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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that "civility" or "tone" is a surface issue and the offence is more fundamental to what's being discussed. There's a well-known "euphemism treadmill" where certain words are deemed bad, a replacement is developed, and then people start using them as a slur instead. It's possible to be perfectly polite while arguing for genocide.

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Completely agreed, and honestly, sometimes we need to have frank conversations about true horrors and abhorrent behaviors that exist in the world. I hate to pull the Orwell card, but I fear that the normalization of this technology would inhibit necessary conversations about true evils, and give a false impression of civility and neutrality to people spreading hateful ideology.

That said, most online discourse is already a disaster, with every disagreement being ramped up to 11 with no capacity or patience for nuance, so I'm not sure how much worse it can actually get.

The reason that tone is a good signal (though that may change with generative AI in the mix) is because, in practice, it's correlated with intentions and understanding of the writer. It is possible to politely advocate genocide, and to make angry, simplistic, but 100% correct arguments for a right cause, but both cases are very rare to see in practice. Usually, people who write politely do so because they want to carefully get a considered point across; people who write angrily do so because they want to win a verbal fight.

It's obviously just my subjective impression, but I see lots of examples of people arguing for quite abhorrent positions on HN in a civil and carefully articulated manner. Rather than pointing to specific HN comments, I'll pick Richard Hanania as a recent example of the same phenomenon. The guy writes long blog posts that are (for anyone who can make basic logical connections between ideas) openly racist and sexist. Recently, it turned out that he'd spent many years, even into his late 20s, writing extremely uncivil racist and misogynist claptrap under a pseudonym on various internet forums. But because in public he presented essentially the same ideas under a veneer of civility, he was taken seriously by many 'intellectuals' who should have known better (e.g. Steven Pinker) and amplified by several mainstream media outlets (e.g. the Washington Post).

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