>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
>Omit internet tropes.
>Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
nickff: I agree it was borderline. My sentiment was closer to suggesting we look past tone to how shocking the content is. The human brain tries to normalize things, but a statement like this would have been unprecedented before 2016. People would have resigned or been fired, it would have been a scandal.
The problem with shallow dismissals in general is that it is a low bar for a comment. The problem with shallow dismissals in the context of someone else's work is that it's invalidating something which should be celebrated. They're both problems for different reasons. A comment explaining why one thinks the quote is ridiculous is more substantive than simply laughing at it.
The problem is if you do the work of analyzing the overt liars' statements, people will then pick on that for being too inflammatory. Never mind the downvotes from the true believers that are still gulping down the Kool-aid.
if you treat all this information as equally deserving of respect, then you spend all your time with a flood of intentional nonsense
I remember back in the age of dinosaurs, when HN made it a point of turning usernames lighter grey so comments would stand on their own. It made sense at the time for all of us coming up on the early Internet where humans were scarce and if someone was speaking you could assume not just that they were doing so in good faith (modulo mental illness), but that they were somewhere between higher intelligence and a bona fide leader in their field. This is laughably naive today, even more so with the rise of LLM slop.
Of course the major immediate problem here is the propagandists have set up shop in one of the key authorities of our society, and are still fueled by a crowd that still thinks they're supporting some kind of "independent thinking" revolution rather than totalitarian Party-allegiance-first regime akin to the Soviet Union, to a larger degree than "the woke" ever was. Navarro's bizzarro-universe economics and "anti-woke" applied to research/academics are basically our modern Lysenkoism. Same shit, different time period.