HN user
The point is that the 49% eventually leave when their every contribution get bombed to the bottom immediately. Then the 49% of the remaining 51% get bullied out.
Reddit's system encourages purity spirals, especially when the main topic of discussion is how terrible everyone else is.
Instead of constantly hand-wringing about "disinformation" from the shadows, they should be desperately addressing their own plummeting credibility: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/gallup-american-trus...
People would be less susceptible to disinformation if they could actually trust mainstream sources like the NYT.
I'm very confident that orders of magnitude more man-hours have been spent thinking about P=NP in the past 20 years than were spent in the whole 358 years on Fermat's theorem. The number of people in academic situations to work on hard problems has increased exponentially.
I think it's fair to assume that there are potentially asymptotic limits to what can be achieved, but it's not that we default to one conclusion or the other, but that we conclude that whatever might be the real solution, the complexity of the proof is insurmountable or doesn't exist.
Most people are openly taught about the misdeeds of the McCarthy era in schools and in public discussions. This wasn't swept under the rug, most people agree that it happened and wasn't a good thing.
This was the original idea, that some people with genuine traumatic experiences and were currently suffering from mental illness could choose to opt-out before proceeding on to read/watch something. But the concept got wildly out of hand as activists, especially younger adults, began obsessively applying it to nearly any piece of written word and anything they could frame as traumatic.
For example, if you're about to present a movie to a captive audience that involves depictions of rape, it would be good that someone who has experienced rape, especially recently, knows that it will ahead of time and has the ability to opt-out because it might trigger a traumatic episode. The circumstances where you have a captive audience and it's not clear from the context what will be depicted are actually quite rare, so its usage should be rare.
But young people, trying to signal their virtuous compassion and understanding to like-minded individuals, would put "trigger warnings" at the top of blog posts about things like "racism" or "homophobia", and all that would be discussed would be that they overheard a slur at the store.
At some point, the dominant use of trigger warnings was by people with thin skins, ready to get offended on behalf of "victims" who had suffered, at worst, nothing more than people being rude or mean to them. Pretending like these kinds of negative encounters are anything close to the mind-breaking trauma of getting raped or watching your fellow soldiers explode in front of you is disgusting, and eventually everyone caught on that the activists were trying to equivocate real trauma with "hurt feelings". Worse, they were effectively teaching young people to internalize and exaggerate negative experiences so that they could identify as someone with PTSD. That doing this made them unique and gave them extra attention from others who wanted to actively show compassion to victimized people. For lonely young people who want a cause, it was extremely attractive because it gave them identity, purpose, and community. But in reality, it was largely a perverted roleplay which coddled everyone involved and made them emotionally fragile.
The original concept of trigger warnings is solid, but should be practiced only where necessary and never attached to the phrase "trigger warning", as that nomenclature has been ceded to the activists.
The divorce rate is higher and it's easier to be comfortable living independently, both of which are stated in the article and are unquestionable. There might be other reasons, but these are definitely breaking down relationships.
Tie the ability for a student to take out a loan to go to a particular school to the ability for its graduated students to pay back said loans. Put simply, incoming Colombia film students can only borrow money Colombia film graduates have paid back.
Schools that have always graduated successful people with valuable degrees will prosper, and schools which prey upon idealistic young people will quickly find themselves only able to entertain rich dumb kids.
It's an indirect solution which will fix future and past wrongs, without giving any University the right to sue. It doesn't impose any unreasonable burden on institutions, other than the most reasonable one, that they're giving young people educations that actually have value.
We want to incentivize people to own homes and buy electric cars and a thousand other things, and we use the tax code to do that.
[If we want] to incentivize...
While it's true that incentivization necessitates tax code complexity, we don't all agree on the necessity of incentivization in the first place.
I had the same suspicion and did the math based on the numbers below.
40,273 cases/1M pop (better than 49 states)
597 deaths/1M pop (better than 48 states)
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
https://data.sfgov.org/stories/s/COVID-19-Cases-and-Deaths/d...
