If even on Hacker News a topic like this can't be objectively discussed, what hope do we really have? What is the solution? Even in a place like this, the comments are full of extremist ideology, bickering, people arguing from feelings, people just repeating echo chambers mantras, and a significant portion of the comments are probably from inauthentic/propaganda accounts. We're incapable of just using a place like this to objectively, dispassionately, discus the facts/data and properly debate the various analyses of those facts.
I really feel like we need some sort of new revolution in terms of online communication, how it's done. How people share information and communicate. I just don't see how the current systems can continue existing without leading to societal disaster.
> even on Hacker News a topic like this can't be objectively discussed
This site has as much of an ideological slant as any other site, this isn't a unique oasis in a sea of partisan echo chambers.
A lot of those aren't really online problems. People will always be discussing from feelings, bickering, so on. Go to any town hall meeting or debate club and you can see the same. Take a look at politicians and their discussions too, yeah?
If you need dispassionate reasonable debate to get things done you'll be waiting a long time.
We need some gatekeeping. We need automated fact checking. We need moderation based on someone's domain expertise and not how well their argument appeals to readers. User moderation is fundamentally broken and maybe only worked for a while due to the participants tending towards a particular background. Also, in the age of AI it's questionable if community forums can even continue to exist.
Who is the arbiter of the fact checking algorithm? If we use AI can we really trust the outputs are hallucinated?
Turns out people have quite strong feelings about career -ruining and planet-burning tech advances.
I think it's good that there are topics that elicit emotional responses. It does make the discussion a bit difficult, gotta admit that.
I do not believe for one instance that people are coming from a legitimate concern around planet-burning and reaching their conclusions about AI vs. reasoning backwards from wanting reasons to be anti-AI. Very few people I've met seems willing to make one iota of earnest personal sacrifice for avoiding actual in-real-life planet-burning industries.
Actively pisses me off hearing climate rationale for opposing something so relatively inconsequential while the house is on fire from pre-existing industry that is grandfathered in.
> I do not believe for one instance that people are coming from a legitimate concern around planet-burning and reaching their conclusions about AI vs. reasoning backwards from wanting reasons to be anti-AI.
You're certainly wrong in my case, and I can't speak for others but I think you're probably wrong about many of them.
> Actively pisses me off hearing climate rationale for opposing something so relatively inconsequential while the house is on fire from pre-existing industry that is grandfathered in.
not complicated: it's much harder to stop pre-existing industry than it is to stop the building of new data-centers (esp for something that isn't really going to help most of the population much; it's not we're accepting an increase in global warming in exchange for curing cancer)
just because I'm voicing opposition to data centers doesn't mean that I'm okay with all the the other sources of global warming. Those are separate discussions.
You must not live in a planet-burned spot yet. But, direct experience shouldn't be the only way to build empathy for viewpoints that aren't yours.
I live in a place with sufficient books that I know how to understand the written word, but I understand not everyone replying to my comments is so fortunate.
Do any of those books include 101 climate change or Cadillac Desert.
if you've ever read Plato's dialogues or are familiar with the court politics of the eunuchs during, well, any Chinese dynasty, you might be convinced that even those that sit squarely in the seat of power and have the best access to food, education, and disposable time in their era are all still just a bunch of ideologues prone to bickering, constantly arguing from feelings and having little echo chambers, and so on
has there ever existed any forum of perfect discourse in all of human history? HN is still so much better than on any other site I've been on outside of MetaFilter. I get pissed everytime I read any reddit commentary because it's just a series of tropes - here at least, the tropes are well written and people come with citations
Go outside and talk to your neighbors. This is not a problem technology will solve.
When you label people who disagree with you ideological extremists, you're part of the problem. They're properly labeled "people who believe things that I don't believe" and they deserve a counterargument rather than a curt dismissal or demand for silencing. If you have the courage of your own beliefs, it should be trivial to offer one.
It doesn't even matter if it's AI slop. If AI slop asks a question you can't answer, it's good AI slop.
Agreed, also with the people claiming foreign influence or fake accounts. I like AI, I use it a lot for work. I do not think people opposed to data centers are under foreign influence. It's pretty obvious why someone wouldn't want a huge building in their neighborhood. It's also pretty obvious to me that we shouldn't be building these heat generating facilitates in places like Phoenix Arizona! There can be discussion for sure, but to accuse people (who are quite frankly taking a pretty obvious and easy to understand position) of being "foreign agents" or "extremists", is just wrong. If anyone is the extremists, it's us, the heavy AI users.
> we shouldn't be building these heat generating facilitates
Jesus.
>even on hacker news.
come on now, HN is just a step above reddit. some of these discussions are pretty solid.
> HN is just a step above reddit.
It didn't used to be this way. The line between HN and reddit is converging and now sometimes it's difficult to tell them apart.
I do think the quality has gone down over my seven-ish years on HN, but that could be me just remembering "the good ol' days". Still so much better than Reddit though. It's not close. Reddit has a much lower quality set of posts and comments on average across technical subreddits.
I remember the Ivermectin/Hydroxychloroquine fights where people were gaslighting others for some unknown reason. People sharing dubious studies, with questionable results.
Meanwhile many of those people had a secondary agenda to keep the FDA from releasing the covid vaccine. America's Frontline Doctors (the group) promoted drugs over vaccines, etc.
Granted there was a lot of fear in the air back then. But this site is not immune from toxicity.
Yeah COVID really showed the darker side of HN. It was madness and still sticks out in my mind. Any question that didn't toe the line was shouted down from all sides. Don't forget Youtube was even censoring content then. It was a mess.
I’ve been reading that same line for 15-20 years now.
Yeah, maybe I'm just getting older. Not sure how you would measure it, but maybe it would be % of posts with "nuanced" discussions. It feels like HN was gone way downhill in this regard, but who knows.
Or perhaps your tastes have improved!
This is technically explicitly a rule violation. Yes, yes we've been hearing it for years but it is much more true in the past 2-3 years than anytime in the past imo.
Frankly, it's a shame that the only high quality discussion I can find is on gross platforms like 'the everything app' or more obscure forums.
It’s just reversion to the mean / Eternal September. I use blocklists to manage my consumption of the site and the experience is much nicer.
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