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It seems you've missed my point. I don't doubt everyone you've listed has earned their credibility. What I'm trying to ask is "Why do you need to have earned

It seems you've missed my point. I don't doubt everyone you've listed has earned their credibility. What I'm trying to ask is "Why do you need to have earned credibility before you can be brutally honest with people?"

qq66 16y ago
Because that's how people know that you know what you're talking about. I've seen many factually incorrect, heavily upvoted posts here on HN, and credibility is part of what lets me identify good material. For example, there was a post in the last few weeks about DNS -- I knew that davidu's answer was the one to trust, even though others were more upvoted.
- palish 16y ago
  Speaking as a scientist, "don't think about it, don't care about it, just trust someone" is contrary to my nature. I was born with a burning desire to understand. Everything. I just wish I could locate a group of like-minded people to work with. I've been somewhat dismayed to find that "the real world" consists mostly of people whose sole ambition (or sole reality) is to fulfill their current role, without ever analyzing what it is they are doing or striving to improve the overall project. Status is very important. I wish it weren't so. At my last job, I was using EC2 to devise solutions to problems that they truly believed were technically unsolvable --- but no one would listen to me, because I was a newcomer. Their faith in the senior technical engineer was absolute and unwavering, and the senior technical engineer believed it was unsolvable, so therefore it was, for all intents and purposes, unsolvable. (After all, nothing ever came of my research, because no one cared enough to listen, or had time to think about something other than their current, immediate goal.) Worse, they even became offended when I tried to research the "unsolvable" problem in my own spare time. Status really sucks.
  - Psyonic 16y ago
    Status often does suck, but it's a necessary evil. There is too much information out there -- filters of some kind are necessary, and status is more reliable than most
  - qq66 16y ago
    I feel the same way about understanding things, but I don't have the time to understand every concept in the world from first principles. Nobody does. When there's a discussion on DNS, I like to know what's going on, but I can't take 2 years to go learn everything there is to know DNS (Well, I could, but I'm not going to). Luckily I know there is someone here who has done this, and until I have more or better information, I'm going to trust him. It's a necessary shortcut.
afshin 16y ago
I think the idea is that being curt is a mild evil that is tolerable if the information contained has a high probability of being valuable. But if the person being curt (or even rude) has no particular bearing/merit in the listener/reader's mind, it just comes off as pushy or presumptuous, sometimes to the point where you are tempted to ignore what's being said altogether. It's not ideal, but I think the basic version is: I trust you enough to put up with your "brutal" honesty, vs. who are you and why are you being a dick?
ahoyhere 16y ago
It's not really about credibility, it's about status. Bad behavior -- and being this rude is bad behavior -- is much more tolerated in high status individuals, in every type of community. Just like (extreme example) how senators and Goldman Sachs CEOs can walk away with a slap on the wrist and a little bad press, where you or I would go straight to jail. If it were just about the value of the information conveyed, people would do their own research when a person is "brutally honest" with them, and decide whether or not that information itself is credible. The confusion lies in the fact that in a community like HN, that worships logic (and also success), those things that make you "credible" are what make you a high-status individual. That means even the statements those high status people make which are NOT credible themselves will be accepted, or only gently rebuffed. (Which is a big reason why you don't see much criticism of pg here, or when you do, it's very respectful, vs other authors, even when he writes something ridiculous.)
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >"(Which is a big reason why you don't see much criticism of pg here, or when you do, it's very respectful, vs other authors, even when he writes something ridiculous.)" If you think someone is being ridiculous why don't you say something.
  - G_Morgan 16y ago
    People don't do it because it is counter productive. Respected people have their supporters. Unless you first bury your argument in adequately respectful terms it will get downvoted. Regardless of content. You cannot say "The Linus rant about C++ is just wrong". You need to first blather on about why Linus is a great guy but has his limited perspective and from that perspective he is correct. However there is a world outside of that perspective where he is wrong. If I posted the Linus rant on C++ I'd just be called an idiot. Nobody would worry about my perspective because, to my knowledge, I don't have any supporters to appease. It is just politics. It affects tech communities as much as anywhere else. People get invested in their side. If you challenge their side then you must be sneaky about it.
    - 16y ago
brk 16y ago
Because various forms of textual peacocking are frequently used by people who have no status, or knowledge, in a particular domain to try and appear as if they do. This is part of what a system like karma tries to address, if you see a comment that seems accurate, but is delivered in a very direct or even slightly annoyed tone by a user with high karma, you assume that this user is held in high esteem by others and while their comment may not be elegant, it should be taken to heart. Additionally, in the hacker sphere, it seems that many of the top hackers are also VERY busy with their projects. Thus, they may have less time to spend prettying up a comment. The goal is to share knowledge or information in the most efficient manner. Not to share knowledge without worrying about hurting feelings. Meanwhile, a direct comment from a new user with no standing in the community is likely to be met with some distrust or skepticism, even if wholly accurate. That user has not earned a status in the community. They have two options: 1) be brutally direct with all their comments and wait for people to realize they are frequently right, just inelegant. 2) start at least initially with more of a 'hearts and minds' campaign with their comments and build status in a more traditional method, slowly letting more of their actual personality come through in their comments.
- trotsky 16y ago
  Hmm, I'm somewhat surprised to hear this description of karma. Does this mean people click through on a username to discover their karma score before deciding if they should believe or agree with what has been written? It seems pretty clear to me that karma mostly measures the amount of time spent commenting. An interesting metric, but not one I would look to to predict comment quality.
  - brk 16y ago
    There have been times that I personally have seen a less-than-elegant comment from a new (to me) username. So, I check out the persons profile, look at their karma, other comments, submissions, etc., and then reply/vote/whatever. Not very frequently, but one or two times a month maybe. Could be just me...
    - 16y ago
scythe 16y ago
If you're going to state an opinion, you ought to give some justification. Linus can use as his justification the experience he has gained from running a major open-source project. Someone who has not run a major open-source project cannot use that justification. If pg wants to talk about starting a successful company, he can use as a reference his experience starting that thing he sold to Yahoo! for loadsamoney, et cetera.
intended 16y ago
This reminds me of this recent HN post: Hacking the status game: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2460233 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2460233 The part about people responding strongly to people acting above their status in particular was relevant.

