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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

You've posted something like 9 unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments in this thread. That has a seriously damaging effect on discussion, especially when the topic is divisive as this one is. I'm sure you don't intend that, but the effects work that way regardless of intent: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

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I disagree strongly. Conflict-avoidant platitudes have much less substance.

Something else having less substance does not make your comments substantial.

Well this is another very tricky one, I’ll give you that. So many N-order effects.

I still disagree strongly with your characterization of “substance” in this context though. E.g. when another user sent this (ad-hominem) challenge:

> Why is it that everyone who pushes Ivermectin as a miracle cure for COVID is also a conspiracy aficionado?

I responded with a simple and dispassionate explanation, rather than taking offense. Is there no “substance” in my entirely coherent, well-argued, and non-emotional reply?

> Simple. You have defined the latter as some variation on the former.

Perhaps you could call out my "what a pair of years" top-level comment as that was not responding to any of the nasty attacks in this thread, or even dogpiling on the excellent arguments that other people are making. But those kinds of comments function to put me on the record here with a timestamp, so I can link to them later. There is a tiny bit of substance even in those.

It sounds like you might prefer that I disengage and flag all of the nasty posts (e.g. another person in this thread implied that I am a murderer) so "the bureaucracy" can fix this conversation? Sorry, you are a great moderation team, but I am not going to do that, because I don't believe it is a real solution to anything. You cannot fix this kind of conversation from the top down - Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Trying will just disenfranchise the out-group further and make the echo-chamber effect worse. If that means this topic cannot be on HN, so be it.

These were super low quality posts, as well as being obviously baity:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27562666

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27562679

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27562717

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27562722

Please stop posting like that. It's not hard, and doesn't need complex argumentation.

On the other hand, many of my hot takes over the years have been celebrated, but it seems to happen when they are long and dense (and not personal attacks). Perhaps it is because fewer people read/flag them. Perhaps it is because this community values eloquence (or effort) over substance.

Add to that the built-in handicap because this community (like every other) values in-group opinions much more than out-group opinions, and it doesn’t make sense to even try better/longer arguments. I’m going to stop participating in controversy on this site, and move the infowar project over to audio chatrooms, where a conversation like this actually has a chance.

To everyone else: Arguing controversial topics with strangers, in Reddit-style text threads, is primitive and ineffective. The technology is insufficient for the task, and it will never get better.

> The technology is insufficient for the task, and it will never get better.

This is very true. But I don't think it is a problem with technology.

It is just that you cannot really have a valuable insight by putting a 10000 idiots in a room and have them argue it out. In other words, you cannot replace one intelligent man with a 10000 idiots, hence the failure of HN and similar forums.

These things are only good for sharing interesting things, so the best way to use is to just use posted links, and never to engage in discussion.

Commenters going on about how other people are idiots is actually a strong marker of mediocre comments. If you guys would please indulge in that kind of thing somewhere else, we'd appreciate it. It's tedious, and it's against the site guidelines. Note this one:

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

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

I'm disappointed you are not more active in pulling these snake oil posts from the front page.

I'm with you on this. I've put a nontrivial amount of effort into commenting (including reading a lot of source material and watching video clips), and there has been some interesting discussion, but I'm not convinced it's been worth it.

My suggestion is to be more selective about sources, and perhaps to have an explicit policy. Individual papers tend not to be good sources, as people just use them as weapons to prop up their opinion. Mainstream media pieces aren't either, as they lack intellectual depth. I suggest blog posts by experts (David Gorski, Derek Lowe), pieces by top science journalists (Helen Branswell, Kai Kupferschmidt, Jon Cohen). Note I am not saying only mainstream views should be represented, quite the contrary. If and when Alina Chan posts something long form on lab leak (likely, as she's working on a book), that's a great candidate for spurring intellectually curious discussion.

Here's an observation. I've seen at least three "pro-Ivermectin" posts on the front page in the last six days. Does it seem like that's been balanced with any posts discussing its inefficacy (which is apparently the medical community's dominant view)?

I also remember today's Ivermectin post being flagged. Does that mean the moderators then chose to unflag it (despite the fact there'd already been at least two earlier "pro-Ivermectin" posts throughout the week)? According to the Hacker News FAQ, moderators "sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair."

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

Maybe the question we should be asking is: what made the moderators consider the flagging of this post unfair?

It doesn't seem to me that the dominant view here is that Ivermectin is ineffective, just that it has not yet been proven to be effective, for a certain definition of "proven". With time and stronger studies, that may well be proven, or not.

Seconded.

The whole Ivermectin saga does not deserve the attention that it is getting, those that are relentlessly pushing it are causing people not to get vaccinated and that in turn will prolong the epidemic and lead to people getting ill and some fraction of those will die.

I've read up on this thing as much as I could and it's quite simple: there is at this point in time zero hard evidence that it works in humans short of using it in dosage that is well outside the range that we have data on. It's just the HCQ story warmed over.

> are causing people not to get vaccinated and that in turn will prolong the epidemic

Can you make an argument that people going for natural immunity and relying on currently used COVID treatment protocols in case they decide it is needed will prolong the epidemic more than if they took the vaccine?

Maybe it will do the opposite, as 1) natural immunity may be stronger, last longer 2) some number of non-vaccinated people getting sick, getting isolated and taking effective treatment may on the whole infect less people than if that same number of people gets vaccinated and then interacts with other people and potentially spread the infection more because they don't get strong symptoms.

I'm not saying that you are incorrect, just that the argument that getting vaccinated solves the epidemic quicker isn't clear.

Modulo a few hundred thousand deaths those mechanisms have the same outcome. If you're ok with that by all means, go push herd immunity through infection.

There are effective treatments available now, it is not clear that well-treated infections would lead to more deaths than vaccinations.

I've addressed that here and here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27563873

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27564376

This community is not equipped to have this discussion, as evidenced by the discussion.

Seeing HN used to promote garbage is going to cause good people to leave, and that in turn is going to accelerate the degree to which garbage will end up on the homepage and so on. This is a downward spiral.

This is not the way to handle this. There are better ways to handle this.

You seem to be on a tear today. FYI, I added my flag here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27577500

As well as adding a flag to one of the comments in that discussion that attacked you. I don't leave a lot of flags on HN. For various reasons, I'm pretty conservative in my use of flags.

I'm surprised to see this particular piece where I am currently commenting got so many upvotes and so many comments. I asked about the mechanism of how this drug works and got some meaningful engagement and also some really worthless engagement, in my opinion.* And then I lost interest. I couldn't readily see a meaningful connection.

But you are basically talking about censorship. Censorship grows interest in the forbidden topic. I wholly disagree with your position here.

If this is the garbage you claim it is -- and it may well be, I just don't know the topic well enough to affirmatively agree with you -- then there are vastly better ways to kill it without harming freedom of speech.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27562715

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