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Comment by pixelgeek | Hacker News Reader

I wandered through the rest of the blog. What an amazing asshat. He should be on display somewhere. His rant about US health issues[1] is breathtaking.

What sort of person begins a description of autism like this?

> Autism. I’m not sure this doesn’t fall into the category of “insanity.” It may also have something to do with hormonal disruption. Either way, the fact that some huge fraction of the population who thinks they don’t have to be kind and thoughtful to others because “muh disability.”

I don't want to read the biography he is referring to but I do want to read a psych profile of Scott Locklin. He is the platonic ideal of a cranky, covid-denying asshat.

[1]https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/11/20/us-public-heal...

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Please don't take HN threads on offtopic flamewar tangents. That's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

Edit: And boy was this a doozy. Not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

you should spend sometime in special education classrooms in America. You'd be shocked what is considered a disability. You have to realize once you have a documented disability it opens up things like lifelong disability payments.

Imagine you have an E student, 16 years old. You have major anxiety over the thought of supporting them for the remainder of your life as it seems unlikely they'll ever be able to able to hold a job/achieve financial independence. Disability can be your ticket and parents hire what's know in the industry as advocates who you guessed it advocate for their student to be labeled and receive support for having a disability. I can tell you it's a surefire way to ensure your child receives passing grades w/ out doing anything at all b/c you can relabel the lack of effort as due to their disability.

It's akin to drug addicts learning the in's and out's of the hospital system to receive pain medications. Pain has a lot of wiggle room and ppl will milk it just they like do disabilities.

Even if all of this is true, it doesn't disprove the existence of autism as a legitimate disability or diagnosis.

I just looked it up and the number of kids on disability started to skyrocket in the early 90s. In 1980 there were about 260k kids on disability. By 1990, there was ~300k kids on disability. In 2000 there was nearly 900k.

> Let's imagine that happens. Jahleel starts doing better in school, overcomes some of his disabilities. He doesn't need the disability program anymore. That would seem to be great for everyone, except for one thing: It would threaten his family's livelihood. Jahleel's family primarily survives off the monthly $700 check they get for his disability.

https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

I mean yea - another way to look at is if you're making $700 per month doing nothing you'd need make at least $701 to even consider from a pure economic perspective - realistically more like $1000+ to be motivated enough to go to work.

So many will write that off but then you have the a ha moment of what if I do work under the table so that's what you do - best of both worlds free money and extra cash. Problem obviously is a lot of ppl choose illegal options especially considering how profitable they are.

You should read the rebuttals to the NPR piece which I think is one of the worst reports NPR has ever done. The journalist should have done better research. This was something I would expect out of a conservative think tank and completely missed the boat.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/04/18/177745599/form...

> Imagine you have an E student, 16 years old ... it seems unlikely they'll ever be able to able to hold a job/achieve financial independence.

I'm confused; that sounds like a disability to me. If someone loses the genetic lottery and can't hold a job or achieve financial independence then that does seem like a pretty good use of disability funds. What is the alternative?

Maybe I misunderstood.

I think, in this example, the student isn't medically disabled, but is just a lazy nogoodnik who hangs out on YCombinator all day instead of studying.

You have no idea what you are talking about and frankly your understanding of special education and people with disabilities is obscene.

Schools aren't necessarily even the best place to get that help and that's a big problem despite the provisions of the IDEA or your local state laws and programs.

aside from the "COVID denying", he's also refreshingly unwilling to bow to the trend towards dilution of language in favor of obfuscation of meaning. Direct and entertaining rants have their place and he's good at them.

What is it about the scientific method and changing your advice based on new evidence is so difficult for some people to understand?

> The same dipshits who now think you should wear a mask while outside by yourself insisted that they were ineffective, because they knew the mask factories had long since been outsourced to China, and they wanted those masks for hospital worker to have while doing tiktoc videos. Now we have to wear them forever, because muh consensus or something.

Wow

Because there was no new evidence, the only thing that changed were the incentives. The evidence was always there and most of the rest of the world that didn't suffer from mask shortages recommended wearing masks and made them readily available for their residents. The countries that were not prepared for this decided it was best to lie and spread misinformation that masks don't work, or people are too stupid to put a mask on properly, or that there's nothing to be concerned about in the hopes that COVID would not be a long term global lockdown type of pandemic.

Whatever disagreement you might have about the author of this website, don't give a pass to the people who were at the helm during this pandemic. They failed the public along numerous basic metrics and that doesn't change simply because this author may or may not be an asshole.

> Because there was no new evidence...

But there was. The WHO recommendations, which I assume is what he is referring to, were based initially on data that suggested an non-aerosol transmission and then evidence was produced that lead to the theory of aerosol transmission.

One can certainly criticize the WHO and other health organizations for moving too slowly but the issue I am referring to isn't that.

There is a general tendency on the right to point to changing advice as some sort of proof of a conspiracy or idiocy on the part of the health officials. I see it all the time (as a daily lark I read Gab) and it points to an obvious lack of understanding on the part of a large part of the population (deliberate or not) about how science works on a fairly fundamental level.

