I speak I think for many people on HN when I say that at least on this thread, in this context, in this discussion, in these circumstances, this idea should be dismissed out of hand.
Let's stipulate you just want to have an interesting intellectual conversation. Can we have it some other time?
I understand where you're coming from, and that's fine.
As for context, I disagree--I think this is a perfectly fine time for it--OP was saying, in effect, "Folks, we're about to do Demo Day, don't be scumbags and/or harass our founders; there's a price to that."
My comment was in response to a (completely valid and correct!) complaint about the tainting of business relationships for investing with romantic/sexual nonsense. I asked a question that several people interpreted as crass, which is unfortunate. I later refined and elaborated on the topic, showing it could be taken quite seriously and evaluated beyond just being thought of as some lowbrow joke.
The troubling thing to me about this all is the out-of-hand rejection of the idea without further argument than "This idea makes us really uncomfortable, and we summarily refuse to evaluate it".
It's a sign of intellectual laziness, of prejudice, and perhaps most unfortunately, mob mentality on a forum I generally respect.
If we want to fix a lot of these issues we have as an industry, we can't shy away from ideas we find odious or comfortable: we must engage them on their own ground and show them to be folly.
"I imagine such a thing would be amazingly toxic and hopefully collapse into a vortex of bad."
That's exactly right. Your idea is nothing more than a thin veneer over a brothel. And that's exactly the reason it merits no further discussion. (Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with brothels, but that's not what HN is about.)
No, this 'intellectual conversation' should never happen. The people involved in any sort of conversation of this type(as I am sure many have happened in the past) will only dull their sympathy for people who do have to struggle/contend with this happening to them. It's morally disgusting and I could care less about your definition of 'morality'.
The idea that scholarly discussions should ever be disregarded as insensitive is, in my opinion, pure absurdity.
I don't disagree that this isn't the right time for it (though I don't fault angersock for that), nor do I disagree that it might dull the sympathies of some - regardless, I completely reject that as a valid reason for avoiding an exchange of ideas driven by intellect.
The exchanging of ideas is the definition of conversation itself, it is not particular to 'scholarly discussions'. That alone completely negates your point.
However, I understand what you are trying to say. You are worried that the dismissal of conversation is a bad attitude towards progress. That is true. BUT that is not what is happening here. The premise was already set for what this conversation would be about. You should think of my rhetoric as a part of the conversation itself. Just because I weighed in as "going further accomplishes nothing", does not make that a a wrong conclusion. You could try to prove why THAT conclusion is wrong (but only in relationship to the conversation itself) instead of generalizing what I am doing as somehow "stopping all scholarly discussions".
>Stopping any scholarly discussion is, in my opinion, pure absurdity.
And yet you hypocritically just put an end to a conversation that would be about: "Whether or not stopping points for scholarly discussions can be useful".
How can you not even see how unfruitful your conclusions are?
Because I don't have any desire to prolong a conversation with someone who feels like a possibly poor choice of words on my part renders my entire argument useless.
Choosing to opt out of a discussion is not the same as attempting to prevent others from having one.
Having a discussion with someone whose principle argument is that the discussion shouldn't be had seems like folly to me. Call it unfruitful if you like, but I wasn't attempting to start an argument as much as do my duty and explain the downvote.
We could go on and talk about the hypocrisy of how your attempts to extend the conversation are being made in order to bolster your argument against having one in the first place, but truly, I was not, nor am not trying to be condescending, as much as expressing my outright rejection for the idea that there is ever grounds for preventing an intellectual discussion on the grounds that someone might not like it.
The original conversation is not the one being extended. And who chose to take a leap away from the original conversation? You did. Your entire comment: invalid.
Disagreed. Any form of discrimination or ignorance should be challenged with more dialogue instead of less. Take whatever abhorrent ideological position you can think of and I will tell you that we should discuss it publicly, challenge it publicly, and destroy it intellectually in a public forum.
This has the advantages of:
* the person who held these thoughts outs themselves as a bigot as opposed to being a toxic agent
* a corpus of knowledge how to dispel/combat such positions is formed
* people who may be in the beginning stages of harboring such ideas are either discouraged due to strong public pushback or are helped to realize how wrong that position is
steveklabnik posted a good link for PG's take on downvotes--do we have a similar reference for flagging? I recall a couple of polls on it, but beyond that, nothing comes to mind.
Maybe it was hard to see with all the grey text, but I couldn't find a specific line where you supported the idea, but rather, you just wanted to discuss and dissect the merits of such an idea through breaking it down to promote discussion and to specifically call out pitfalls in taking things to an absurd degree. Shame people here have problems separating discussion and refutation of toxic ideas from the active support for toxic ideas.
