Comment by mudil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mudil | Hacker News Reader

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Got it.

You know, dang, I am an old man. Born in Soviet Union, seen the scars of that brutal regime. Came here without English and money. Went to work. Went to college, then medical school in Chicago, residency in Harvard, and fellowship in NY. Started one of the first medical blogs, in 2004, that still going on. Lots of work in the hospital, big cases.

I would consider my bio full of intellectual pursuits.

Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes you make mistakes. Sometimes society makes mistakes, and these mistakes can live for hundreds of years...

Maybe I made a mistake. But maybe what you consider a failure of intellectual pursuit, is your own biases.

But point taken. I’ll limit comments.

PS Here’s an interesting idea for you (and that’s not to offend you, really): try to find and ban someone on a comment that lacks intellectual curiosity and scores political points, and has many upvotes. Surely there’s a comment like that today, somewhere?

That's a great story! There's a lot of rich experience for some great HN posts in that, too.

I didn't mean to imply that you were lacking in intellectual pursuits or depth or anything like that, and I'm sorry if it came across that way. It's just stock moderation language. All I have to go on are the things an account has posted, especially the recent things an account has posted.

Usually, when people are battling their political or ideological enemies in internet comments, they leave out all of the background and motivations and experiences that have led them to feel the way that they do. That's a shame, because if we included such things it would make it easier for us to relate to each other. It also means that our comments—especially flamewar comments—create a one-dimensional picture of us in the reader's mind. That of course is not an accurate picture of at all, but there's very little information transfer going on in these arguments.

I'm not sure I understood your last suggestion there but we don't consider upvotes when banning accounts. We also don't ban established accounts for just one thing they posted—we'd warn them instead. Bans are for when an account has built up a pattern of breaking the site guidelines. There are some exceptions to that, but they're probably not relevant here.

Thanks for writing such a humane response. I appreciate it.

Thanks to you too.

Snide comments tend to get such a reception, regardless of which side they are promoting. I am sure "Many colleges would find it difficult to arrange for Ben Shapiro to speak on their campuses" would be received much better than what you wrote.

In my book, there's something fundamentally wrong when one person tells another how to speak. It's dictatorial, anti human rights, even.

And just because something is well received doesn't mean that it is right, or moral, or anything, really. Countless speeches were well received before some of the most atrocious events in human history.

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