Brain_Thief

In your fervor to dismiss the human experience it appears that you have played a bit loose with the logical formation of your argument and thereby missed an important point. Your premise is that the veracity of previously-achieved scientific results holds independent of human opinion or emotion. You then use this basis to conclude that "...feelings are irrelevant to both the scientific process and the results found from using it." But here you are 1) confusing the product of the scientific process (a distinctly human endeavor with obvious limitations) with the actual nature of reality that said process is attempting to probe, and 2) conflating the achieved results of the process with the process itself. In fact, nearly every novel scientific result achieved is the product of a human mind's creative efforts (and sometimes fortunate accidents). The enthusiasm, open-mindedness, and feelings of a scientist absolutely impact his or her line of thought and level of creativity and therefore directly influence the set of scientific results that are generated by the scientific process. Our ability to probe reality is correlated with our ability to imagine and intuit relationships (and to construct experiments that may illuminate them); our imagination and intuition are correlated with our current and past emotional states. Ergo, human feelings directly impact the output of the scientific process and our understanding of the natural laws underpinning reality.

You may consider the case of pure mathematics, where intensely creative and open-minded individuals manipulate exotic structures atop towering ladders of abstraction; such exploration is the source of much of our most powerful technology and insights into reality. If you listen to explanations of the working methods employed by mathematicians many of them will claim that among the tools they rely upon most heavily are intuition and "feeling".

Once you move beyond the unfortunate anti-human perspective of what I'll half-jokingly call "extreme scientific materialism" and accept the fundamental role of the human experience in the unfolding of the cosmos you might come to see that a mind bent on pure rationality (to the exclusion of all else) is like a beautiful, fueled-up airplane idling on the runway with no pilot in it.

I think you may have blown past my point a bit in the rush to label what is and is Not Science (:P). Generally speaking, scientists and engineers today do not seem to be indifferent to the concept of teleology at all - in fact, many of them seem to have reached very strong (and quite hostile) conclusions about the topic with shockingly little basis. This lack of open-mindedness regarding the concept is precisely the problem I am attempting to point out. The perspective is so pervasive among the engineering classes in particular that I have routinely heard very well-educated people espouse incredulity at the merest notion of a natural telos (when they're not openly hostile to the concept, that is); from what I can tell the concept does not occur to them even as a remote possibility. My own opinion is that this violates the spirit of scientific thought and should be addressed.

I would argue the opposite, to an extent. The denial of a natural teleology (i.e., denying that a purpose, goal, or reason underlies the universe and Nature) was a useful conceptual bridge when scientific materialism was founded and growing - it allowed the burden of highly-politicized organized religion to be shrugged off and for many previously-untouchable classes of questions to be explored in new (read: empirical) ways. However, the utter rejection of a telos during that transition period (by the engineering class in particular) was, I believe, too thorough; to this day, the default position of many working scientists and engineers is that Nature has no purpose, goal, or reason whatsoever. That seems a very extreme and austere perspective for an element of Nature (i.e., a being capable of forming your comment or my response) to subscribe to. In my own opinion, it is dangerously close to a form a nihilism and feels very much like a cognitive blind spot. It also fails to comport with the espoused perspectives of many of the people we would think of as great scientific thinkers - including those who gave us the constructs of formal logic that underpin our current technological age.

I encourage you to look twice at your question - I believe that, under close scrutiny, you will see that it contains its own answer.

No one is advocating for prohibiting people from peacefully expressing their genuinely-held political beliefs in ways that do not infringe on the rights of others in public (unless you want to count the multitudes of minority voters who are regularly removed from voting rolls by GOP lawmakers or subjected to onerous identification requirements and other intimidation tactics...). If a person's "genuinely-held political beliefs" involve racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., and if said person "genuinely believes" that the appropriate way to exert their opinion upon society is to discriminate against the people they hate or even inflict violence upon them, then they are crossing a line established by our societal norms and threatening the stability of society itself.

If a person's genuinely held political beliefs lead them to enact discrimination or violence upon others then they have placed themselves outside of society and are by definition not valid input sources for determining societal norms and laws.

Are you aware of anyone in this thread, or of any major national movement, advocating for a tolerance-based right to perform sexual acts in public in front of children? Looking past the strange and extreme strawman you've propped up, the reasons for tolerance in society are multitudinous. It prevents misunderstanding, fear, and hatred from festering and potentially giving rise to violence.

