[HN Gopher] The Members of the Dull Men's Club
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The Members of the Dull Men's Club
Author : herbertl
Score : 65 points
Date : 2025-06-16 18:07 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| zh3 wrote:
| I will exclude myself from this club by finding it interesting
| enough to comment on.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| > I will exclude myself from this club by finding it
| interesting enough to comment on.
|
| I immediately thought of the interesting number paradox
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox
| kergonath wrote:
| I find some posts interesting, but most comments utterly stupid
| and a huge waste of time, although there is an occasional gem.
| romanhn wrote:
| Reminds me of the Dullest Blog in the World
| (https://dullestblog.com), which I frequently checked out more
| than 20 years ago. Hilarious to see a new entry just a couple
| years back.
| silisili wrote:
| Aw man, this sounded like just my kind of place. But...
|
| > It's a sentiment eagerly embraced by The Dull Men's Club.
| Several million members in a number of connected Facebook groups
| strive to cause dullness in others on a daily basis.
|
| Apparently I'm too dull to even have a FB account. I know it's a
| bit tongue in cheek, but in the name of maximum dullness,
| something with UX closer to this site seems much more appropriate
| than a Facebook group.
| reg_dunlop wrote:
| I guess this explains my affinity for nocss.club
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I think once you are features in a guardian article, you arent
| dull anymore. Building model airplanes in a shed is dull. Being
| so good at building them that journalists take time to visit you
| is not.
| chubot wrote:
| I don't think building model airplanes is dull. I'd say doom
| scrolling and para-social behavior are the modern dull things
| BizarroLand wrote:
| This is pretty true. Brilliance is marked at many levels by
| not doing what everyone else does, after all.
|
| It's also marked by doing what other people do better than
| they do.
|
| Lonerly contrarianism is not a cornerstone of brilliance.
| kergonath wrote:
| > I think once you are features in a guardian article, you
| arent dull anymore.
|
| Come on, the Graun is the epitome of dull middle class.
| ecshafer wrote:
| The Dull Men's Club group of facebook is actually oddly
| interesting. I would classify it more as a group who point out
| the very small oddities of every day life that are not very
| interesting. There is a post where someone saw two geese with 42
| bay geese, another where the rental company fixed a door with a
| piece of pool noodle. Its more like a "huh that's kind of weird I
| guess" group.
| RajT88 wrote:
| It's a bit like reading this site...
|
| Gentlemen, have you heard The curious tale of Bhutan's playable
| record postage stamps (2015)?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44054775
| gambiting wrote:
| I had to block it because I realized it just completely
| overtook my feed and 99% of it was in that "interesting but
| ultimately forgettable within 30 seconds of reading it" zone
| that's filling up social media. I mean it lived up to its name
| - it's very "dull" if vaguely interesting.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| this is the part of the internet that everyone would be
| better off avoiding: not bad but no long-term value. When the
| internet was novel and your engagement limited these were
| rarer, cool things to share (often face to face!). Now this
| content is internet sugar that will be the health crisis of a
| generation.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I laughed out loud at this line. It feels like something out of
| Futurama:
|
| >Australian member Andrew McKean, 85, had dullness thrust upon
| him.
| dalmo3 wrote:
| No banana for scale?
| smj-edison wrote:
| And no shoe size!
| danielodievich wrote:
| One of my most favorite places in nearby oregon is the community
| of Boring, OR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boring,_Oregon.
| Exceptionally lovely place. I've yet to visit it's sister town of
| Dull in Scotland, but I hope someday to remedy that, albeit with
| measured levels of excitement
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| Reminds me of the proof that all natural numbers are interesting.
| If there is some set of uninteresting natural numbers, there must
| be a minimal element of that set. It being the smallest
| uninteresting number is interesting which is a contradiction.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Why aren't all numbers in the set uninteresting? Did someone
| make a mistake when defining it?
|
| Perhaps the minimal element should be removed from the set;
| there will be plenty of members that still remain.
| Cerium wrote:
| Serious response? In that case the set still has a smallest
| member which can then be removed, if we keep going eventually
| there will be no uninteresting numbers remaining.
| leereeves wrote:
| The problem with that is the explanation of why each number
| is interesting becomes:
|
| the smallest member of the original set of uninteresting
| numbers
|
| the second smallest member of the original set of
| uninteresting numbers
|
| the third ...
|
| ...
|
| That version of "interesting" quickly becomes "not
| interesting". The concept simply defies mathematical logic.
| Tade0 wrote:
| My algebra 101 professor made this exact argument.
| notnmeyer wrote:
| > The over or under toilet paper debate raged (politely) for two
| and a half weeks.
|
| i found this particularly confusing because we all know that
| "over" is the only sane choice.
| wccrawford wrote:
| Only if you don't have cats. If you have cats, "under" is the
| only sane choice.
| dgfitz wrote:
| If you have cats you've willing given up your sanity.
| GianFabien wrote:
| ouch! that is a catty comment.
| GianFabien wrote:
| Don't you love all the punctures in the paper?
| robocat wrote:
| There must be a confounding variable: are you an engineer-type?
|
| What traits are correlated with overing?
|
| Do underers look at the world differently?
|
| And it is a false dichotomy. Some people just don't care what
| direction when they replace the roll - what's a suitable name
| for that clade? And then there's the people who use the floor
| and ignore the holder.
| Volundr wrote:
| Mine is in the under configuration, due to being near an AC
| vent that will sometimes unspool the whole roll in the over
| configuration.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| if you're interested in the opposite, finding the intrigue or
| fascinating in the seemingly mundane, you might be a candidate
| for the RR&R. The most recent topic was an elaborate history of a
| Oklahoma state senator based on some old telegrams found in a
| junk shop.
|
| https://www.ephorate.org/
| _fat_santa wrote:
| This is a cool concept but I have an issue with one being "dull"
| on a conceptual level. Personally I think that every single
| person on earth is both the dullest person you have ever met and
| the most interesting person on earth, it just depends on your
| perspective.
|
| I have friends that play DnD which I personally find very dull
| but hearing them talk about it, it's clear they do not see it the
| same way. Conversely I love cars and talking about cars and I can
| talk with another gearhead for hours on the topic, but the times
| my wife has listened in on my conversations she said it was the
| most boring thing she has ever heard in her life.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Personally I think that every single person on earth is both
| the dullest person you have ever met and the most interesting
| person on earth, it just depends on your perspective.
|
| You are most certainly right, but I don't think that this is in
| contradiction with how the Club works. Everyone is dull and
| interesting depending on the situation and the audience. The
| Club is for when you found or saw something interesting and
| important to you, but your audience disagree, does not notice,
| or does not care.
|
| Nobody _is_ fundamentally dull, but everybody is being dull at
| some point.
| rramadass wrote:
| This seems to be a riff off of the "Diogenes Club" invented by
| Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes Stories -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_Club
|
| _" There are many men in London, you know, who, some from
| shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of
| their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and
| the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that
| the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most
| unsociable and unclubbable men in town. No member is permitted to
| take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's
| Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three
| offences, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the
| talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders,
| and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere."_
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