I don't think there are two separate crowds. I think HN's initial population of smart, mostly apolitical nerds has been diluted by the arrival of a lot of new users who are not as smart, and are thus more excited by shallow controversies.
Politics happens to be a big source of shallow controversies. But I don't think most people who upvote comments saying "Fuck Monsanto" do it because they have a deep interest in politics, any more than most people who rail against "Obamacare" do it because they have a deep interest in politics. They do it because they're dumb. It's the shape of this sort of idea that excites them, not its content.
> I think HN's initial population of smart, mostly apolitical nerds has been diluted by the arrival of a lot of new users who are not as smart, and are thus more excited by shallow controversies.
Or: I disagree with you, therefore you are dumb.
Outstanding.
I up-voted the parent comment. I have been here for years. I consider myself to be a free market supporting, fiscally conservative and independent thinker.
I have major issues with the methods Monsanto uses to conduct itself in the marketplace. In everything from the products they produce, their influence of the legal and regulatory systems, their seeming inability to factor in a basic responsibility to those that consume their products and even the way they distribute the surpluses in their pension funds (i.e. they steal them, when allowed).
I believe they act this way mainly due to a void of ethical behaviour at their highest levels, and because of this, I will look at them, and individuals that fail to recognize these actions as being a problem with a certain level of suspicion.
If you think I am not as smart as you because of this so be it.
You're arguing against a strawman. Nobody said that taking a particular side of a debate makes you dumb. This isn't about what side you take, it's about how you choose to debate.
HN used to be a place that cared deeply about conversing in a civil, responsible, and educational manner. Whether or not you agree with the sentiments expressed in the parent comment, the fact is that it doesn't meet those standards. Even if the logic wasn't childish ("fuck X by association", really?), the comment does little to substantiate its opinions, or to educate those who aren't aware of the issue. In other words, it's a populist comment expressly made to pander to those who are already in agreement.
Upvoting said comment means either (a) you haven't even considered the importance of having a quality discussion, (b) you've considered it but in this case you don't care, or (c) you actually think it's a high quality comment. The fact that the comment is sitting pretty at the top of the page means that people have, en masse, fallen into one of these categories. Like it or not, A and C are simply dumber than the HN of old, and B is more confrontational.
"Even if the logic wasn't childish ("fuck X by association", really?)" <-- I am failing to grasp how this logic is childish? Have thousands of corporations not apologized and often paid money for partnering with organizations with dubious pasts? An extreme case example to highlight my point: do you think Hugo Boss apologizing for being a partner of the Nazi party in WW2 Germany was just a PR move?
My point is, aiding x in its mission makes you an accomplice. You can argue that x is not bad or as bad is it is being made out to be, but being a partner makes you exactly that, a partner.
> My point is, aiding x in its mission makes you an accomplice. You can argue that x is not bad or as bad is it is being made out to be, but being a partner makes you exactly that, a partner.
This is an overly-idealistic way to look at a complex world, and taking such a stance would surely make you a hypocrite. As I asked another commenter: Do you not use a bank? Pay taxes to a government? Buy food, shelter, and other products? Well then, you've undoubtedly patronized at least a few entities who have committed horrible atrocities. So, by your own logic, fuck you.
First off, I never swore, I was referring to the logic part, so please don't swear at me (not cool).
Secondly, you're calling me overly idealistic and simple minded, the world a complex place, yet make your case by comparing an individual citizen bound by legal obligations they can't escape without jail time or leaving the country to a corporate partnership made out of free will? Think of comparing the two then think about the names you called me. I'll let you be the judge.
> First off, I never swore, I was referring to the logic part, so please don't swear at me (not cool).
Whether you swore or not, you're defending the comment "fuck Cloudant by association". Don't you think it's hypocritical to back up that type of language when it's directed at others, but criticize it when it's directed at you? You can't have it both ways. Either it's an immature way to conduct a discussion or it's not.
> yet make your case by comparing an individual citizen bound by legal obligations they can't escape without jail time or leaving the country to a corporate partnership made out of free will? Think of comparing the two then think about the names you called me. I'll let you be the judge.
I gave you a short list of offenses you've committed, and you've only attempted to defend yourself against one of them (paying income taxes). Furthermore, your defense is pretty poor: "leaving the country" would be inconvenient. And you don't think it would be inconvenient for companies to refuse to do business with others who have at some point committed an ethics violation?
