[thro32]

Go and Chess AI are SERIOUS and REAL problem. It is something which goes back for thousands years and will be remembered for another thousands years.

AIDS and other contemporary diseases will be soon forgotten after their extinction.

[sctb]

It's hard to read this in a way that doesn't suggest that real, serious diseases aren't, at which point it becomes hardly distinct from a troll comment. Please post civilly and substantively on HN; we have to ban accounts that refuse.

[zeveb]

> Please post civilly and substantively on HN

Did the author edit his comment? This is what I see:

> Go and Chess AI are SERIOUS and REAL problem. It is something which goes back for thousands years and will be remembered for another thousands years.

> AIDS and other contemporary diseases will be soon forgotten after their extinction.

That is both civil and makes a substantive point. There is nothing trolling about it. Nor does it suggest that AIDS is either fake or unserious: it suggests that someday AIDS will not be a problem (I think that's very likely, in the sense that bubonic plague is no longer a problem).

I can only imagine two possibilities: the author's original post was trolling, uncivil or unsubstantive; or sctb had a knee-jerk reaction.

[civilian]

Yeah. I think sctb is overreacting. thro32 just has a cynical view on what the public values, and has a long view of history.

The namespace collision between Go and Golang infuriated me before I realized that--- Go has lasted thousands of years, and could very well outlast Golang. :D

[zeveb]

> Yeah. I think sctb is overreacting.

Probably 11 times out of 12 when I see that one of the admins has marked something as off-topic, I disagree. Probably a quarter of those times I _strenuously_ disagree; the rest I can kinda see their point, but still think it was on-topic. It's rare that I think, 'thanks admin team, that was garbage and deserved to be detached!'

From what I've seen, the admin team does more harm than good. I think that their hearts are in the right place, and I completely appreciate that they don't want HN to devolve into chaos — but I think that instead they risk turning HN into an echo chamber in which only views considered mainstream in San Francisco & Boston are permitted (even when those views are considered extreme elsewhere), while those which are considered mainstream elsewhere are silenced.

[civilian]

I really enjoy Go (I'm an 8k) but I have to disagree with this. Curing diseases-- AIDS, smallpox, guinea worm, chicken pox-- are accomplishments have impact people lives and directly help humanity get more value out our citizens.

Fun fact: did you know that kids don't get chicken pox these days? They all get immunized, so they don't go through the rite of passage that everyone who's 20+ plus has gone through. And it'll soon be forgotten. Which brings me to: Just because people forget about a disease we've cured doesn't invalidate that good that was done by the people solving that problem. The general public doesn't know about _most_ good things that were done to bring about the world we live in. There's still value in helping anyway. Doctors & researchers don't ask to be worshipped.

Even if we strongman Go and Chess and say that they are great at sharpening & maintaining one's mental facilities, have been integral and beneficial to military thought, and are immensely enjoyable, I don't think that the value of solving the Go and Chess problems compares to curing diseases.

[greendragon]

It's more about status than utility. As long as Go and Chess can maintain some sort of high status (as games or as historical points of interest) among the intelligent or ruling classes, they'll be remembered. Diseases seem to get status a different way. Humanity will probably remember the Plague for a long time still. Or if a biologically engineered supervirus was unleashed that killed a significant fraction of humanity over a short period of time, that too would be remembered. Quick mass death is the status currency of disease. If we ever get around to ending aging, probably one of the lowest-status problems on the to-do list, death by aging will be forgotten too.