As a simple thought experiment ask yourself the following question. How many individuals hailing from tolerant communities or organizations have you seen commit mass shootings? Contrast that to the number of individuals committing public violence who hold intolerance as a virtue. Public violence is a serious negative for everyone and its prevention should be reason enough to support tolerance as a basic tenet of societal health. The fact of the matter, no matter who might dislike it, is that modern societies are, for the most part, very diverse. Without tolerance for differences violence is a forgone conclusion in the modern world.

I don't know if this is the kind of answer you were looking for, but Elizabeth Warren was very successful in her efforts to get the CFPB off the ground, much to the displeasure of the financial sector: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Financial_Protection_.... It's true that under the Trump administration the bureau's behavior is being...modified...but it was quite a success when running as originally intended by Warren.

Furthermore, both Warren and Bernie Sanders seem to have genuine convictions w.r.t. climate change, health care, social inequality, etc. Whether or not their particular points of view are desirable is open for debate, but their multi-decade commitments to these issues are beyond question. They seem to have non-trivial support in the electorate as well - I encourage you to check them out, especially if you're feeling cynical or anxious about the future.

This is correct and one of the best high-level descriptions I've read recently of why American-style capitalism's ultimate conclusion is pernicious social rot.

Thank you for linking to this.

This is fantastic - thanks for sharing!

And control over users and their behavior.

The simple and honest answer to your question is greed. The fact is that the USA has more than enough money to support a healthy and well-educated population through government-funded healthcare and education (including what you asked about - higher education), but the capture of significant portions of our government by corporate interests has successfully stopped that kind of progress from occurring so that an ever-shrinking number of people can become unfathomably wealthy. This has been accomplished primarily through the use of emotion-based propaganda over a series of decades and has been incredibly effective at poisoning the national discourse.

Not OP but I would pay $5-10 per month without blinking an eye.

It seems obvious to me that there is a burning need for tech unionization and the reason has little to do with individual compensation or job security (although those are very important ancillary issues that deserve to be addressed and discussed as well). The real purpose that unionization could potentially serve is as a check against what people like Stallman and Bruce Schneier would perhaps call the mass exploitation associated with extreme surveillance capitalism. There are risks associated with unionization, of course, but collective bargaining offers one of the only proven mechanisms for average workers to impact the behavior of their employers. In the past, collective action was taken primarily as a means to improve the work conditions and compensation of average employees; as you point out, work conditions are generally very good for tech workers already, and so the improvement of working conditions isn't such an issue (although there is a good argument for organization as a means to preserve good conditions). I argue that in the case of tech employees, many of whom are involved in the development of systems that carry the potential for horrific misuse against vulnerable populations in the name of corporate profits, unionization is actually a moral imperative. Such unionization would represent a form of evolution in the history of collective action and employee organization, since it would be (at least in part) about challenging large-scale trends that run counter to the ideals of privacy, human rights, and equal society - things that can't be meaningfully impacted by individuals switching jobs. For instance, consider the case of challenging the pervasive use of privacy-violating adtech in products, or partnerships between corporations and authoritarian governments.

As tech workers, we are uniquely positioned within society: we have privileged knowledge of how the most powerful systems and products of the age function and we are incredibly close to the control surfaces of the major pillars of the economy. We are in demand, paid well, and generally well-educated. We have the ability to make a difference in the world in ways that very few people do. This is why organization is important.

I've read your comment several times and am having trouble understanding your underlying point - could you elaborate?

I agree with the general spirit of what you're stating, but the fact of the matter is that the Chinese government has proven conclusively that its vision of the future is not one that incorporates a free flow of information or the preservation of individual rights; the Chinese government as an entity is not a viable partner in the task of building the society of free information you envision - it is an obstacle standing in the way. Unfortunately, the Chinese government has chosen to use its economic prosperity to brutally subjugate ethnic minorities and construct an authoritarian nightmare that fully realizes Orwell's visions of state rule [1].

Every bit of available data indicates that the Chinese government would censor you and everyone you know if it had the ability to do so; the ruling party have demonstrated their willingness to violently destroy any person, group, or ideology that they disapprove of. Any other assessment of the situation is, at best, naive to the point of being dangerous. The twentieth century (not to mention the past ten years) has taught us that democracy is a fragile thing; it is extremely important that western citizens be vigilant and open-eyed when assessing who to deal with in educational, political, and business theaters.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/04/world/asia/xi...

While I understand your point, I strongly disagree with the implication that individual actions are meaningless. People should not accept a "death by a thousand cuts" behavioral paradigm when it comes to moral decisions in the realm of consumption. Voting is a part of the situation, but voting is an individual choice just like purchasing decisions.