Aerosol transmission is not the only reason to wear a mask and in fact most masks that people wear including surgical masks do not provide great protection against aerosol transmission, you need an N95 mask for that.

It was always known, even prior to COVID and by the WHO (who posted as much on their website), that coronaviruses spread via respiratory droplets and that's what most masks are effective at protecting against.

Because coronaviruses spread through droplets, there was concern that touch would be a significant vector of transmission. Droplets will land somewhere; then what?

If the virus could persist viably on surfaces, handling a soiled mask properly would be absolutely critical to getting any benefit from it, and handling it improperly would be risky. People wiped down their groceries for the same reason.

With the benefit of real data, we now know that touch is a negligible vector. The novel coronavirus does not persist viably for long on any surface. So masks are an excellent trade off.

> If the virus could persist viably on surfaces, handling a soiled mask properly would be absolutely critical to getting any benefit from it, and handling it improperly would be risky.

That's not a reason to tell people that masks don't work. It's a reason to tell people that masks do work, provided you take precautions A, B, and C. And you should also say why those precautions are necessary--because of the assumed risk of touch transmission--so people can apply common sense, since no amount of advice from a central authority can possibly cover all individual cases.

It's not just changing advice. It's refusal to acknowledge the false certainty with which the original advice was given, and that undermines any reason to trust the certainty with which current advice is being given.

If the WHO had said in the early days 'We're 55% certain masks do more harm than good' and then said 'we've looked at more data and are now 60% certain masks do more good than harm', I doubt many of us would be clowning them to the degree we are. It's the fact they spoke as if they had 100% certainty in one direction and then as if they had 100% certainty in the other that gives the impression these people don't know what they're doing.

> They failed the public along numerous basic metrics and that doesn't change simply because this author may or may not be an asshole.

Asshat. I think he has far too much understanding of his basic character flaws and limitations to be an asshole. Its what makes his commentary especially wonderful. He isn't some ignorant asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else. He seems to know how smart he is and what his failings are but it doesn't stop him.

His frequent use of 'muh' speaks to a very elitist and classist view of modern society that has to come from, I assume, some sort of rural or less sophisticated upbringing of his.

Unlike hatebags who write for Breitbart or Infowars this guy is a wonderful combination of contradictions, insight and sheer bile.

Its f*$king breathtaking.

Calling people names as a form of argumentation is very rarely wonderful.

You don't need new evidence to come to a new understanding of policy measures.

We were worried about supply chains, and then we weren't.

In a supply chain constraint, Doctors get masks, because they need them.

Beyond that, the general population for whom masks are marginally useful, can have them.

Because 'masks are a policy' then we have to wear them in certain environments with strict oversight, I think this has led some people to believe that they are some kind if 'important tool' when of course they are not, they're just a small measure, but an important one in the aggregate.

The author is perfectly within his rights to be curmudgeon, but he's not very reasonable in his argumentation, he's more or less venting and name calling, which is unfortunately the reality of most of the anti-vaxx populism: there are very few well orchestrated skeptic arguments.

> your advice based on new evidence is

Because based on that old evidence that seemed so sure at a certain moment in time the lives of hundreds of millions of people were negatively affected (lockdowns, job losses etc), so one could forgive a part of those people for not giving a damn about the evidence subsequently changing and we being closer to the truth, in a scientific way.

Almost no-one cares about science, even the majority of people who materially support science by giving scientists money don't care about science (most of them have ulterior motives, like the ability to militarily be superior relative to their foes based on said science, or the ability to gain even more money compared to what they put in etc), long story short almost nobody really cares about science in the way that (some) scientists do, i.e. getting us closer to the "truth" (whatever that "truth" is).

In that respect, telling those hundreds of millions of people something like "but, you see, we were doing science when we were negatively affecting your lives based on evidence that proved out to be further to the truth compared to the evidence that we have now" means, in the best case scenario, that you're taunting them, in the worst case, that you're taking those millions of people for utter fools that should just sit like ducks in the way of science.

The mask advice didn't change because of any new evidence. It changed because the public health authorities stopped being worried about health care providers not having enough PPE. The real problem was that in the first place, instead of lying and saying masks did not work (which they knew was false at the time), they should have said "Yes, masks work, but the highest risk people are health care workers so we are using the government's eminent domain power to commandeer supplies of PPE until we know all health care workers have enough, so until that happens it will be very difficult for private individuals to obtain masks."

For instance:

>If you’re capable of writing a makefile, you’re capable of learning how to behave in public in a way that doesn’t make people want to fling you from the roof.

Anything that can be gamed will be gamed. It's a hard problem.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/a-complex-problem-riches...

> High-fee private schools are claiming the most HSC disability provisions despite the independent sector having the fewest students with special needs, as new data shows claims increased by a third in the last four years

HSC is the Higher School Certificate, the highest secondary school examination in this state.

It might be a hard problem, but I think we can all agree the solution is not to declare that autism is fake and anyone claiming to be autistic is just an asshole.

