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I just took it as expressing confusion that anyone believed that to be a real option at all, since Christianity broadly isn't well-known for an anti-vax stance,

I just took it as expressing confusion that anyone believed that to be a real option at all, since Christianity broadly isn't well-known for an anti-vax stance, so "Christian" without further qualifiers is surprising in this context. Christian groups known for being anti-vax tend to be relatively fringe, small, and well-known for those positions (e.g. Jehovah's Witnesses). This matters for how upset anyone ought to be over this, assuming it's actually happening, since the government tends not to respect "deeply held beliefs" that, conveniently, were only recently arrived at, so depending on exactly which Christians we're talking about, denying these folks an exemption (despite whatever paper they got their pastor/priest/minister to sign) is either totally normal & expected, or somewhat unexpected and (perhaps) worrisome. I don't see the post as flame bait, but an expression of confusion inviting clarification. I think the tone's appropriate for the original claim (which... smells a bit rotten).

petesergeant 5y ago
Exactly the intention, thank you
- dang 5y ago
  Flamebait is not about intention, but about the effects a comment can be expected to have (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=troll%20effects%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). In this case the comment consisted of one sentence pointing straight to two classic flamewar topics (religion + vaccines), and a second sentence containing a snarky, reductionist provocation ("traffic signals"). In other words, we had fuel plus flame. The effect such a comment can be expected to have is definitely flamewar. If your intention was to engage in thoughtful conversation, the burden is on you to disambiguate that, since intent doesn't communicate itself. A person's intent is accessible to them, since it's immediately available in their head, but not to anyone else—so it needs to be encoded somehow in the message. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=disambiguate%20burden%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... In this case, the whole thing was probably best to leave alone, though, because nothing good (by HN's definition of good, i.e. gratifying intellectual curiosity) was likely to come of it.
dang 5y ago
The whole idea of having a thread about "how upset anyone ought to be" about some religious topic is already flamebait. Religious themes in general are best avoided on HN unless there's some extraneous neutralizing factor to supply some distance between the discussion and people's extremely strong emotions about religion. For example, historical articles sometimes allow for this. But thoughtful discussion about religion in the context of hot current topics? Basically impossible. When people starting getting upset about it, which is highly likely, the place burns down. That's what we're trying to avoid.
- handrous 5y ago
  It's not religious, it's political—it's not inviting an argument over religion, but clarification for which Christian group might have thought they actually had a hope of the government accepting their religious exception, since those are normally subject to fairly intense scrutiny—this is either a real thing, which needs clarification to be understood, or totally normal government behavior being cast as exceptional in order to advance, essentially, a lie. Which, fine, maybe politics is a bad topic for HN, too (and yet, the front page on most days...) but in that case you're addressing the wrong poster. Getting onto someone for pushing back (in, I think, straightforward, but not harsh or provocative, terms, in this case) on a shitty post is missing the mark, IMO, and is part of why HN is very vulnerable to certain kinds of shitposting/trolling—if you can fly just under the radar, enforcement will fall on posters trying to police your shittiness (or, in this case, just trying to make sense of a bad post), not on you directly, which is is a classic effect trolls aim for. (Please don't take any of this as personal—I'm sure this stuff's hard on the best of days, and you can never please everyone, and it's entirely possible I'm dead wrong about all this, and we're all just trying to get through the day in a complex world, and I'm very sure I'd be overall much worse at what you do than you are)
  - dang 5y ago
    (I appreciate the bit at the end!) From my perspective these arguments are short-circuited by much simpler points, which is sort of the level at which I try to look at all this. First, if the GP comment was shitty and/or trollish, then "pushing back" is exactly the wrong thing to do. That is known as feeding trolls, which of course is even more "the classic effect trolls aim for". This is in the site guidelines: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." – a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls. Second, if we're making arguments about whether a political-religious argument is more political than religious or more religious than political, we've already lost. All this is obvious flame fodder and to be avoided here—no? I don't believe that anyone on HN is eager to discuss Christian-priests-issuing-vaccine-exemptions for simple reasons of intellectual curiosity. But if they are, the burden is on them to disambiguate their intellectual interest from garden-variety flamebait. Btw I'm not saying either of the GP commenters was being trollish or malicious - just that the expected value of such subthreads is negative (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22expected%20value%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).

petesergeant 5y ago

Exactly the intention, thank you

dang 5y ago
Flamebait is not about intention, but about the effects a comment can be expected to have (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=troll%20effects%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). In this case the comment consisted of one sentence pointing straight to two classic flamewar topics (religion + vaccines), and a second sentence containing a snarky, reductionist provocation ("traffic signals"). In other words, we had fuel plus flame. The effect such a comment can be expected to have is definitely flamewar. If your intention was to engage in thoughtful conversation, the burden is on you to disambiguate that, since intent doesn't communicate itself. A person's intent is accessible to them, since it's immediately available in their head, but not to anyone else—so it needs to be encoded somehow in the message. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=disambiguate%20burden%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... In this case, the whole thing was probably best to leave alone, though, because nothing good (by HN's definition of good, i.e. gratifying intellectual curiosity) was likely to come of it.

dang 5y ago

The whole idea of having a thread about "how upset anyone ought to be" about some religious topic is already flamebait. Religious themes in general are best avoided on HN unless there's some extraneous neutralizing factor to supply some distance between the discussion and people's extremely strong emotions about religion. For example, historical articles sometimes allow for this. But thoughtful discussion about religion in the context of hot current topics? Basically impossible. When people starting getting upset about it, which is highly likely, the place burns down. That's what we're trying to avoid.

handrous 5y ago
It's not religious, it's political—it's not inviting an argument over religion, but clarification for which Christian group might have thought they actually had a hope of the government accepting their religious exception, since those are normally subject to fairly intense scrutiny—this is either a real thing, which needs clarification to be understood, or totally normal government behavior being cast as exceptional in order to advance, essentially, a lie. Which, fine, maybe politics is a bad topic for HN, too (and yet, the front page on most days...) but in that case you're addressing the wrong poster. Getting onto someone for pushing back (in, I think, straightforward, but not harsh or provocative, terms, in this case) on a shitty post is missing the mark, IMO, and is part of why HN is very vulnerable to certain kinds of shitposting/trolling—if you can fly just under the radar, enforcement will fall on posters trying to police your shittiness (or, in this case, just trying to make sense of a bad post), not on you directly, which is is a classic effect trolls aim for. (Please don't take any of this as personal—I'm sure this stuff's hard on the best of days, and you can never please everyone, and it's entirely possible I'm dead wrong about all this, and we're all just trying to get through the day in a complex world, and I'm very sure I'd be overall much worse at what you do than you are)
- dang 5y ago
  (I appreciate the bit at the end!) From my perspective these arguments are short-circuited by much simpler points, which is sort of the level at which I try to look at all this. First, if the GP comment was shitty and/or trollish, then "pushing back" is exactly the wrong thing to do. That is known as feeding trolls, which of course is even more "the classic effect trolls aim for". This is in the site guidelines: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." – a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls. Second, if we're making arguments about whether a political-religious argument is more political than religious or more religious than political, we've already lost. All this is obvious flame fodder and to be avoided here—no? I don't believe that anyone on HN is eager to discuss Christian-priests-issuing-vaccine-exemptions for simple reasons of intellectual curiosity. But if they are, the burden is on them to disambiguate their intellectual interest from garden-variety flamebait. Btw I'm not saying either of the GP commenters was being trollish or malicious - just that the expected value of such subthreads is negative (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22expected%20value%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).