Comment by dang

Thank you!

Ah good question and sorry that wasn't clear—I use that word a lot. By "activation" I mean arousal of the nervous system, particularly the sympathetic nervous system, which regulates fight-or-flight responses, and the limbic system of the brain which assesses threats and seizes control when it feels that survival is threatened.

What happens in flamewars is that when people encounter material they strongly disagree with, these systems get activated and rapidly produce aggressive and defensive responses that have to do with self-protection, and nothing to do with thoughtful consideration of the material, things one might learn, points where one might be wrong, curiosity, playful interaction, and so on. When survival is at stake there is no time or space for the latter sorts of reactions. But it's the latter that we want on HN—they're what the site is for.

Of course we all know cognitively that our survival is not really at stake when someone disagrees with us on the internet—at least our frontal cortices know that—but our limbic systems and autonomic nervous systems definitely do not know that. They experience it as a threat and from then on it's kill-or-be-killed. The fact that survival is not really at stake has no effect; what matters is the feeling that it is so.

This is what underlies commenters being so angry, snarky, sarcastic, aggressive and so on, on the internet. It's also what underlies our inability to hear each other or respect each other.

I sometimes describe this is as 'reflexive' vs. 'reflective' responses (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). By 'reflexive' I mean when the rapid-response system I just described takes over and reacts from "cache", so to speak, to quickly counter a threat. By 'reflective' I mean the slower processes that happen when one is in a relaxed state and available for curiosity and play. In the jargon I'm using, 'activated' means being in 'reflexive' mode, and 'interested' or 'curious' means being in 'reflective' mode.

This has all kinds of interesting aspects. Here's one: you can't be in both of these states at the same time. It's literally one or the other. Think of the implications that has for a community like HN, where basically everything we want comes out of one of those two states and everything we don't want comes out of the other.

Someone is going to object that political developments can and do present real survival threats. That of course is true, and maybe to the extent that it is true, people have no choice but to function in kill-or-be-killed mode. But we feel this way and behave this way to a greater extent than we need to, and that's one factor preventing conflicts from being solved. That's a vicious circle which it's in all our interests to explore our way out of. We can't kill our way out of it.

In case it's not obvious, I'm using the word 'kill' metaphorically. What I mean by 'kill' is what we do when we try to eliminate threats (and the feeling of threat) by annihilating the other. That shows up as real killing in extreme situations like war, but the same (let's call it) psycho-physiological state shows up in other environments too, including trivial ones like internet forums. Here it shows up as people trying to annihilate the other by maximizing the aggressive potency of their language.

How do we end up getting so activated when we don't need to? and what can we do to become less activated in this way? I believe that if you tug on those threads and keep tugging, you arrive at the most important problem in the world. That's one main reason why I've kept working on HN for so long. Internet comments are trivial, but this environment is a laboratory for learning about this stuff—not just by observing others, but mainly by working with what they activate in oneself. In that sense it's a driver for growth and learning. This learning isn't primarily conceptual—it's more somatic.

p.s. Lots of people on HN know far more about the physiology here than I do. What I'm saying comes from my explorations of the therapy world, e.g. somatically-oriented trauma therapies and even-more-out-there stuff. That culture veers into metaphor more often than genuine specialists would be comfortable with. If I've done that in this comment I would certainly be interested in correction!

In this context, "activating" is speech which elicits gut-reaction. Whereas "interesting" is speech which stimulates thoughtfulness.

As I read it, when someone is "activated" they are provoked to responding; someone replying because they want to say something. I see "triggered" as somewhat of an analogy, but a much more loaded word.

This seems to stand opposed to people who reply because they have something interesting to say.

I don't feel out of depth. To me it feels like variations on places we've been before.

But I hasten to qualify this:

(1) This is just my feeling! You asked how I feel, so I'm telling you, but I don't claim my feeling is anything more than that.

(2) I'm only talking about dynamics on HN. I'm not talking about what Trump might do or AI might do; it's not my job to comment on those and your guess is as good as mine anyhow.

