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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

We changed the URL from https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/09/after-winning-nobel-for-fo..., which cherry-picks a single detail (doubtless the most sensational), to the video itself.

With cases like this, it's helpful to remember that we're trying to optimize HN for one thing, intellectual curiosity [1]. Remembering that often turns borderline calls into easy ones.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

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dang thanks for the url change. The detail I would not otherwise have noticed was his rejection of the idea that AI might dumb people down (~13:00). He states in analogy, unironically, that you don't need to be able to do multiplication tables if you've got a pocket calculator. However, as we've recently discussed, but perhaps not enough, learning your multiplication tables isn't optional if you want to understand math. It's part of the language.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41547566

Removing the most curious portion of the video from the headline is not optimizing for intellectual curiosity. I shouldn't have to dive into a half hour long video to get the lede. This is outright censorship, which you're hiding behind a fig leaf, to protect Altman.

Ironically, the original headline piqued my curiosity enough to watch the video, and I wasn’t going to before. So censoring the headline probably resulted in fewer views of the video by HN readers, not more.

It may pique social curiosity but I don't think "$Celebrity1 delivers sensational one-liner praising $Celebrity2 for firing $Celebrity3 in well-known $CelebrityEpisode" is satisfying anyone's intellectual curiosity. The distinction between those two kinds of curiosity is central to how we run HN.

Fair minded readers who look seriously at HN threads on the topic wouldn't say that we "protect Altman". Countless such threads have spent long hours on HN's front page, and the comments are dominated by vitriol. Actually, we moderate those threads somewhat less than we normally would.

Thank you dang. I’ll take the downvotes/flags but it really would be beneficial if HN “understood” that we are better off removing sensationalism rather than playing directly into the bait of it.

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