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Comment by FakeComments | Hacker News Reader

> Especially: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

> dang has previously said that they’re more critical of people who perturb the groupthink, and take action against them for things people supporting popular opinions would be excused for.

Your entire moderation policy is based around precisely what I claimed, as you yourself stated: the arbitrary application of increased standards for comments which disrupt groupthink, or to use a euphemism, are “divisive”.

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@FakeComments: I'd like to share an idea you may find helpful.

I too am sometimes frustrated by how HN conversations go. There are numerous times where I know I'm taking a contrary position on HN, and despite my best efforts to present my argument politely and succinctly, the audience seems unable or unwilling to honestly engage with my logic. It's doubly vexing when my comments are downvoted without clear justification. (To be clear: I'm talking only about downvoting, not thwacking from the site admins.)

But I also think there's plenty of evidence that taking a harsh tone in the discussion is unproductive in such conversations, and is ineffective at curbing the behavior of (what I perceive as) unjustified penalization of my comments.

So here's my idea: How about treating this as an intellectual challenge? The goal is to study the form and substance of these contentious discussions, and identify trends regarding successful vs. failed presentations of contrary viewpoints. And then see if adopting those forms results in more satisfying discussions of the points you're trying to raise?

If you're able to nail that skill, especially with a sometimes-fickle audience, you may find it benefits other areas of life as well.

You admit your comment is non-responsive to my point, which is that dang ideologically censors posts.

Do you believe a non-sequitur ad hominem was a constructive comment?

I’d prefer not to learn that style of social skill.

Your comment is also factually wrong: the reason that censorship for civility developed as a strategy is that it’s maximally effective suppressing ideological conversion for the amount of speech it suppresses. Your comment then becomes nothing more than “working under adverse conditions teaches resiliency”, which is true — but not a reason to stop questioning the censorship policy.

People do not rationally switch positions — they switch positions during an emotional cascade after a sufficient number of rational reasons have accumulated. That “avalanche” where an emotional spark triggers the awareness of a substantial shift in your beliefs.

These criticality events necessarily require an emotional trigger such a failing to be able to substantively reply to provocatively phrased arguments or the inability to factually correct mocking humor.

Civility suppresses precisely that: the emotional barbs in arguments and the mockery which might provoke a person to change their stance, in a substantive manner.

Rationality alone is all powder, no spark.

I'm assuming that we all want roughly the same thing: we each want to believe all true facts, disbelieve all false facts, and hopefully help others achieve that as well.

I think your point about cascades is interesting, and it seems to jive with my experience. And I can see how censoring for civility would, as a result, be an impediment to changing minds.

I also believe @dang's point that not stifling incivility leads to unproductive flame wars. Which, I'm guessing, also results in conversations that fail to change minds.

So where does that leave us regarding HN discussions? Can you think of an approach that addresses both your and @dang's points? Are we stuck with having HN admins try to find the optimal censorship policy that somehow balances the issues you and @dang have raised?

Please also consider the possibility that you may have a greater appetite for (hopefully productive) acrimony than the majority of HN's target community. In terms of your theory of changing minds, the HN owners may wish for this site to be where people can discuss the logical / empirical aspects of issue in a calm and pleasant manner, and leave the mind-chaning, emotional stages of the discussions for other forums.

That guideline is based on the evidence of what happens when people don't follow it. That's the opposite of arbitrary. You're effectively calling the rule "no fires in a dry forest" arbitrary because it doesn't apply to all forests.

Uncivil comments about divisive topics lead to flamewars. Flamebait comments don't "disrupt groupthink"; they reinforce it, because what flamewars do is reinforce pre-existing opinions with jacked-up intensity. If you want to change other people's minds, you need to actually reach those people. Verbally tasing the other side makes them go rigid and think whatever they thought before, just more angrily.

> That guideline is based on the evidence of what happens when people don't follow it. That's the opposite of arbitrary.

I didn’t mean to imply that the rule was arbitrarily selected, merely that your application of it was arbitrary — that it, at the sole discretion of a small group of people, without guiding rules, and without systematic review for p, eg, bias.

Force, such as bans, applied in an arbitrary manner is inherently tyrannical — and your appeals to civility a rote recitation of a millennia old justification for tyranny. Tyrants are never merely enforcing their biases on others — it’s always for the greater purpose!

Having been a member of this community for a while, my reply would be that flame war groupthink is better than this groupthink: flame wars can occasionally change minds and show the diversity of extant opinions — while your groupthink preserving censorship distorts people’s view of the diversity of opinions while leading to no more changed minds, and is therefore strictly worse.

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