Comment by dang

I'll try to respond to this in a minute but in the meantime have detached it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39146010.

Edit: I guess my basic response is that I'm skeptical of approaching these questions from that level of abstraction. None of us can say what we would have done in those horrible situations. We can only answer out of our own imagination about ourselves, which is likely to be completely unreliable.

What I do think is that on this site, we can and should be working with our own responses in a way that is more than just venting them onto a perceived other. That's in keeping with what HN is supposed to be for.