Usually I agree with the moderating, but ...
... on this occasion I'm at a loss. There was an item entitled:
"Unanswerable multiple choice question"
and it was here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1363393
There was a lively discussion, and it got lots of upvotes. That, of course, of itself does not mean it was on-topic, but the guidelines say:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
That includes more than hacking and startups. If
you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might
be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual
curiosity.
I will almost certainly now be using it in my next math club talk, and have already started discussions about it with colleagues in the local university math department.
So why was it killed?
Probably "the judges decision is final" will reign, but I'm annoyed at this one.
37 comments
[ 132 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadSelecting an answer at random, in my dialect of English, can be said to be choosing. In my dialect of English "to choose" does not necessarily imply the exercise of free will and decision.
Thus, "to choose at random" makes sense, and might be regarded as "to select at random" without any implication of a deliberate decision (except the decision to follow the random "choice").
Does that answer your question?
But I've expanded my reply so it's less relevant now. [edit: oops, or replied again].
This seems like an observation about either pointers or Meta-questions. If I pick an answer to {an unspecified thing}, what is the probability of being right?. Choose A/B/C/D.
First, I have to assume the {unspecified thing} is your question itself. Then model a clone of your question, then based on the answers to the clone model, answer your real question. Then I have to make some assumptions about the biases in my random selector (i.e. it has none and picks each option on average 25% of the time). Then I have to make some assumptions about whether one of the answers is right and three are wrong, or if more than one can be right.
If I assume one is right and three are wrong, then A and D are ruled out, so the right answer must be B or C. C can't be right, so it must be B, so my chance of picking "B" and getting the right answer is 25%. So I answer your real question either A or D.
If I assume that A or D could be right, then I assume B and C are wrong and get a 50% chance of picking correctly, so I answer your real question B.
I guess I could carry on and say "if no answer is right and I always pick one of the four, then I have no chance of answering correctly and answer your meta-question with C" and then see if I can sum up all the potential assumption answers and see if it resolves to a most likely sum-over-histories style answer.
But that sounds like work.
I cannot understand the point of hiding deadened questions while still keeping the comments?
It's all about removing the visibility. If the story is hidden, so are the comments, and so there's no reason to [dead] all of the comments too. The only way to see those comments is if you have showdead on anyway...
It makes sense to me. If the users flag & kill a link submitted by spammers, the spammers get no value from it because, by default, a spider won't be able to follow the HN page to the URL the spammers wanted to promote.
But keeping the comments helps users at HN get a feel for how the article was initially received.
I wasn't aware that users could kill posts like this. How many users does it get to do this? On Stack Overflow, it takes 5 users to vote to close a question, and even than the question is still visible.
But that's just my opinion.
It may also be that I just didn't get it. At a glance, it looked like a semantic game rather than a worthy paradox. Why should one presume that a multiple choice question has one and only one correct answer?
I was probably also influenced by the quality of the discussion. When I started reading, the top voted answer was "It is answerable... with a swift kick to the balls of the person asking it", followed by geek jokes about this answer. This didn't seem like a good start. Perhaps I should have flagged only this response, rather than the whole post.
1) "random process" was undefined.
2) There was no limitation given as to choosing nothing or more than one answer.
3) At best the discussion might have been amusing, but that's just trolling IMO.
PS: I thought about it for a while before flagging it.
That's not true for unexpected results, which are often incorrectly called paradoxes, but it does seem to be true for real paradoxes. They have led to major innovations and advances in math.
The discussion I had with Ray was years ago now, and I don't remember the details, but I think you are mistaken in dismissing paradoxes as "just a sign that your assumptions are wrong."
Additionally, all the objections you raise can be clarified and the problem made more precise, losing the pithiness, but without losing the paradoxical nature. "Random process" can easily be defined clearly, and you can add the limitation about choosing exactly one answer.
For a basic paradox like "This sentence is a lie" there are more options than true or false. Other things are best answered with "your asking the wrong question" etc. But, once you walk though the basic options paradoxes are just another example of the same thing.
PS: Yellow void toe air zen bubble toy 4:72 PM lisa. Not all collections of words have meaning.
Paradoxes in the true mathematical sense are useful in mathematics, and I thought that many here on HN would find that they sufficiently provoke their intellectual curiosity to be regarded on topic.
However, clearly you disagree, so clearly we disagree. I found the submission interesting, the discussion less so, and wish the inappropriate comments had been flagged/killed to allow the interesting and contentful discussion to flow. That's not what happened.
People complain that HN has jumped the shark, and the submissions are of poor quality. Personally I think it's the inappropriate comments that are dragging HN down, the insistance by so many to add largely content-free and insight-free comments. And yes, I admit that I've done it too.
PG says that the greatest threat to HN isn't the poor quality of submission, but the poor quality of comment. Perhaps submissions should die less often, and comment be killed more often.
Perhaps not. I don't have solutions, but I do know that this submission was a paradox, and that some true paradoxes are of interest and use in formal mathematics. Others aren't - it would be interesting to know if this is the former, and that's what I'll be exploring with some of my colleagues over the next few days.
Good reply, and good points. It's probably a better paradox than I thought at a glance.
But while one doesn't want to throw out too many babies with the bathwater, at least with fruit trees, it's often better to prune too much than too little. You might get less fruit this year, but you end up with a stronger tree and better root system.
In this case, I think the better solution would be to make a page about the paradox, and link to that. It's hard to know, but I think a more fully fleshed out blog post about the paradox might have produced better discussion.
So, don't read to much into Gödel, you also can't prove 1 + 1 = 2 except by making an equivalent assumption. Yet, that does not mean what you think it means.
PS: I don't think HN has jumped the shark, but I do try and keep it clean. IMO, it was fairly close to the acceptable line but to close to the HN equivalent of a funny cat photo, (hey look a paradox how cute), but a longer post taking about a well defined paradox and it's implications would have been acceptable and had a much cleaner discussion.
The very fact that that post had a lot of comments with, collectively, a lot of upvotes is proof that HN is not what it used to be. :/
Perhaps more than a glance is appropriate before flagging items?
"I was probably also influenced by the quality of the discussion."
Wouldn't down-voting the particular comment(s) you don't like be more appropriate?
I don't know the submission volume of HN, but I'd guess it's sufficient that a glance is all one can afford.
Perhaps, but I don't think so in this case. The main reason I flagged it was not the 'paradox' but because it's not a direction I want to see HN going. If a rabbi and a priest walk into a bar, I'd flag it regardless of whether the punchline is hilarious. I'd agree that the moderator should take more than a glance.
Wouldn't down-voting the particular comment(s) you don't like be more appropriate?
I can't really assess 'appropriate', but it certainly wouldn't have been as effective. Knocking a 'funny' comment down from 16 to 15 points wouldn't have even been noticed, whereas using the flag to call it to the attention of a moderator for review had the effect I hoped for.
As a rule I limit my flagging to spam, for the most part the voting system works ok, most of the time.
And with RiderOfGiraffes penchant to pose interesting logical problems I think he should get the benefit of the doubt before hitting the 'kill' button.
Given the poor quality of the comments perhaps I was less surprised than I might've been, but as I've said elsewhere, I just wish the bad comments had been flagged, not the submission.