qq66 16y ago

Because that's how people know that you know what you're talking about. I've seen many factually incorrect, heavily upvoted posts here on HN, and credibility is part of what lets me identify good material. For example, there was a post in the last few weeks about DNS -- I knew that davidu's answer was the one to trust, even though others were more upvoted.

palish 16y ago
Speaking as a scientist, "don't think about it, don't care about it, just trust someone" is contrary to my nature. I was born with a burning desire to understand. Everything. I just wish I could locate a group of like-minded people to work with. I've been somewhat dismayed to find that "the real world" consists mostly of people whose sole ambition (or sole reality) is to fulfill their current role, without ever analyzing what it is they are doing or striving to improve the overall project. Status is very important. I wish it weren't so. At my last job, I was using EC2 to devise solutions to problems that they truly believed were technically unsolvable --- but no one would listen to me, because I was a newcomer. Their faith in the senior technical engineer was absolute and unwavering, and the senior technical engineer believed it was unsolvable, so therefore it was, for all intents and purposes, unsolvable. (After all, nothing ever came of my research, because no one cared enough to listen, or had time to think about something other than their current, immediate goal.) Worse, they even became offended when I tried to research the "unsolvable" problem in my own spare time. Status really sucks.
- Psyonic 16y ago
  Status often does suck, but it's a necessary evil. There is too much information out there -- filters of some kind are necessary, and status is more reliable than most
- qq66 16y ago
  I feel the same way about understanding things, but I don't have the time to understand every concept in the world from first principles. Nobody does. When there's a discussion on DNS, I like to know what's going on, but I can't take 2 years to go learn everything there is to know DNS (Well, I could, but I'm not going to). Luckily I know there is someone here who has done this, and until I have more or better information, I'm going to trust him. It's a necessary shortcut.

