juletide

hence the self-centeredness of thinking one is entitled to having children, resorting to all sorts of immoral technologies to have them

Huh? I'm confused how you reconcile this (seeming) attack on fertility treatment with the pro-natalist sentiment expressed later in your comment. Who or what principle is transgressed by what technologies?

In what ways do you think it is wrong?

To my mind, though, it’s important not to minimize the gravity of the fateful decision by conflating it with everything that preceded it. I confess to taking this sort of conflation extremely personally. For eight years now, the rap against me, advanced by thousands (!) on social media, has been: sure, while by all accounts Aaronson is kind and respectful to women, he seems like exactly the sort of nerdy guy who, still bitter and frustrated over high school, could’ve chosen instead to sexually harass women and hinder their scientific careers.

This seems like such an oddly prickly and defensive bit to throw into the middle of the essay? I have no idea why Aaronson is nervous about being associated with SBF ("both were affiliated with the same large research university at some point in time" hardly seems damning), nor what on earth these charges about disrespect to women are about. Am I missing something?

"In recent months, Russia has once again been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons, with the US and Western media loudly proclaiming (since November) that Russia is planning an imminent invasion of the Ukraine, though Russia has repeatedly denied that fact and it's not exactly clear what Russia is waiting for, or what advantage it could expect to derive from lying about its intentions at this point (the whole Western world expects an invasion and the US has pulled embassy staff from Kiev)."

Given that it's now obvious that Russia in fact has been planning an invasion of the Ukraine, for months, which furthermore undermines the author's later claim that there was some peaceful concession that Putin would've accepted... I'm not sure why I should take this author's argument seriously. They seem naive and under informed.

My statement wasn't "things that disproportionally affect people based on sex"; it was specifically "policies [that] have outcomes that disproportionately burden women." This is a pretty common conception of the term "sexism" in policy-making circles; sometimes it's specifically explicated as "structural sexism" to distinguish it from interpersonal/individual sexism, but it's a valid use of the word.

I did not say the policy's disproportionate affect should be the sole consideration; I did say it's worth considering, because in practice the vast majority of ethical questions are not simple binaries; we have to weigh competing needs/desires/etc and decide what the best course based on all the factors at play.

My intention is not to "blur things intentionally" but to encourage thinking about this in a less black-and-white way, and explore some unexamined (arguably irrational!) assumptions that seemed present in your original post. For instance, you said:

When does it go from cells to alive inside the mother?

...with the implication that answering this will give us a "rational" and correct answer to the ethical question. But there is nothing about <i>this framing itself</i> that is objective or rational. Knowing that a life <i>is</i> at some point (via whatever scientific definition we've chosen) doesn't tell us what <i>ought</i> be done about it; in general you can't derive an ought from an is; you could <i>easily</i> instead reframe the ethical question as "is there some point when a fetus's life is more important than the woman's bodily autonomy," and come up with a very different set of heuristics for answering the question. You can pick an objectively measurable line but the choice of what that line is, and what to do about it, are not a thing that can be objectively chosen.

My intended point wrt Texas is that, based on the discrepancy between polling data and the law as written, it seems like the representatives in Texas have passed a law that is in fact <i>more</i> restrictive than what the majority of voters want; ergo, I don't think it actually reflects the majority's intuitions on when abortion should be OK. But this really isn't my main point; I'm mainly trying to point out this isn't a question that can be solved solely by finding some science answer, and an attempt to sway voters solely on that type of argument seems not-correct based on everything we understand about how people in modern democracies make such decisions.

It is not women vs men. However, anti-choice policies do have outcomes that disproportionately burden women, which is another way of saying such policies are misogynistic, which is... sexism. You can argue sexism only counts as such if there's intent behind it, or you can argue the sexism here is less important than other considerations, but I don't think it's derailing or distracting from an ethical issue to point out this sexism. It's something worth considering when deciding on the ethical issue.

Again: even in "pure" science, you are generally making value judgments when studying stuff like "what makes something a member of a species", "what counts as a life for the purposes of this study", etc. E.g. a scientist may use the biological, ecological, or evolutionary species concept to study a population of organisms, depending on what question they're trying to answer. There is no "objective" answer to what a species is; it depends on what question you're trying to study. Similarly there is no "objective" answer to when life begins; someone can pick "at conception" or "at first breath" or whatever, and then we have to have a value discussion about why that, why not something else? See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma..., which argues well (in a different context) how this sort of thing works.

The Texas law is far more restrictive. Six weeks is much shorter than first trimester.

I think it's useful to consider that many women may not be comfortable naming or formally accusing her rapist (for reasons that include, way more often than you'd think, that a family member is her rapist and she still lives at home). For this reason, anti-choice laws that have exceptions for rape often mean only a tiny minority of women can actually use the exception.

