There are four categories of claims:

1. Easy to hear and false

2. Easy to hear and true

2. Hard to hear and false

3. Hard to hear and true

The first category is the domain of spin doctors and marketers. Let's ignore it for now.

The second category encompasses a lot of facts, but generally these won't show up in discourse. Because they're easy to hear, they are already known to both parties and agreed-upon. Let's call these "common knowledge" or even (more tendentiously) common-sense.

The third category show up in discourse as "things you want to make your opponent believe about themselves or their worldview." These are your psyops, basically.

Finally, the fourth category is pretty much every true thing that you need to actually point out. They need pointing-out because of a natural (and relatable!) human tendency to avoid discomfort. If they weren't hard to hear, you would have let yourself hear them already. Thus, most of discourse takes place here.

If the foregoing breakdown is correct, it also suggests that the *hardest-to-hear truths* are going to be the ones which are most significant, because of all the truth claims, they are the ones which have not yet been universally admitted.

HN's current posture toward discourse seems to encourage making hard-to-hear truths even harder, by literally fading them. And moreover, the guidelines prohibiting the discussion of our collective moderation decisions in-thread is itself a way of figuratively moving *even the awareness of the problem itself* from `color: #000` to `color: rgb(130,130,130)`.

This is why I now try to read the greytext first. For every one comment faded because it was offtopic or whatever, there are three which were faded for telling us emperors about our new clothes.