afshin 16y ago

I think the idea is that being curt is a mild evil that is tolerable if the information contained has a high probability of being valuable. But if the person being curt (or even rude) has no particular bearing/merit in the listener/reader's mind, it just comes off as pushy or presumptuous, sometimes to the point where you are tempted to ignore what's being said altogether. It's not ideal, but I think the basic version is: I trust you enough to put up with your "brutal" honesty, vs. who are you and why are you being a dick?

ahoyhere 16y ago

It's not really about credibility, it's about status. Bad behavior -- and being this rude is bad behavior -- is much more tolerated in high status individuals, in every type of community. Just like (extreme example) how senators and Goldman Sachs CEOs can walk away with a slap on the wrist and a little bad press, where you or I would go straight to jail. If it were just about the value of the information conveyed, people would do their own research when a person is "brutally honest" with them, and decide whether or not that information itself is credible. The confusion lies in the fact that in a community like HN, that worships logic (and also success), those things that make you "credible" are what make you a high-status individual. That means even the statements those high status people make which are NOT credible themselves will be accepted, or only gently rebuffed. (Which is a big reason why you don't see much criticism of pg here, or when you do, it's very respectful, vs other authors, even when he writes something ridiculous.)

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>"(Which is a big reason why you don't see much criticism of pg here, or when you do, it's very respectful, vs other authors, even when he writes something ridiculous.)" If you think someone is being ridiculous why don't you say something.
- G_Morgan 16y ago
  People don't do it because it is counter productive. Respected people have their supporters. Unless you first bury your argument in adequately respectful terms it will get downvoted. Regardless of content. You cannot say "The Linus rant about C++ is just wrong". You need to first blather on about why Linus is a great guy but has his limited perspective and from that perspective he is correct. However there is a world outside of that perspective where he is wrong. If I posted the Linus rant on C++ I'd just be called an idiot. Nobody would worry about my perspective because, to my knowledge, I don't have any supporters to appease. It is just politics. It affects tech communities as much as anywhere else. People get invested in their side. If you challenge their side then you must be sneaky about it.
  - 16y ago

brk 16y ago

Because various forms of textual peacocking are frequently used by people who have no status, or knowledge, in a particular domain to try and appear as if they do. This is part of what a system like karma tries to address, if you see a comment that seems accurate, but is delivered in a very direct or even slightly annoyed tone by a user with high karma, you assume that this user is held in high esteem by others and while their comment may not be elegant, it should be taken to heart. Additionally, in the hacker sphere, it seems that many of the top hackers are also VERY busy with their projects. Thus, they may have less time to spend prettying up a comment. The goal is to share knowledge or information in the most efficient manner. Not to share knowledge without worrying about hurting feelings. Meanwhile, a direct comment from a new user with no standing in the community is likely to be met with some distrust or skepticism, even if wholly accurate. That user has not earned a status in the community. They have two options: 1) be brutally direct with all their comments and wait for people to realize they are frequently right, just inelegant. 2) start at least initially with more of a 'hearts and minds' campaign with their comments and build status in a more traditional method, slowly letting more of their actual personality come through in their comments.

trotsky 16y ago
Hmm, I'm somewhat surprised to hear this description of karma. Does this mean people click through on a username to discover their karma score before deciding if they should believe or agree with what has been written? It seems pretty clear to me that karma mostly measures the amount of time spent commenting. An interesting metric, but not one I would look to to predict comment quality.
- brk 16y ago
  There have been times that I personally have seen a less-than-elegant comment from a new (to me) username. So, I check out the persons profile, look at their karma, other comments, submissions, etc., and then reply/vote/whatever. Not very frequently, but one or two times a month maybe. Could be just me...
  - 16y ago

scythe 16y ago

If you're going to state an opinion, you ought to give some justification. Linus can use as his justification the experience he has gained from running a major open-source project. Someone who has not run a major open-source project cannot use that justification. If pg wants to talk about starting a successful company, he can use as a reference his experience starting that thing he sold to Yahoo! for loadsamoney, et cetera.

intended 16y ago

This reminds me of this recent HN post: Hacking the status game: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2460233 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2460233 The part about people responding strongly to people acting above their status in particular was relevant.