I'm sorry but your entire position is full of double standards that you can't justify. When you bend over backwards and make the countless sacrifices necessary to live your life without supporting questionable organizations, then you can come back and criticize others for not doing the same.
You're essentially arguing that the expression of passion/emotion via a comment is below the standards of HN. It's an interesting viewpoint, but one I don't completely support.
The problem with your stance is that preventing the expression of emotion is often a cover for elitism. Rather than being a strawman, this is exactly what Paul is doing in his comment. i.e. "I am above being emotionally attached to this argument because it isn't very important. If you think it's important, you simply aren't at my level."
All of us - being that we are all subject to emotion - will allow emotional responses to topics that we feel matter. What it all boils down to is a disagreement on what level of importance you place on a topic. This of course has nothing to do with intelligence at all in most cases.
The continued association of intelligence to apathy is a bit of a fallacy, to be honest.
> The problem with your stance is that preventing the expression of emotion is often a cover for elitism.
Elitism is a good thing. HN is an elitist forum. Youtube is a forum for the mob.
There is a reason that Idiocracy portrayed stupid people as those who mindlessly cursed and raved in every sentence. Profanity has its place, but especially in comment threads it's a limbic reaction rather than an intellectual one. "F* you" adds no value, can be said by anyone, and can be heard anywhere. The more "f* you", the fewer posts by startup founders, technologists, and people who know what they are doing.
I think a lot of people are missing the point. The nature of Company x and y is irrelevant, the issue is interchangeable.
Hacker News used to be a community devoid of emotional outbursts and when they occurred they were thought out, thought provoking and well articulated. Smart comments. Only smart comments were up-voted.
This wasn't and it was at the top. It's indicative of the direction HN is going.
(For intensive purposes x in this case is Monsanto and y is Cloudant.)
Mr. Graham, wow, this is rather disappointing to hear. You wish to frame a discussion through ad hominem instead of on the merits. For what it's worth I am apolitical, and have little interest in provoking controversy, but that doesn't mean I wish to see the promotion of a company which pushes injustice across the world.
Previously, I had looked up to you as a bit of a hero, now my opinion of you has dived quite low. I would not have minded if you disagreed with the merits of what Monsanto and Monsanto's customers choose to do. However, referring to people as dumb, for upvoting what is essentially a very well held and defensible position is a very weak thing to do. There are lots of arguments to be made against Monsanto, not the least of which is its Superfund environmental disaster sites.
The point is, I am informed, I know exactly what I am against, and have every reason to be outraged at the injustice perpetrated by Monsanto. This is furthered by needing to make the same arguments against Monsanto at my own company. If we've gotten to the point where we can't be outraged against injustice, then we may as well be heartless automatons.
To summarily dismiss them in this way and at the same time attack the intelligence of your readers is, well, reprehensible. Call me dumb if you will, I won't make arguments to the level of my own intelligence, but know that you have invalidated every reason to see you as a role model.
If you were apolitical, you wouldn't see monsanto as "a company which pushes injustice across the world".
Notice that this thread is full of such disparaging assertions, but no actual details, no citations, and the closest anyone gets is to pointing to people who have a very clear political agenda who make accusations against monsanto.
"what is essentially a very well held and defensible position"
I think this is what he's referring to as "dumb". This is not a "defensible" position because it isn't a fact, it is merely a dislike. As for "very well held" its unclear what you mean, except maybe you mean "widely held". I think it is dumb to assume that just because a lot of people say the same thing about something, that means they are right, especially when they cannot go into details, and what they are saying is just broad political assertions.
"The point is, I am informed, I know exactly what I am against, and have every reason to be outraged at the injustice perpetrated by Monsanto."
If you're informed, why aren't you specific? Even when describing what you're outraged, the best you can say is "injustice". Such a weak word, and what does it really mean anyway? They did something you don't like?
Wendy's screwed up my order the other day, giving me someone else's food, and they didn't give me a coupon to compensate. Oh, the injustice! Sure, that's silly, but at least I described specifically what they did wrong!
You're "outraged" at something you can't even describe. Yet you're "apolitical". Really?