1) The societies of the world are composed of individuals. Individual actions, if appropriately cultivated and communicated, may become group actions. Individual actions absolutely matter.

2) At no point did I claim to be against trade.

I say this kind of thing a lot, but I feel compelled to repeat myself. It seems like every week brings more evidence of oppressive governments edging ever closer toward a full-on 1984 nightmare scenario.

At this point the decision tree facing privacy activists, those concerned with human rights, and those who support the expansion of western moral aspirations is unambiguous.

Are you uncomfortable with China's aggressive censorship, human rights abuses, and surveillance? Stop buying shit from them. Stop using their software. Nine times out of ten you don't need it. Don't support corporations that enhance the efficiency of the Chinese government's oppression in the name of profits. Don't accept the idea that it's okay for giant corporations to bend to whatever demands (however ominous) an authoritarian government hands to them in the name of profit.

Exceptions arise, and no one's behavior is perfect. But the 1/10 case where you absolutely MUST use a certain surveillance app or buy a certain widget made by slaves in another country is not an excuse for throwing your hands up and capitulating in the other nine cases you encounter every day. Many of us on HN have the option to not support oppressive systems - I implore you to exercise that option so that others may gain the ability to choose as well.

It seems like every week brings an ever-quickening deluge of this kind of information, whether about some surveillance corporation lying to / exploiting its users or an oppressive government edging ever closer toward a full-on 1984 nightmare scenario (some are just about there).

At this point the decision tree facing privacy activists, those concerned with human rights, and those who support the expansion of western moral aspirations is unambiguous.

Do you dislike Google fucking up the internet and assisting with totalitarian censorship regimes? Stop using their services. Stop letting them pay you to improve their services. If you're good enough to work at Google, you're uniquely positioned to get another high-paying job somewhere else. Same with the other big offenders.

Do you dislike FaceBook's scummy behavior on everything from censorship, to digital stalking of non-users, to psychological experimentation with unwitting human subjects? Stop adding fuel to the fire. Quit. Today. Now.

Are you uncomfortable with China's aggressive censorship, human rights abuses, and surveillance? Stop buying shit from them. Stop using their software. Nine times out of ten you don't need it.

Exceptions arise, and no one's behavior is perfect. But the 1/10 case where you absolutely MUST use a certain surveillance app or buy a certain widget made by slaves in another country is not an excuse for throwing your hands up and capitulating in the other nine cases you encounter every day.

It's important to keep in mind that FaceBook is an enterprise founded by an individual who appears to have many of the traits of sociopathy, and that an overwhelming amount of shady, anti-privacy, socially-destructive, and downright exploitative behavior has been credibly attributed to them over the years. The second sentence of TFA claims that the HUD's opinion of FaceBook is that the company "...enables and encourages discrimination based on things like race and religion, as well as sex, by restricting who can see housing-related ads on its platforms and across the Internet." This should come as no surprise from a company with the kind of track record that FaceBook has; the company's founding purpose was, after all, to judge people based on superficial traits.

Rot of this kind, when located in the head of an organization or creature, does not go away easily. It has been obvious for some time now that the culture in the leadership echelons of FaceBook is deeply amoral and disinterested in societal health. Although it's a very touchy subject (especially around tech sites), I think there's a strong justification to start really questioning whether or not a person who is interested in the health of society can continue working for FaceBook.

This type of behavior is exactly why I block all online ads, always. The fact that large companies like Google and Facebook (and many others) not only go out of their way to deceive their users about what they actually do with their data, but actually actively lobby relevant governments to prevent any kind of privacy protections from being enacted, is all the evidence I need to understand that their operations are fundamentally at odds with the concept of personal privacy and freedom.

There is an argument that is often made when I (or others) advocate for ad blocking, and it always involves the evocation of "the little guy" content creator / website owner who gets shafted when adblockers are used. The problem with this argument, and the reason that I feel fully justified - even obligated - to blanket block all ads, is that it is essential to exert SOME kind of pressure against the large surveillance companies. They clearly don't care about their user's preferences, so the next way to fight this trend is to erode, to the greatest extent possible, the economics of their operations.

Facebook and the rest of the surveillance corporations can create shadow profiles on me from my digital crumbs if they want. At the end of the day I cannot stop them from doing that - and that's why I will never view, click on, or interact with any online ad under any circumstances, to ensure that they don't reap any significant economic reward from stalking me. When / if a semblance of sanity returns to online advertising and the personal privacy rights of users are respected by default, I will change my behavior accordingly so that content creators are supported. In the mean time I directly donate where possible.

