Yesterday I wrote a simplified outline of the orthodox economic account of the factors of production, how they relate to the historical process of industrialization, and how these relate to market incentives and cross-border capital flows, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27639177. The post is downvoted to -4 and has no responses.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27502867, where I explained some basic errors in a comment written to rebut one of my own, is downvoted to 0 and has no responses.

In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448878, I described the incentive structure of cryptocurrency mining and how it relates to recent developments in the price structure of the energy market. My comments in the thread all have positive vote scores but the responses from others are mostly things like "This is incoherent," and "I've heard this argument 1000 times. It is bogus," apparently because their author is unaware of the most basic relevant facts and unwilling or unable to absorb new information.

When I shared my experience of why people use Bitcoin in Argentina in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27448744 I got accused of tax evasion—by someone who openly admits he himself has arranged to avoid paying those same taxes. (Which, as it happens, I am paying, except for those I'm legally forbidden to pay—a problem I hope I can solve this year.)

My comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397765 got flagged and downvoted to -4 and got me called "gross" and "racist" for, apparently, not hating the Chinese Communist Party. I didn't say anything negative about any ethnic or racial group in the entire thread, but evidently, people like tptacek who really, really hate the CPC a lot can't distinguish between anti-Chinese bigotry and unremarkable facts about Chinese popular opinion.

And that's just in the last month.

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An even bigger clue than my own experience, though, is to look at the words people on HN use in a derogatory sense:

"Weird": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646624

"Strange": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27646758

But "weird" and "strange" are just synonyms for "novel" or "unfamiliar". Learning is, profoundly, seeking out the things that seem weird and strange to you in order to take them into yourself and become weird and strange. If you detest whatever is weird, strange, and odd, you will sedulously avoid any opportunity to learn, and you will detest anyone who has learned things you have not—most vividly illustrated by the gross racist tptacek incident I linked earlier. And this mindlessly conformist attitude of hatred for the unfamiliar, far from being roundly rejected as it should be on a "hacker" site, is very commonplace here—all six of the noveltyphobic comments I linked above were posted in the last three hours, and those were just the ones that were easiest for me to find. Although many of these comments attracted pushback, in no case was it for the anti-intellectual attitude implicit in this wording; it passed without comment, just as it would in the larger anti-intellectual society.

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Basically, to me, HN is the intellectual equivalent of the slums where I used to volunteer. Eight times out of ten, people silently approve of informed, thoughtful discussion, but don't participate. One time out of ten, they do participate, and it's great. The other one time out of ten, I get pistol-whipped and left bleeding on the sidewalk—in this case, thankfully, only metaphorically. It's not an environment that welcomes people like me, who do learn things quite a bit. It's an environment where the nail that sticks up gets hammered down, where the rule of the day is baseless calumny and casual accusations of criminality and dishonesty (though blessedly "this is disingenuous" seems to have become less common). It's contemptible.

I'm certainly capable of spinning out baseless calumny and casual accusations of dishonesty, but I think of that as the worst aspect of my character, not the best. And it does not create a favorable environment for people to learn things or to share what they've learned—or, especially, what they are in the process of learning.