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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Alright, let's switch to that, since most of the thread below is just semantics about the term 'political correctness'. All: I'm sure we can do better than that, so please try.

(The submitted URL was https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...)

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The bigger issue is why wasn’t this whole submission flagged and killed? It could not possibly lead to an intellectually interesting conversation.

I don’t have an opinion on the submitted article. I routinely flag posts that are political even if I agree with the contents because nothing good can ever come of them.

There have been intellectually interesting conversations on such topics in the past, though I grant you that they are both rare and precarious. It wouldn't be good for HN to exclude such topics altogether, endless problems though they lead to.

If the original poster wanted to directly link to the underlying study, the OP would have. That original link was to a prominent media platform.

Sure, but if a different link is better for the community as a whole, that takes priority over the original poster's intention. We change links like this all the time; it is not a recent innovation.

Then it's your definition of what makes content better for the community that needs updating. That this admin conduct, or maybe just yours, has been ongoing for some time now is not sufficient reason for it to continue.

Thought policing like this is not why I participate in the HN community.

You aren't being called out on this behavior so I feel obligated to give you this feedback.

We contribute to defining that, but the greater part comes from the community. If that weren't true, we'd never hear the end of it.

The most important part of the moderation job is to listen for what the community wants and, as long as it's within the mandate of the site, help to realize it. Moderation is necessary because (a) this wouldn't happen on its own, and (b) what would happen would be less interesting.

Do you really think most people have the time to read a 160 page report?

Any random snippet of that report is probably better than a shallow article/title about political correctness. However, a better article summarizing the report might have been ok too.

I got to page 38 before I even thought to look at how long it was, it's kind of engrossing, and because it's mostly quotes and infographics, it doesn't take long to go through a page, it's not Mochizuki's proof of the abc conjecture or something.

It only took ~15 minutes to get that far? What's the difference between spending 15 minutes reading hn and 15 minutes reading a report? It's still 15 minutes.

Open it up, I bet you'll find it interesting and get further than you think in a short amount of time.

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