Do the people who are downvoting this comment believe that sympathy for Scott's class of people IS trendy at the moment? What's the objection to the comment.
Contrary to popular belief, HN's demographic is not immune to knee-jerk hostility triggered by the notion of a concept merely existing, wherever one might come down when discussing it.
"White fragility" is a kafkatrap: you can't object to "white fragility" as a concept without that being taken as a demonstration of "white fragility". There are sensible reasons to object to the "notion of (such) a concept merely existing" if you care about the standards of intellectual argument - as most people familiar with SSC would.
My point was not necessarily that white fragility exists, but that the mere suggestion of it existing provokes hostility. Thanks for proving said point.
The parent is clearly not being "hostile". At least I don't know of any definition of the word that includes calmly pointing out bad faith argumentation.
It is possible - in text, probable - to present a hostile front in a civil manner. What is objectionable about hostility is the bald-faced rejection of a premise. To accuse someone of not "caring about the standards of intellectual argument" based on the utterance of a single phrase is hostile.
This is not a matter of reasoned skepticism, it's knee-jerk ego defense; the above poster recognizes white fragility as a probable truth that traps him in a state of cognitive dissonance, and it makes him so uncomfortable that he has no choice but to respond. However, the response that truly rejects my initial premise would have been no response at all; the fact that he responded lends credence to that premise because its core holding was that it would elicit a response.
Scale can reveal problems. Overall, discussion on HN seems to be higher in quality than when I made my first account in 2012, but there are a lot more people. The number of people who upvote good comments seems to have gone down though. It makes sense: there are a lot more good comments (in quantity and probably in proportion), so it's easy to get tired of reaching for the upvote button on all of them. Meanwhile, people who make snap downvotes for ideological reasons still reliably downvote. A nerve-touching comment can easily hit the -4 cap without an equal number of upvotes to balance it out.
If I'm right about my theory of the reduced propensity to upvote with a higher quantity of good comments, there could be a tipping point where quality of discussion does go down as good but controversial comments sink to the bottom. HN isn't there yet, but it's something to watch out for.