HN user
If they hate Lina Khan, it's because she's liable to make demands on them without knowing anything about their business. In the worst case, her office turns outright extortionist, as the current administration is bent on demonstrating.
None of that conflicts with the observation that large, well-financed, entrenched players better at navigating regulatory obstacles than small upstarts.
They won't always be (prohibitive).
The opening qualifies as sarcastic:
I am so happy not to live in an American small town. Because whenever I'm shown some small town in the States it is populated with all kinds of monsters among whom flesh hungry zombies, evil aliens and sinister ghosts are most harmless.
Mocking irony, in the context of a negative review.
I mean, look at it this way: when you ask a crew to paint your house, you specify the colors upfront. You don't iterate with them on after every room, or every wall.
This isn't a useful analogy - more often, it's like asking a crew how much it would cost and how long it would take to paint your house, except the house isn't built yet, you're not sure what you're going to use it for (or whether you'll actually use it as a house rather than a B&B), plus you reserve the right to change colors at any point in the process.
The standard you've laid out proposes that any statement about a man's experience in a relationship is by definition misogynistic, because it's centers the man (and, of course, erases women). Do you stand by that?
Additionally, consider that you are the one bringing the nagging wife trope into this: it's merely one of many possibile explanations and unhappy marriage.
I'd agree that they are "dominant", and that legal authorities should watch Amazon closely for specific violations, but they only control 35-40% of the online consumer retail market (by most estimates circa 2022).
What is Amazon's Monopoly?
I don't mean this as a gotcha question: I really don't understand what people are claiming when they say this.
All three of those companies are now large conglomerates with a lot of power (perhaps too much), but calling them "monopolies" is counter-productive (except Google search), especially in the context of regulatory or legal framework, where the facts have to fit a very precise pattern to take action.
I agree that the enterprise market does not value usability very much, and I would even agree that the enterprise vendors made the right choice to deliver anything at all, in the early stages of ERP (even the first two decades).
None of that means the software is good: we can recognize the smart business choices those companies made and also abhor their products.
They provide what Alan Cooper calls "Dancing bearware" - it doesn't matter how badly the bear dances, they're just grateful to have a bear that can do it at all.
What you say is true, but these companies aren't successful because their products are usable. They succeeded because of their first-mover advantage, lack of alternatives, and compliance requirements that raise the cost of competition. We don't owe them any respect when it comes to UX.
I can see how it gets tiresome reading repetitive arguments, but a solid theory undergirds all the criticism: that one way to beat SAP, oracle, Microsoft, etc. Is to provide a better user experience.
Don't worry, there's plenty of room for conformity in society too!
Reading this comment (which is correct, I think) gives me the urgent desire to log off HN.
Orwell, from "Politics and the English Language" [0]:
Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive.
[0] https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...
I'm merely pointing out a fact.
"The Hunter Biden story is insignificant" is a judgement, not a fact, it's a judgement. I'd say that calling it "misinformation" is bizarre, except that most prominent allegations of misinformation boil down to judgements too.
I mean, read the comment chain you were responding to?
How about this: you don't get to decide what's remotely important to people in the context of the election?
The FBI doesn't get to decide what's "important in the context of an election."
The contents of Hunter's laptop didn't stop me from voting for Biden, but that's because I'm a cynical jerk that already thinks politicians are corrupt by default.
No, "Orwellian" means almost the opposite: Winston and Julia are perfectly capable of thinking dissident thoughts, despite being immersed in Ingsoc. "Orwellian" refers to dominating people to the degree that you can force them to use the words you specify and make them say things that they know aren't true.
"Blurred Lines" versus "Got to Give it Up"?
On March 10, 2015, a jury found Thicke and Williams, but not T.I., liable for copyright infringement. The unanimous jury awarded Gaye's family US$7.4 million in damages for copyright infringement and credited Marvin Gaye as a songwriter for "Blurred Lines". In July 2015, the judge rejected a new trial and the verdict was lowered from US$7.4 million to US$5.3 million
Why is this a special concern about GPT-3? I cannot think of an institution, entity, or tool about which those statements are not true.
Replace "GPT-3" with "Hacker News posters" "Wikipedia", or "News broadcasts" to create three more 100%-accurate paragraphs.
Will any downvoters comment? I think democracy is the best option we have, but ignoring its weaknesses and checkered history isn't constructive.
The current democracy-worship afoot in the US ignores the fact that almost every progressive aspect of the US state sprang from a counter-majoritarian institution: Roe and Brown, plus the administrative implementation of civil rights law.
people who wouldn’t otherwise have had them reinforced.
You mean people without access to niche communities / echo chambers?
I grant there are people ready to embrace destructive ideas, but the fraction of them that don't already have access to those ideas is small enough to be irrelevant, especially in the age of the internet.
Better to have them out in the open, for the reasons I mentioned, and moreover, because it's better to have an accurate view of what they think.
That isn't what anyone means by "echo chamber". You're talking about manners, not different viewpoints.
