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Comment by zapdrive | Hacker News Reader

> My college fucking put the caste next to people's names on notice boards for things like seating arrangements for an exam.

You are lying. The colleges never do that, once the admissions are done. Yes, during entrance exams and results, they list the "quota" under which the student is seeking admission. If you don't want to have Scheduled Caste listed against your name, don't seek admission under SC quota.

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Please reference the site guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Accusing someone of lying violates several of them.

But original comment is a lie. There are thousands of castes all over the country - different in every state. So education boards create categories (named 1,2A,2R etc.) Each such category is an umbrella for x number of castes. And perhaps this category is indicated next to students' name and not the caste itself.

You can only assert that the comment is a lie if you've visited every university in India and have verified that what the OP says isn't true, and can provide evidence that you've done so.

"This doesn't feel true to me based on my experience" does not mean OP was lying. It just means they had an experience that you weren't aware was possible.

Expressing polite, respectful skepticism is fine; accusing someone of lying without presenting evidence of that lie is not.

Thank you. This is what I'm trying to explain. E.g. you might see "SC" for scheduled caste or "ST" for scheduled tribe, but you will NEVER see anything like "choorha", "chamaar", or even "dalit". And even when it days dalit, it's in regard to their quota, not caste.

Heck, colleges are not even allowed to ask your caste, only under what quota you are seeking admission!

Your reason for asserting that it doesn't exist is that you have 7 years experience of not seeing it. That's simply logically invalid. You shouldn't be believing yourself. You're speaking in overly certain terms without justification which makes your claim seem unreliable and using insults makes it appear that you have an axe to grind - which is also a sign of being untrustworthy.

Did you notice you just contradicted yourself too? "you will NEVER see [...] "dalit". And even when it days dalit [...]"

But it IS a blatant lie. If the OP can provide any evidence of a student's caste listed on a notice board in a college, I'll eat my hat.

macintux is correct. Here's why. The word "lie" implies more than saying something false—it implies intent to deceive. That's against the HN guidelines, which ask you to assume good faith. When people assume bad faith, the odds are much higher that the thread will degenerate into flamewar, and we don't want that here. Also, none of us has a mind reader, and it's almost impossible to read someone else's intent just from the small bits of information that internet comments provide.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Here's what to do instead: when encountering incorrect information, respond respectfully with correct information. If the person was honestly mistaken, then they learn something; if they disagree, they can say why, also respectfully, and we can hear out the different views.

This way, we can all learn something, regardless of whether the other commenter is persuaded or not. Best of all, you don't discredit your own views by attacking the other person unnecessarily. If you're in the right, that's especially important, because you don't want to discredit the truth. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I know what it's like to see something on HN where you 100% doubt the story someone is telling. The problem is that hostile skepticism and cynicism are devoid of content, at best.

If you want to clarify to other readers that you find something very uncharacteristic or unlikely, then just keep it conversational and assume they are telling the truth. What would you say if a crystal ball revealed that their story did happened? "Whoa, I'm from India and I've never heard of anything like that, it's hard to believe. Which college/region was that?" would make the same point yet possibly provoke more info from other people/OP. And people are unlikely to downvote an earnest inquiry.

“I’m very skeptical of this, other than <short list of exceptions>. Do you have any citations for this in any other context?”

That would be an interesting discussion I’d like to see, but you derailed it immediately through accusations of bad faith.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but, consider the possibility that it's rare, maybe even unique, but real. If that's the case, you've never seen it because it's rare.

Why would you say that? Would you imagine separate hospital rooms based on religion? It happened couple of months ago.

https://scroll.in/latest/959274/covid-19-separate-wards-for-...

If they are not allowed to live in the same quarter and be in the same hospital rooms, it is not hard to imagine segregation in universities too.

https://www.economist.com/asia/2020/07/23/even-as-india-urba...

It is not fair to call someone liar, just because you have not experienced it.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24558590.

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