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Comment by qq66 | Hacker News Reader

It's not strange at all. Linus has earned his credibility. Some people in this community have too (pg, joshu, patio11, it's a long list). But people are downvoted when they act like they've earned credibility when they haven't.

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It seems you've missed my point. I don't doubt everyone you've listed has earned their credibility. What I'm trying to ask is "Why do you need to have earned credibility before you can be brutally honest with people?"

Because that's how people know that you know what you're talking about. I've seen many factually incorrect, heavily upvoted posts here on HN, and credibility is part of what lets me identify good material. For example, there was a post in the last few weeks about DNS -- I knew that davidu's answer was the one to trust, even though others were more upvoted.

Speaking as a scientist, "don't think about it, don't care about it, just trust someone" is contrary to my nature.

I was born with a burning desire to understand. Everything. I just wish I could locate a group of like-minded people to work with. I've been somewhat dismayed to find that "the real world" consists mostly of people whose sole ambition (or sole reality) is to fulfill their current role, without ever analyzing what it is they are doing or striving to improve the overall project.

Status is very important. I wish it weren't so. At my last job, I was using EC2 to devise solutions to problems that they truly believed were technically unsolvable --- but no one would listen to me, because I was a newcomer. Their faith in the senior technical engineer was absolute and unwavering, and the senior technical engineer believed it was unsolvable, so therefore it was, for all intents and purposes, unsolvable. (After all, nothing ever came of my research, because no one cared enough to listen, or had time to think about something other than their current, immediate goal.)

Worse, they even became offended when I tried to research the "unsolvable" problem in my own spare time. Status really sucks.

Status often does suck, but it's a necessary evil. There is too much information out there -- filters of some kind are necessary, and status is more reliable than most

I feel the same way about understanding things, but I don't have the time to understand every concept in the world from first principles. Nobody does.

When there's a discussion on DNS, I like to know what's going on, but I can't take 2 years to go learn everything there is to know DNS (Well, I could, but I'm not going to). Luckily I know there is someone here who has done this, and until I have more or better information, I'm going to trust him. It's a necessary shortcut.

I think the idea is that being curt is a mild evil that is tolerable if the information contained has a high probability of being valuable. But if the person being curt (or even rude) has no particular bearing/merit in the listener/reader's mind, it just comes off as pushy or presumptuous, sometimes to the point where you are tempted to ignore what's being said altogether.

It's not ideal, but I think the basic version is: I trust you enough to put up with your "brutal" honesty, vs. who are you and why are you being a dick?

It's not really about credibility, it's about status. Bad behavior -- and being this rude is bad behavior -- is much more tolerated in high status individuals, in every type of community. Just like (extreme example) how senators and Goldman Sachs CEOs can walk away with a slap on the wrist and a little bad press, where you or I would go straight to jail.

If it were just about the value of the information conveyed, people would do their own research when a person is "brutally honest" with them, and decide whether or not that information itself is credible.

The confusion lies in the fact that in a community like HN, that worships logic (and also success), those things that make you "credible" are what make you a high-status individual. That means even the statements those high status people make which are NOT credible themselves will be accepted, or only gently rebuffed. (Which is a big reason why you don't see much criticism of pg here, or when you do, it's very respectful, vs other authors, even when he writes something ridiculous.)

>"(Which is a big reason why you don't see much criticism of pg here, or when you do, it's very respectful, vs other authors, even when he writes something ridiculous.)"

If you think someone is being ridiculous why don't you say something.

People don't do it because it is counter productive. Respected people have their supporters. Unless you first bury your argument in adequately respectful terms it will get downvoted. Regardless of content.

You cannot say "The Linus rant about C++ is just wrong". You need to first blather on about why Linus is a great guy but has his limited perspective and from that perspective he is correct. However there is a world outside of that perspective where he is wrong.

If I posted the Linus rant on C++ I'd just be called an idiot. Nobody would worry about my perspective because, to my knowledge, I don't have any supporters to appease.

It is just politics. It affects tech communities as much as anywhere else. People get invested in their side. If you challenge their side then you must be sneaky about it.

>You cannot say "The Linus rant about C++ is just wrong". You need to first blather on about why Linus is a great guy but has his limited perspective and from that perspective he is correct.

You may think that you have to appease people.

If you posted "The Linus rant about C++ is just wrong" then I would down vote you. Why is it wrong, why is it a rant, what's wrong about it - that's what gets my vote.

I thought we were building a Brave New World here away from political double-speaking and ass-licking and endless regurgitation of memes. Please don't give in.

