I know we're just supposed to upvote but I wanted to explicitly thank you for finding and posting this article (I too was captivated by the mention of the sigh as a psychological function in that previous HN post, but I didn't succeed at finding a summary like this one).
I'm curious as to what psychological impacts we receive when a norm is to only express gratitude through a very anonymous and vague upvote. I think what the article explores is how a simple, seemingly meaningless, factor may influence us more than we think and I wonder how design decisions of HN do as well.
So, I'll also break it and say thank you for inspiring me to wonder about this.
I think the intentions behind the norm are for generic expressions of gratitude to be restricted to upvotes. When there are so many people communicating with each other in a shared environment, you kind of have to have a rule like that.
If this website had private responses, that'd solve that issue, but it'd also make abusive behaviour easier. Then you'd need to have a report system that allowed people to provide context, and before you know it, you need a large moderation team rather than the very small one that Hacker News currently gets away with.
I wonder whether there's a way to have it both ways.
I appreciate you pointing out the nuances in how it might play out, not just for the user, but also for the moderation of it behind the scenes. The pains and scalability of moderation is something I've thought about a lot when I've been imagining myself as the admin/moderator, yet, oddly enough, I easily forget about it when I just think about myself as the user.
For example, as a user on HN, I've often felt so lost in having conversations longer than a day, because I only notice upticks in my karma (is that what it's called here?) number and if someone replied to something not on the first page of my threads, then it may as well disappear. So I've wondered why HN doesn't have notifications, yet maybe there's a hidden moderation pain that I'm not imagining behind the scenes.
Where are y'all seeing this norm? I regularly see shallow praise on HN, and I think it's great.
Looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, I don't actually see any restrictions on saying nice things. Knock yourself out! It's only if you're criticizing that you have to give yourself a high bar.
It's true that a lot of praise would get tiresome. But that's never a problem in practice. I usually have a clear field any time I want to send someone a compliment.
Psychologists are quick to glorify weaknesses these days. A sigh is a breath signal for helplessness, it follows that mammals would instinctively look around after expressing an exhaustion of known options. I'm sure other kinds of breaths (gasp) probably alter nervous function too, it wouldn't fascinate me any more than the sigh/gasp YT video thumbnails do.
Every time I see a slumped alcoholic sipping on their liquid anguish I think the habit must have started with a single sigh, itself an idea planted by a bar of unattainable nostalgia music.
I’m sorry but this statement is so ridiculous on so many levels.
Any source on a sigh being a “breath signal for helplessness”?
Did you just made this sentence up, then use that sentence as a stepping stone to a scene with an imaginary alcoholic whose predicament was caused by a sigh?!
For starters, how is processing or integrating emotion a weakness?
>sighs could signal a behavioral state change [...] Teigen (2008) also describes situations in which sighs are elicited by a quick drop in physiological arousal, during situations in which humans feel helpless and surrender.
The source is my source. What really gets my goat is the Goldilocks findings; too little sighing and baby death occurs, too much and adult depression sets in. It's all too convenient a match for the present moral zeitgeist of the expert external savior. The study ignores ways anguish can be prevented (in adults) because it doesn't dare find fault with any actors in a situation, instead it looks to play the defeatist mindset off as natural & necessary from earliest life.
I don't see it mentioned here yet, but the Huberman Lab podcast "Dr. Jack Feldman: Breathing For Mental & Physical Health & Performance" covers the function of sighs and other interesting topics. "They discuss physiological sighs, peptides expressed by specific neurons controlling breathing, and magnesium compounds that can improve cognitive ability and how they work."
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 47.5 ms ] threadSo, I'll also break it and say thank you for inspiring me to wonder about this.
If this website had private responses, that'd solve that issue, but it'd also make abusive behaviour easier. Then you'd need to have a report system that allowed people to provide context, and before you know it, you need a large moderation team rather than the very small one that Hacker News currently gets away with.
I wonder whether there's a way to have it both ways.
For example, as a user on HN, I've often felt so lost in having conversations longer than a day, because I only notice upticks in my karma (is that what it's called here?) number and if someone replied to something not on the first page of my threads, then it may as well disappear. So I've wondered why HN doesn't have notifications, yet maybe there's a hidden moderation pain that I'm not imagining behind the scenes.
Looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, I don't actually see any restrictions on saying nice things. Knock yourself out! It's only if you're criticizing that you have to give yourself a high bar.
It's true that a lot of praise would get tiresome. But that's never a problem in practice. I usually have a clear field any time I want to send someone a compliment.
Every time I see a slumped alcoholic sipping on their liquid anguish I think the habit must have started with a single sigh, itself an idea planted by a bar of unattainable nostalgia music.
Any source on a sigh being a “breath signal for helplessness”?
Did you just made this sentence up, then use that sentence as a stepping stone to a scene with an imaginary alcoholic whose predicament was caused by a sigh?!
For starters, how is processing or integrating emotion a weakness?
The source is my source. What really gets my goat is the Goldilocks findings; too little sighing and baby death occurs, too much and adult depression sets in. It's all too convenient a match for the present moral zeitgeist of the expert external savior. The study ignores ways anguish can be prevented (in adults) because it doesn't dare find fault with any actors in a situation, instead it looks to play the defeatist mindset off as natural & necessary from earliest life.
https://hubermanlab.com/dr-jack-feldman-breathing-for-mental...