6 ms·

Glad to see climate change denialism has spread HN, what the fuck is happening?

by ntzm 7y ago

aldoushuxley001 7y ago
People being reasonable and skeptical?
dageshi 7y ago
Lot's of low effort contrarianism in just about every thread is what's happening. Genuinely, I think HN is now worse than reddit, only reddit has some actual funny/entertaining comments while HN is just... I don't know low effort tedium pretending to be insight? Maybe HN got too popular?
- antisthenes 7y ago
  Contrarianism is when you're well informed about both viewpoints and slightly leaning towards the less popular one. Flatly denying the other side's points isn't contrarianism - at best it's trolling and at worst - willful ignorance.
- fdsonvbno 7y ago
  > low effort tedium pretending to be insight I've never heard it described better. Somehow the culture of a pedantic top comment that 'refutes' the article took off. It's the extension of the infamous dropbox comment to climate change posts.
- ryanobjc 7y ago
  My friends introduced me to a new term for this site... the orange site. It’s hard to say if it’s people espousing heartfelt views, trolls, bots, or who knows what other internet monster?
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  Are you serious?? There's no way HN is worse than reddit...the front page of reddit for me has about 1/3 twitter posts, 1/3 memes, and 1/3 teenage-culture references. This is not funny or entertaining...there are maybe 5-10% of posts MAX that I find enjoyable...only if I head to r/aww will I find genuinely worthwhile content.
- mistermann 7y ago
  > Lot's of low effort contrarianism in just about every thread is what's happening. Not to mention mind reading.
- enraged_camel 7y ago
  Honestly, it is really, really bad. The worst comments are of the "just asking questions!" type. The asker will preface it with an apology about them being "genuinely curious", and then continue by stating their "concerns" about how the established and agreed upon consensus was reached, and say they "couldn't help but notice" how the "other side" gets "suppressed/censored". This type of concern-trolling is straight out of grassroots propaganda rulebook (which the asker is either consciously following, or has been a target and victim of themselves), and it's quite depressing how many posters here fall for it and engage the asker in good faith.
  - NoodleIncident 7y ago
    > "just asking questions!" I recently learned that some people call these comments and posts "JAQing off"; such a term isn't going to change anyone's mind, but at least there's something to sadly smirk about when I see the same bad-faith questions posted for the umpteenth time.
jariel 7y ago
Skepticism is healthy and is the essential posture of the Scientific Mind, and is not remotely the same as denial. The cherry picked time series used by the Met are clearly 'bad science' in the name of something 'ostensibly good'. FYI the intellectual authoritarians are much scarier than the skeptics, usually, in the long run. I wonder if this discussion should be more about communications strategies than material science.
- imtringued 7y ago
  It is one thing to not believe whatever crap the media is 'shitposting'. It is another to completely dismiss the fundamental science. The only thing that is questionable in those graphs is the temperature prediction for 2020 to 2025 because we can't see into the future.
paulddraper 7y ago
"Climate change denialism" is a very broad stroke. This term is always includes not only actual deniers of climate change (rising average surface temperatures), but a lot of other adjacent things, like "why", and "with what effect", and "effective solutions." To the casual observer it it looks a "science cult." You either believe and abide by it and all its tenants or you're branded a denier, an unbeliever, a heretic. Not a healthy way to look at science, especially when inevitabley some one thing is later shown to be incorrect and your faith comes crashing down.
- adrianN 7y ago
  Yes imagine we finally get rid of fossil fuel and live in a future with cleaner air and renewable energy everywhere and it turns out that global warming would have killed only one third of the ecosphere instead of the majority. Would be terrible.
  - agent008t 7y ago
    Depends on the costs, no? I do not think many people are arguing against cleaner air or renewable energy.
    - donaldihunter 7y ago
      End of humanity. Cost. Infinite.
    - komali2 7y ago
      > Depends on the costs, no? No
      - sebow 7y ago
        Yes it does. People will not eat bugs (as much as you'll try to force them to) nor the corpses of their relatives in order to save the planet. Humanity will find solutions, but only idiots believe that accelerating the doomsday cult will help us find them.(By the logic of the 60-70s, when there were similar high temperatures, we should have been dead by now.Similarly, during roman periods, there were elephants roaming in southern Europe and people were walking in sandals during winter, those depictions were real and not some "translated bullshit") Time and time again we've been proven that humans don't like being told what to do.Alongside that, people who think climate change is ENTIRELY man-made have no idea what they're talking about and think way too bigger of themselves. The sun & the moon have a much bigger impact on earth than humanity will ever have. As far as earth's temperature: yes, in the next hundred years the temperature will most likely rise.But as of now we're in a very cold period compared to "recent" history. Another note: just as temperatures rise, new life will grow and some will go extinct.In Europe for examples the forests have been growing a lot in the last decades.Instead of radicalizing the way we live overnight(which will cause unrest because people don't suddenly change), let's try to find rational and effective means of living.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
yongjik 7y ago
Spread to HN? I can't remember a single time when climate denialism was not prevalent on HN. -_- Welcome to the sad reality.
- dang 7y ago
  That doesn't even accurately reflect this current thread. It's just that you're more likely to notice what you dislike. What's going on here is the afterimage effect. People's general impressions of HN are an afterimage of the things they saw and disliked, which burn deeper into the retina.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
dsghdb 7y ago
You don't follow the guidelines, that's what happening. >Don't be snarky https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dang 7y ago
You've been bitten by the contrarian dynamic, which I just wrote about elsewhere—see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21475106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21475106 and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Your comment is a classic phase-2 voter-upper, which was sitting at the top of the thread until I marked it off topic. Apologies for quoting myself, but: After that first wave of comments, we frequently see a second wave of comments objecting in a reflexive way to the first wave. Although they take the opposing position—defending the article and criticizing the comments—it's the same contrarian dynamic, the same mechanism, driving them. Usually the second wave gets upvoted the most, leading to the paradox of the top comment in a thread expressing how bad the thread is, or the most popular comment expressing how wrong the populace is. Once this subthread was marked off topic, which lowers it on the page, one sees that the top subthreads are all pretty thoughtful. In other words, once you account for the contrarian dynamic (first wave of dismissive comments, second angry wave dismissing the dismissals and getting voted to the top), HN is doing reasonably well in this case. The contrarian dynamic happens in general; it has nothing to do specifically with climate, any more than with race (which was the context in the thread I just linked to).

