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Why do HN comment threads always end up as Pedantry Pageants where all ye who dare comment must address all the fucking edge cases or be called out by the immed

• declnz 5y ago
  Yes. In fact perhaps we could automate these, with GPT-3! Unless, err, that's already happened
• JMTQp8lwXL 5y ago
  Because it's missing the forest for the trees. Look at total energy usage, across all industries. This is more an indictment of cryptocurrency than it is about actually caring about the environment. Compare it to say, eliminating all gas vehicles for electric cars. Where is the HN thread advocating for that, if the end result would be massively fewer carbon emissions versus this proposal? My criticism is this proposal is like banning plastic straws. It's patting ourselves on the back, with no real solution.
  • adamrezich 5y ago
    > It's patting ourselves on the back, with no real solution. modern politics in a nutshell
  • kaesar14 5y ago
    Are you joking? There are plenty of conversations on Hackernews about electric vehicles, it just so happens that replacing every single car in the world with a totally different energy system is a way harder problem than banning useless cryptocurrencies that are burning energy to fuel equity bubbles.
    • shawnz 5y ago
      Only if you just consider how hard it is to ban, not how hard it is to replace while achieving the same utility.
    • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      So instead of dolvibg the hard problem well focus on something easy and useless. SV moto in a nutshell
      • kaesar14 5y ago
        You may have heard of this company Tesla based in Silicon Valley, one of the largest companies by market cap in the world, just led an electric car revolution that's inspired automakers worldwide to shift off IC engines
      • joshuamorton 5y ago
        No, it's addressing the low hanging fruit first. An efficient approach to solving a problem.
• wnevets 5y ago
  > Every fucking time "Regulations" of any kind come up. unless of course those regulations are about regulating "big tech" for "censorship".
• ChemSpider 5y ago
  This is not an edge case at all. Who is to decide on what to spend energy or not? This is curing the symptoms only. The (counter) solution is not to discuss for what to burn coal, but to finally stop burning coal, oil and gas. USA and EU could do that within a few years. And then stop or tax imports from countries that still do burn coal. But that is inconvenient for many, so they prefer discussing nerdy Bitcoin PoW instead.
  • helmholtz 5y ago
    I mean, thank you for offering the alternative solution! I couldn't agree more that not burning coal is the only ultimate solution. A severe, possibly overly severe, Carbon tax is maybe the way. But as the great Stephen Schneider once quoted some other great, "Don't let the perfect get in the way of the good". And he was talking about cap and trade vs carbon tax!
    • insert_coin 5y ago
      The real reason is twofold, first and more importantly, because you don't know the unintended consequences of proposing something like that. Who knows what else would get caught between the regulatory framework needed to prevent someone from doing math, because let's face it, that is impossible so unintended consequences will be the only consequences. And secondly and most importantly, the government should not decide what products are allowed to be traded: Governments should lift all bans on products currently banned, all drugs, all books, all music, all banned clothing, etc.
      • giaour 5y ago
        The last sentence comes off as a rhetorical sleight of hand. You can be against censorship of books and music and still believe that the government has a role to play in regulating dangerous goods like plutonium. The trade of goods with an outsized environmental impact is regulated today, though this mostly shows up as restrictions on chemicals that are themselves direct pollutants.
        • 5y ago
• shawnz 5y ago
  It's not a counter-solution, it is a suggestion that the problem isn't really a problem. PoW power usage is high in an absolute sense but lower than many other things which people would consider an obvious waste. So why does PoW power usage have so much contention compared to those other things? I would say because there's too much baggage/hype associated with cryptocurrencies, not because there's a genuine belief that increasing the energy usage of our species is a universally bad thing. As for the carbon side of the issue, that isn't something which is specific to cryptocurrencies or any other kind of energy usage. I support carbon taxes and import taxes on CO2-producing goods/services, including cryptocurrency services, and I am certain that many cryptocurrency believers feel the same way.
  • mc32 5y ago
    So if ready alternatives didn’t exist, sure PoW is wasteful but has no alternative... but we have an alternative. If there were alternatives to running a social media platform that didn’t spend energy we should also back that option.
