How Intellectuals Talk
I posted yesterday’s post about quitting Hacker News right before lunch. (I’d actually written it the week prior but never got around to posting it because I had a business trip to Chicago to deal with.) When I got back from lunch I had a long list of emails from WordPress full of comments which is the telltale sign of a front page article on HN, and sure enough it was #1.
So a few thoughts on the responses. For one, I didn’t mean to imply that I wouldn’t visit the site anymore, I’ll still lurk. I like the links. I think there are some great people on the site. I think good discussions do occur, though you have to dig for them. I just don’t think it’s worth getting in 20 discussions to have one where I learn something.
One person said of HN
as far as I know is still one of the few sites with a large community and a strong bias towards intellectualism and knowledge sharing
I wish I believed that, I’d still be commenting there if I did. It’s not biased toward intellectualism, it’s biased toward nerdiness. Intellectuals have nuanced conversations about any topic. Nerds have partisan conversations about geeky topics. HN isn’t intellectual, it’s nerdy. There’s a big difference.
Most smart people aren’t intellectuals. It’s not their fault, they largely haven’t been exposed to other intellectuals. It’s easy to confuse talking about esoteric things for talking about things intellectually. I’ll give a few examples to help.
One common thread over the last year or two is that people are often focusing on how HN has changed as it’s grown. That’s a common topic on the site. Some people say it’s gotten better, some people say it’s gotten worse and whenever you hear people generalize like that, you know the result is not going to be an intellectual conversation.
An intellectual would discuss the community changes in a nuanced way, which would be to talk about specific facets of it that have gotten better or worse and implicitly admit the possibility that words like “better” or “worse” are useless when applied as generalities. I will say that the community has changed in the time I’ve been there, in some ways I would consider positive and some I’d consider negative, but that’s a post in and of itself, and to be honest not the one I’m interested in writing now, but you get the picture. The point is that there are things about it that are better, and things about it that are worse, and whether it’s better or worse overall depends greatly on what you visit the site for.
Another total failure of intellectualism: some people mistook my leaving to be the result of the glut of TSA articles. That’s like saying the guy who suffered from AIDS for the last ten years died of a cold. It might have been the nail in the coffin, but it was just a result of something deeper, which is that the lack of down-votes leads to annoying trends and makes vocal minorities overrepresented.
And, for the record, I’m not in favor of the backscatter machines. I actually agree with the community sentiment on that from a very high level which, admittedly, doesn’t say much. I just recognize that the issue is incredibly complex and the discussions I’m seeing there don’t reflect that at all. I hesitate to even bring it up here, as I don’t want people to think this post is about the TSA either, or even about the glut of TSA stories, but it’s a great example of how conversation could be better.
The issue is right up there with abortion in terms of complexity. There’s the issue of the TSA itself. What knowledge it has (perhaps there’s a legitimate reason that someone with a lot more information and experience preventing terrorism than me feels these are worth the expense and invasion of privacy). Who is making the decisions and why, who is enforcing them and how? There’s the issue of civil liberties issue (i.e. even if these things do make us safer, are they worth it? What’s the tradeoff?). There’s the health issue (these things use X-rays, is there a cancer risk to travellers? What about to TSA agents?) There’s the issue of enforcement (how much culpability do the ground level TSA agents have? If the system is immoral, does that make the TSA agent amoral for accepting that job? I personally feel that way about telemarketers, but not TSA agents, why?) There are the questions us travellers who think they’re a bad idea should be asking, most specifically what do we do about it? The answer clearly isn’t being a douche to some TSA agent at the airport, but beyond that it gets murky.
My problem is that what I’m not seeing is that nuanced discussion of any of these myriad of facets. Even if we accept that this issue is on-topic for Hacker News (which I don’t, it’s no more relevant than abortion, which is verboten, or any other civil liberties topic) I’m not seeing the sort of discussion I should from a community that routinely pats itself on the back for being so intelligent. I’m just seeing senseless partisanship. If I wanted that I’d watch cable news.
