[dang]

A shallow comment can contain a profound question. "What is the meaning of life?" would be an even shallower comment.

Were a comment to contain new and interesting information about a profound, i.e. generic, question, that would be fine. But this is precisely what internet comments bringing up generic questions don't usually do. It's not a good fit for the genre. Someone who really has something original to say about a profound question would be better off writing an essay, or a book. Certainly not a one-liner to an internet forum.

This is so much the case, in fact, that changing the subject from a concrete topic to a more generic one is a frequent form of trolling.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[wombatmobile]

In this case, the question is informative and stimulating because it challenges the assumption that human interaction has a different dynamic to animal interaction.

Bringing this question to conscious awareness is a different category of social discourse to “What is the meaning of life”, which is not really a social question at all.

[dang]

I'm sorry, but I don't agree. The topic is the social behavior of octopuses. It's not always bad for HN threads to go off topic—for example if there's an unpredictable direction which is more interesting than the original topic—but it's pretty much always bad for them to go in generic, pseudo-profound directions like this. It makes discussions more predictable, and therefore more (yes) shallow.

p.s. Please don't use multiple accounts to comment in the same thread. That's abusive, and will eventually get your main account banned as well.

[Sporktacular]

It's not pseudo-profound. It goes to the heart of what social behaviour is and provides another angle for interpreting the personal experiences shared by the researchers. There's nothing shallow about it.