    • shawnz 5y ago
      Assuming you are talking about PoS systems, I think they are very promising but it's still not obvious that they can achieve the same risk profile as PoW systems. I think they are worthy of further research and I am excited to see how Eth 2.0 works in practice, but I don't think we understand the economic nature of cryptocurrencies well enough to definitively say that it can completely replace Bitcoin.
• micropresident 5y ago
  There is a counter solution to advocating for regulation. It's to create an economic system where people are naturally incentivized to do what's best. Vote with your wallet. You don't want energy that produced Co2? Don't buy it and advocate for others not to buy it. Instead what people are doing is advocating for the government to come and point guns at people who don't do what they want -- even if they happen to be wrong. And when they are wrong, there are disastrous consequences as is currently extremely apparent in California. There are all kinds of perverse incentives which have resulted in the severe homelessness and extreme government waste. The people advocating for this neither listen to the wisdom of Murphy's law, nor do they understand that when regulation impacts the market that regulation becomes what is bought and sold. Have you never heard of regulatory capture? That has worse human-cost impacts than leaving people to their own devices. Vote with your wallet. Don't like the environmental cost of beef? Don't buy it. This works -- you can see it playing out. https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/BA65/production/_105471774_us_consumption-nc.png https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/BA65/production/...
  • ForHackernews 5y ago
    This idea doesn't apply at all for stupid speculative bubbles like proof-of-work crypocurrency. As another good counterexample to your "market solutions for everything": I don't want rhinos driven to extinction, so I vote with my wallet by never buying powdered rhino horn or other poached products, and donating to environmental charities to protect them. However, it's very likely that rhinos will be extinct in the wild within our lifetime. Does this mean "the market" has decided to exterminate wild rhinos? Should we eliminate poaching regulations and remove red-tape to stop distorting the free-market price of rhino horn?
    • micropresident 5y ago
      Create your own nature reserve for rhinos if you think it's so important. There are huge swaths of the US dedicated to nature reserves.
      • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
• beaner 5y ago
  The crowd of HN tends to be more philosophic. Without a moral / ethical / long-term practical view, we're just ships with torn sails floating in the waves, wandering about, making short-term decisions. Decisions often have 2nd, 3rd, 4th-order consequences that can be unpredictable and often counter to the goal we think we're working towards in the short term. It pays to think them through from a high level and apply long-term thinking principles.
  • helmholtz 5y ago
    Lol, please. The crowd on HN is just as impotent as the crowd on Twitter, Reddit or Facebook. But with more "first principles" thrown in.
    • beaner 5y ago
      If that's how you feel, maybe that's the vibe you're bringing with you.
  • virmundi 5y ago
    We’re talking about HN. Most people here are moral relativists that think their feelings based worldview is absolute. They already are ships without a sail. How many have actual researched and applied a philosophy? I bet most here can’t even find utility in Kant.
  • fwsgonzo 5y ago
    I agree. Having used Reddit for too long, and Facebook too before I deleted it completely, my experience has been that HN is much better at talking about things, and more careful about wording. Despite the predictable slippery slope comments, there is always some good commentary in most threads. I can't think of anywhere else to go to get discussion on a multitude of complex topics like this. That doesn't mean that threads on HN can't take a nosedive and become flame wars. But that's what good moderation is here for, and I believe HN has that.
• Teelo 5y ago
  Just can't escape this mentality.
• nickpp 5y ago
  Because banning outright is stupid, and banning a technology is even stupider. Technologies have both benefits and drawbacks. TAX (not ban) the drawbacks. In this case, tax carbon. Then people will decide what they want to spend their (expensive) energy on.
  • patrickthebold 5y ago
    I'm actually hopeful that crypto will bring about a carbon tax. I figure the people getting rich in crypto are a different set of people than those getting rich in traditional CO2 emitting industries. So there's a slightly better chance that politicians will enact the necessary legislation.
  • soco 5y ago
    Unless they do that outside your jurisdiction and/or get tax cuts from the powers to be.
