Hacker News Reader

It is clearly a charged topic and while you did a good job setting the tone, it clear that moderating this discussion will be a daunting task for anyone.

I am already seeing the antisemitic comments calling Jews colonizers, stealing land from indigenous people for 75 years. The one-liners or single-sentence zingers lack context or, often, truth.

I do appreciate comments from people living in that area -- what their lives were and are before and during this conflict.

I do wish that instead of this charged subject on HN, instead an article discussing the history of this land and people living on it. History of empires, conquests, displacements, wars, attacks.

Etymology of the names and Meaning of terms that are being used by both sides.

* What did Zionism mean in 19th and 20th centuries? What does it mean in 21st century?

* What does Anti-Zionism mean?

* Where does the word Palestine come from?

* What really happened in 1948?

* What happened to Gaza Strip under Egyptian rule from 1948 to 1967?

* What happened to West Bank under Jordanian rule from 1948 to 1967?

Discussing history of what happened and what did not would be less explosive and more productive use of great minds on HN, in my opinion.

The problem is that while al jazeera can be balanced about certain topics, fact is it is entirely government funded by an authoritarian undemocratic state and on this topic in particular it seeks to purposefully take a prejudiced anti Israeli stance. It has also been criticised for biased to the Syrian dictator, and takes various stances according to the foreign ministry. We therefore cannot be certain if the claims are true. Unfortunately as history has repeatedly proven, propaganda works. At the very least maybe source should include Government funded?

You can make a similar case against any media organization. They all publish true things and false things. They all have biases that highlight certain things that are happening while occluding others.

On HN, we go by article quality rather than site quality. This has been the case for many years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

I attempted to give a detailed explanation of how that relates to the current thread in these comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38620928

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38618471

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38617464

If you read those and still have a question that isn't answered there, I can take a crack at it.

> This follows from HN's core principle* because curiosity and battle can't be active at the same time.

Does HN have a policy against epistemic soundness in claims? Because if there is a method that is maximally useful for these sorts of issues, it is disciplined epistemology. Yet, I know of no explicit policy on it, but I have been subjected to scolding for practicing it, suggesting there is an implicit policy, at least to some degree (perhaps only on some topics, who knows). Or, an error has been made....which once again is an epistemological matter.

If people refuse to even try to utilize the tools that exist, and discussion of that phenomenon is disallowed, it may not be optimal game play....and sometimes, suboptimal gameplay results in large quantities of death. Is curiosity about that a good thing?

(And yes, I do realize that the culture we've been raised in has taught us that statements like mine "are" necessarily "in bad faith", though mine is not actually.)

I'm afraid I don't understand your comment, nor what you mean by epistemic soundness, but I'm pretty sure HN has no policy against it.

> what you mean by epistemic soundness

This, for starters:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-epistemic/

You know that word "is" you use now and then? That word is fundamentally based in epistemology.

> and sometimes, suboptimal gameplay results in large quantities of death. Is curiosity about that a good thing?

Do you understand that part?

I will add some clarity: by "suboptimal gameplay", I am referring to the individual and collective behaviour of human beings, as it relates to causality (the consequences of our behaviour).

I am basically asking what HN's stance is on being curious about "large" quantities of (at least plausibly) unnecessary human death.

I'm sorry but I don't understand that.

Are you asking about how one can possibly be "curious" in the face of a catastrophe like this, and what that even means? I think that's a legit question. If curiosity means a detached-technical attitude, that is not an appropriate response to this topic and could in some forms even be monstrous. But that's not what I mean here. What I do mean, I tried to describe at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616823 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38616662. It has to do with being open to others.

> Are you asking about how one can possibly be "curious" in the face of a catastrophe like this, and what that even means?

I am asking: can you be curious about whether it may have be possible for these (and future) deaths to be avoided, had some humans acted differently than they had?

I suspect this may seem like a very strange question, and I propose that that is an artifact of the problem.

> If curiosity means a detached-technical attitude, that is not an appropriate response to this topic...

Here you are representing a subjective belief as knowledge, on a matter where people's lives are at stake. Can you be curious about whether this approach as a moderator on a website frequented by some of the most powerful minds on the planet may be preventing lives from being saved, or whether it is part of the underlying causality of why these powerful minds can't keep it together when discussing topics like this (which may also contribute to the causality underlying deaths)?

As a random bystander I find your comments extremely hard to comprehend. It's not really the vocabulary, although it could do to be less lofty. I think part of it is sentences like this:

> Can you be curious about whether this approach as a moderator on a website frequented by some of the most powerful minds on the planet may be preventing lives from being saved?

This sounds to me, and maybe I'm wrong, like you have some sort of pre-formed opinion about what Dang et al are doing, but are choosing to cast it in the lens of "can you be curious" as a way of avoiding just directly saying what you think.

> This sounds to me, and maybe I'm wrong, like you have some sort of pre-formed opinion about what Dang et al are doing

I certainly do. And, it is worth noting that while all beliefs are opinions, not all are merely opinion.

Is your read on me better than mine on you? How much experience do you have in the domain?

> but are choosing to cast it in the lens of "can you be curious" as a way of avoiding just directly saying what you think.

My strategy is to use deliberately unusual language in order to break people out of System 1 / LLM / Colloquial mode.

Clearly it is not working, have you any advice for me now that we've at least somewhat, perhaps, broken the 4th wall?

Reminder: thousands have died already, more will (presumably) in the short run, and MANY more in the long run. I appreciate this may not be a pleasant experience, but the stakes are not exactly low.