> My point was simply this: "Elon sieg-heiled showing that he's a Nazi" has become dogma around here, because nobody is engaging in constructive debate about it, because the opposing viewpoints are either not making it to the screens, or not being offered in the first place.

I think the subject is debated again and again each time it appears. There were tons of newspaper article debating the subject.

You say you don't know Musk and the context around him. Well, how can you know if there was constructive debate then? You basically say "I did not care to read any article discussing of Musk's ideology, but I conclude that if someone link Musk to one ideology, it's surely a superficial reaction".

(as for the need of having some political discussion when talking about technology, the fact that you admit not understanding the context around Musk shows that maybe in fact it is more needed that you think it is)

> but my point is that here on HN, it has become a truism that Elon performed a nazi salute.

I don't think it's a correct formulation. The idea that this gesture was not a mistake is just the consensus. Here or everywhere else. Of course, "official" entities (like companies or official instance) will not openly take a position because it can hurt them. But it is just "politically correct" to avoid being clear on the subject, while the large majority, unofficially, know what happened.

Strangely, you seems to both saying that "political discussions should not happen here" and saying "people have political discussions and build their opinion also outside of HN, so if they present their opinion without redoing here the whole discussion, it is not valid". If people had discussions elsewhere and reached a conclusion, the fact that they share a consensus here does not mean that this consensus is a dogma.

An interesting aspect is that not only the far-left is thinking it was a nazi salute, the far-right too, welcoming it and seeing it as Musk supporting them.

For me, the gesture is already quite suspicious (People have tried to cherry-pick similar gestures from other people, but they don't come close. The way the hand is flat at the end does not seem something that come "naturally" or "by accident", as it does not occur in others). But the reaction to the controversy is even more suspicious.

As I've said, far-right people were saying it was a nazi salute, and Musk never deny that to them. He criticized "far-left", or even instrumentalized it to attack people he does not like (for example, he attacked Wikipedia for just saying "some people compared the gesture to a nazi salute", which, according to him, is the proof that Wikipedia is part of the far-left conspiracy). He may have publicly said it was not a nazi salute, but it is clear that it is not enough to convince his far-right supporters it was not one.

So, yes, I think that "he has made a nazi salute" should be the default hypothesis. The data fits wayyyy better with this hypothesis than the one where it was an accident. No need to pretend that this hypothesis is favorised because of a conspiracy of biased people against Musk.

(Personally, I think that Musk did this gesture on purpose, in order to troll, trying to "trigger the woke". Does it make of him a Nazi? Well, some people supported the Nazi party because they were intrinsically "nazi" inside (whatever that means, probably something different for every single nazi). Some people supported the Nazi party just to troll their neighbour. They all ended up guilty of nazism all the same. So, while it can be an interesting nuance, it does not matter: if you are happy to play with the nazis, you are as toxic for humanity as them.)

I think the US, right now, is just exceptionally bad (not just the president, the whole culture, divisiveness, weaponized fake news, ...).

If a president is just being not competent, it would be normal that the majority of the posts are negative.

I wonder how it was for a "normal" president during a "normal" period. For example, Obama? From what I recall, the international comments were pretty balanced at the time.

Take what you dislike about the US and then compare it against:

- migrants in the UK and EU;

- slave labor in the Far East;

- documented genocide in Africa;

- military conscription in Russia;

- press freedom in Central Asia;

- crime and drugs in Latin America

This is not to say that the US shouldn't be criticized. Let's have that discussion. But why on HN? And why do these other topics never result in substantive engagement? My earlier statement that the US is a punching bag meant that relative to all other injustices in the world, the US appears to be facing the most criticism on HN.

On one hand, maybe it's because the expectations for the US are so much higher than other countries. On another, maybe it's because it's fashionable to criticize the hegemon. I don't know. But my experience here is that almost all "government does something bad" posts are about the US. This is, to me, evidence of a bias.

Not sure what is your point: all of these are also strongly discussed.

Interestingly, "migrants in the UK and EU" seems to even be one of the favorite subject of conversation of americans (especially conservatives), totally blown out of proportion with respect to the reality of the crisis.