On a side note, I notice an obliquely similar situation with Comcast and other big, anti-consumer tech companies that cannot avoid having large customer-facing communications divisions. The people they have manning their phone systems are inevitably exhausted, desperate-sounding, and clearly under some sort of sales quota. Sometimes I almost think that Comcast intentionally makes the lives of their call center employees as miserable as possible so that customers feel guilty dealing with them on the phone and have a lower probability of complaining about the company - after all, why beat up the peon in the cubicle farm about working for a company they already hate? It's almost as if these big companies have decided to use regular people's lives as human shields to hide their inhumanity behind.

My bizarre experience attempting and failing to get Apple to refund erroneous charges to my credit card has reinforced my perspective that companies of this scale cannot be trusted with operations outside of their core competencies, and that any financial product offerings from non-finance companies must be avoided like the plague (not to say that I'm any fan of fintech...). I cannot imagine how Apple's foray into financial products / business can result in anything other than the incorporation of all of the destructive incentives and bad behaviors that come along with big banks as the profits stack up over time. God help anyone who needs customer support from a giant tech company when some unclear policy document or bug leads to a financially-ruinous mistake being made on either end of the relationship. Prediction: the little people will be crushed and have no recourse, just like they are when Google closes their email accounts without warning.

In my case, Apple were attempting to charge me a monthly fee for an app that I installed last year before I ditched my iPhone. After using (and paying for) the app for a month, I realized I didn't like it and declined having a monthly subscription moving forward. After terminating my account with the app and uninstalling it Apple continued to charge me for it for months afterward. Repeated escalations in Apple's customer service labyrinth resulted in a massive amount of wasted time and, ultimately, an admission on their part that they didn't have a clear answer for what was happening or what I did wrong (one customer support person even told me that the same thing had happened to him once upon a time). Despite that, the relevant policy document they referred me to strictly prohibited me from being refunded for the erroneous charges. In the end, the only thing that saved me was being able to turn to my credit card company and flagging the months of charges as fraudulent. In this case I got all of my money back, but the experience really makes me wary of the idea of a big tech company being involved in my finances.

I can't claim to know the OP's perspective w.r.t. why he / she doesn't like programming on Windows, but as an early (and current) user of the WSL I can say that I too dislike the overall experience, mostly due to how it colors my experience programming and using the system. Windows has an intensely corporate feeling to me that I can't seem to shake; it's obvious to me when I'm using it that I don't in any sense "own" my system, and that my behavior is being monitored and recorded on some level. The next update will inevitably bring some setting reversion to a pro-tracking default, and the lack of visual and system-level customization options takes a lot of the joy out of system setup, management, and exploration for me. Windows is, and always has been, a corporate productivity environment at its core, and it's very good in that role, but it feels awfully stiff and suffocating as a dev environment to me. Minor technical frictions like moving data and files between Windows land and my WSL home directory add just enough unnecessary overhead to my workflow that I find myself constantly questioning what actual value the entire thing provides. I suppose for people who are chained to specific Microsoft productivity software it's a good option, but in the absence of such a requirement I don't really understand the appeal.

To be fair, the environment is nice, and the WSL is certainly an impressive technical accomplishment (no question there!), but it doesn't have the feeling of a Linux to me. The freedom, control, and transparency just aren't there.

IMHO, anyone who claims to care about privacy should seriously consider throwing down the ~$10 a month (I forget exactly how much it costs) to have a paid PM account. The company isn't perfect, but it's a far sight better than the majority of other providers out there. Furthermore, by paying for your account you are not only directly supporting a service that aspires to provide communications privacy, you're also helping to subsidize said service for those users who may not be able to afford a paid account (particularly important in countries where economic and governmental problems overlap).

I pay for my PM account and have had nothing but good experiences with the company and service so far (including with the VPN and with the mobile app before I ditched my iPhone). It took me years to migrate off of Gmail but since I finally managed to do it I've never looked back. Give it a shot.

I may be misinterpreting your question, but it seems as though you're equating the average worker's retirement fund investments to what the GP was most likely referring to: large investors who compose what we commonly refer to as the "ownership class" and who are most certainly engaged in a perverse form of wealth hording at the cost of any apparent negative externalities. The two classes of investor are not remotely similar and cannot be judged by the same standards. It would be best if all investors (present company included) insisted on environmentally and socially ethical standards as a precondition for investment, but what does that have to do with the observation that such focus seems particularly critical for the largest players to adopt ASAP?

