Comment by pvg
7 days ago
I fixed the confusing bit, thanks. I'm not persuaded by the reasoning because I don't see how the reasoning is relevant - we're talking about a specific dickish comment in a specific social place with its specific norms. These are so well understood and established the comment got flagblasted by users and moderator scolded on top of that - effectively the maximum penalty/public shaming an HN comment can get. It's not a hypothetical different context in which some kind of hypothetical value eventually comes from such comments - the bad comment and the bad subthread are concretely in front of us.
I think the non-hypothetical value that came from this comment in this case is that it surfaced good reasons for writers to use generative AI and showed that many people support doing so. I would have liked to see that happen in a much more civil fashion, but I don't think it could happen at all without some openly stated form of the initial objection to writers using generative AI. So I think that's the wrong aspect of the initial comment to taboo.
My concern is that the flagblasting and moderator-scolding, while certainly justified by the comment in question, will cause the collateral damage of discouraging politer versions of such comments in the future. So I think it's worthwhile to affirm that criticizing people's behavior to their face is not in fact inherently dickish, but rather a much better alternative to doing it behind their back, or to finding ways to silently exclude them, or people you suspect of being like them.