I've recently seen many good and curious comments "answered in downvotes." Maybe I can't read the room, but why does that happen? Is there a way to phrase statements that challenge others in a way that leads to conversation and not flags/greying out?
"Why not?", by itself, isn't a great reply to a two-paragraph comment that said more than one thing. It took me quite a while to realize that it was in reply to the "[n]either are people who won't say more than three words at a time". Given how long it took me to get it, I suspect that others may have missed it because it was too subtle. If you missed that (like I initially did), it's a lousy reply - either low effort or badly said.
I think that HN has more zealots, propagandists, shills, and others arguing in bad faith than it did ten years ago. And I think that many of us have grown less patient with posts that clearly seem to be grinding axes, pushing agendas, or arguing rather than listening. (I think dang would say that we shouldn't be like that, but my patience has limits. I admit that as a weakness in myself, but there it is.)
> Is there a way to phrase statements that challenge others in a way that leads to conversation and not flags/greying out?
Of course there is! For example the way you have worded your question. It makes it clear what you diagre with and stimulates a conversation.
At the moment the greyed out comment simply says “why not?”. I would love to answer their question too, but it is not even clear what exactly it is about? And then further more are they disagreeing or are they requesting clarification on the root causes of some detail? If they are disagreeing on what grounds are they disagreeing?
I thought person was making a kind of lame joke, demonstrating why people who don't say more than three words are no fun to talk to (and hence downvoted)
But that's not a good way of doing it. A one-word reply rarely makes clear what needs more explanation, or even that that's what you're after.
On the other hand, a low-effort, drive-by unsupported claim doesn't necessarily deserve great effort and eloquence in a response. Maybe we should be better than them, but we also all have limited energy.
Some of us are kind of dense. I did not reply to the "Why not?" reply because I could not decide if it was intentionally a question about one of the things I said, or if it was a tongue-in-cheek example of someone who only uses three words or less.
Pretend I am dense, and give me a better idea of what I didn't explain well enough, and I'm happy to oblige. Everything I say makes sense in my head but I don't always communicate it effectively.
Right now it does look like it attracted one or two downvotes. I did not reply to you because I didn't understand what you were asking. I thought maybe you were just being cheeky with a 'not more than three words at a time' response.
That's curious, the score must have been bouncing around a lot via a lot of upvotes and downvotes.
I was being partially cheeky with the answer, though it was also partially genuine, i.e. why are conversations with either loud mouths or silent types unappealing?
The way it has been described to me is that if you always take the same route to work then your cognitive performance goes down. Staying curious and exploring the different routes is hard with relatively few waypoints but then you can zoom into more granular decisions (or out ... to the causes).
I just spent the night dancing. That's what I am mostly passionate about, discovering peer-to-peer and building trust. Hoping to see people participate in the future they want rather than suffering the present that they believe inevitable.
Can you explain more about what it does? The website is a bit vague but it looks like you're encoding S-expressions on a blockchain, so my first question would be what this gives us that traditional PKI would not.
So make the change. If your idea is strong and has gravity then people will follow (clearly the guy who is working hard with no reward is a FOSS developer ;)
Sorry but you are full of shit. Centralization is not digitization. Centralization is relying on the use of coercion. It's a /central/ source of truth.
The identity system we've been stuck with since WW1 will finally be replaced with something decentralized and approaching fair thanks to digitization. What we're lacking is the software that gives individuals self sovereignty.
I’d love to have a constructive conversation rather than resorting to base name calling.
I mean to say that centralization is caused by digitization because of the financial incentives, not that centralization IS digitization. And all of our current systems are systems of legacy control.
In fact I generally agree with you. Generally the identity system will be interrupted, and at the core digitization of the legacy system will happen. I’m simply saying that there will be further consolidation and centralization first and it will take longer than most people think due to the powerful financial interests involved.
To put it in your own words, I generally believe we will have to go through a economics “with the tragedy” before we get to the part where the tragedy gets removed.
I believe it was kind but the tone does not get across the textification.
Glad to hear your justifications. They are more persuasive than the initial representation.
Thank you for engaging the constructive conversation.. now w.r.t. the power of financial interests, I think it is overestimated and easily shattered but we will just have to see what happens.
Am I affected? sr.ht/~ilmu/tala.saman ... I would appreciate knowing so I have time to move and since you (drew) are in this thread this is the expedient way to find out...
I'm not sure what this project is for, but on the face of it it does not seem to be a problem. If it develops further and starts to run afoul of these rules, we can discuss it further and if necessary work together to ensure a smooth transition to another hosting provider. If you'd like to clarify more about this specific project, feel free to email me (sir@cmpwn.com) (or just elaborate here on HN).
It is meant to solve the class of problems (in the computer science sense) that is cryptocurrency. This is because I want a name system where the definitions are given meaning relative to our economic system but where the economics within the network should converge on better incentives (which is why the approach should encompass the space of solutions; so we can find the points in that space which have good tradeoffs w.r.t. reality, our current central currency model systematically produces pollution and the motivation of datalisp is to eventually replace that system with a provably better one).
You can assume for the time being that this project is permitted on SourceHut. Once it materializes further and its relationship to the social problems of cryptocurrency becomes more clear, we can evaluate it properly. It seems that you at least have a pretty good background on the problems with cryptocurrency, so I'm optimistic about this project. Good luck!
Degrading? Hah! man.. I've prioritized this problem over everything else in my life to the point where it has almost killed me and it has robbed me of everything.. when you are living on the street with 0 money in your pocket and you need to take a shit and the bathroom costs a coin to enter then what do you do? Cause I guess the difference between us and dogs is that you can poo straight into the plastic bag, no need for the intermediate step... Now if I would accept a job creating problems for regular people I'd have north of 100k for sitting in my chair and occasionally pressing a few buttons on my keyboard. But my refusal is absolute, the problem I am working on is important and if no one is willing to pay me for it then that is not my problem (yes it is but it is even more everyones elses problem than it is mine).
Rather than poor theory of mind what about good understanding of economics. The cost of absolutely clear context is too high to bear in many situation, it is often better to get the message across in whatever way works for those who are also in the know.. that way collaboration can cheapen the cost of constructing context. Of course if there is an off-the-shelf context available that you can refer to then there is no communication problem in the first place.
For me this is how I learned mathematics up until university. By just going unprepared to exams or doing extracurricular competitions and then "inventing the math" in the exam. In the case of competitions it was a bit more fun than exams which would still just be testing one or two ideas with a few examples but still it is in my opinion the more fun way to go about it. All these kids who were memorizing things, or studying the thing to death, a lot of them had trouble understanding what it was that they were doing.
I remember doing the same thing in my exams but the problem was that I'd always run out of time and wasn't getting the best grade. I was doing pretty good otherwise and my understanding was deeper. I wouldn't recommend doing that in exams if you care about grades. I didn't and still don't but not to the point of having bad grades or failing at anything.
Yeah my grades were terrible but there was this one time that the teacher had to regrade everyone because I spotted something he hadn't seen himself and so my solution was better than the one everyone was repeating by rote memorization.
I always took the elite classes so that stung a lot for all those perfect students.
I don't give a fuck about grades, that system of assessments is cruel and inaccurate. It makes people stupid.
