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> "rape isn't funny" is entirely off topic. ... in response to a joke about Sodom and Gomorrah? Perhaps that's not the topic you originally intended, but as t

> "rape isn't funny" is entirely off topic. ... in response to a joke about Sodom and Gomorrah? Perhaps that's not the topic you originally intended, but as the comments show, the article left the door wide open for it. > "The article is about a major new finding in intellectual history" It presents that finding in a very poor way.

dang 12y ago
I'll try to respond to the points you've made here and upthread. I posted the article because it surprised me. Also, of all the classic components of HN, history is by far the least represented. HN needs more high-quality historical articles. Is this article high-quality? I take it you don't think so, but it seems to me as good a bit of intellectual history as we can hope for from major media these days. It manages to be serious, not overly tendentious, and packed full of information. To pick just one example, the fact that Bentham's writings on sex were kept out of Bentham scholarship as late as the 1960s is remarkable. So I'd say the article easily clears the bar for a good HN post. It's also news, of a sort—a pretty dramatic revelation about a major thinker. The thread went bonkers, but we should hesitate to overinterpret that. There's a lot of randomness, and the threads are sensitive to initial conditions. It's not hard to imagine a sensible discussion of this article on HN, though the dice came up snake eyes this time. As for off-topicness, sorry to put this glibly, but yes: responding to something off-topic with something even more off-topic is certainly off-topic. Triply so when it's a fast track to a flamewar. An on-topic discussion is typically about the specific content of the article—the things that make it stand out from other stories. Going on a tangent is fine if it's something surprising, i.e. if the tangent adds information, like this one did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962077. But when a thread breaks away from the specific content of a story and makes a beeline for some generality, no information is added. The worst kind of beeline is the predictable ideological tangent. That's not only off-topic, but likely to fuel an agitated argument, and those are the lowest-quality discussions on HN. So the rule of thumb for on-topicness on HN is something like this: story specifics good, predictable ideological tangents bad.
- lotharbot 12y ago
  > "It manages to be serious, not overly tendentious, and packed full of information." Odd. I found it to be lacking in valuable information. There was no indication as to whether there had been any new manuscript discoveries (though the sidebar indicates the writings are being newly published). There was no indication as to anything particularly surprising about his views other than the era in which they occurred. "There was a guy a few centuries back who agreed with modern sexual mores, and it wasn't published because society wasn't open to it a few centuries back" doesn't strike me as a particularly valuable contribution. Obviously some people saw it as such or it wouldn't have gotten so many upvotes -- but obviously others saw it as not belonging. > "responding to something off-topic" It was a direct quote from the article. In fact, it was the quote from the article that I thought pushed it over the line into flagging territory. Even so, I'm not sure why you think my response was a fast track to a flamewar. I think my response was measured and calm, clearly explaining why the comment in the original post was problematic, and furthermore adding information people might not be aware of (that Sodom wasn't following modern "not your business what consenting adults do" practice; "rape culture" was alive and well there.) I would expect people reading such a comment to come away with better understanding, and perhaps not be so quick to treat Sodom as modern/enlightened.

dang 12y ago

I'll try to respond to the points you've made here and upthread. I posted the article because it surprised me. Also, of all the classic components of HN, history is by far the least represented. HN needs more high-quality historical articles. Is this article high-quality? I take it you don't think so, but it seems to me as good a bit of intellectual history as we can hope for from major media these days. It manages to be serious, not overly tendentious, and packed full of information. To pick just one example, the fact that Bentham's writings on sex were kept out of Bentham scholarship as late as the 1960s is remarkable. So I'd say the article easily clears the bar for a good HN post. It's also news, of a sort—a pretty dramatic revelation about a major thinker. The thread went bonkers, but we should hesitate to overinterpret that. There's a lot of randomness, and the threads are sensitive to initial conditions. It's not hard to imagine a sensible discussion of this article on HN, though the dice came up snake eyes this time. As for off-topicness, sorry to put this glibly, but yes: responding to something off-topic with something even more off-topic is certainly off-topic. Triply so when it's a fast track to a flamewar. An on-topic discussion is typically about the specific content of the article—the things that make it stand out from other stories. Going on a tangent is fine if it's something surprising, i.e. if the tangent adds information, like this one did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7962077. But when a thread breaks away from the specific content of a story and makes a beeline for some generality, no information is added. The worst kind of beeline is the predictable ideological tangent. That's not only off-topic, but likely to fuel an agitated argument, and those are the lowest-quality discussions on HN. So the rule of thumb for on-topicness on HN is something like this: story specifics good, predictable ideological tangents bad.

lotharbot 12y ago
> "It manages to be serious, not overly tendentious, and packed full of information." Odd. I found it to be lacking in valuable information. There was no indication as to whether there had been any new manuscript discoveries (though the sidebar indicates the writings are being newly published). There was no indication as to anything particularly surprising about his views other than the era in which they occurred. "There was a guy a few centuries back who agreed with modern sexual mores, and it wasn't published because society wasn't open to it a few centuries back" doesn't strike me as a particularly valuable contribution. Obviously some people saw it as such or it wouldn't have gotten so many upvotes -- but obviously others saw it as not belonging. > "responding to something off-topic" It was a direct quote from the article. In fact, it was the quote from the article that I thought pushed it over the line into flagging territory. Even so, I'm not sure why you think my response was a fast track to a flamewar. I think my response was measured and calm, clearly explaining why the comment in the original post was problematic, and furthermore adding information people might not be aware of (that Sodom wasn't following modern "not your business what consenting adults do" practice; "rape culture" was alive and well there.) I would expect people reading such a comment to come away with better understanding, and perhaps not be so quick to treat Sodom as modern/enlightened.