You need only look at the threads that HN has hosted about this to see that "pro-Trump" is a strong overstatement. The community is divided, just like the society at large is divided (or societies, since many countries are represented here).

Given what we know about the demographics of HN—for example, users here are probably more likely to be college-educated, many come from outside the U.S., and so on—the community here is probably less pro-Trump than the general U.S. population is, but that still leaves a great many users on both sides of that issue.

Of course I understand that any level of pro-$X can be disturbing if $X itself is disturbing enough. But that's more of a qualitative experience than a quantitative one. I've called it the "shock experience" in the past and wrote about it here, if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.

Why would it have to be organized flagkilling? A combination of a sizeable pro-Trump faction (even 20% of users would be more than enough) and a sizeable "just keep US politics off the front page" faction would be more than enough to account for what you're seeing.

I guess 2 days isn't new by firehose standards, but this particular story didn't get discussed until today and there's still some interest in it. HN has a long tradition of hosting threads about the exploits of young hackers.

I'm not talking about the events themselves or how significant they are—I'm only talking about HN comment threads.

Often, a sequence of related stories (S1, S2, ..., Sn) produces threads that are more or less the same as their predecessors, rather than focusing on the specific new information introduced by any Si. This particularly happens when the topic is a major and divisive one, like the current one.

What happens in this cases is that people tend to post their generic views about $Person or $Topic, often in vehement terms and without much curiosity about the specific details of what's happening. In this way we get threads that don't differ very much from one discussion to the next. That's what I mean by "interchangeable".

I tend to disagree, in terms of coordinated upheaval we saw something similar in Andrew Jackson's presidency. Nothing new under the sun, I'm afraid.

That same statement applies to literally every moment the country has existed.

Unprecedented things happen in every US presidency, they're just different things. (Hard to mention examples because the ones I am most familiar with are the last 6 terms, and each topic has flamebait potential)

My thought is that it's not great in absolute terms but reasonably ok in relative terms. Any thread on a topic this intense is going to have a lot of qualities that aren't good-for-HN.

We do some moderation things to try to nudge it in a more reflective/interesting direction, but there's a limit to how much that can help.

Just as many people feel that HN is horribly right-biased as left-biased. I could give you hundreds of examples. Here are a couple:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42066014

The way out of this logjam is to stop thinking in quantitative terms (how many 'left' posts vs. how many 'right' posts) and instead look for the highest-quality articles you can find. If there's a high-qualty article about USAID, meaning one which contains interesting information and isn't primarily hammering on partisan drums, I don't see why that wouldn't be on topic here.

> We'd love to have the sort of useful discussion you're aiming for,

Alas, that is not true for all values of "we". Let's see how we do in the current thread. (Edit: so far it does seem to be a little better.)

> but all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged

Yes, and at the same time we've turned off the flags on quite a few of them—enough that this continues to be by far the most-discussed topic on HN right now. I realize that's not enough for those who want more, but this is always the case whenever there is a MOT (Major Ongoing Topic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011

* (because as far as I know, all the important questions have already been answered, which is not to say everyone is happy!)

At what point does a story become big enough to disable the flagging mechanic? Maybe this post isn't the one to do it, but there has been an onslaught of stories about the damage Musk and DOGE is doing to the US government including lots of tech specific stories. This is an important ongoing story that is relevant to the community here and every post about it shoots up the front page of HN only to disappear minutes later because of mass flagging.

Not everyone is censoring you. Some of us want to learn about cool technology, not read politics irrelevant to daily life.

its not censorship. There's several comments on here that have no relevance to the source article and are hand wringing which is unproductive and often is eager to descend into flaming. Lets talk about the article and its content and the potential cybersecurity risks to government data please.

> all new discussions that reference Musk are being systematically flagged by apparent supporters of Musk.

I'm not a Musk supporter at all, but I flag these discussions for several reasons.