It's the natural outcome of publishing being cheap and supply of aspiring authors being much higher than the demand for novels. The money which used to be concentrated in the hands of the few who could convince publishers to do business with them is now spread thin among many niche authors.
Further, every modern author is competing with every author who ever lived. I could read the science fiction you wrote last year or I could read Asimov, Herbert, Card, etc. and they're often cheaper and more socially relevant.
Companies like Google and Facebook were running around screaming Chicken Little about how companies like Verizon and Comcast will use their monopolistic powers to dominate public speech, screw over users, and screw over startup competitors. Interesting where we ended up today.
The propaganda framed it like sites like Netflix would be really fast because they could afford to pay for it and startup competitors would be very slow, but economic incentives would have actually caused the exact opposite. A startup video hosting site is of relatively no burden to an ISP compared to a behemoth like Netflix so they would have no reason to slow down the startup speeds. If the startup succeeds because it has a competitive advantage to Netflix, then when they become big they get a new customer they can bully into keeping their speeds high.
Yes ISPs will take a cut of the fees they charge content providers, but they will also be able to pass those savings onto the average consumer because the Netflix customer, who is already using most of the internet bandwidth, is helping pay for the service connection. Market forces would force streaming services to go up in price and ISP costs to go down. It would be generally fairer.
It certainly was at one point, but near the end it definitely wasn't. Whether it was soft censorship, hard censorship, or a declining user base, I struggled to find videos I could sometimes even find on Twitter or Youtube. Videos whose place was obviously LiveLeak, based on their standards from 5 years ago.
As much as I lament the death of LiveLeak, it died well before today.
She's still accepting the premise that more female success, as a whole, is something she values. But validating that it is okay for women to choose to be less successful in order to focus on their family is clearly going to result in less female career success.
Deep down I think we all agree that both startups and involving yourself in your children's lives take a lot of time and effort, and that we should respect an individual's free choice to determine what balance works for them. But many are struggling with an opposing ideal that necessarily cannot coexist. For example, by declining the CEO position, she's actively working against the ideal of having an equal number of female CEOs to male CEOs.
The author makes a lot of good points until the last paragraph:
We can’t expect more women to succeed in the startup world until we’re able to talk honestly about how much harder startups are for those who want to spend a lot of time with their kids...We’ll never reach our potential as female founders until we acknowledge that each woman’s attitude towards children is different.
The idea that just "talking honestly" will change the inescapable realities of everything discussed before this paragraph nearly dismantles the point she's trying to make. She acknowledges that "on the whole" women want their time to be consumed more by kids than by career success. She acknowledges that even she herself has turned down a position that would grant her more success and power, but did so for a cause she deemed valuable and does not regret it. The logical conclusion of her argument and personal life experience is that not all women are the same, but that women are more likely to decline more successful positions, not because of discrimination or some systemic barrier, but because they'd rather focus on their family.
But instead of suggesting that we accept that fewer women are going to succeed in the startup world, she's suggesting that "honest talk" about how hard it is will magically increase their success. How would "honest talk" have changed her totally rational and uncompelled decision to decline a CEO position? How would recognizing that the potential of some female founders is limited by their priorities towards children help other, possibly childless, female founders reach their potential?
The last paragraph reads as an apology for what would have been the natural conclusion of her argument, but which she dare not say because suggesting that we accept anything less that full parity of success between men and women in positions of power is forbidden. She should have stuck to the idea that people need to be treated like individuals with different priorities and not to the idea that women need to be treated like a group collective.
Other than that I wish more unification was done on ML algorithms and dynamical systems, just in general. There's too much crossover to ignore.
Check out this work, "Deep relaxation: partial differential equations for optimizing deep neural networks" by Pratik Chaudhari, Adam Oberman, Stanley Osher, Stefano Soatto & Guillaume Carlier.