But importantly, people react to the conversation that is already on the table. When you see people on HN criticizing the US government, it is in the large majority of the case when the US government is a relevant subject of the conversation while crime and drugs in Latin America is not. If HN was talking more about Latin America, maybe there would be more negative reactions about their crisis around crime and drugs. In the meanwhile, the US government actions that are discussed outside of US are in the large majority actions that has a direct impact on the people discussing. Tariff and petrol cost have way more impact on European countries than drug cartel in Latin America (and often way more than even migrants in these countries).

> But my experience here is that almost all "government does something bad" posts are about the US. This is, to me, evidence of a bias.

What about an evidence that the US government is exceptionally bad while also having a lot of impact on other people's lives?

In think you are missing the point with regard to immigration in Europe. American liberals have long talked about Trumps immigration policies and rhetoric as uniquely bad. They do not seem to known EU countries have border walls, or that the UK will separate families. Very few countries have birthright citizenship as broad as that of the US. This may have changed with the powers given to ICE but it was not true in Trumps first term.

Of course the right in the US talk utter nonsense about the British cities being dangerous etc.

I don't think it can be the point, as the point was "bad things happen in other places and yet people don't care about it, they criticize US because it's the current trend".

One of my reaction was that one of their examples (immigration in UK/EU) seems to be an exact counter-examples where US people are overestimating crises that are outside of US and point the fingers.

As for the situation in UK/EU, a real reaction that happened in UK/EU is that if something like ICE was to happen in UK/EU, the population will never accept that (they may be wrong, but they are right that there is something there). Not because immigration laws are less unfair or less cruel in UK/EU, but because in US, there was not even the decency of pretending a due-process was needed. You can deport in UK/EU, but it is done by people who follow the rules and who are not particularly "against" people they deport. With ICE, it looks like cowboys who openly don't care about due-process. In UK/EU, the machine can be cruel. In US, there is no machine at all, just people openly showing they don't care.

> but why on HN?

It makes sense to discuss it here since YC is largely US-based and the US has been such a large center of tech, VC-funding, etc. That impact obviously extends globally but I’m fascinated by the attempt to be “apolitical” on HN when those in charge of YC and nearly all of those in YC’s orbit are anything but.

I understand wanting to keep discussion curious and meaningful, but the influence of tech and these companies cannot be separated from either red v blue, capital-P Politics nor from small-p policy and politics on any level. It cannot, in my opinion be “apolitical” in the sense of “absence of politics”.

Either way, there clearly seem to be bubbles on HN. I’ve almost never seen pro-union sentiments here but other commenters indicate that the prevail view here is left of Marx. Evidence of bias either way is impossible with anec-data. I find the arguments about the actions and views of those in charge more meaningful than complaining about post and comment removal personally, but the discussion here is multi-faceted and prone to folks talking past each other.

I think you're 100% correct here. Thank you for expressing this point of view so succinctly.

> Around the start of Trump's second term, HN reduced the degree to which politics was considered off topic.

That is inaccurate. The standard has remained the same ever since pg changed the name of this site from "Startup News" to "Hacker News", and its focus to intellectual curiosity, coming up on 20 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html. You can see there the original language: most stories about politics are off topic (note that the word is "most", not "all"), which is still in the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Arguments about HN having gotten-too-political go back many years, long before the time you're talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869. I think there are two reasons for this. One is that there are swings and fluctuations, some of which last for quite a while and give the misimpression that the site has permanently changed. Such swings are inevitable—they are caused by macro trends, which HN is not immune to: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

The other is that when people see a series of threads they don't like, or even a single thread they don't like—for example because it offends them politically—they rush to overgeneralize. This applies to all of us and has to do with how our emotions affect our perceptions and thinking.

The one exception to all this was when we tried a "no-politics week" as an experiment back in 2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13108404. That experiment failed quickly—its actual effect was to make HN more politicized, so we canceled it after a couple days (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13131251), and reverted to the original tried-and-true (albeit unsatisfactory, in the sense that no one is really satisfied by it—there's something for everyone to dislike) standard.

At first I thought this experiment was what you were referencing, since to this day there are people who occasionally get confused by the fact that we briefly tried it. But when I read more closely I see that you were talking about 8 years later!

I seem to recall, at the time of the start of Trump's second term, some posts that were purely politics, and people flagging them as off topic, and you, dang, as I recall, saying that HN was loosening the rules to allow more politics.

