The trouble with saying you don't want children | Hacker News Reader

The trouble with saying you don't want children

bbc.com

Why does anyone care if someone else doesn't want kids? I mean, I have kids but I couldn't give a toss if others don't want to procreate. Its not like the species is at risk.

I can think of a few reasons, mostly that it implies[] criticism the same way most abstinence does. But you should check out the reaction to the previous BBC coverage in my other comment to get an idea of other reasons.

[] is perceived as implying, i guess

Because society as a whole spent resources on you to educate you and turn you into productive member of the society.

Its your responsibility to repay that debt by reproducing.

This is one of the strange explanations I usually get.

That's actually not a strange argument. It's semantically identical to the widely-held belief that the benefits of order, safety, and education granted by the government morally obligates one to pay taxes.

One could argue that the people making 'that' argument should probably not be reproducing ;-) !

According to an older family member, me and my girlfriend's decision not to ever have children was "destroying the white race" and was going to result in "muslims taking over".

There's really nothing more wonderful than ignorance backed by fear. or fear backed by ignorance.

There are a few men out there who see women as nothing more than sex objects and baby factories. For a woman to openly reject that role challenges their male chauvinism. They don't actually care that she reproduces, but they don't want her to influence other women to think they don't have to settle for the role they've been assigned. That's why one threatened her with laryngectomy, which obviously has no connection to reproduction.

also, some people just like to try and be as hurtful as possible, regardless. especially on the internet.

I've certainly been guilty of lashing out at someone with whatever I felt might cut deepest. being impotent to resolve your (technically unjustified) rage can lead a person down a dark path.

HN comments on the previous story:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10609524

This is why I don't talk about this decision, although I admit that's not a great solution.

I wish there was some way that Twitter et al could automatically filter hate messages. Some sort of clever language processing system that can detect tone?

It's almost a worst-case scenario for current AI, though. It wants volume of text for confidence, and Twitter guarantees the nonexistence of that.

It doesn't have to be a large text, but yes, this is currently under heavy research.

If you added the equivalent of a spam button ("I don't like this"), took the user's history into account, and relations with other users, would there be a way to pre-flag posts much like a spam detector?

Although I suppose even if it were an interesting and feasible AI project, and even if it were useful to some users, it's probably something Twitter just wouldn't want to get into. They would be setting themselves up for endless political flak when it did or didn't work correctly.

Problem with that approach is that a lot of the worst trolling comes from one-time accounts.

I think twitter probably needs to do something about this, however. Or soon (if it isn't already) it'll become as big a cesspit as reddit, and soon after that be replaced by the next new and clean service.

In that scenario, it should be doable from Twitter not to have new accounts to have the ability to @ at some other account for the first 24 hours after creation or something and maybe after 24 hours to be able to @ at someone the new account must have at least 5 follower which in turn have at least 5 followers or something. Maybe not full-proof but it will weed out quite a bit of new accounts purely created for trolling.

I'm sure Twitter themselves should be able to come up with a more effective method but it seems they simply don't want to...

> It wants volume of text for confidence, and Twitter guarantees the nonexistence of that.

Why would it need volumes of text, though? People are very good at detecting tone even in a short phrase, so the information is there. And really, even if at first it can only handle the most egregious cases, and slowly gets better at more borderline cases, that would still be a huge win—since the more extreme the example, the more it matters.

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