Comment by mattgreenrocks
13 years ago
I've noticed this too. It's a vicious hit-and-run attack on a thread's discussion that presumes only the empirical viewpoint is worth considering. It often trainwrecks the thread into intellectual pissing contests, rather than discussing subjects with fellow human beings.
Removing karma entirely might help. Too many people treat it as a vanity metric, and game it.
And the way to game it is by posting "middlebrow dismissals".
As a poster I am often surprised by what gets upvoted. Everyone surely can see this: negativity is rewarded. It only reinforces in my mind that "karma" means little anymore.
You can get karma just by being dismissive. Look at the tone of some of the posters who consistently jump into the top spot, thanks to their "karma". I get tired of seeing those same monikers over and over^1; the comments are often rubbish. No matter how articulate and cogent their commetns may have been in the past, no one is 100% consistent; we should not have to read _everything_ they say. But it doesn't matter if they are on the mark from day to day because they get a top spot no matter what they contribute, based on accumulated karma. You are forced to read what they've said, no matter how silly it is.
1. Unless you need to contact someone, I find usernames and profiles to be about as useful as karma (=not very), but I doubt many others would share my view. My interest is in quality comments that offer useful information, not "reputations". People with great "reputations" often make some very dumb comments. Judging the quality of a comment by the author's username instead of its content is a fool's game. It's also a basis for the HN algorithm.
> only the empirical viewpoint is worth considering
So what other viewpoints are there?
I would be far more interested in a discussion about how we could identify the factors that lead to a community that doesn't appear to be following the aging and health norms of other communities rather than just saying "the article is stupid and isn't worth reading".
"how we could identify the factors that lead to a community that doesn't appear to be following the aging and health norms of other communities"
How do you propose to do this while avoiding empirical evidence?
> I would be far more interested in a discussion about how we could identify the factors that lead to a community that doesn't appear to be following the aging and health norms of other communities rather than just saying "the article is stupid and isn't worth reading".
OK, I don't think we're using 'empirical' in the same way, then. 'Empirical', the way I've always seen it used, just means 'evidence-based' or, more verbosely, 'based on observed facts and not purely theory or philosophy'.
In particle physics, the fine structure constant is an empirical constant: We don't know how to derive it from any theory that doesn't include it already; if we want to have the correct value for the fine structure constant in a theory, we have to explicitly put in the value we know from experiment, that is, the value we derive empirically. Compare this to the value of the acceleration due to gravity between two objects of known mass: We can compute this value, derive it from a theory, called the theory of universal gravitation. We don't have to physically construct an apparatus and perform an experiment every time.
Frankly, it seems that you're tired of people being dismissive based on an imperfect knowledge of a set of specific formal and informal fallacies they came across once.
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