aggressive”.

(To what end do you think I would do this, and who do you think my “aggression” is aimed at? You think I am just trolling you for my own amusement?)

I don’t see any way of convincing you otherwise here; continuing this conversation seems futile. Have a good day.

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Edit: for the record, my top comment upthread is currently at net +25 votes. Apparently a whole lot of other people also found the top-level comment very confusing/ambiguous.

I love this.

I ask a very simple question:

> Anyone trying to shickle a few dollars from the medical system to provide "pre-natal diagnosis" without sound science - they can come burn in the same hell I live in every day.

Where's the ambiguity?

And there is none so you're forced to divert the conversation to... literally anything but that.

"I don't see any way of convincing you that incredibly direct statement was ambiguous" would have been shorter, no?

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Continuing this conversation was futile the moment you decided to lie instead of admitting there was no ambiguity and you had just asked a stranger if they wish they had aborted their child for no good reason.

And who knows. Maybe despite appearances some basic understanding of why you don't make statements like the ones you did so casually... has permeated into your subconscious after being schooled on the concept for this many words?

I guess the world will never know

Woah, that wasn't my reading at all, I also didn't understand top-level commenter's implication, as in what went wrong and should have happened, or what's regretted; no judgement or disbelief or whatever - I just didn't understand (not denying there was one) the failing that meant the test manufacturers should join the commenter in hell.

So you read:

> Anyone trying to shickle a few dollars from the medical system to provide "pre-natal diagnosis" without sound science - they can come burn in the same hell I live in every day.

And didn't understand the failing? Really?

> Anyone trying to shickle a few dollars from the medical system to provide "pre-natal diagnosis" without sound science

I mean how much more obvious could they have made it? Do you just not understand why pedaling unsound prenatal tests is a failing?

Maybe it's because I'm not American and am pretty unfamiliar with that system, but yeah.

To be clear I'm not disagreeing with OP or saying nobody else is to blame, I just didn't fully understand. I was glad someone else had asked and hoped to scroll down and understand, not find an argument, I think everyone had good intentions here.

It's not an American concept. Pre-natal diagnoses based on unsound science is a bad thing regardless of if money is involved.

And bilking a medical system has nothing to do with if it's free or privatized.

Even with free healthcare the suppliers are still getting paid somehow... so them providing an unsound test is still making unjust profit.

From what was described in the NYT article, the tests are not “unsound”. Nor are those making the tests inherently corrupt or malicious (some medical testing companies are, e.g. Theranos, but the same could be said of any other occupation or industry). My impression is that people who design these tests go into the field to help give parents the best possible information, and do their best to make tests which are as accurate as possible. (Disclaimer: I don’t know anyone in medical technology, pharmaceutical, etc. industries.)

The tests are extremely good, but they are not perfect, with a specificity in the 99.9%–99.99% range, which is low enough that there are more false positives than true positives for extremely rare conditions. Making tests with specificity in the 99.999% range or beyond is an inherently extremely hard problem.

The current quality would be fine if the posterior probabilities were properly explained to patients and if physicians had enough basic intro-level statistics background to interpret the test results. Unfortunately patients often aren’t given the results directly or told accurately how to interpret them and apparently many physicians lack basic statistical competence. It isn’t too promising that this NYT article expressly aimed at clearing up laypeople’s misconceptions does such a poor job explaining the subject, and spends its first half on misleading clickbait about how “wrong” the tests are.

Disagree. I don't get your reading from it and frankly I read the above comment and also did not understand what they had intended to communicate due to seeming contradictions. I had the same questions.

My reading was being charitable, but I was corrected by the follow up.

I wanted to believe this person understood the top level comment was venting and asked anyways (implying sarcasm) because that seems like a pretty basic inference from most people's social experiences.

But instead they clarified they (and I guess you as well) truly do not realize that the top level comment is upset because prenatal tests were part of a traumatic event.

You apparently did not realize the top level comment is not conflating a false positive and a false negative, or solely blaming prenatal tests, but rather they're saying all forms of inaccuracy in a prenatal test have great potential to cause heartbreak... which is 100% true.

tl;dr: Their comment is venting about something unimaginably painful while staying on topic and closing with a relevant statement, so I REALLY don't get what the point of drilling into the more personal part of it buys you?

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I also assumed you and the other reply did not un-sarcastically try to ask a stranger if they regret not aborting their child so casually. But again, I stand corrected.