No, but it is _very_ dangerous to Jews for those people to be isolated, never have their ideas challenged, and miss out on the moderating influence of other viewpoints
This has some internal logic, but every experience I've had contradicts your proposition.
For example, I'm in my late forties. When I was growing up, it was rare to encounter (out) gay people outside of major cities, and people would believe practically any negative statement about them, not so much anymore. Conversely, in my college town today, most of my accquaintences have never met a Republican, and they predictably believe in a stupid cartoon caricature of red staters. I'm definitely not buying it.
I'm in favor of letting people pursue their preferences, but echo chambers are antithetical to civil society - much more dangerous than so-called misinformation (indeed, they are environments in which errors and lies are more likely to flourish), so counteracting then is a valuable goal, in my book.
Yes, and I agree that it's always important to keep that possibility in mind. I am generally keenly aware of uncertainty normally shy away from bad bets (predictions).
But taken too far, that principle leads to abdicating our responsibilities as citizens in a democracy, so while I was definitely chastened by the experience I will kindly decline the invitation to shut up: I choose to get better instead. The sum total of my influence on this matter has been, at worst, to encourage quicker and more widespread adoption of home tests, which falls very short of pernicious.
I'm quite puzzled by P5fRxh5kUvp2th's vitriol - maybe he or she is ardently pro-mask? Since I alluded to my low opinion of mask mandates (which I stand behind), that could explain it.
I think you should perhaps cool down.
1) I am admitting that I was wrong and updated. That includes updating on my thought process, just like you are so ardently suggesting.
2) Ninety percent of your assumptions about me are wrong. I'm not sure what you're accusing me of, or what "many people were RIGHT" about.
There's a canyon of difference between being wrong because you just didn't know and being wrong because the entire platform you were basing it on turned out to be wrong.
What is the "platform" I was basing it on?
This is all beside the point at hand, but I suppose it's still about epistemology, so I'd like to stand up for my old position, even though I understand it looks foolish in retrospect.
The fact that so much was unknown was part of the reason I thought testing might have a different effect than the flu. Well into the pandemic, the vast majority of people feared COVID much more than the flu, so it seemed they would be much more likely to take precautions to avoid getting it or spreading it. But that fear attenuated over time, especially as people lost trust in the alarmist if-it-bleeds-it-leads coverage.
Finally, your hostility is unwarranted: I am and have been a strong proponent of vaccines and I was fully on board to "flatten the curve", even for a short period of lockdowns. But I am not and never have been in favor of permanent midnight.
I don't understand what you're suggesting - that changing your mind only counts if there's no evidence?
Even now, I can think of ways to argue that testing could still drive COVID nearly to zero in the US, most of which revolve around the idea that we're not really testing or we're not doing it right. But I think I was wrong, partly because of things other people said earlier during the pandemic, including parallel arguments about why "masks work" were wrong, which I saw right away, though I didn't draw the obvious conclusions related to the effectiveness of testing.
I think Kahneman's position requires creative gerrymandering about what counts as an important belief, and about what counts as persuasion.
This turns into "no true Scotsman" pretty quickly.
I was a (relative) loudmouth about my position for over a year, since we didn't have access to home tests in the US until 2022. It was a very heated topic, since I often proposed testing as a preferred alternative to ineffective mask mandates that were popular where I live, and when my wish finally came true, I had to admit I had been wrong.
If changing one's mind about something of that magnitude doesn't count, the principle is badly overstated.
To a good first approximation, people simply don't change their minds about anything that matters.
I love the model of adversarial collaboration, and I don't dispute the extremely strong influence of social bonds on knowledge formation, but Kahneman is just wrong about this. I know he's wrong because I change my mind relatively frequently, about things of at least some consequence.
For a recent example, I was fairly sure that at the beginning of the pandemic, in the US, widespread, cheap testing would enable us to drive COVID cases near zero, and I wasn't shy about telling everyone I met. Obviously, I was wrong, for a variety of reasons - so I updated.
That intimate experience with uncertainty and updating my own beliefs makes me wonder about Kahneman's research methods. It makes me doubt whether this question is even tractable or whether people are even legible enough to researchers to draw conclusions about this.
Interestingly (and disarmingly) Khaneman is very forthright about the role his own experiences have played in convincing him that people in general don't change their minds. He writes:
I was also impressed by the fact that Anne and I didn't change our minds. I had read Kuhn and Lakatos about the robustness of paradigms, but I didn't expect that minor theories would also be impervious to evidence.
also:
I will now share a personal experience of belief perseverance that I cannot shake ... However, it turns out that I only changed my mind about the evidence. My view of how the mind works didn't change at all. The evidence is gone, but the beliefs are still standing. Indeed, I cannot think of a single important opinion that I have changed as a result of losing my faith in the studies of behavioral priming, although they seemed quite important to me at the time.
I think the most likely explanation for this is 1) social desirability bias has a dramatic influence on what information people make accessible about their cognition and 2) Kahneman is unusually stubborn, and his generalization from his own personality to all humankind is a manifestation of the typical mind fallacy. [0]