Its just wonderful that I am being downvoted for asking why the parent post was being downvoted. Great going mods.

Asking why isn't trolling and deserves a response. If you don't want to respond it is fine, but downvoting? really? It implies that you (the mods) think you are beyond any questioning from the hoi polloi.

Well, saying "Here's one question in each field which is better than any of theirs" will sound presumptuous to a lot of people, but I agree that there was some serious effort in it and many good questions, which should more than compensate if one reads from start to end.

I'll answer: first paragraph was trollish and could have been left off. I'd flag but for the later stuff being more substantive.

Trollish? Hardly. It's a strongly-worded criticism of the article.

Yes, and when that harsh working provokes unproductive dialogue, it is known as being "trollish". If you really don't see what's trollish:

- inflammatory, dismissive labels without concrete justification: "eugenics, corporatism, sci-fi bait:"

- ditto for "what a series of shallow tropes"

- presumptuous assertion: "Here's one question in each field which is better than any of theirs"

The HN guidelines strongly advise against doing that.

This is fair. I started my comment by responding to each section, but I quickly realized that I wouldn't be able to make a constructive contribution.

First, the most important thing: Note that one of the responses to my original comment is feeling intense emotional relief at having some uncanny unease put directly into words. This is not the first time I've responded to this sort of article, and not the first time I've seen this sort of reply. I gather that it is difficult for folks to articulate the ambient horror of what this sort of writing is sketching.

Eugenics is recognizable from phrenology. They want to know why brain size matters and how to measure intelligence in different parts of the brain. They also want to know whether FAAH-OUT can make people happier and less sensitive to pain, and whether "extreme" human life extension is possible. They want to know how small the human race can get, and what the marginal utility of each additional person is. Indeed they ask whether utilitarianism isn't the ultimate ethical method.

Corporatism is most obvious in the framing. Various already-established consensus positions are turned into but-really or what-about questions, so that it seems as if climate change is not something that definitely exists, that we definitely could do something about, and that we definitely are not doing enough about. Corporations are portrayed as the leaders in innovation, while governments and the public are incompetent and slow to change.

Why do I say that these positions are tropes? Because I've read enough Dark Enlightenment literature to recognize its fingerprints, mostly. The authors are very slanted towards a meritocratic transhumanist utopia, where their very intelligent observations about the coming utopia will be rewarded with high stations and praise in the coming utopia. Meanwhile all of the implications about classism and injustice are carefully worded away so as not to be blatant and repulsive.

I recognize that you might not like my questions. But you also admit that they're substantive, and that's good enough for me. Honestly, they're barely my questions at all; each of them has been open for decades, I think. Maybe quantum computing is the most recent one to have something interesting happen, and that's changed our trajectory from asking "can we?" to "can we, bigger?" and "can we, cheaper?" and "can we, easier?"

Thank you for clarifying. I still think those aren't good reasons to apply the labels. But at least now you've spelled out your justifications for those strong claims, which is more productive that the first paragraph of your original comment, since it allows others to respond. So I do not consider it trollish when phrased as your most recent comment does.

Also,

>I recognize that you might not like my questions.

My criticism wasn't about any of those.