No one got angry or passionate or flamey as I saw it... the topic never made it much onto the main page and was a nice discussion.

Im not disagree with the sentiment "avoid flame topics" - I just dont think that is a good example.

A better one would be the current TC article on the main page (and all the boring meta discussion on "ban techcrunch" and flaming about pg & ma being buddies).

A topic that gets ugly here sometimes and where no one ever has anything new to say is genes, nationality, and IQ.

Meta discussion is a very different type of flame topic. It's also been extremely important to defining the character of this board so seperating it MetaFilter style is a drastic step. How can we discourage metatalk when it is annoying but allow it when it is interesting?

But I take your point.

In terms of meta discussion; all that is fine. I just mean it should be considered "non gratis" to bring up flamey meta topics. Like Ban TC and so forth. It's been discussed a billion times before and always leads to flaming.

EDIT: I also love the rule that says if you've been here for less than a year dont moan about thinks going reddity - that's another pet-hate meta topic of mine :(

Respectfully agreeing, but sharpening the definition, I would say that the topic rarely gets ugly here on HN (it gets terribly ugly most of the time elsewhere online) and that I personally had a lot of new things to say on that topic the first few times I posted on it here. I do research on that topic

http://learninfreedom.org/iqbooks.html

that most other online participants have never bothered to do.

As a counter example, I was greatly unnerved the other day at watching a bar discussion between two friends that revolved on whether or not one could make money daytrading. Friend A said "obviously you can't, the market is random", while friend B insisted that "well, with mathematics you can predict the way it will go". This went on for hours (I refused to join) while they both had clearly very different meanings for the words "random", "luck" and "mathematics". I believe that, had they stopped early enough to define those terms, they wouldn't have argued.

Of course, sometimes the discussion is specifically about the definition of a few key words. Even then, I find what really helps is agreeing on some restricted definitions for other "primitive" words and using those primitives to build up definitions for the words in question. For example, person A could argue that selfishness is actually a form of blindness, while person B insists that it is not really so, and one can be selfish while seeing what others are doing. This way they can argue, by having pre-defined what "blind" "see", etc mean in this context.

Discussions about the meaning of words are easily just philosophical traps where one person says A and the other hears B.

Keep pulling and you have two options. You can base things on what you observe, which leads to science, or what you on things you assume which leads no where when others don't agree to the same assumptions. It's only when people have the same assumptions that you can have really interesting discussions such as Math or a good logic puzzle.