> I'm getting downvoted for saying VCs are idiots. (elsewhere people are getting upvoted for saying "Deniers are morons", so it's not the name calling. Its' the "if I can just get thur YC and get VC funding I'll have it made!" ideology that pervades HN.
No, there's a critical difference between your statement and that one: VCs are an identifiable class of people. Saying they're all idiots (something you don't know, couldn't possibly know, and indeed is not only false but obviously so) is attacking a specific group of people. "Deniers are morons", while obviously not a high-quality thing to say, is closer to a tautology. Both break the HN guidelines, but the former is worse.
This is not ideological. One needn't agree with everything every VC ever did to insist that calling them all idiots is wrong, breaks the site rules, and is correctly downvoted.
Sam once wondered whether we should make it explicitly against the HN guidelines to attack whole classes of people. At the time I said that sounded too legalistic. But it stuck in my head, and I have to say that every example I've seen come up in practice since then has suggested the value of such a rule. This is a good example.
No, there's a critical difference between your statement and that one: VCs are an identifiable class of people. Saying they're all idiots (something you don't know, couldn't possibly know, and indeed is not only false but obviously so) is attacking a specific group of people. "Deniers are morons", while obviously not a high-quality thing to say, is closer to a tautology. Both break the HN guidelines, but the former is worse.
This is not ideological. One needn't agree with everything every VC ever did to insist that calling them all idiots is wrong, breaks the site rules, and is correctly downvoted.
Sam once wondered whether we should make it explicitly against the HN guidelines to attack whole classes of people. At the time I said that sounded too legalistic. But it stuck in my head, and I have to say that every example I've seen come up in practice since then has suggested the value of such a rule. This is a good example.