I have, often. Why would you think I hadn't? You must not have looked at my comment history.

Here's an example from the first page of my comment history. Me responding to pg: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2342860

>"Why would you think I hadn't?"

You said so.

>>"those high status people make which are NOT credible themselves will be accepted, or only gently rebuffed"

If you spoke up then your story of 'people with particular status not being challenged at all' was lacking. It's probably a form of hyperbole but it was your evidence that I was trusting to make the assumption about your action. I'll try to be more careful.

It's not so much "tolerated" as just a form of abusive willy-waving that powerful people can get away with. If Linus behaved like that in real life with real people he'd likely get punched in the mouth, repeatedly. It's amusing to read him doing it to other people but he is still behaving like a dick.

In real life, he does it with a smile on his face and it's actually quite disarming.

Doubtful. I know people who act much the same way in person, and while tempers occasionally flare, I've never seen it get physical.

I would tolerate it because I think that's how he needs to act to keep the project from becoming a POS. Being nice/courteous often gets you design by committee results.

Also, I might be swayed by his credibility, but what he's saying sounds reasonable.

I don't think anyone has really argued about WHAT he said. It's just a question of how he says it. There are many, much politer (and probably more effective) ways to say the same thing.

Well that was part of what I was saying - being able to reprimand effectively is part of what makes him a good leader for this thing. Being excessively polite and sugar coating everything doesn't instill the same desire to do things right next time. I think he's acting exactly as he needs to.

You're creating a strawman -- there's a big gulf between "being rude" and "being excessively polite." On top of that, I've never seen any proof that suggests that leaders who create shame & embarrassment & anger work better than leaders who inspire.

Dead on. I found myself cringing at your suggestion that pg has said something ridiculous, and I like to think I'm less affected by status than most.

Because various forms of textual peacocking are frequently used by people who have no status, or knowledge, in a particular domain to try and appear as if they do.

This is part of what a system like karma tries to address, if you see a comment that seems accurate, but is delivered in a very direct or even slightly annoyed tone by a user with high karma, you assume that this user is held in high esteem by others and while their comment may not be elegant, it should be taken to heart.

Additionally, in the hacker sphere, it seems that many of the top hackers are also VERY busy with their projects. Thus, they may have less time to spend prettying up a comment. The goal is to share knowledge or information in the most efficient manner. Not to share knowledge without worrying about hurting feelings.

Meanwhile, a direct comment from a new user with no standing in the community is likely to be met with some distrust or skepticism, even if wholly accurate. That user has not earned a status in the community. They have two options: 1) be brutally direct with all their comments and wait for people to realize they are frequently right, just inelegant. 2) start at least initially with more of a 'hearts and minds' campaign with their comments and build status in a more traditional method, slowly letting more of their actual personality come through in their comments.

Hmm, I'm somewhat surprised to hear this description of karma. Does this mean people click through on a username to discover their karma score before deciding if they should believe or agree with what has been written?

It seems pretty clear to me that karma mostly measures the amount of time spent commenting. An interesting metric, but not one I would look to to predict comment quality.

There have been times that I personally have seen a less-than-elegant comment from a new (to me) username. So, I check out the persons profile, look at their karma, other comments, submissions, etc., and then reply/vote/whatever.

Not very frequently, but one or two times a month maybe.

Could be just me...

So if they had a lot of karma would you change the opinion you had formed about the idea/whatever?

I tend to maintain a neutral opinion and use additional input to come to an absolute conclusion.

If you're going to state an opinion, you ought to give some justification. Linus can use as his justification the experience he has gained from running a major open-source project. Someone who has not run a major open-source project cannot use that justification. If pg wants to talk about starting a successful company, he can use as a reference his experience starting that thing he sold to Yahoo! for loadsamoney, et cetera.

This reminds me of this recent HN post: Hacking the status game: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2460233

The part about people responding strongly to people acting above their status in particular was relevant.

>But people are downvoted when they act like they've earned credibility when they haven't.

I downvote when people don't add to the conversation; when I consider them to be wrong or misleading (or when we had comment scores if they're comments seemed over-rated).

Personally I don't find anything wrong with the comment made there - the chap is just asking that things aren't done without a proper rationale. Doesn't seem brusque, harsh or patronising to me.

Just decide not to be offended, job done.

On the other hand, I bet that same list of people would say that the credibility of the argument is more important than that of the person making it.

Otherwise, you get either self-serving double standards or fawning hero worship (or both). Neither is strange, but neither is healthy.

So in other words, you'll happily down-vote people who aren't on your friend list, even though they are trying to tell you something you need to know.

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