You've made some undeniably good points, and it is true that the current state of our country is in many ways lamentable, but a fair analysis of our current condition reveals that the negative news is only half the story; it is important to keep in mind the dualistic nature of our situation, both for ourselves as individuals, and for the greater society we are components of.

Alongside all of the tragedies you mentioned, an entire host of miracles have occurred as well. Technological advances in healthcare show no sign of slowing, market forces (and public pressure) are slowly but surely moving us toward a future powered by green energy, US-based companies are now sending missions to the ISS and mass-producing electric vehicles, and the USA still has the greatest institutions of higher learning in the world. On a minor technical note that may seem insignificant but is near and dear to my own heart: it's 2019 and there are now more flavors of *Nix (and users of the same) than ever before - free software is still going strong despite the tech behemoths' anti-choice tendencies. On the front page of HN right now is a story about the mass exodus of users from FaceBook (an indicator that the public is waking up to the damaging effects of emotionally-predatory social media).

In the political sphere, too, there are signs of significant improvement. The 2018 midterm elections revealed a public who is more informed about and interested in governmental oversight than at any point in the past decade at least, more attention than ever is being paid to white-collar corruption and chicanery, the best efforts of our unindicted co-conspirator in-chief (and his merry band of sycophants) haven't succeeded in quashing the myriad investigations into his (and his family's) business and political activities, and the most popular politician in the country (according to some recent polls) is an avowed anti-corruption advocate who supports universal healthcare, a resolution of wealth inequality, and an end to endless overseas warfare. On your drug points: every major contender for the Democratic presidential nominee (that I'm aware of) favors a rebalancing of federal drug enforcement priorities to bring sanity to the discussion (funding for research into the use of psychedelic drugs for therapy & the decriminalization of marijuana). On the gun front: there has never been more public support for (slightly) more sane gun restrictions than there are now.

There are many places we need to improve, but there is much to be grateful for, optimistic about, and proud of as well. The reason I say this is not in an attempt to refute or mitigate your points, but to emphasize the need to periodically remove oneself from the negative data streams and pay attention to the good evidence as well.

Although I'm detecting a significant amount of hostility and condescension in your response, I'm going to ask you to elaborate on your position a bit more since I don't really understand what it is that you're trying to say. What do historical cycles of industrialization have to do with the observation that modern, information-rich consumers appear to have a growing moral imperative to prioritize human rights and positive environmental management when deciding how to allocate their discretionary resources (time / money)?

Or, as informed consumers, we can identify the obvious fact that, outside certain exceptional industries, corporations have no inherent interest in improving the standards of living of their workers and accept that we have a vital role to play in incentivizing them toward more ethical behavior, mainly be refusing to patronize them in the absence of rigorously-enforced and progressive ethical standards.

I find this statement confusing. Is it not generally true that optimizing for maximum convenience (coupled with lowest monetary cost) often corresponds with an increase in negative externalities?

Changing the ranking to the world's most polluted countries really puts into perspective the ecological destruction wrought by the trend of western consumerist fetishism (this isn't to say that the destruction of natural systems is entirely the fault of western citizens, of course).

The top 25 (at least) most polluted countries are all firmly outside what would be considered the western world; it's obvious that the environmental byproducts of materialism and consumerism are simply outsourced to where westerners cannot readily see them. The necessary course of action for an informed and future-minded person seems blindingly obvious - allocate resources only to those corporations and systems that reject the trend of object fetishism and environmental (and social) exploitation.

The classic rebuttal to this stance (i.e., that all corporations naturally engage in this type of exploitative behavior / the standard of living of the exploited region's citizens is being raised as a byproduct of said exploitation / etc.) is ringing more and more hollow. The fact of the matter is that you don't need a new smartphone / TV / whatever nearly as often as we are conditioned to believe.

There is a strange (borderline schizophrenic) attitude that I notice among defenders of entrenched corporate systems (meaning production and consumption symbioses) wherein the defender of the system simultaneously resigns themselves to powerlessness in the face of what they claim are the inevitable (and often negative) byproducts of technological and economic growth and at the same time admit (directly or indirectly) that they willingly add to the conflagration under nothing but the threat of relatively minor social inconvenience (see: Facebook membership, ordering junk from Amazon, using Google services, etc.). It's tiring and bewildering to witness.