Glad to see climate change denialism has spread HN, what the fuck is happening?

by ntzm 7y ago

Glad to see climate change denialism has spread HN, what the fuck is happening?

aldoushuxley001 7y ago

People being reasonable and skeptical?

dageshi 7y ago

Lot's of low effort contrarianism in just about every thread is what's happening. Genuinely, I think HN is now worse than reddit, only reddit has some actual funny/entertaining comments while HN is just... I don't know low effort tedium pretending to be insight? Maybe HN got too popular?

antisthenes 7y ago
Contrarianism is when you're well informed about both viewpoints and slightly leaning towards the less popular one. Flatly denying the other side's points isn't contrarianism - at best it's trolling and at worst - willful ignorance.
fdsonvbno 7y ago
> low effort tedium pretending to be insight I've never heard it described better. Somehow the culture of a pedantic top comment that 'refutes' the article took off. It's the extension of the infamous dropbox comment to climate change posts.
ryanobjc 7y ago
My friends introduced me to a new term for this site... the orange site. It’s hard to say if it’s people espousing heartfelt views, trolls, bots, or who knows what other internet monster?
WhompingWindows 7y ago
Are you serious?? There's no way HN is worse than reddit...the front page of reddit for me has about 1/3 twitter posts, 1/3 memes, and 1/3 teenage-culture references. This is not funny or entertaining...there are maybe 5-10% of posts MAX that I find enjoyable...only if I head to r/aww will I find genuinely worthwhile content.
mistermann 7y ago
> Lot's of low effort contrarianism in just about every thread is what's happening. Not to mention mind reading.
enraged_camel 7y ago
Honestly, it is really, really bad. The worst comments are of the "just asking questions!" type. The asker will preface it with an apology about them being "genuinely curious", and then continue by stating their "concerns" about how the established and agreed upon consensus was reached, and say they "couldn't help but notice" how the "other side" gets "suppressed/censored". This type of concern-trolling is straight out of grassroots propaganda rulebook (which the asker is either consciously following, or has been a target and victim of themselves), and it's quite depressing how many posters here fall for it and engage the asker in good faith.
- NoodleIncident 7y ago
  > "just asking questions!" I recently learned that some people call these comments and posts "JAQing off"; such a term isn't going to change anyone's mind, but at least there's something to sadly smirk about when I see the same bad-faith questions posted for the umpteenth time.