Autism is actually hard to fake and requires a diagnosis.

Does that have anything to do with this blog post in particular? I would wager your comment is off topic

That depends on whether the original post was about the book review or about him :-)

I think you are correct though that I am wildly off-topic but when one discovers something like this you really need to point it out.

Bookmarked for review later. Can’t wait to get all steamed up about something some guy said.

I use twitter for that.

We need a new acronym for this. Candidates:

AaaS: anger as a service

PoaaS: pissed-off as a service

We could try other emotions, but this seems to be the biggest addressable market.

Another suggestion:

CaaS: Cortisol as a service

I thought we already had a word: doomscrolling

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

Following a link from his "Stuff I like" page I also found this excellent blog-post [1] about the modern-day corporate antitrust industry, the author reminds me of Christopher Lasch and his writings on (good) populism that can still save our (Western world) democratic system (or the most important principles supporting it). For example I didn't know this fact:

> In 1931, Jackson, the last Supreme Court not to graduate from law school

which I found pretty interesting, especially as he was pretty instrumental in implementing some important New Deal stuff (I'm not and American and as such many of those facts were knew to me):

> Jackson, a country lawyer from upstate New York, became one of the central lawyers in the New Deal, resurrecting the Antitrust Division in 1937 and a few years later sitting on the Supreme Court

[1] https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-big-law-cartel-how-an...

Reminder of the HN Guidelines [1]:

"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I am quite serious in my praise for this blog. It is breathtaking. I disagree with almost everything he says but I am still reading it.

This is a direct quote from the blog:

"The main upside to all this for me anyway is middle aged to old men like me have giant cocks compared to 20-somethings because we weren’t exposed to this shit in the womb. Of course most of the 20-something year old American women are obese and mentally ill anyway, so it’s a wash."

How do you appropriately comment on something like this? Other than to point out that this is not someone worth having a conversation with? And yet this blog hits the front page,and therefore requires engagement of some sort. Pretending, against all evidence, that you are engaged in a good faith, curiosity driven conversation when faced with stuff like this does not seem like an appropriate, rational strategy to me.

I'm a 20-something woman and I'm not offended by that. He's using hyperbole for effect, obviously. Don't take everything you read personally; very rarely is it intended as such.

> And yet this blog hits the front page,and therefore requires engagement of some sort.

It really doesn't. If someone's writing bothers you, just move on with your life. I promise that railing against this dude will not stop him from blogging.

I'm not sure this much common sense is appropriate for the Internet; thank you for trying to inject some much needed perspective. I don't know how people like the OP and many others in this thread have the energy to be constantly offended and wound up over so many things utterly out of their control. Nor how anyone that has to live with them can put up with it too.

I was not complaining about the snippet being offensive. I was saying that it's not based in an honest attempt at rational discourse.

It's performative not informative. It's hyperbole written to evoke a reaction rather than to illuminate. So the HN guidelines for keeping things within the bounds of rational discourse are useless when engaging with it. Not engaging is of course an option, but yet, here we are. I replied to something, your replied to me. And I do feel that just letting irrational things stand when they already have gained some prominence is risky as well (c.f. covid vaccine).

Finally, yes I do find it offensive, and that does not hinge on it offending you. But it's also obviously irrelevant whether I find it offensive. There are plenty of people who take offence at gay marriage, or women driving, or blue hair. I'd rather have/debate general norms of civility than outsource the decision making on what's inappropriate or not to self appointed spokesperson of affected groups.

I believe the author was banned from HN a while back.

I find his bluntness funny and somewhat admirable, where I disagree with him and not. Might be a regional thing, we're both New Englanders.

Is calling Mississippi "Amerikwaanza" a New England thing?

No but not getting offended by it or laughing at the absurdity of it might be.

Politeness > accuracy & honestly is a very common preference, but not mine.

You can be honest and accurate without being needlessly nasty/mocking as the quote seems to be

Your sentiment is a really common and insidious one that way too many people use to feel smug and "rational" about being mean

People are allowed to be blunt and even curmudgeon, there's nothing wrong with that, it's just one of the many dispositions we can assume. That's diversity. This is a personal blog and it's totally reasonable the he takes this posture, it's slightly refreshing. If this were a public intellectual being taken seriously, or if he had a huge audience, then there would be more scrutiny, but otherwise he's just a guy with an odd way of communicating with a small soap-box on a small corner. It's fine.

> That's diversity.

Careful - you'll cause some heads to explode before they can retreat to their safe spaces...

Based.

> " Politeness > accuracy & honestly "

These concept are pretty much orthogonal. While I don't disagree that insistence on politeness can get in the way of good discourse, it is an all-to-common mistake to read or promote lack of politeness as a signal of honesty and accuracy - which manifestly isn't the case.

It's also often done in a lazy way. Which doesn't imply the thinking is also lazy, but there is a good correlation.

In practice they are far from orthogonal.

That doesn't match my experience at all, and I suspect it isn't unusual.

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