"How Harmful is Religion?" topics are one of the biggest red herring scapegoat topics you can get, and usually come with a generous side of philosophical wankery. I'm glad we don't talk about it much here. I'd recommend discussion of the impact of particular cultural values and beliefs instead.

Personally, on non-hacker topics, I'd be interested to see more on linguistics, the scientific study of language. We can't even begin a real discussion on most of your listed topics until we know how to recognize and establish semantics and metaphors.

The first problem we run into with "how harmful is religion," for example, is that everyone is going to see 'religion' and think of something completely different, but no-one will notice. Everyone will start arguing and get angry because they're confused and don't realize it. The first problem we run into with "is math invented or discovered?" is defining invention and discovery. But again, most people ignore that question and dive right into discussion.

I'm also less interested in hearing people's opinions about how evolutionary pressures have affected us, than I am interested in hearing about the actual archaeological discoveries that inspire such speculation.

"The first problem we run into with "is math invented or discovered?" is defining invention and discovery."

Yeah, that's one of the most interesting parts of the discussion.

"I'm also less interested in hearing people's opinions about how evolutionary pressures have affected us, ..."

I'm referring to the sciences of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, not evolutionary punditry. ;-)

You are spot on with that observation. Somebody says "religion" and everybody runs to their corners ready for an argument instead of a discussion. Same goes for "discovery", "soul", or "justice." I spent about 20 minutes retyping my comment above because of the issues around definitions.

The thing is -- everybody wants to argue what the world is based on their definitions, but nobody wants to take the time to compare notes about just what the heck the other guy is talking about.

I've been in some really good net discussions -- discussions that changed my mind about some closely held beliefs. But you first have to get beyond all the pre-defined BS and canned political arguments people learn to a place where everybody is on the same page and thinking for themselves. Otherwise it's just a waste of time: nothing happens except people posturing and talking past each other. I wouldn't want the board to devolve into that.

I voted this up because I agree with the first paragraph, but I don't like most of the specific big questions you list here.

I can't think of any way of saying this without sounding mean, but the type of big questions you list here are the stuff of pseudo-intellectuals. These are Omni magazine big questions (if anyone here remembers that). I'd prefer Economist big questions.

A question being permanently unanswerable or currently out of reach (or "too big") doesn't make it a poor question. I agree that academics focus on questions at the edge of reach with currently available tools, and that's fine and important from a practical standpoint. But I don't think that the validity of the question is determined by whether or not we currently have the tools to attack it. If you're interested in the important political and economic questions that face us today, that's fine, and I agree that in practice it's more immediately valuable to debate and resolve those questions. But I do think that the larger (and possibly unanswerable) questions are interesting to ponder. Maybe I picked a poor list as I wrote the original comment, but as the sibling poster said, the types of questions asked at edge.org are what I'd like to see more of.

I'm surprised that everyone is responding to my list of questions instead of the meat of the post. I just threw that list out there as an illustrative list, the real point I'm trying to make is in the body of the post. I also think that all of those questions I listed have mostly settled answers in academia that aren't popularly accepted by society. (e.g. people still cling to the idea of a "soul" separate from the information content of your brain)

EDIT: I also think that the most interesting work happens when asking questions that are at the edge of being taken seriously.

I highly recommend reading up on linguistics, if you're interested to know why people responded the way they did:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics

Writing is hard.

The answer lies somewhere in between. The problem with big questions is lack of traction, whereas the problem with small questions is lack of vision. The insightful questions latch onto the pivot points between these two realms, either reshaping the big questions in light of the small answers or visa versa.

I agree, but I'd prefer questions like the kind that are asked at Edge.org: related to technology, physics, mathematics, biology, logic, astronomy, etc.

Reddit, Digg, and even Slashdot already cover all that stuff daily... why do you want another source of it?

There is no reason you can't participate in those sites alongside this one. I like having a place where I know I can find good nerdery.

I like this place because it's solely good nerdery, unlike Slashdot, Digg and Reddit. I think it'd be nice to expand the scope of the nerdery though.

Those questions belong in a late-night dorm room discussion in between bong rips, not Hacker News...

That's exactly why I like news.ycombinator, I can only hope that the community will remain focused for as long as possible (which doesn't mean it shouldn't grow, but it should stick to the hacking/ programming/startup theme so it attracts more dedicated users from these areas and doesn't deviate into a mainstream news aggregator) ... anyway, if you look for articles like those you mentioned in your comment you can always check out reddit.com or other similar sites.

I'm all for discussing these topics, but if you want to start a discussion you've gotta submit a thread. Find an appropriate link around which to discuss or just ask a straight up question.

I think more provocative and deeper issues are great. Only problem is: how do you do provocative/interesting when you have a system where people vote you up or down based on how much they like what you are saying?

If this were pre-copernicus Europe and we were discussing astronomy, some of the most interesting (and as it turned out later, easily verified) ideas would be voted through the floor. Neat discussions about neat topics turn into popularity contests and mob rule, even with a generally neat audience like this.

Perhaps sticking your neck out and taking a position which is uncomfortable and posting and engaging in provocative subjects requires a level of trust that doesn't exist in up-down social sites? It seems the format encourages being interesting and challenging, but only up to a point. I think lots of people confuse being snarky and asinine with having something interesting to say.

So count me in on the more deep questions -- as soon as we don't start voting people up or down based on which clique they are in and instead vote them up or down based on how interesting and thoughtful their comments and articles are. I remain skeptical that's going to happen anytime soon. How about going from up/down arrows to a dropdown with positive and negative attributes? That would at least start telling you something about what the raters were thinking, and might lead to some more interesting insights.

I doubt that you can really influence the depth of a debate with any voting system. Voting is good for filtering large amounts of information. For everything else we'll have to use our brains for the time being. I agree that fear of getting downvoted is a very bad motivation in a debate. Downvotes are just unnecessary in my view. They only create bad blood and don't help to filter information. I've decided to never downvote.

But, you know, the day I really start to worry about downvotes is when the karma to $$$ conversion rates are announced ;-)

I agree that downvotes are much less useful than upvotes. That's why there are so many restrictions on them. There are no downvotes on submissions; you don't get a downarrow on comments till you get a certain karma threshold; and even then downarrows are missing in some places.

I'm becoming convinced that vote-oriented threaded commenting is harmful to discussion, except of a more limited, conversational kind. I haven't had time to properly think it through, so forgive the sketchiness of the rest of this comment, but my instinct is that this approach favors narrow, isolating, unnatural and oppositional discussion.

Dynamically-ordered threading divorces comments from the context they were written in (i.e. the rest of the thread, and of the natural linearity of conversation), and forces an awkward, artificial pattern of replying. This is a marked contrast to the sort of all-in-this-together, synthesizing discussions that can be found on sites like MetaFilter, and indeed of the natural conversations people enjoy in groups in real life. Voting and non-linear threading encourages and rewards simplistic, emotional, bias-confirming comments, while discouraging and often punishing any other kind of comment, leading to fragmented individualistic comments, which seems to me like the opposite of discussion.

I'm sure there are big problems with traditional linear comment threads, but if you want interesting, intelligent discussion, dynamic threading+voting seems to me the worst solution. (I might add that the generally high quality of comments here reflects the community, rather than the commenting system)

sounds like slashdot 3.0 or another reddit/digg 2.0...