Personally, I'm so tired of people going around repeating things they heard from other people, without doing any investigation or applying a legitimate moral compass to the issue.
This leads to "heartless automatons"... people who are easily controlled by media outlets. "Hate walmart!" (but don't hate Target, they're just the same, only they're unionized, and therefore they're not evil.) "Blame Wall Street!" (But ignore the government that, via regulation, forced banks to make loans to people who couldn't repaying them, claiming that to do otherwise was "racist".) etc. etc. etc.
I would have agreed with you except you ignored that I did indicate a specific incidence, the fact they hold a Superfund site. I didn't want to get back and forth on points, as I knew pg would not wish to debate them.
I did a full research study on Monsanto as part of TA'ing for a Professor who taught "International Political Economy" of Food & Hunger. I'm about as informed on the subject as I'm going to get short of doing a graduate thesis.
Regardless of how you count the numbers, Monsanto has at least one super fund site, a public externality that we have to deal with. See here for a discussion of reasons you can count many more to be under their guise: http://projects.publicintegrity.org/superfund/report.aspx?ai...
Actually, if you don't mind spending a few minutes to go on a bit further, I think it would be useful to have it all archived here for future reference.
one of my favorites, can you see the parallels between Monsanto and the RIAA? You could point this one in favor of Monsanto, but if you are like me and think that pushing terminator seeds to small farmers is a terrible thing then you will see it a different light. Often times they give out the seeds free the first year then have you stuck on them, comparisons could be made to drug pushers: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/knowledge_goods/monsanto.h...
Excerpt:
"Monsanto entered India in 2002 with some very compelling advertising. They claimed their engineered seeds would produce yields up to five times that of conventional cotton – 20 quintals per acre (equivalent to approximately 4.5 bales) compared to the 4 quintals (less than 1 bale) farmers were struggling to pull from their fields at the time. At the time, Monsanto admitted that their seeds costed more but insisted that investment would pay dividends.
Unfortunately the average yield of Monsanto’s GE cotton turned out to be nowhere near the advertised 20 quintals per acre. In reality the average output of the crop turned out to be 1.2 quintals per acre. Nowhere in India did it exceed 4 quintals per acre at the end of the harvest. To add insult to injury, farmers soon found out that the fibers produced by the Monsanto GE cotton plants were of lower quality. Instead of getting the usual $86 per quintal, they were only able to sell their crops for around $36 per quintal.
On average since 2002, of the farmers in India, many of whom fell into the Monsanto trap, one is committing suicide every 30 minutes. Many end their lives by drinking RoundUp."
The list goes on, if you've read this far and want more, I'll be glad to dig up some more of the material.
I have a deep interest in politics. I've watched and read much on Monsanto. I upvoted because I like to think if given the chance I would refuse to partner with a Monsanto no matter how much $$$. I'm comfortable with you thinking I'm dumb based on an upvote.
This statement is much worse than Cloudant having Monsanto as a client which I support.
And I'm a big critic of Monsanto but to suggest being socially aware is "politically shallow" is insulting and stupid. You should be encouraging us to be socially and politically engaged and fighting for responsible corporate governance.
They're selling them data analysis. I cannot find in that a great moral question or hazard. I'm sure when Monsanto employees go about their daily lives they also are sold food, clothes, computers, cell phones...
Nick O'Niell's analysis of Paul Graham's comment is nonsensical:
"He’s actively suggesting the idea that because other people are doing it (people with big brand names), it’s ok for a YCombinator company to do it as well."
Putting aside the rape of the English language going on in that sentence --'actively suggesting'? --, it is false in its claims. Paul pointed out that if the moral standard is that companies who sell things to nasty companies are committing a moral offense, then we need to apply this standard massively, to essentially every company that exists. Targeting Cloudant specifically is unfair and seems arbitrary.
That's rather disingenuous. Let's let them explain it:
"Monsanto has chosen Cloudant to be the core of their new genome analysis platform.
Cloudant’s BigCouch will be the core, for both storage and analysis of a new, company-wide platform powering a fundamental aspect of a Fortune 500 business: the analysis & identification of new traits & genomic combinations in agricultural crops. The data & reporting interfaces will be used across Monsanto and should be instrumental in the making of key business decisions."
