[marcos123]

Really? To me, the thing that is most discouraging about HN is the rampant closed mindedness. For example, anyone who questions the long term safety of genetically modifying organisms and eating them, will always be downvoted to oblivion.

[tetrep]

It's probably because doubting things isn't very useful. I can question the long term safety of walking up stairs, but unless I can provide an argument such that rational people are convinced they should also be concerned, I wouldn't be surprised at downvotes.

Not to knock the Anti-GMO argument[0], but it's similar to other conspiracy arguments. I can make so many rational arguments against it, but I know from the outset if I see a comment that says "Well of course the Hyper Loop isn't going to work, it was designed by Lizard people in order to keep us complacent!" I know that I will never convince that person to see what I would consider a rational viewpoint. It's a lost cause. And as I user of HN, I would consider such comments to be noise, and I would downvote them.

Edit: I have the unpopular opinion (at least on HN) of not liking the "right to be forgotten", not to tangent too much, but I think that the ability to substantially change as a person is an important concept of human development, and that by allowing people to willfully scrub their actions from the record, they encourage the myth that people can't change, and that we're always how we currently are. And that, I think, trains people to be less forgiving. It's harder to forgive when you don't think someone can change.

[0]: although I do disagree with it (even beyond the screaming naturalistic fallacies)

[marcos123]

My questioning the long term safety of GMO's is logical though. Peer reviewed studies on the topic just plain don't address the very real possibility that GMO's can have very harmful effects 20, 30, or 50+ years down the road. Both to our environment and our bodies. Believing that a short term study that concludes they're "safe" also means they're safe in the long term is quite a leap of faith, and illogical.

Edit: To put it another way, I'll bet short term studies concluded that asbestos was "safe" to use as a building material. In the long run though, that didn't really turn out to be the case.

[adrusi]

Maybe I'm making a good case for eliminating comments by contributing to this tangent. On the other hand, maybe I'm making a good case for my claim that HN's comments are not nearly as plagued by groupthink as people claim.

The problem is treating GMOs as a category. Maybe there's good reason to be concerned that genetic modificiations that make crops less attractive to pests are hazardous to long-term health (I have no idea if there are), but what does that concern have to do with the risk of introducing genes to grow larger fruits?

I'm sure you can find reasons to be worried about any possible application of genetic engineering, but if you're willing to get that creative, you can find reason to be worried about any agricultural innovations. Maybe you claim that the introduction of a lentil gene to soy will indirectly create come carcinogen through protein interactions, but why don't you worry about the same issue when a new fertilizer is introduced? It seems to me that it's only because transgenic plants are new and scary and people are uneasy about "playing god".

Asbestos was ALWAYS known to be dangerous [1] so not a great example. I can't think of a case off the top of my head where long-term safety was incorrectly assumed from short-term studies. Perhaps some medicines? Anyway, in principle you're right that short term studies say little about long term impacts on health.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos#Discovery_of_toxicity

[bbradley406]

>but what does that concern have to do with the risk of introducing genes to grow larger fruits?

Off the top of my head, there are several consequences that fall into the realm of possibility. Larger fruits will require more resources from the host plant, which could alter its development in unpredictable ways. More nutrients could be taken from the soil in order to make larger fruits, leading to earlier depletion and requiring more crop rotation (a process many farmers put off due to profits). Larger fruits will attract larger animals to graze (just look at what happens when hikers throw apple cores / other compost into the woods, it alters the movement patterns of multiple species).

I understand these examples sound hyperbolic, and I think GMO's are definitely beneficial in some situations. However, introducing changes to the very genetics of our ecosystem faster than they would naturally occur has definite effects. To think that we can adequately anticipate, react, and solve issues caused by these effects seems a bit hopeful, at least until we have a very advanced computational model simulation of our ecosystem.

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should." - Ian, Jurassic Park

[dismantlethesun]

I feel it is hard to change you reputation so long as people remember your previous actions.

For most of human society, memory was constrained to the brain, which fuzzily remembers at best, and within mere years only can make summaries of past events.

Now with high quality video from phones, voice records, and text preserved in perpetuity, people can not only merely remember a person held inane ideas, but also see exactly what, when, and in which context they held those ideas.

So long as that's possible, it's easy for others to critique by saying "people can change, but X person said Y and that's beyond the event horizon for me".

[pyromine]

Wait, I didn't realize the prevailing opinion was that "right to be forgotten" is a good thing. I thought the pseudo-libertarian strain combined with the strong archival beliefs of many on HN would be turn common opinion against it.

[maxsilver]

> To me, the thing that is most discouraging about HN is the rampant closed mindedness.

Absolutely true. But is HN more closed minded than the folks you see everyday?

Personally, the HN community is more open minded than 95% of the people I personally interact with daily -- even after including what you've just mentioned.

[adrusi]

That hasn't been my experience. There are views that HN generally opposes, like being anti-GMO, and newcomers who don't know what HN's opinions are might accidentally run into something and get punished for it. But once you know what the standard HN opinions are, you just need to be very clear about exactly how you depart from them when you voice dissent. This means disclaimers and hedging — poor style in traditional writing, but necessary on the internet where you can usually assume that someone protesting GMO foods is committing the naturalistic fallacy.

[losteverything]

Dude. I work in 2 jobs where the act of hearing any sentence with more than one multi-sylable word is like trying to find my Ashton-Tate manuals in the attic.