Now that you mention it, I remember the "no politics" week, and it's possible that I'm conflating the end of that experiment and "allowing more politics" and getting the time messed up. But... are you sure you didn't loosen up on politics at the start of Trump's second term?

> But... are you sure you didn't loosen up on politics at the start of Trump's second term?

Yes in the sense that we didn't change HN's standard or moderate differently. But of course there was a surge of that sort of content - this is what I mean by "macro trends" above.

> you, dang, as I recall, saying that HN was loosening the rules to allow more politics

I don't think so! but if you can track down any post that sounded like that, it would be interesting to take a look.

>This is not to say that the US shouldn't be criticized. Let's have that discussion. But why on HN?

This is foremost a tech focused website, and currently the US is basically tech-Hitler for lack of a better term. So it makes sense we would come up in discussion as the current thread of techno-fascism works its way through all portions of American existence.

But shouldn't anything about Grok be flagged as political then? (or rather: where do you put the threshold?)

There is a big political aspect to Grok: it does not really bring much more technologically than any other model, its existence is mainly political in the first place. And talking about it / promoting it is participating to that: not everyone who does that does it for ideological reason, but a part of people doing it clearly does.

On my side, and to build on top of what you've said here, I think the article misses the point of the fact that anger is a useful and healthy societal tool.

The naive disney approach to anger is "you should not be angry, it is baaaad". But anger is an important signal to put limits on what is not acceptable to do in society. If my neighbour throw their garbage over the fence in my garden, me being angry at them is the uncomfortable situation they will be faced with and that will teach them it is not acceptable. Alternatives don't work: any other response will signal that what they've done is in fact "not that bad afterall, otherwise people would have been angry".

I think it's what is missing in the article. Anger incorrectly directed is a bad thing. But the article implies that there is no correct direction to the anger, which makes the article sounds as naive and misdirected as people who get angry at the wrong persons.

I would even say that being angry at the wrong person is as bad as not being angry at the right person.

Being angry is a societal tool to put limits on what can or cannot be done. If there is no anger when people crosses the line, then there is no real signal for them to not cross the line. And, no, "a peaceful rational argument" is not an alternative. This is not at all the same signal, this is a signal that is sent way earlier before that specific line and it is exactly how the overton window shifts.

Also, a scientist is interviewed in the documentary (I haven't seen the documentary, but my understanding is that it is the only real expert involved), Prof Katya Rubia, and they recently reacted to the documentary:

"My own contribution to this programme has been largely misrepresented as my comments were cherry-picked, truncated and presented out of context to make them fit into the programme’s narrative"

They comment further in the article, also concluding that the documentary is non-scientific and ill-advised.

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-the-tv...

Same as the parallel comment: the situation of string theory is the same as with black holes and relativity. It is not it is not testable, it is that it is not testable yet. The situation is very similar of the situations of black holes and relativity at their own time.

The fact that so many people, like you, just INVENT that it is not testable is quite worrying. Why? What's the point of doing that?

No one has "invented" that it's untestable. String theory literally doesn't give predictions that would allow it to be falsified. There are an astounding number of possible geometries that mean that any set of data could technically be "consistent with string theory". There are no specific energy bounds where it kicks in - if an experiement doesn't show existence of strings, it's "try again with more energy" instead of "falsified".

String theory can't be disproved even in theory. Spending decades on that is akin to spending decades rearchitecting your software to make it more beautiful and full of design patterns and promising users/management that some day it'll all make sense.

First, it is incorrect to say that "any set of data is consistent with string theory". For example, string theory is death in water if we observe a single Majorana fermion with no partner at a comparable scale. This is an observation that fully falsifies string theory.

But more importantly, "falsifiable" means "observations reduce the landscape". It does not matter if the landscape never fully disappear, as long as the observations constrain the parameters of the theory, then the theory is falsifiable. This is the real condition for a theory to be unfalsifiable. Astrology is not falsifiable: whatever the observation, the full astrology theory remains exactly the same, nothing has been constrained.