"We’ve been working with them for a few weeks now and we couldn’t be more thrilled with the partnership."
Cloudant has placed themselves at the very heart of the Monsanto empire. They are the foundation and core of Monsanto's most essential operations. That goes above and beyond simply selling someone something. They are partners.
I'm not sure how many more ways I can break this down for you. I figured my previous comment was pretty clear.
Asserting that Cloudant is only selling Monsanto a simple data analysis is disingenuous, as clearly proven by Cloudant's own press release where they state how significant their partnership with Monsanto is. Partnership is a key word here.
Selling someone a service like Google Analytics (random example) is a lot different than partnering with a company for multiple weeks and shaping the entire core functionality of a company around your collaborative efforts. Even more so is saying that this partnership will help shape the way the company fundamentally does business.
Like I said, its disingenuous to downplay Cloudant's role, considering how highly they emphasized said role.
If that's the case, why didn't you address the issue with the kind of gravity and seriousness that such an issue demands instead of resting on such a vapid comment as the one which our fellow readers have so lavished with approbation? Would anybody have been worse off if you had?
> They [upvote] because they're dumb. It's the shape of this sort of idea that excites them, not its content.
The first part is a fundamental attribution error. The second part definitely plays a role, but don't think it's the primary cause. You can probably do the analysis on the votes, but I'd be surprised if the majority of the votes come from young accounts. I think it's much more likely that political topics are popular because the political climate changed so much in the US, especially for young people.
Regarding your second sentence, it's interesting that the exact same thing happened to reddit in 2005.
I wonder how the population sizes compare.
In their case, blind upvoting of empty politically-charged headlines turned off mainstream visitors (or just people who were looking for actual content in their political links) and attracted ever more such voters in a vicious cycle. Fortunately, the creation of /r/politics helped, but the site to this day struggles to keep /r/politics from overflowing into the rest of the site.
Can't speak for PG, but I'd say you lost him by #2. I never understood this kind of lump-everything-together thinking. It's overly idealistic, totally illogical, and almost always hypocritical.
Yes, boycotting a business is a common way to demonstrate your disapproval with some of their practices. However, it doesn't follow that doing business with a company implies condoning of all of their actions. I'm sorry, but there's no logic that supports such a conclusion.
And even if the logic existed, anyone who invoked it would be a glaring hypocrite. I assume you use a bank? Pay taxes to your government? Buy food, and shelter, and other products? Well you're undoubtedly a patron to at least a few entities who've committed atrocities. By your own logic, you condone each and every one of these attrocities. And by the op's eloquent logic, fuck you.
When I attended the Startup School in 2007, I had to apply. I was sure I wasn't going to get in, but I did, and when I got there I understood that the application wasn't elitist, it was because the venue was pretty fixed in size... and the quality of the event was much different due to this (relatively light) filter you'd applied.
I think hacker news would be much different if you applied a similar filter.
If everyone here were someone sincerely interested in doing a startup, who believed that it was moral to make money by improving people's lives, and believed that technological innovation was a good way to do it, then I think the site would be much different.
The early quality has turned HN into a popular source for a certain segment of news. But that has diluted it as an effective community.
Occasionally there's been talk of doing another site along these lines, but the right kind of filter wasn't obvious.
I think that it is clear what the right kind of filter is-- an application form like the Startup School one.
I don't know what your intentions are for HN going forward, if you have any interest in making significant changes or not. After Nirvana (my open source web platform project) is released, and my startups MVP is done, I intend to write software for a community of startup founders and see if we can make a go of it.
But you have a much bigger following. I think if you liked this idea, picking a hundred or so of the commenters you liked the best from the site would enable rapid evaluation of such applications (especially if the applications were relatively short). However, it might be too easy to game such a system.
But that's where my thoughts are. I always like to try and propose a solution when I see a problem, even if I am not sure my solution will work.
Of course you're on the side of this, you stand to make money from it so anyone that can't see that is "dumb". Hooray for chucking your morals chasing the almighty dollar, eh?
Politics happens to be a big source of shallow controversies. But I don't think most people who upvote comments saying "Fuck Monsanto" do it because they have a deep interest in politics, any more than most people who rail against "Obamacare" do it because they have a deep interest in politics. They do it because they're dumb. It's the shape of this sort of idea that excites them, not its content.