  • belltaco 5y ago
    Carbon tax will increase the prices of essentials for the poor and middle class.
    • fsflover 5y ago
      Basic income?
    • hllooo 5y ago
      Redistribute the proceeds as a tax credit then
• syndacks 5y ago
  Because HN is full of fucking leetcoders or other specially minded folk that sees things as black or white. If any part of a statement is falsifiable that statement is False (or so it goes) so that's why we get this kind of Malcolm Gladwell-level brain candy masquerading as rigor.
• thepasswordis 5y ago
  Because this is a website full of engineers who write computer software for a living? And finding and solving for those edge cases is literally a core function of what most of us spend the majority of both our work and leisure time doing?
  • EricMausler 5y ago
    To me the big gripe is not the concern for edge cases but the immediate dismissal of a very productive first step in addressing an issue by resolving the entire conversation before it even happens. It is very possible to bring up edge cases in a productive manner. Expand the conversation to include them. there's no need to assume the first solution idea posted is meant to be the final form
    • emteycz 5y ago
      Making this change would introduce an enormously impactful precedent. Politicians might take it and run with it to places we don't even want to imagine. I'd agree with you in a world without the current style of politics and decision making, but that's not where we live - and sadly alternative to that is unknown to me too.
    • beaner 5y ago
      But is it even a productive first step? There are arguments to be made that proof-of-work mining incentivizes renewable R&D. By banning that because it uses "too much" energy now - what are we potentially losing? What developments in renewables, energy storage, or grid development simply won't be there, which we won't know we don't have, because we banned the largest for-profit, skin-in-the-game competitive contest for low-cost energy that the world had ever seen 25 years prior? Banning it outright is short-sighted. Thinking about it from a higher level is a way of addressing the real issue of carbon emissions while allowing a phenomenon that has the potential to massively help, not hurt, to thrive.
      • Qworg 5y ago
        The desire for energy is near limitless - PoW simply bends the curve upward. As the price of BTC increases, the drive for less costly energy slackens off. The issue is clearly a tragedy of the commons - the cost (higher air pollution/higher energy costs) is socialized, while the profits are centralized. So the maximization function is cheap >>> anything else. Why wouldn't we expect more and larger coal plants versus research into fusion reactors?
• kietay 5y ago
  How is that an edge case? The OP said ban all POW crypto and the reply questions whether that is really a wise suggestion.
• lancemurdock 5y ago
  just because you lack an understanding to rebuttal coherently doesn't render the argument useless.
• AlchemistCamp 5y ago
  A more apt comparison might be burning fuel to mine copper, nickel and zinc out of the ground for coinage.
  • kd0amg 5y ago
    That comparison would fit even better if we acquired Cu/Ni/Zn at the same rate no matter how much energy we spent on mining it.
• tigerBL00D 5y ago
  Why? Because that's what I bet most people come to HN for. I'd rather find out that my idea is impractical or plain stupid on a HN thread than in some other and expensive way.
• panarky 5y ago
  "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Perhaps it's not idle pedantry to observe that many of those who are angry about crypto energy usage couldn't care less about the energy wasted and pollution generated by other endeavors. It's like an uncle of mine who is outraged that mosques get tax exemptions, but he doesn't care that churches get tax exemptions. Clearly tax policy isn't a genuine concern for him. He's angry about something else that he won't say out loud.
  • helmholtz 5y ago
    Fair enough. I love this orange website, but I also despise it. Flying off the handle is rarely a sensible solution. To your point, though, I'm willing to wager that most of the people whose biggest problem with crypto is energy consumption would happily also support other harsh measures against all manner of pollution generating entities. I know I would.
    • admax88q 5y ago
      A pollution tax is really the only viable solution though. Playing whack a mole against individual entities and activities will never solve the problem, and creates a lot of legislation. So long as pollution and carbon are free or cheap, people will find wasteful ways to generate it. Incentives work, and taxing carbon and pollution will incentive green alternatives.