Why is it the correct definition? Because your definition leads to illogical situations. For example, I can divide "string theory" into "string theory of region 1", "string theory of region 2", "string theory of region 3", ... which are all in different parameters space. In this case, suddenly, "string theory of region 1" can be fully excluded. But it is illogical to pretend that "string theory of region 1" is suddenly "good falsifiable science" just because you renamed it while the physics is 100% the same. Another example of illogical situation is "an observed theory suddenly qualifies as falsifiable" (cf. the example with the electromagnetism below).

Also, "try again with more energy" is very common in beyond standard model physics. It is the case for lepton compositeness, heavy bosons, fourth lepton generation, SUSY, all of Effective Field Theory, ... None of these theories are abandoned because "unfalsifiable". The argument that string theory is bad because unfalsifiable feels like a bad faith argument while plenty of other physicists activities have the same characteristics but people who are against string theory does not care when physicists work on those.

It's also the case with common theories like electromagnetism or weak force: we are happy with them because we have observed them, but theoretically (in their current formulation), their parameters are free: if the alpha constant was 10 to the power -100, electromagnetism would have been undetectable up to now (the world would be quite different, but still). And if in this parallel universe a physicist would have came up with the theory and tried to observe it and failed, they could have always said "well, it just means that the alpha constant is even smaller". So, do you agree that electromagnetism is a non falsifiable theory because the alpha constant is a free parameter and could have been arbitrarily small? Because if not, you are saying that exactly the exact same theory is sometimes falsifiable, sometimes unfalsifiable, depending on where the free parameters are: right now string theory is unfalsifiable, but if we observe cosmic superstrings, suddenly, the theory qualifies as falsifiable.

Finally, the more you eliminate part of the landscape, the more the credibility of the theory decreases. And even if some part of landscape remains, the theory is abandoned when it is virtually useless.

String theory necessitates observable objects to remain viable as an useful theory (for example, SUSY particles, specific inflationary signature, ...). If these are not observed, the theory is not 100% rejected, but it becomes "useless": it will prove that the reality needs another fix than the string theory to explain some of the problem we observe in the current standard model. In other term, "string theory" can always remain a possibility, but "string theory as the answer of the current problems" would be 100% rejected and physicists will start working on other theories.

The idea that you pretend that physicists will still work on string theory when all the "juice" would been removed due to constraints is just so surreal to me. The reason string theory is popular amongst physicists is because they want to understand the current problems and that, according to them, string theory is a good candidate to explain them. It is crazy to imagine that when we have demonstrated that string theory cannot explain these problems, people whose main motivation is to explain these problems would say "we know we will not get anything of what we want if we work on this subject, but, hey, it's theoretically not fully excluded, so, I have to continue for eternity before passing to a more promising subject".

Why are you always so mad, Cauch? I'm worried about you, Cauch.

Oh, it took me a while to find out who you were. Are you stalking me now? I did made an impression on you. I'm sorry.

We're in too deep to let go of each other now, Cauch. Stalking? No. I'd say, unsolicited following.

On a serious note, I was reflecting the other day and recognize I need to do better with how I address people online. I genuinely apologize for my part in our nasty interaction. It's something I've struggled with, but I will do better.

Too deep? Have you considered seeking help? Our interaction should not be a big deal for balanced people. I had forgotten about it myself and moved on. If you cannot, it shows there is something wrong going on and maybe it should worry you.

As for the unsolicited following, I'm not sure what you would get out of it. I guess you will regularly spew your bile. But it does not really affect me, it just confirms I'm right about what I think of you. The "unsolicited following" perfectly fits the character, it is not really an action that you expect from the "winning side" of the story.

I think that if you wanted me to be compassionate, you should have avoided to be so creepy. Put yourself in my shoes, I just feel like I'm been accosted by a drunk who want to both become my best bud and shout at me. And because of that, I'm, on purpose, avoiding to give you any compassion or any other excuse to believe I care about you. That's the best strategy with this kind of crazies.

And this is quite creepy: 1. tracking me back, months after we had our discussion, as if it is something you still think about, this is super creepy, 2. saying, even under the cover of humour (cf. next point), that we're "in too deep" or that it is an "unsolicited following", this is creepy, 3. and bringing all that as a "joke", that is just so bizarre, it reminds me of the caricatural obsessive date "oh we should definitively move in together ... just joking ... and decide the name of our future children ... just joking ahahah ..."

