Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

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I definitely support having a detox.

In the longer run, I think it is good to have some politics on the site. Technology doesn't exist in a vacuum and has a huge amount of intersection with politics. In the past, it has been possible to have rational and nuanced conversations about political issues on HN.

In the recent election cycle, that's been destroyed. It seems to have emboldened people to derail threads with political mud-slinging and the crazies have come out of the woodwork.

To put it simply, I never thought HN would be the place where I was first told to leave the country or get killed. The fact that it was (and not Reddit) honestly depresses me, and I hope that a detox period will force the worst politics out of the forum.

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That being said, I see a lot of people pointing to "incivility" as a problem in political threads. That is incredibly wrong. The problem in political threads is twofold: (a) people civilly arguing without actually acknowledging each other's points at all, (b) hateful rhetoric which destroys a sense of community.

If you want evidence of how civility is not the problem, take a look at this thread where a long-time commenter (with >12k karma) civilly, calmly proposed the mass deportation and/or murder of Jews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056816

> That being said, I see a lot of people pointing to "incivility" as a problem in political threads. That is incredibly wrong. The problem in political threads is twofold: (a) people civilly arguing without actually acknowledging each other's points at all, (b) hateful rhetoric which destroys a sense of community.

I think you're right that both of those are problems, but they're not the only problem. Incivility is also a problem in political discussions here lately. Another problem lately is that discussions to which a political discussion is only tangentially relevant get derailed by political discussions that exhibit these problems.

> If you want evidence of how civility is not the problem, take a look at this thread where a long-time commenter (with >12k karma) civilly, calmly proposed the mass deportation and/or murder of Jews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13056816

I disagree with this for two reasons. Firstly, if people could civilly propose the mass deportation and/or murder of Jews, then that wouldn't show that people proposing either that or innocuous things incivilly is not a problem (only that incivility is not the only problem). But here specifically, I don't think that commenter spoke civilly, any more than "No offense, but <some insulting or offensive thing>" is polite (indeed, less so, as the commenter made even less pretense). The civility of discourse isn't independent of the content of that discourse.

>The civility of discourse isn't independent of the content of that discourse.

This statement should probably become a part of civility rules in most communities.

I like the "civil and substantive" aspect of moderation here at HN. I'd also like to see something along the lines of Rapoport's Rules[0] and the Principles of Charity[1] embodied in the community.

Rapoport's Rules:

How to compose a successful critical commentary:

- You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.

- You should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

- You should mention anything you have learned from your target.

- Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

[0]: https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/daniel-dennett-rapo...

[1]: http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html

I know that dang has been making a concerted effort to encourage the Principle of Charity, something which I definitely commend.

That actually could be a good way to moderate political threads by requiring an even higher standard of conduct. So you must not merely be civil, but actively apply Rapoport's Rules.

Cool! Wonder if it would be worth mentioning it in the guidelines. I can see keeping them relatively brief is worth something, as well.

I can imagine pushback along the lines of enforcing speech rules, which I'm somewhat sympathetic to. That said, I think keeping them in mind is worth it.

> I can imagine pushback along the lines of enforcing speech rules, which I'm somewhat sympathetic to.

That's why I suggest this higher standard for only political threads. It's a lot better than banning them entirely.

Oh, yeah, I understood that. Even some of the long-established users on the site react strongly when they feel their free speech is being encroached upon. I still think it'd be worth a try. (After all, I brought them up :) I know it makes me more understanding of others arguments, not dismissing them in a knee-jerk fashion.

I'm not sure that can work in the cases when Alice and Bob have genuinely different worldviews. Consider, say, economics: the Austrian School and the neo-Keynesian school cannot really be mutually charitable. They're just working in fundamentally different ways. The Austrians believe economics to be a formal science dealing with axiomatic definitions of rational agency and their consequences, while the neo-Keynesian synthesis not only have specific beliefs about "what happens when you do that", they also paradigmatically believe themselves to be engaging in an empirical social science.

Nonetheless, both of them make object-level claims about exactly the same sorts of stuff: which way the markets will go, public policy, etc.

We need a clear, courteous way to talk about situations in which more than one person is trying to predict or prescribe the same object-level thing, but each person in the conversation is bringing completely different paradigms, assumptions, and prior knowledge to the table.

Or to cut to the example that made dang put in the moratorium, an everyday person and a white nationalist are living in extremely different worldviews with extremely different paradigms. This would also be the case where I want content to count for civility: if one side of the conversation is trying to make a courteous, civil, well-written case that the other side should cease to exist, then the line of incivility is crossed, period. There's just not going to be any way for a non-white-nationalist to restate the white-nationalist (ie: neo-Nazi) worldview eloquently, give credit to neo-Nazis where credit is due, and then deconstruct that worldview.

Maybe, in an ideal society, we would expect every citizen to be able to eloquently refute every bad idea. However, in our existing society, our heuristic is to require that citizens only put in the effort to politely discuss or debate content that does not incite or entail violence. When it comes to violence, our heuristic as a society is to protect people first, and ask for justification only much later if at all. We assume that somewhere a philosophy professor, a priest, or a public official can retrieve the arguments against mass violence.

And nowadays, I'm worrying that with the living memory of such violence dying, people are starting to slip into forgetting that there are very good reasons we don't ask for counterarguments against violence.

You're right that civility is probably a problem as well, simply not the only one.

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