      • lancemurdock 5y ago
        a pollution tax will not work. That just becomes the price of doing business and that cost is factored into other areas of the business model. Even worse, it just gives more capital to inefficient governments
        • hllooo 5y ago
          > That just becomes the price of doing business and that cost is factored into other areas of the business model. Yah that's the point and business with less environmental impact will be more competitive. Industries/products with more of an impact will be more expensive, reflecting their true cost. > Even worse, it just gives more capital to inefficient governments Most pollution/carbon taxes are proposed to be revenue neutral, i.e. all the proceeds are returned to the tax base. This is also important because like other (non-luxury) consumption taxes, a carbon tax is regressive.
• ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  While I agree with the genral thrust of your tirade, this is not slippery slope, this is hypocracy of the highest degree. OP proposal to ban cryptocurrencies for 'damaging environment' while we have companies who's entire business model is giving their customers cancer and preying on addicts.
  • davidcbc 5y ago
    This is classic whataboutism. We can't do anything to improve the world because there are other bad things happening in the world too.
  • acdha 5y ago
    1. We can work on more than one thing at a time and I’d be quite surprised if the original poster didn’t want to do something about those companies, too. 2. For all their many flaws, those industries also provide something of value. If they shut down tomorrow, people would miss having cars, pesticides, fuels, medications, etc. but if every cryptocurrency suddenly halted tomorrow nobody outside of a few speculators would find their daily life any different. That doesn’t mean that those externalities aren’t real and don’t require action but they’re widespread because there is some kind of real value to society and you’d need a transition plan to avoid disrupting a lot of processes.
    • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      If a heroin dealer is imprisoned, his customers could have severe withdrawal. Some might even die from it.
  • dudeman13 5y ago
    I'm gonna bet OP would be happy to ban hammer the hell out of the companies who's entire business model is giving their customers cancer and preying on addicts too
• lhorie 5y ago
  It's not pedantry, it's calling out issues in armchair proposals. "Why not regulate" and "Why not let the market sort itself out" are kinda intellectually lazy propositions: there are good regulations and bad regulations, and good and bad implementations. And banning isn't really a proper solution in the first place. It's a literal avenue for tax revenue for countries at this point. The fact that PoS coins like Cardano and L2 solutions like Polygon are bullish despite the crash in Bitcoin shows something about investor sentiment surrounding the whole energy consumption ordeal. Voting with your wallet is a real possible solution and IMHO, people are starting to take the hint.
• tshaddox 5y ago
  I don’t understand why you don’t find these “where do you draw the line?” inquiries extremely relevant to this conversation. It seems like everyone here has just assumed that Bitcoin is useless and therefore the externalities from its energy usage should be unacceptable. Personally I’m not a big fan of bitcoin’s energy usage either, but it strikes me as bizarre to recommend banning arbitrary things that use energy rather than, for example, addressing the externality problem directly.
  • helmholtz 5y ago
    I wouldn't say OP recommended banning anything 'arbitrary'. It was very relevant to the discussion to state that the ban should be on proof-of-work currencies. Here's my issue. There is such a thing as too-late in environmental matters. Once it's too late, it's a fire that sustains itself. Therefore, acting quickly matters. Addressing the source directly is obviously the superior solution. But I just don't see it happening at a fast enough rate. I see nuclear power in the same way. Yes, it's a little bit of trading one problem for the next, but it's a very necessary stop gap to buy us time.
• rattlesnakedave 5y ago
  This comment isn't productive. The original comment suggests states act to ban wasteful energy use. The comment you're replying to asks "who decides?" , and gives an example of energy use they find particularly wasteful. You're presupposing this is a problem that needs a solution. I think myself and the commenter you are replying to would agree that either: A) it's not or B) it does not need to be solved by a regulatory body. Instead of getting annoyed by people pointing out edge cases, it would be more productive to explain what criteria should be used, or admit this is a half baked solution.
• kodah 5y ago
  Moral arguments (ones that offer only should and should not with some supporting evidence but no actual solution) are going to be dismissed more regularly because while they may offer perspective, they offer very little value beyond that. That makes them fairly non-actionable. Choose an argument which requires you to offer a viable and compatible alternative and you'll probably get a lot more ears.