1. To keep my sanity. These stories are pretty much everywhere and will be all over for the next 4 years at least. I don't want to engage in them and lose even more time and get even more anxious.

2. The comments aren't useful and don't bring new information. It's pretty clear what Elon and the oligarchs are trying to do. Those who don't see it won't change their mind at that point.

HN is one of the rare forum to avoid flame war, let's keep it that way.

It's only censorship when the government does it, or so I've been told.

Normally we turn off replies on pinned comments to avoid this problem, but today I decided to leave it open, to give people a chance to air their objections/counterarguments/feelings and hopefully get responded to.

However, to avoid the thread ballooning at the top of the page, I'm also detaching these subthreads as I reply to them.

I am responding to the content of Daniel's comment, not hijacking his comment to coattail my views of the article itself. I think the replies to his comment are the most appropriate place to respond to it.

The effect you describe is an unfortunate side effect of any threaded forum where the ordering of sibling posts is determined by some measure of quality: all responses to the first top-level comment, no matter the quality, precede the second top-level comment, which is probably of higher quality (on average). This is one of many reasons that threaded comments are flawed. Flat comments (phpBB style) of course have their own flaws and chronological threaded comments (LWN for example) have their own too.

I agree in principle, but these are the dynamics of every intense polarized issue and I don't think there's much we can do about it other than nibble around the margins. For example, we try to downweight comments that are primarily name-calling or flaming, in the hope of giving more oxygen to posts that are reflective, find something new to say, and so on.

At bottom, it seems like this is just how mass psychology works—it's what you get when the inputs are (1) human nature, and (2) modern media. It stresses me out too, but I have to remind myself not to fight battles we can't win. That's a recipe for burnout and worse.

>> it's overwhelmingly people repeating the same falsehoods that might, at best, have a kernel of truth, but have been blown out of proportion to the point of just being not-true.

That describes basically all posts about AI, so let's all join in and start flagging any HN post about AI.

> “so and so is literally worse than hitler"

Can you give citations for where you’ve seen these sorts of statements?

However bad Musk is, I’ve yet to see anyone saying he is “literally worse than Hitler”

[flagged]

Edit: oh wait, I think I understand you now. When I said "that will only confirm that the flaggers were right", I did not mean "that will only confirm that the flaggers all had the right motive". (Obviously not all of them do, as I've explained below.) Rather, I meant "that will only confirm that this submission wasn't a good one for HN, and therefore it was good that it got flagged (even though not every flag was rightly motivated)".

-- original comment --

> That would only be true if the flaggers were disinterested judges who never comment.

I don't follow this argument. Can you rephrase it?

Flagging flamewars is an appropriate use of flagging on HN. If this thread turns into the kind of flamewar we normally want to see flagged, that's evidence in favor of the users who made that call in the first place.

> the possibility that any of them could be flagging or commenting in bad faith

Yes. I've made this point many times, including in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993092): there's usually two kinds of flaggers: users who want to suppress a story because they don't like it (e.g. politically), and users who feel like the story isn't in keeping with the site guidelines and are worried about protecting HN. I assume by "bad faith" you mean the first kind.

The preferred approach is (1) flag the stories you think are off-topic for Hacker News, and (2) make peace with the fact that the front page sometimes has stories that you feel don't belong there. This is true for everyone, including me. It's a consequence of the site being under conflicting constraints, and frontpage space being the scarcest resource (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

Oh and (3) if you browse HN while logged in, you can always click 'hide' on a submission and the software will not show you that particular one anymore.

While I understand the sentiment (and support it with a lot of political content on HN) the start of this administration has an undeniable tech angle. If you don’t want to read the stuff, don’t click. But it belongs here.

Don't click into the comments would probably be a good start.

Something simple and direct you can do is don't buy Tesla. It may now genuinely be in America's national interest to not buy Tesla.

There's no point giving Musk more money, power, and influence. He's now calling for the impeachment of judges because he thinks they're in his way:

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5134725-elon-musk-impe...