jariel 7y ago

Skepticism is healthy and is the essential posture of the Scientific Mind, and is not remotely the same as denial. The cherry picked time series used by the Met are clearly 'bad science' in the name of something 'ostensibly good'. FYI the intellectual authoritarians are much scarier than the skeptics, usually, in the long run. I wonder if this discussion should be more about communications strategies than material science.

imtringued 7y ago
It is one thing to not believe whatever crap the media is 'shitposting'. It is another to completely dismiss the fundamental science. The only thing that is questionable in those graphs is the temperature prediction for 2020 to 2025 because we can't see into the future.

paulddraper 7y ago

"Climate change denialism" is a very broad stroke. This term is always includes not only actual deniers of climate change (rising average surface temperatures), but a lot of other adjacent things, like "why", and "with what effect", and "effective solutions." To the casual observer it it looks a "science cult." You either believe and abide by it and all its tenants or you're branded a denier, an unbeliever, a heretic. Not a healthy way to look at science, especially when inevitabley some one thing is later shown to be incorrect and your faith comes crashing down.

adrianN 7y ago
Yes imagine we finally get rid of fossil fuel and live in a future with cleaner air and renewable energy everywhere and it turns out that global warming would have killed only one third of the ecosphere instead of the majority. Would be terrible.
- agent008t 7y ago
  Depends on the costs, no? I do not think many people are arguing against cleaner air or renewable energy.
  - donaldihunter 7y ago
    End of humanity. Cost. Infinite.
  - komali2 7y ago
    > Depends on the costs, no? No
    - sebow 7y ago
      Yes it does. People will not eat bugs (as much as you'll try to force them to) nor the corpses of their relatives in order to save the planet. Humanity will find solutions, but only idiots believe that accelerating the doomsday cult will help us find them.(By the logic of the 60-70s, when there were similar high temperatures, we should have been dead by now.Similarly, during roman periods, there were elephants roaming in southern Europe and people were walking in sandals during winter, those depictions were real and not some "translated bullshit") Time and time again we've been proven that humans don't like being told what to do.Alongside that, people who think climate change is ENTIRELY man-made have no idea what they're talking about and think way too bigger of themselves. The sun & the moon have a much bigger impact on earth than humanity will ever have. As far as earth's temperature: yes, in the next hundred years the temperature will most likely rise.But as of now we're in a very cold period compared to "recent" history. Another note: just as temperatures rise, new life will grow and some will go extinct.In Europe for examples the forests have been growing a lot in the last decades.Instead of radicalizing the way we live overnight(which will cause unrest because people don't suddenly change), let's try to find rational and effective means of living.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

yongjik 7y ago

Spread to HN? I can't remember a single time when climate denialism was not prevalent on HN. -_- Welcome to the sad reality.

dang 7y ago
That doesn't even accurately reflect this current thread. It's just that you're more likely to notice what you dislike. What's going on here is the afterimage effect. People's general impressions of HN are an afterimage of the things they saw and disliked, which burn deeper into the retina.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

dsghdb 7y ago

You don't follow the guidelines, that's what happening. >Don't be snarky https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dang 7y ago

You've been bitten by the contrarian dynamic, which I just wrote about elsewhere—see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21475106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21475106 and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22contrarian%20dynamic%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... Your comment is a classic phase-2 voter-upper, which was sitting at the top of the thread until I marked it off topic. Apologies for quoting myself, but: After that first wave of comments, we frequently see a second wave of comments objecting in a reflexive way to the first wave. Although they take the opposing position—defending the article and criticizing the comments—it's the same contrarian dynamic, the same mechanism, driving them. Usually the second wave gets upvoted the most, leading to the paradox of the top comment in a thread expressing how bad the thread is, or the most popular comment expressing how wrong the populace is. Once this subthread was marked off topic, which lowers it on the page, one sees that the top subthreads are all pretty thoughtful. In other words, once you account for the contrarian dynamic (first wave of dismissive comments, second angry wave dismissing the dismissals and getting voted to the top), HN is doing reasonably well in this case. The contrarian dynamic happens in general; it has nothing to do specifically with climate, any more than with race (which was the context in the thread I just linked to).