Gen Zers Say Silicon Valley Is Elitist/Exclusive. Can They Build a New System? | Hacker News Reader

Gen Zers Say Silicon Valley Is Elitist/Exclusive. Can They Build a New System?

nytimes.com

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> “Gen Z Mafia is a very inclusive community,” Mr. Tran said

> Anyone over the age of 24 is placed into a group called Daddy Gang and limited to only a few channels.

I support these kids 100% but this gave me a good chuckle.

Every generation needs to throw out the old system and then rebuild the same thing with a new name.

>Snigdha Roy, 16, is attempting to use machine learning to create an A.I. therapist.

I'm all for young people getting into hacking, but this seems at best useless, at worst harmful.

Right, the whole point of therapy is that you're talking to someone that genuinely cares about you who is not a robot.

(I say that as someone who has personally struggled with mental health and also has affected family members.)

I would almost say the opposite: your therapist is not required to care about you the way friends and family do, and their status of detachment is often an asset. You can unload without worrying about affecting how they feel about you, and you can trust their advice as being impartial.

I think it's very possible that a virtual therapist could be helpful, but it could also be harmful. In the same way that fiction affects our real emotions despite our knowledge that it isn't real, a virtual counselor that projects sympathy could give someone a real feeling of relief. The trouble comes from the nature of machine learning: unpredictability. What if your virtual therapist has a bug one day and starts telling you to kill yourself?

It’s been the classic chat bot application since Eliza. I have no doubt one day there will be one good enough to begin to help people.

You'd think that would result in an unbearable level of cognitive dissonance, but it doesn't because they changed the meaning of the word "inclusive".

In what way have they changed the definition of the word inclusive?

I've seen this explicitly espoused on many occasions by many people that only the inclusion of certain groups that are marginalized is meaningful for inclusivity and that explicitly excluding groups not perceived to be marginalized is not damaging to inclusivity and the final determination on this is based on the subjective opinion of whoever is talking meaning that many people who agree on the premise disagree on what meaningful inclusion means at the implementation level.

They all seem to agree that the consequences to people who don't agree with their vision should be severe.

This would certainly not conform to most previous definitions of inclusivity.

I get the vibe from this article and the photos that this is another cool kids club, akin to something from their high school days. The signalling language and posturing is too obvious.

Nothing in here is about inclusivity. It's a power trip and a social status game on the internet.

OMG! I try not to put much stock in what Taylor Lorenz writes. She's a reporter for the STYLE section and she seems to spend plenty of time obsessing about what so and so said on some TikTok drop.

It's well and good to dream about being unelitist, but the all of the consumers want the best possible product. Since they're going to choose the best, this choosiness flows downhill to the companies which must reward the best developers.

If Taylor and her TikTok gang want to be total okay with average products, well, we can get by with average coders.

Another project, called Cloakview.ai, is an effort to build technology to outsmart Clearview AI’s facial recognition system

Long Tran, 17, built a tool to help protect people from harassment on Twitter

I mean this at least gives me some hope that there's awareness within GenZ about the negative dynamics of social media.

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