I think it's a bad example, but illustrates an important point he doesn't make explicit, that sometimes the variable you need to estimate is the DX itself, not just X1 and X2 to produce X2 - X1 = DX. With a sufficiently high amount of variance in your approximations of X1 and X2 their difference will tell you little to nothing about DX.
They banned a sitting president of the United States and yet have allowed for years known despots, genocidal regimes, and terrorists groups to operate with impunity. Bad faith is Twitter's modus operandi until they show otherwise.
People are getting increasingly enraged because there is a palpable culture shift happening in the western world, creating a giant rift in fundamental principles, societal perspectives, and interpretation of current events. When we can't agree on any of these things, the other side seems radical and unhinged when interpreted through our own set of values/principles.
The "enrage machine" is simply a product of this phenomenon. Sure, you can try and reduce the rage by censoring and banning minority views off the platform, but the underlying problem is still there. The angry division is still there, whether you're hearing it on social media, cable news, talk radio, or Thanksgiving dinner.
Banishing certain speech to less accessible realms is, in principle, the same as book burning.
"It's not about eliminating ideas from history," the censor explains, "it's about protecting the simple minds of the masses from ideas they can't be responsible with. The ideas are there in the dusty library for them to ponder in quiet consideration. They may even allowed to discuss in secret, hushed behind closed doors. Possibly even publish them if they can find a publisher willing to attach themselves to such vile print. But they just cannot be allowed to spread in public. The internet is too powerful a tool for spreading the lies and hate of the simple-minded, and the masses are too gullible. In order to protect democracy, we must protect the fragile minds of the voters, lest our enlightened and compassionate ideas are challenged."
I think you're overstating how people generally feel about Zuckerberg's influence. He clearly has the most power to wield, but I think most understand the nuance that he's limited by tons of competing interests.
I think that part of the problem is that he's trying to appease people who will never be satisfied, who want to control speech and eliminate wrongthink. In doing so, he's creating enemies out of people who don't ask for much, just that the banhammer not be wielded so liberally.
You've presented no argument here, just an unwillingness to engage with the problem until correcting course is impossible.
"Won't someone please think of the billionaires?"
Zuckerberg made his money off of building social networks. He's welcome to retire and divest, but otherwise it's his ethical responsibly to guide their development for the public good. He's going to get flak from every side, but it's his job to pick a side and go through with it, whether it's doing nothing, reforming, or even strangling the app.
The dangers of this approach soon became apparent. Facebook now has some three billion users—more than a third of humanity—many of whom get their news from the site. In 2016, Russian agents used the platform in an attempt to sway the U.S. Presidential election. Three years later, a white supremacist in New Zealand live-streamed a mass shooting. Millions of people joined groups and followed pages related to QAnon, a conspiracy theory holding that the world is controlled by a cabal of Satan-worshipping, pedophilic Democrats. The First Amendment has made it difficult for the U.S. government to stop toxic ideas from spreading online.
The idea that these things can be stopped by censoring "toxic ideas" is the false premise that both the New Yorker and Facebook state as their primary justification for expanding their power. They miss the point of the 1st amendment entirely, and hint at it being an inconvenience to progress instead of a cherished human right. They act like the demands of censors to remove speech deserve equal consideration to those who want their speech rights preserved. But the idea that free speech is a human right doesn't mean we stop at first ammendment protections from government censorship, it should be extended in sentiment to any position of power. The idea that either the author or the company is treating the censorship of a world leader supported by over 70 million people as something that should be debated by "high-minded" people suggests that they have already abandoned the concept of free speech as a human right.
Free speech is important in part because, to the contrary, it cools extremism. When elites stamp out speech, they don't eliminate the ideas, they make those individuals more desperate and disillusioned with society. They hamper the abilities of like-minded communities to deescalate radicalism. They remove the ability of radicals to vent, where they can feel like they're making a difference with words instead of violence.
