As you can imagine, mods get this kind of feedback all the time from all angles. The basic learning it adds up to is that everybody always feels this way. Therefore those feelings are not a reliable compass to navigate by.
This is not a criticism—I appreciate your reply!
Edit:
> forcing people to be saccharine [...] like a simulacrum of an HR department
We definitely don't want that and the site guidelines don't call for that. There is tons of room to make your substantive points thoughtfully without being saccharine. It can take a little bit of reflective work to find that room, though, just because we (humans in general) tend to get locked into binary oppositions.
The best principle to go by is just to ask yourself: is what I'm posting part of a curious conversation? That's the intended spirit of the site. It's possible to tell if you (I don't mean you personally, I mean all of us) are functioning in the range of curiosity and to refrain from posting if you aren't.
It is true that the HN guidelines bring a bit of blandness to discourse because they eliminate the rough-and-tumble debate that can work well in much smaller groups of close peers. But that's because that kind of debate is impossible in a large public forum like HN—it just degenerates immediately into dumb brawls. I've written about this quite a bit if you or anyone wants to read about that:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (I like the rugby analogy)
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
However, I, again, feel you're improperly pushing shapes into the shape-board again. Of course, understanding cognitive bias is a fantastic tool to improve human behavior from an engineering perspective, and your argumentum ad numerum is sound.
That being said, you're focusing too much on what my emotional motivation might be rather than looking at the system - do you really think there isn't an element of that dynamic I outlined in an interaction like this? Of course there is.
Anyhow, you know, I don't have the terminology in my back-pocket, but there's definitely a large blind-spot when someone is ignoring the spirit of intellectual curiosity in a positive light rather than a negative one.
In this case, don't you think a tool like mild negative social feedback might be a useful mechanism? Of course, there's a limit, and if such a person were incapable of further insight, they'd probably not be very useful conversants. That's obviously not happening here.
If someone were egregiously out of line, typically, I feel community sentiment reflects this.
Personally, I feel your assessment of cognitive bias at play is way off base. I don't think it's a valid comparison to claim that someone is causing "damage" by merely expressing distaste. That's a common tool that humans use for social feedback. Is cutting off the ability for genuine social feedback or adjustment and forcing people to be saccharine out of fear of reprisal from the top really an optimal solution to an engineering problem? It seems more like a simulacrum of an HR department where the guillotine is more real: your job and life rather than merely your ability to share your thoughts on a corner of the Internet.
Think about the engineering problem you find yourself in with this state of affairs: something very similar to the kind of content you might find on LinkedIn, a sort of circular back-patting engine devoid of real challenge and grit because of the aforementioned guillotine under which all participants hang.
And, quite frankly, you do see the effects of this in precisely the post in this initial exchange: hyperbole and lack of deep critical assessment are artificially inflated. This isn't a coincidence: this has been cultured very specifically by the available growing conditions and the starter used -- saccharine hall monitors that fold like cheap suits (e.g. very poorly, lots of creases) when the lowest level of social challenge is raised fo their ideas.
You know what it really feels like? A Silicon Valley reconstruction of all the bad things about a workplace, not a genuine forum for debate and intellectual exploration. If you want to find a place to model such behavior, the Greeks already have you figured out - how do you think Diogenes would feel about human resources?
That being said, I appreciate the empathy.
Obviously, I feel a bit like a guy Tony Soprano beat up and being forced to apologize afterwards to him for bruising his knuckles.