Lab leak theory proponents were flagged on HN in 2020. So much for us trying to say this, comes off as rich. I just wish we could be a bit more self-critical and introspective.
The system is imperfect, but how do you design a better system?
It's easy to design a system that prevents the flagging in this particular case, but will it be better overall?
I feel that it's quite inevitable in a community like HN for this theory to get flagged. It's undesirable, but the alternative is worse.
Why? Because at its core, the HN community is a polite, considerate one. We try to apply the charitable interpretation when possible.
The postings about the lab-leak theory could be interpreted in a charitable way too, but unfortunately, the lab-leak theory has a dark undercurrent: "China is bad". Of course, lots of people on HN are smart enough to understand that the lab leak was a joint China-US fiasco (of stupendous proportions). But they also understand that these nuances will be lost in translation. "China bad" is the only thing that comes out.
For more than half a year there were numerous attacks on Asian people in the US. This was not just a theoretical exercise, it resulted in actual hate in the US.
So flagging the lab-leak postings was in line with the HN's tendency to go for the charitable interpretation.
> We try to apply the charitable interpretation when possible
To the people we're debating with, yes! That doesn't mean everyone needs to have wide-eyed naivety about every possible person, institution or event that could be discussed.
> the lab-leak theory has a dark undercurrent: "China is bad".
> So flagging the lab-leak postings was in line with the HN's tendency to go for the charitable interpretation.
This is a useful case study of why so many people have a problem with wokeness: "we can't allow any criticism of the Chinese government because someone, somewhere, might do generalize to all Chinese and do something bad". That's destructive to intellectual curiousity and honesty of all kinds.
Anyway it doesn't seem like the best possible explanation. It wasn't just China-related stuff like that which got reliably flagged and downvoted. It's anything that criticized any aspect of the response, unless the criticism was insufficiently aggressive response.
A different attempt: HN has many people who owe their status in society to confidence in the academic/scientific system. Anything that brings that system into disrepute gets attacked. Same pattern is seen on discussions of vaccines, climate change, anything where there is allegation of bad behaviors by public sector researchers or people who justify their stance through caring about the collective future. Ideology is also corrupting. A very common response to people posting evidence of problems with the natural origin theory or other non-COVID scientific dogmas is "that link is to a right wing site so I won't look at it at all". The justification for it being a right wing site? That it contains criticism of government science, a perfect ideological catch 22.
A simple alternative is to make people select one of a handful of reasons for flagging, and if the selected reason doesn't seem justifiable, those people lose flagging privs.
A version of this idea was discussed when the flagging feature was introduced [1]:
A flag is enough. People around here are pretty smart. The reasons why will mostly be obvious.
> if the selected reason doesn't seem justifiable, those people lose flagging privs.
It's in place right now, except for the selected reason. If the flagging does not seem justifiable, those people lose flagging rights. It's a tough call on the moderators though.
Is there a way to crowdsource the decision? Without increasing too much the complexity? Quite unlikely.
My take: HN is the best there is. It's not perfect, but few things in life are perfect.
I don't think that belief worked out there. I browse with showdead turned on. Many, many stories end up dead and it's often very unclear why. For comments you can usually guess but that guess is never more precise than "this upsets some people a lot" which is almost tautological. You can speculate about what exactly upsets them, but it becomes only pop psychology, and anyway, hiding whole discussions because some people didn't like it even if it was polite and intelligent goes against the stated goals of the site. It actually incentivizes people to shoot the messenger.
But the Chinese government is bad regardless of whether they played any role in starting the COVID-19 pandemic (we have no hard evidence on that). There should be no doubt among us that the Chinese Communist Party is an enemy to all of humanity.
I posted a link [0] to project-evidence.github.io [1] in April 2020. I think it got flagged at the time, but a year later somebody vouched for it when I complained about the previous flagging in a comment on another thread just like this one.
It's an unbiased document that has aged pretty well, IMO.
FWIW, I also think many (not all) of the tweets from @EthicalSkeptic have aged well. But he's definitely not for everyone (and his - or their - pseudonymity does reduce trust, regardless of how understandable it is in this climate... after all, I'm using a pseudonym for the same reasons!).
An open forum like Hacker News is taken care of such that opinions that go against the narrative on sensible topics like: covid, elections, inflation, crypto get massive downvotes and even more, there are task-forces that handle discussion and form opinion to give impression that a majority of people are woke :)
Dang should intervene IMO, he does such a fantastic job on other topics. When opinion is controversial but based in good reasoning, he should step in and foster those opinions. At the very least, disable flagging them.
I’ve lost interest in HN because there are no new things I can learn. It’s the same anti-car thread after anti-car thread.
It's easy to design a system that prevents the flagging in this particular case, but will it be better overall?
I feel that it's quite inevitable in a community like HN for this theory to get flagged. It's undesirable, but the alternative is worse.
Why? Because at its core, the HN community is a polite, considerate one. We try to apply the charitable interpretation when possible.
The postings about the lab-leak theory could be interpreted in a charitable way too, but unfortunately, the lab-leak theory has a dark undercurrent: "China is bad". Of course, lots of people on HN are smart enough to understand that the lab leak was a joint China-US fiasco (of stupendous proportions). But they also understand that these nuances will be lost in translation. "China bad" is the only thing that comes out.
For more than half a year there were numerous attacks on Asian people in the US. This was not just a theoretical exercise, it resulted in actual hate in the US.
So flagging the lab-leak postings was in line with the HN's tendency to go for the charitable interpretation.