And that was my point. I’m not quitting the discussions because they are too frequently about the TSA (which seems to have abated anyway) or that they aren’t intelligent, it’s because they aren’t intellectual. I don’t learn anything from them.
November 24, 2010 at 6:18 pm
By your definition, does intellectual debate occur consistently on any public internet discussion channel? While I assume a private community (or extremely obscure) can manage this feat easier, is there anyway for a visible and public community to do so?
November 24, 2010 at 6:35 pm
I really don’t know. It’s rare offline so I’d assume it’s also rare online.
November 24, 2010 at 9:19 pm
There you said it. It may be rare offline and its even rarer on forums. The very nature of message board conversation tends to make you partisan and cut out the niceties and “i agree but..” and “but what do you think about..” like phrases. What makes forums different from face2face conversation is that it makes us assertive rather than perceptive, but as a side effect, a purpose does get served – that of increasing variety and diversity rather than depth.
November 24, 2010 at 6:42 pm
Matt,
I’m generally a fan of what you write. But here’s an analogy for what this post feels like: your girlfriend breaks up with you for some well defined reasons. After she leaves you, she continues to call you just to tell you why those reasons were valid, and how much better off she is. She continues to describe your flaws, while saying, “we will never get back together.”
Just seems kinda weird to me. If you don’t want to be on HN, don’t. But why write about it?
November 24, 2010 at 6:44 pm
I can kinda see that I guess. It wasn’t meant that way, it was meant to help. It’s more like the girl saying “I broke up with you because you’re co-dependent, go see a psychologist”.
November 24, 2010 at 7:40 pm
Matt, I found your original post and this followup helpful.
I rarely comment on aggregating sites like HN, mostly because I do not think it will help me or anyone else. Once a group grows beyond my social comfort number, I become just an occasional lurker instead of a participant.
I like to be a part of small discussions, even if I strongly disagree with participants, if it stays civil. I wish that could happen on a larger scale, but it never seems to for very long. That is one of the things I hate about politics in general: reasoned civil discourse happens in the small, but rarely in the large.
Anyway, thanks again for sharing, if nothing else it reminds me to be careful what form my contributions to discussions take, whether virtual or in-person.
Doug
November 24, 2010 at 8:00 pm
First time poster on your blog.
For what it’s worth, I think your take on HN’s level of intellect is spot on. HN is great for being a community of experts who are eager to share knowledge, but any time the topic is removed from their expertise, HN turns nerdy, as you put it. Which is too bad, since many big things in life are beyond the expertise of just about anyone, and you basically have to be an intellectual to make progress. I don’t suppose you’ve read Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter?
November 24, 2010 at 8:17 pm
Thank you. I’ve felt this way about the tech/hacker/programming community in general for quite a while and hadn’t been able to put my finger on exactly what it was about the conversation that always drove me nuts. I’m an open source programmer and very interested in everything around technology, but I have taken to trying to distance myself the scene. Even if the topic of discussion is something I’m intensely interested in, it seems that whenever “geeks” (and they tend to self-describe that way) enter into it, I get bored. It rapidly turns into blatant punditry combined with a technical dick-size competition (the more esoteric and tangential detail you can bring in, the more you must be correct).
“Intellectuals have nuanced conversations about any topic. Nerds have partisan conversations about geeky topics.” pretty much nails what I’ve been feeling about a large portion of the culture. The replies arguing that the scale of the forum inclines it towards that style I think are missing the point. Of course, when the forum is large, the loud annoying voices tend to drive the rest out, but I notice this tendency even when it’s just a couple geeks talking about text editors over a beer.
November 24, 2010 at 11:09 pm
For most of my life I have felt like I live in an intelectual void, I have never really been able to find other Intellectuals, most people think “I am an old man” or “I care too much” or “I take life too seriously”
Is there any place on the web that any of you know that IS having Intellectual conversations about topics similar to hacker news?
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