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Why is this downvoted? This has been happening a lot recently on seemingly normal messages.

just-juan-post 6y ago
Covid has created an atmosphere where certain questions are not allowed to be asked. Certain discussions are not allowed. Welcome to the coronavirus discussion on the Internet. Bring up how people are dying and it's terrible? Automatic upvotes. Attempt discussion about the tradeoffs of the lockdown (economy vs lives)? That person is stupid and uneducated and a Trump supporter - automatic downvotes. It's pointless to even attempt a discussion that isn't simply lamenting deaths. Don't waste your time like I have.
- stef25 6y ago
  > Covid has created an atmosphere where certain questions are not allowed to be asked I find that unacceptable so let's talk. Long story short I think that the economy will pick up again once this all blows over and that whatever negative consequences there are from a lockdown are still better than hundreds of thousands of people dying. One person dying is objectively worse than one person going bankrupt, this is ethics 101. I realise now that I'm doing exactly what you were criticizing (lamenting deaths) but I'd really like to hear your counter argument.
  - jquery 6y ago
    Define “blows over”. If covid appeared, today, with its current death rate (about 3x of the flu), there’s no way we would be taken the extraordinary measures that are being taken: shutting down schools, businesses, churches, and in general grossly violating constitutional rights with questionable efficacy. I see people saying “let’s wait for a vaccine” but what if a vaccine doesn’t appear for years? How many deaths of despair are worth it? How many domestic violence cases counterbalance one 70-year-old person dying (the average age of a covid death)? How many people going bankrupt is worth saving the life of a single person? What if I told you that going bankrupt is associated with increased likelihood of death? And so on... single-variate analysis of such a complex issue is doomed to fail, but that’s basically all I see.
  - forgot_account 6y ago
    >>>One person dying is objectively worse than one person going bankrupt, this is ethics 101. The argument of the anti-lockdown crowd (at least as I understand it) is that the second- and third-order effects are just rich people going bankrupt, but middle- and lower-class people being forced into dire economic straights up to and including starvation, or a drastically reduced ability to afford esssential life-saving healthcare for other non-COVID conditions.
    - stef25 6y ago
      > a drastically reduced ability to afford esssential life-saving healthcare for other non-COVID conditions Isn't that more of a symptom of a broken healthcare system?
13415 6y ago
In my opinion GP's post was silly in the context in which it occurred, as a comment to an article by journalists from the BBC about how people currently live in Wuhan, which also includes links to earlier reports from Wuhan and videos from Wuhan. The comment was rightly downvoted.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
This is a topic people are very emotional about, so it's unsurprising to see a lot of hair triggers on the downvote button. I've definitely felt myself fighting the urge to flick to a downvote whenever I see a comment that frustrates me.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Why is this downvoted? This has been happening a lot recently on seemingly normal messages. It's actually fairly normal for HN, posts very often attract a few stray downvotes when they don't really deserve it (the set of people who can vote is broad enough that that is blind to happen) and if that happens early on you'll often end up with a undeserved negative net score. And it'll usually go away fairly soon, which is one of the reasons for the guideline about not discussing the votes a post receives. It is almost always a waste of time that will provoke one or more people to get up on a soapbox about the way they perceive a viewpoint to be systematically suppressed on HN, often about the same time the score recovers to net positive, never to return to net down voted status, so all that's left in the subthread is a bunch of conspiracy theories explaining why HN is biased against a message with a positive net score.

Covid has created an atmosphere where certain questions are not allowed to be asked. Certain discussions are not allowed. Welcome to the coronavirus discussion on the Internet. Bring up how people are dying and it's terrible? Automatic upvotes. Attempt discussion about the tradeoffs of the lockdown (economy vs lives)? That person is stupid and uneducated and a Trump supporter - automatic downvotes. It's pointless to even attempt a discussion that isn't simply lamenting deaths. Don't waste your time like I have.

stef25 6y ago
> Covid has created an atmosphere where certain questions are not allowed to be asked I find that unacceptable so let's talk. Long story short I think that the economy will pick up again once this all blows over and that whatever negative consequences there are from a lockdown are still better than hundreds of thousands of people dying. One person dying is objectively worse than one person going bankrupt, this is ethics 101. I realise now that I'm doing exactly what you were criticizing (lamenting deaths) but I'd really like to hear your counter argument.
- jquery 6y ago
  Define “blows over”. If covid appeared, today, with its current death rate (about 3x of the flu), there’s no way we would be taken the extraordinary measures that are being taken: shutting down schools, businesses, churches, and in general grossly violating constitutional rights with questionable efficacy. I see people saying “let’s wait for a vaccine” but what if a vaccine doesn’t appear for years? How many deaths of despair are worth it? How many domestic violence cases counterbalance one 70-year-old person dying (the average age of a covid death)? How many people going bankrupt is worth saving the life of a single person? What if I told you that going bankrupt is associated with increased likelihood of death? And so on... single-variate analysis of such a complex issue is doomed to fail, but that’s basically all I see.
- forgot_account 6y ago
  >>>One person dying is objectively worse than one person going bankrupt, this is ethics 101. The argument of the anti-lockdown crowd (at least as I understand it) is that the second- and third-order effects are just rich people going bankrupt, but middle- and lower-class people being forced into dire economic straights up to and including starvation, or a drastically reduced ability to afford esssential life-saving healthcare for other non-COVID conditions.
  - stef25 6y ago
    > a drastically reduced ability to afford esssential life-saving healthcare for other non-COVID conditions Isn't that more of a symptom of a broken healthcare system?

13415 6y ago

In my opinion GP's post was silly in the context in which it occurred, as a comment to an article by journalists from the BBC about how people currently live in Wuhan, which also includes links to earlier reports from Wuhan and videos from Wuhan. The comment was rightly downvoted.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

This is a topic people are very emotional about, so it's unsurprising to see a lot of hair triggers on the downvote button. I've definitely felt myself fighting the urge to flick to a downvote whenever I see a comment that frustrates me.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Why is this downvoted? This has been happening a lot recently on seemingly normal messages. It's actually fairly normal for HN, posts very often attract a few stray downvotes when they don't really deserve it (the set of people who can vote is broad enough that that is blind to happen) and if that happens early on you'll often end up with a undeserved negative net score. And it'll usually go away fairly soon, which is one of the reasons for the guideline about not discussing the votes a post receives. It is almost always a waste of time that will provoke one or more people to get up on a soapbox about the way they perceive a viewpoint to be systematically suppressed on HN, often about the same time the score recovers to net positive, never to return to net down voted status, so all that's left in the subthread is a bunch of conspiracy theories explaining why HN is biased against a message with a positive net score.