It's deeply disturbing to see that the people living in New York and California, especially those in power, seem to have less of an appreciation for the principle of free speech than those abroad. I think the time where America was a world bastion for free speech is over. Only thing in their way is that pesky 1st amendment.
But the main, core "Reddit experience" as algorithmically produced by r/Popular is a complete dumpster fire. It's the noise of the entire internet, jam packed into a webpage. So many low quality posts and comments that encapsulate all the negatives about "internet culture". There's no room for thoughtful discussion and discourse on the majority of the site, just shitposting and low rung commentary.
Just jumped onto the front page and found most of the posts to be politically charged, including posts from ostensibly apolitical subs like /r/science. Of course there's a market there, but they're certainly not going to grow when they're immediately alienating such a wide potential user base.
Reddit generally works for these small subs, but even those will eventually become cancerous. I don't know if it's something reddit can fix, outside of adult hobby-oriented subs, nearly every community went from something of quality to worthless after a few years.
I think this is a convenient narrative for an abusive pattern of behavior by Google. The company is infamous for having non-existent customer service. It's not a matter of their AI having too many false positives, it's that when there is a false positive you have literally no recourse even if you're a well known business partner.
Are we really going to believe that Google, one of the highest grossing companies in the world, doesn't have the money to provide even basic level customer service? If it were really a matter of not being able to afford it, certainly they could offer it for a fee. No, they're stubbornly refusing to address the issues, relying on this lie, and using their market dominance to avoid having to answer for it.
It's hard to believe that someone advocating for the censorship of opposing arguments has any interest in a serious discussion either.
Nobody cares about the people who are "unsophistocated people who have bought into the frenzy", especially if they get screwed. Further, they shouldn't care about them because anyone who doesn't understand what's going on deserves to get whatever happens to them. Stock trading is high risk, high reward, and that should be clear to everyone.
The problem is that hedge funds constantly benefit from a much lower risk due to market structures designed to stabilize the market. Many of the WSB people are willing to risk a big large loss in order to reveal this flaw of the system. Many of them will not be fine, and, if they're successful, some hedge funds will be bankrupt and all of them will be scared moving forward.
The only reason Gamestop is going up is because of Tulip-mania. It's a classic bubble. Some early people on the hype train reaped eye-popping gains as more jumped on and bid up the price.
A cursory look at /r/WallStreetBets suggests this is statement is mostly wrong. You're suggesting the price is rising due to speculation/hype, but this phenomenon is fundamentally different. The reason for this rally is clearly activistic in nature, an attempt to bankrupt the hedge funds who engage in vulture capitalism.
Some might be greedy, but many aren't trying to make money and greed wasn't the cause of the rally. At the end of all this, there will absolutely be a redistribution of money, but even if the "diamond hands" investors walk home with a loss, they (hopefully) will have strangled a few hedge funds far greedier than the speculators who are taking advantage of this market dynamic.
This is far from a "classic bubble", driven by over exuberance, or a classic squeeze, driven by greed. This is an example of a new phenomenon that will change how hedge funds operate in the future.
Disgusting but not surprising take from the Nasdaq CEO. A few managers with access to billions are able to coordinate their funds because they own them all, but a diverse mob of retail investors couldn't do this up until now because they're all subject to game-theoretic prisoner's dilemma forces.
It's only because so many people are rallying around the ideological worth of the stock that keeps the price from crashing. As the fad dissipates naturally over time, its ideological worth will decline and bring the price down with it. Time is on the side of the hedge funds.
The gig economy exploits the efficiencies of a trusting society masterfully. It would have been unthinkable 20 years ago that we'd let total strangers drive us home from bars and use our houses like hotels. But it turns out that with only a little oversight, we can trust our fellow citizens just as well as an employee of a professional company.
Systems of maintaining trust are very important, but having a trustworthy culture and populace is just as important. In the words of William Easterly, these systems can either be virtuous cycles or vicious cycles. Either trust flourishes or mistrust flourishes and going from one to the other is challenging because of its game-theoretical properties.