He wants any opposition or limit or restraint to him gone. Here's an interview with Kara Swisher about Musk's mentality that's worth watching:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xXLycFv5Gc

[dead]

This is a (very) well-explored issue on HN and the solution we arrived at has been stable for many years: most stories about politics are off topic, as the guidelines say (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993906

The answer is that we don't "just remove them when people complain". We only remove them sometimes, when doing so seems in keeping with the principles by which we moderate HN.

I don’t know how many flags it takes to flag kill a whole article, but the threshold for comments is two or three flags. It doesn’t take a lot of people to kill an entire topic of discussion by flagging related articles, especially for users who only peruse the front page. Brigading on this site is almost trivial.

Dang’s anti-flagging mechanism is the human factor that balances that very blunt automated system. People don’t seem to vouch for articles as much as for comments.

I don't see how this isn't hacker news: "What is the technical education of the teenager with security clearance to the network of the org that is responsible for nukes"

That sounds *literallyf like the plot for any 80s hacker movie out there. You know, when hacking was political and hackers were people interested in undermining structures of authority and bending the rules.

That is the origin of hacking, and as such it is totally in order to discuss such topics here, IMO.

I'd rather read stuff like this than another CEOs musings that are entirely marketing and make believe (cue Sam Altman). Just because it affirms billionairs viewpoints of the status quo doesn't make it apolitical. If it feels apolitical to you that probably says something about your political biases.

This site is called hacker news… the article is news about hackers

Ignoring the US politics angle, would this post have been flagged? It's Brian Krebs, back after being DDoSed yet again, reporting on hackers hacking. doxing and swatting people. hacking. That's not of interest on hacker news? If, then, the subject without the political angle, would have been of interest here, then why does adding, yes, a highly contentious topic on top of that, make it of less interest to the community?

I think the fact that we keep hearing about DOGE grey-area accessing of computer systems run by the US government and not about whatever else the Trump administration is currently doing is pretty good evidence that HN maintains a bias towards stories of interest to hackers. Like it or not, I think most of the hackers here are also US citizens.

> It isn't particularly newsworthy.

I disagree. Krebsonsecurity has regularly delivered HN salient and interesting frontpage material, and this is currently the most flagged submission they've ever had on HN. We've discussed security assessments very similar to this in the past, even political ones, with technical curiosity and good faith discussion. The constraining factor is now people who unconditionally idolize Elon Musk. It's easy to see who's in the wrong when flagging relevant, well-written and objective reports like this one.

My personal view is that HN shouldn't promote political content at all. It should just be moderated out or flagged with no opportunity for recourse, whether it's Syrian independence or the invasion of Ukraine. But I abide by the exceptions made in HN's guidelines and consider this a technically imperative article that most can tune out if they dislike. It's very easy to see the title and decide for yourself whether you're comfortable reading and discussing the article.

I hear you but I think this sequence of stories has interest to HN readers on both sides of the political abyss, though not necessarily for the same reasons, and I think one can find the stories interesting without crossing into personal attack. (It's true that some of the articles do that more than others.)

We don't want too much of this, but a certain amount is ok, and that's how HN has operated for at least the last 15 years.

I see you're "ready to label one of the “other side” as evil" but the article seems well researched and referenced while your comment makes vague claims.

I see a lot of really specific and well thought out raising of issues in this thread, as it applies to technology, commerce and security, all very much on topic for HN.

Criticism of the current administration is an important part of democracy, we need to hold the government accountable, no matter who runs it.

> I think it’s very irresponsible of you to allow articles about US politics in the front page

There are a couple answers to that. One is that it's not possible not to. We tried once, as an experiment, and it had the counterintuitive effect of making the site more politicized.

The other answer is that a limited amount of political overlap is actually part of optimizing the site for intellectual curiosity. Lots of past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... if anyone wants more.

What in the article do you consider as lacking a factual basis?

I’m curious what you consider to be a smear. Are the items about his background & history factual or not? If true, it seems calling it a smear attempt might be disingenuous.