• dbsmith83 5y ago
  There's nothing wrong with pointing out problems with a solution and not providing a counter-solution. When one isn't provided, it can simply mean that the offered solution is actually worse than the status quo. In this particular situation, I may not have the solution, but I know that the offered one is a short-sighted knee-jerk reaction which has terrible implications for other things
• jraph 5y ago
  I don't know if that was their intent, but I would actually like a good answer to your parent's question to have a strong argument for backing OP's proposition, which I'd like to happen.
• setum 5y ago
  It violates principle of equality to target only one
• gvhst 5y ago
  In my mind its not about figuring out the edge cases, its more about building a framework in which tradeoffs can be analyzed, debated, and mindfully considered before drafting legislation. In order to do this there might need to be a few conversations that some may consider pedantic. I will say that given the text based medium of HN, it can be hard to gauge whether one wants to have a mindful discussion or if one is just trying to mindlessly ding a poster.
• Graffur 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. Please don't post shallow dismissals
• mpfundstein 5y ago
  the thing is that 'simple' solutions are never that. and if you find that boring or whatever than maybe its time to think a bit further before making some arguments. if a case is so easy to dismiss, it might not be a good case after all.
• XIVMagnus 5y ago
  I literally LOL'd. Thank you and never stop being this way
• MR4D 5y ago
  > edge cases That’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone describe Facebook as an “edge case”. If $900,000,000,000 of market capitalization counts as an edge case, I’d think you must be hard to please at Christmas - those are some really high standards!
• OOPMan 5y ago
  There is a good reason n-gate exists and endlessly mocks the HN comments
  • helmholtz 5y ago
    I love n-gate. My best guess is that it's Maciej from Idlewords running it :) I've seen him rant about HN on Twitter as well.
• acituan 5y ago
  > must address all the fucking edge cases or be called out by the immediate first child comment about failing to do so. Because it is an incredibly common fallacy to ignore boundary conditions and unintentional consequences when proposing a pie-in-the-sky regulation that is supposed to just fix things. Any regulatory mechanism is essentially a machine that will need to work with every input and minimize some class of error, be it precision or coverage or some other system level metric. Turns out the most interesting part of such a system is indeed around the edge cases, and the difficulty of handling such cases is essentially the bulk of the difficulty of building such a system to begin with. It is like saying "why don't we build a system that punishes criminals", which sounds very agreeable and popular at that level of construal, but is incredibly complex and sophisticated at the actual implementation level; e.g. to have a process to minimize false positive convictions rather than maximize conviction rates. > It's SO trite, predictable, wearisome and boring Not to sound harsh but HN does not owe anyone their favorite type of entertainment and honestly criticisms on those metrics are more trite, predictable, wearisome and boring themselves than anything else. Many find intellectual stimulation and systemic thinking entertaining and thus those comments enjoyable.
• StandardFuture 5y ago
  Or is that you refuse to address the complexity of "Regulations"? The easy seduction of oversimplification runs high with those whose argumentation is primarily a fallacious appeal to emotion. Maybe it's time to grow up and realize that the real world is highly complex and requires sophisticated tools, mathematics, and questions in order to better live in it?
• selfhoster11 5y ago
  I am not being pedantic. I am simply bringing up two points: - There are those who are OK with high carbon emissions for various things that are a proven net-negative to the society or the planet - examples being, as I mentioned, social media, user tracking and advertising server farms, plus anything directly related to that. If these things are not a net-negative, then at the very least they could operate at the fraction of their current emissions, were they built with externalities in mind. To be OK with that but not with Bitcoin where it objectively provides some value by directly helping human lives (it is a store of value and a way to transfer money for people whose home currency is unstable or restricted by hostile governments, for instance), is hypocritical. - Literally all legislation surrounding cryptocurrency (well, anything else too, really) by necessity has to be based on someone's opinions. Whose, is my question. Because that will shape what's allowed and what's not allowed to a great extent. Badly chosen opinion-givers lead to clusterf*cks like Disney, Sony and a few other giants effectively being in charge of worldwide copyright durations, which causes untold damage to the cultural commons.