[dang]

> they will prefer children in developing countries starve and go blind

Please don't use inflammatory language like this when arguing on HN. It's unsubstantive (because it overstates things for agitation effect) and tends to provoke low-quality subthreads.

Here's something PG once wrote that clarifies this principle:

[HN comments] should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445761

[ataggart]

Sorry, I don't see why you consider what I wrote "inflammatory". Children in developing countries starving and going blind is the status quo. Opposing an existential solution without bothering to provide an alternate existential solution is de facto preferring the status quo. This should not be a controversial statement.

[dang]

Well, it's inflammatory because it depicts opponents as monsters who prefer to see children suffer. That's plainly one meaning of such language, regardless of whether there's also an abstract factual interpretation. It's not as bad as if you had accused someone personally, but it's still bad. It provokes a downward spiral in the discourse. HN threads are sensitive to this.

There are places where inflammatory, provocative language does well: in the rough and tumble of political debate, for example, or battles of literary wit. The trouble is that if we have much of it here, it rides roughshod over everything else. It's a tradeoff. The values of HN are intellectual substance and personal civility, and those are fragile in a public anonymous forum, so we all should consciously protect them. This still leaves lots of room to make one's point (albeit at the cost of a certain blandness), so it shouldn't be a problem.