[aleem]

On what should you be:

> This guy has gone to the zoo and interviewed all the animals. The tiger says that the secret to success is to live alone, be well disguised, have sharp claws and know how to stalk. The snail says that the secret is to live inside a solid shell, stay small, hide under dead trees and move slowly around at night. The parrot says that success lies in eating fruit, being alert, packing light, moving fast by air when necessary, and always sticking by your friends. His conclusion: These animals are giving contradictory advice! And that's because they're all "outliers".

> But both of these points are subtly misleading. Yes, the advice is contradictory, but that's only a problem if you imagine that the animal kingdom is like a giant arena in which all the world's animals battle for the Animal Best Practices championship [1], after which all the losing animals will go extinct and the entire world will adopt the winning ways of the One True Best Animal. But, in fact, there are a hell of a lot of different ways to be a successful animal, and they coexist nicely. Indeed, they form an ecosystem in which all animals require other, much different animals to exist.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469831#up_469940

[leafboi]

Great analogy, but analogies can be deceptive, because while the snail can coexist with the tiger, for every two animals that coexist hundreds still have to fail the natural selection process.

We like to view the world through an idealistic narrow lens of an analogy but the truth is often far more complex.

I would go further to say that analogies and quotations are dangerous and deceptive. These quotations don't actually offer any new information. You usually only like analogy because you already agree with it, no new information or insights are being offered other than the comparison that is part of the analogy itself.

[throw_this_one]

Damn, nice. Great analogy to do your own thing.

[MrXOR]

@mechanical_fish! please come back

[golergka]

That zoo clearly didn't have any humans in it.

[cercatrova]

I will have to agree with the dead comment by @leafboi, it is not that every animal can live harmoniously, indeed every animal is in competition by the laws of natural selection, and each animal can be seen as the outlier in its species. In the case of humans, there may be multiple paths to success, but it may be that many of them lead to failure while producing certain outliers.

Unrelatedly, does anyone know why certain comments immediately become dead, they don't really seem to break any HN rules but I see often that some comments die quickly.

[wombatmobile]

As human beings, moderators have their own preferences which exist beyond the HN guidelines, and are not meta moderated, except in the aggregate.

When a comment becomes dead, it's because some mods chose to vote it down, and fewer mods choose to revive it. The net effect is an expression of the prevailing culture.

Your question about why this sometimes happens "immediately" is an interesting part of the dynamic.