Sure. Ask in the spirit of good conversation, not cross-examination, e.g. "how did you come to that conclusion" or "why do you think that"—the way people put things in a friendly in-person conversation. Make it clear that you're just curious, and find some way to indicate that you assume good faith on the part of the other.
In face-to-face conversation, most good-faith signals are sent with tone of voice and physical expression. We don't have those channels in text so it's necessary to encode them some other way.
FYI I really appreciate the way you moderate dang, thanks for all the hard work. You're clear, transparent, informative and paitent. It really makes all the difference.
I feel like the example you provided vs. the person's detached comment is splitting hairs over a stylistic issue. In the detached comment, ErikVandeWater is precisely asking for what he wants. In a community heavily weighted with engineers, I think this behavior should be expected, and not penalized.
I understand, but we have a lot of experience with "stylistic issues" triggering destructive flamewars on HN, and there were signs of that in this case.
They run a botnet of users, utilizing browser mods, that upvote a whitelist of users. Sometimes you can see it in normal /r/news submissions, the comments from certain users are voted above 100 immediately as they say crazy racist things and the person they are arguing with has a normal number of upvotes. You can find old lists of the users to upvote and downvote.
In face-to-face conversation, most good-faith signals are sent with tone of voice and physical expression. We don't have those channels in text so it's necessary to encode them some other way.