(1) Women are perfectly capable of supporting policies that have materially misogynistic outcomes. I agree some of the mainstream rhetoric doesn't emphasize this in the interest of pithiness and such, but this strikes me as an odd complaint. (2) You seem to imply that some scientific definition of when life begins would offer a clear cut solution... but whatever we pick involves some kind of value judgment, right? And anyway, e.g. most voters (of all stripes!) in the US support some right to choose in the first trimester and do not support it in the third trimester, so "first trimester abortions should be safe/legal/accessible" seems like a fine place to start, and go from there

...but people aren't allergic to other humans? I don't understand the point of this hypothetical that does not occur in reality?

fyi, "cis" generally means "your gender identity = the gender you were assigned at birth", as opposed to being trans. it's possible to be gay + trans, or gay + cis, etc, but being gay doesn't describe anything about cis vs trans in-and-of-itself.

(thank you for the post, by the way! i thought there were some genuinely neat little tips in there.)

Why exactly were you arguing so vociferously when all this information was available just one click away, at the link the other user provided?

This kind of comment (being unwilling to do even the most basic research before pontificating on something one doesn't know about) makes HN discussion poorer overall, imho.

Natural selection is not the only force that shapes evolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Beauty

...tends to imply that beauty standards can, in fact, be quite tightly bound to a culture.

On a related note, there's an app that will identify bird species based on photos that you upload (http://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/photo-id/), and it's powered by "Visipedia", a collaboration between a Caltech and Cornell research group (https://vision.cornell.edu/se3/projects/visipedia/?__hstc=75...).

I remember how nascent the tech was when they first started releasing it in 2011ish and it's incredible how good it is now. Really awesome stuff.

Actually, recent research indicates that these two species began differentiating themselves a long time ago, but their lineages have since converged: they now interbreed freely and there's no reliable way to tell the two species apart: https://twitter.com/dlslager/status/1072353359041085440

It's been really interesting to talk to birders I trust about this. The rough consensus is, most people think they're the same species and will get merged back together soon, but some are very attached to the distinction between the two, haha.

Birds are so cool! I think it's fascinating that we're still learning new things about this stuff all the time.

Okay. The phrase is in pretty wide use with more casual implications (googling “be respectful of your reader’s time” brings up a lot of marketing email advice pages, for instance), but obviously it's not in as wide of use as I’d thought, so I apologize for overstepping!

I do wish your original comment had been a little less snarky; I’d like to contribute more to HN but it’s not so easy when replies seem to assume entitlement/bad faith/etc.

I’m not quite sure how sharing an anecdote about how I, personally, found it difficult to find information in a particular email conveys a “sense of entitlement”—perhaps my phrasing didn’t come across well? The “respectful of my time” thing is just a phrase I’ve generally heard as shorthand for “make the information easier to access,” and I was merely expressing a wish, not a demand.

Counter-anecdote: I got the email, was excited to see that Starfighter was launching soon... but was annoyed that I couldn't quickly skim the rest of the email to get the "tl;dr" version (the basics of what the challenge will involve, or if there's anything else I need to know about the launch, etc). I've been cutting down on my RSS reader lately because there are a lot of things I want to read and there's not time to read them all; I wish the emails were more respectful of my time. Just including a clearly-marked summary, followed by the long version, would make me far happier.

"The guy has an MD from Duke; I doubt he is as religious as he seems"

I don't understand what you're saying here—are you implying that MDs are somehow unlikely to be religious?

While I understand where the skepticism comes from, I think it's overly pessimistic to think nothing's changed since your time in the government, or that Recordon won't be able to enact positive change.

I've been really impressed with the quality of talent that USDS and 18F have been drawing, and with the quality of their output. While I'm sure there's still more friction than you'd see at a super-tiny private sector startup, I think everyone's aware that software/IT delievery needs to radically change, and there's a lot of smart, driven people who seem to be helping enact that change.

Would you mind explaining why that bothers you? It seems innocuous to me.

Hilarious.

I kind of dig how the "shitty ideas" aspect of it liberates folks to work on dumb-yet-amusing stuff.

You could make the gap between those note groups wider and it would become impossible. Even then, it is impossible to play for some—my piano teacher had rather small hands and had to "cheat" by dropping out notes if she was going to try Rachmaninoff.

Physical property rights and intellectual property rights are different things.

Expressing the value of allowing intellectual property rights to expire does not require arguing that physical property rights ought to expire.

Tumblr seems to have toyed with this idea a bit in their paid/premium themes section: http://www.tumblr.com/themes/tagged/premium

for clarification: I'm fairly certain this piece is meant to be a satire of lifehacker/self-improvement/etc-ish block posts...

Hi, I hope this isn't too random, but your comment made me smile—please keep doing what you're doing. I was raised by a medical doctor father and a "geeky" older brother—dad was always sharing cool science things with me, and my brother got me into pursuits like chess, video games, etc. I was a dorky girl in a rural mountain town but my family still drove me five hours to computer camp every summer, where I first started learning to program, because fostering my dorky interests mattered that much to them. Now I'm 22, nearing graduation in a great computer science program, headed to a fabulous startup next year, and I couldn't be happier—I don't think I'd be here if I hadn't had such great encouragement at home.