hayst4ck

Can you explain that more deeply?

Neutrality is implicit support for whoever can muster the most power, neutrality is in many ways the opposite of law and betrays an ideology where there is no objective truth. When there is no objective truth, there is nothing to be curious about. When authortarians tell you what the truth is or rob you of the data to make your own assessments, curiosity becomes an act of rebellion.

I don't think HN mods operate as conservative or liberal (although curiosity is an extremely liberal cause), but I think they will come to understand the cost of neutrality.

If anything I think they have not fully confronted the paradox of intolerance or realized that the times are different than they were in the last 30 years of internet flame wars. In the past when Godwin's law and flame wars were the rule of every forum, there weren't historians at prestigious universities who studied the holocaust/fascism warning us that fascism is happening here in America right now.

When faced with horrifying information which demands response most people will choose a strategy of denial and hoping other people will act. When people are under threat by people who don't seem accountable to the law or who are even able to punish them, most people will choose a strategy of neutrality and rationalizing that it's not them under threat.

These are mental health preserving and physical health preserving until they are not.

Nobody wants to hear that if you don't do something bad things are going to happen and nobody in power, such as mods, wants to have their power challenged or use it to threaten others in power because it is going to make them uncomfortable or their lives harder.

What you are seeing is how Nazi Germany happened. Not this specific thing, but this behavior scaled over an entire population. People with empathy and others subjected to stress enter a state of grief, and the first stages of grief are shock (disbelief) and denial (not asking questions you know the answer to because the answer is too awful to bear), people tell them they are overreacting or that they are "too political." "Protest somewhere else" is a common sentiment for anyone inconvenienced by those who feel unjustly treated, and only once they personally experience harm do they start to change their mind.

It is flagged because most people want to be comfortable, and hearing uncomfortable things in comfortable spaces is something they don't want to tolerate, even if it threatens the existence of their comfortable spaces in the long term because curiosity is not compatible with authority and authoritarianism.

The economic concept of economies of scale dictates that the more researchers there are in one location, the more efficiently they are likely able to research.

Yes, the math is the easy part, doing is the hard part. The difference between understanding and doing is large and denial, shock, rumination, and rationalization all fuel inaction and there is often a moment in which it becomes too late.

People on death marches, in concentration camps, or other similar scenarios have the same math, and yet they get gassed or forced to dig their own graves after which they are shot and buried in them.

So yes, rationally that all makes sense and we should celebrate anyone putting themselves at risk to fight for the benefit of a larger group, but reality is different, especially if the hijackers can guarantee at least one death.

To say a hijack could never happen again is wrong. The doors are a much more reasonable explanation than the courage of men.

History also gets forgotten, such as the history of secret police or mass deportation efforts as is quite clear in this thread.