by kragen | 2025-04-30 16:36:21+00:00
Your [dead] comment begins, "Downvoters: You are ignorant and lazy. Do some research and use your brains!"

While arguably courtesy does demand that commenters use their brains and make an effort to investigate and understand (because the alternative is polluting the discussion with bullshit), being ignorant, dumb, or uninformed is not rude, since only voluntary actions can be rude. Accusing people of being ignorant and lazy and not using their brains, however, is rude. I'll be surprised if you can find any social circle where that's false; at most, respected members of a group are permitted to criticize lower-status people in such a way, but not vice versa.

It's rude for five different reasons:

1. It replaces a critique of a particular claim with a criticism of the person making the claim, which not only directly harms the clarity of the discussion (because it's not clear which claim you're disagreeing with) but also tends to provoke ego-defense responses from the person being criticized. In fact, such criticisms are far more common as a means to intentionally offend the person being criticized than as a disinterested evaluation of their competence.

2. It's implicitly boasting, because in order to judge how informed or intelligent someone else is, you need to be very well informed indeed about the area they're commenting on. Even if you are in fact very well informed (which you have not always been when you've made such comments in the past; for example, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43431287 commenting on solar hot water heating, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42519616 commenting on atmospheric carbon capture, and in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42424685 commenting on solar panel lifetimes) it is considered rude in most cultures to talk about how great you are. For example, you may notice at this very moment that you are getting annoyed at me for doing that myself.

3. It tends to foster Twitter-style partisan debate rather than curious open-minded inquiry, because now that you've put your status on the line as well as your interlocutor's, anyone else commenting on the factual aspects of the issue will be read as attacking at least one of you and possibly both. Not only does it make it harder for them to admit they were wrong; it also makes it harder for you to admit that you were wrong. I note that in none of the three threads I linked in my last point where I corrected you on fairly cut-and-dried factual issues did you ever publicly admit you were wrong, and in one case you went on to repost the same misinformation in another thread later, and I had to correct you again, so you hadn't even admitted it to yourself. (I note with approval, however, that you apparently haven't reposted it in months.)

4. Sometimes your judgment of your interlocutor is mistaken, so it just adds more misinformation to a discussion already swimming in misinformation. For example, sometimes your interlocutor is well-informed but has different information than you have, or they're very intelligent but made a rare misjudgment in the discussion in question, or is actually correct.

5. Like your digressions about Biden, both the boasting and the criticism of the person are irrelevant to the discussion—even ignorant, lazy, dumb people often say true things, even if only by chance, and even very well informed, industrious, brilliant people sometimes say false ones. In many contexts, though not all, bringing up irrelevant points is considered rude.

It's unfortunate that you phrased your comment on the minimum wage in this way, because you presented extremely informative evidence demonstrating the falsity of a widespread point of view. That's useless to people who already agree with you, but the people to whom it could be of most service—those who are mistaken—will have a harder time receiving it when it starts by attacking their egos. By "calling them out for what they are", you are not reducing the damage they do to society; you are increasing it.

I'd like to urge you to attempt to comment more civilly and less arrogantly in the future.