So, yeah, just consider that I'm a rotten person if it helps you, or blame others for not showing you the compassion you crave when you admit that you have been shitty with them. You are not relevant to me, I've forgotten about you so fast last time and I can easily block your username if I decide I have better entertainment elsewhere, and I truly don't care about whatever fantasy you invented about me in your strange brain.

I'm still not sure what you imagine this conversation will do. What do you think will happen? You know I think you are ridiculous and pathetic, already from the previous conversation. And you're coming back after months to do this strange little dance, it just looks so unhinged. Do you really think this whole conversation will change that, and not in fact reconfirming that my first impression was correct?

I feel that you are trying to convince me that you are very wise by doing more and more unhinged things. I'm not sure why you think this would even work.

As I've said, I'm 100% fine to know that you think I'm rotten. You already insulted me previously, I got the message and I can't care less, so why come back to do it again? Why would you think I will take you seriously now? Are you "trying to save me from myself"? That's not really convincing: coming back to a stranger on the internet after few months for pure altruism, that is not something that a sane person would do (especially as you were pretending that you did not care at all). Instead of "trying to save me from myself", the readers will suspect that you came back because you still have things on your chest, and that this conversation is more for you than for me. That's sad.

This conversation won't change the fact that you like this. Bitter people like having a vehicle they can't get their toxicity out on. That is why you can't help yourself and you continue.

At this point, every single one of your responses is just a reflection of you, not me.

You keep saying you don't care. But you can't help yourself from responding to me every single time.

You do care, Cauch. You care because the toxicity in your bones that you refuse to let go of needs an online enemy you can't direct your toxicity towards.

The point stands: Cauch responds, Cauch cares!

Responding is fun because your answers are entertaining and make me laugh. The fact that I keep putting a coin to see the little monkey dance does not mean that when the little monkey emits some sound I would take it personally.

And I enjoy thinking you get more and more convinced that I care the more I answer. Why would I stop? You are literally giving me reward for answering you.

> You care because the toxicity in your bones that you refuse to let go of needs an online enemy you can't direct your toxicity towards.

I cannot let go so much that I recontacted you out of the blue after weeks. Oh, wait, it was you. "We broke up but my ex is so not over me, it is very annoying. They even said my name and got angry when they saw me stalking them behind the bush, if it's not the proof".

Again, you did not answer: what is your goal here? What do you think you will receive? You know that it will never go further than that, that you will never feel that you've "won", that you will never be really convinced that any of your insults have ever landed. It will end like the last conversation, and it will be as unsatisfying for you.

In fact, even if I say exactly what you want to hear, you will not be satisfied, because you will always have a doubt in the back of your mind that I just said that to fool you to think you've "won".

Whatever rationalization you need to keep responding -- it's all yours Cauch!

The guy who initially accused me of being creepy all of a sudden understands that there's an entertainment component to how I communicate.

You ask me what my goal is. The question is, for someone who keeps saying they don't care -- what is yours?

The good old Cauchenator needs somewhere he can release his anger.

You mention that tried fooling me so that I can think I've won. I apologized to you. Someone who has even the slightest desire of winning doesn't apologize bubs.

Good ole, Cauch. If we ever run into each other, that'll be in an interesting discussion. We're not that far from each other.

> The guy who initially accused me of being creepy all of a sudden understands that there's an entertainment component to how I communicate.

You realise I laugh at you and not with you, right?

For example, the hilarious fact that you try to convince me that I "refuse to let go" when not only you are the one starting talking to me, saying we're in "too deep", saying you want an "unsolicited following" of me, and now wishing to "run into each other" and implying you care enough to be interested to know where I live.

You are really obsessing over me, don't you?

> You ask me what my goal is. The question is, for someone who keeps saying they don't care -- what is yours?

What? My goal for what? For answering? It was literally the content of my previous comment, you pillock.

Your turn to answer now, what was your goal to contact me. Wait, I can do it for you: "because I'm so great that I needed to apologize to you because you are so pathetic and I worry about you and wanted to help by explaining how much you suck". Move on, bud, you are pathetic. Whatever you are looking for, you will never get it. Cut your losses and stop obsessing over me.

> The good old Cauchenator needs somewhere he can release his anger.

And yet you are the one who had the need to talk to me.

> Someone who has even the slightest desire of winning doesn't apologize bubs.

Someone who has even the slightest desire of not looking like an idiot does not pretend that the person he practices an "unsolicited following" over is the one who "cannot let go". Idiots don't always do things that align with their goal.

But, yeah, you know what, if you want to convince me that you did not contact me because I got under your skin in the previous conversation and you are still upset about it, you know what you can do: tell me what is your goal for talking to me.

> If we ever run into each other, that'll be in an interesting discussion. We're not that far from each other.

You would love that, wouldn't you? Obsessing over me much?

I don't think "shared knowledge" means "shared knowledge between mathematicians and lay persons" (there is no much point in that, the same way a smartphone technician knows how a smartphone works deep down to the details but there is no big interest for society to have every lay persons being informed about it). I think it means "shared knowledge between mathematicians".

And at this level, while there are anecdotical exceptions, mathematicians have always been pretty decent (with their conferences, workshops, paper publications, international collaborations, ...).

So, it does not mean "teaching the subject", it means "creating a human network of people that share the understanding". LLM can be useful at telling a human, but you still need a human. The point of Tao is not that LLM is not good at providing explanations, it is that "providing explanations" is not the contribution to science, "the human network" is. It's like saying "LLM are great cook, they generate tons of food in space", but the point of having cooks is so that people can eat food and not die. Having LLM generating mathematical proofs is as useless as having LLM generating food that no one can access: the point was never to "generate proofs" or "generate food", the point was "creating a shared human understanding" or "eating the food so human can survive".

I don't get the argument.

I get that there is a cultural benefit to keeping it alive. Just like we ideally want the languages represented at the universities.

But keeping humans in the loop does not appear to be necessary in order to call it science, and certainly not in order to have progress or dessiminate that progress.

I don't have a problem with people doing math. As long that we don't idiomatically hold on to that way of doing things.

I do, however, find it hard to belive that individual humans will play a big role from here and forward, in any scientific desciplines.

The goal is indeed to have progress or disseminate that progress.

The point of Tao is that people see LLM providing "proofs" and are concluding that this is all that is needed to "have progress or disseminate that progress". That is the same mistake of thinking that "generating food" is all that is needed to "have people not dying of hunger".

The hard part of "have progress or disseminate that progress" is the human network. A fundamental point of this human network is that it generate trust, accountability and reliability. Generating "useful new theorem" is useless unless the society also built the trust around the theorem to distinguish it from a fake theorem.

Maybe in the future, we will have AI doing some part of it, but this is a totally different AI animal than the one we are able to have now, and people who think the current AI that we see now is able to do that have no understanding how it works. This is demonstrated by the facts in math: current AI is able to provide math proofs, and yet, a lot of human work is still needed to get progress out of current AI.

I would not bet that individual humans will still play a role as big as today in the future. Maybe AI will be different in the future, but the reality is that we don't have any indication if this is even possible.

Why is there a cultural benefit to keeping it alive, or to having universities? It seems like education is toil that could be automated for those that don't have fun with it.

Humans soon won't need it.

You were the one introducing the argument "they are getting advantages out of it so we should be careful to not take what they say as an impartial view". Same can be told of Hossenfelder (personally, I would say that Hossenfelder has shown more clues that indeed she is not very reliable and would prefer caricatural sensationalistic descriptions, which is not what the typical string theory physicist does).

No, my point was only to refute the idea that people need to be egotistical or moronic (the only two options) to cling to an idea past its expiry date. People could also be “pot-committed” career-wise. Or they could have myriad other reasons (identity, sunk-cost fallacy, etc).

Nowhere did I suggest that “the reason for discrediting string theorists is that they have financial stakes in the idea.” Please try to be more charitable than that.

You said

> No, not morons, but people who have built a career on string theory. At this point, even if they regret their decisions, it’s too late to turn back now.

This is not presented as "yet another option that may or may not be the reality", this is presented as your conclusion of why we observe what we observe.

Maybe it is not what you are thinking, but you cannot blame people for interpreting your message the way you have written it.

I agree with you that there are several options, one of the most probable, that you did not mention, is that the situation of the string theory is just "normal" and some idiots are not able to understand that.