ardy42

> When a person tells you their own lived experience, the thing to NOT say is, "nah, that's probably not true."

As far as I can tell, your GGP comment wasn't actually talking about your lived experience at all. It was making general remarks about society and history that's very external to you, which you can definitely get wrong in ways that can and should be corrected.

For instance, if I told you my lived experience was that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and Biden is a Satan-worshiping cannibal, the exact thing to say to me is that those things aren't true. They aren't lived experience, they're errors in fact.

> C++ offers direct, low-level control over memory, and C++ can be used to implement anything which can be implemented in Rust. Maybe Rust has certain advantages which made this problem a lot easier to solve for Mozilla, and I'm certainly happy to have Rust in the language landscape, but another team with other processes may have been able to use C++ to achieve similar goals.

You could say the same thing about assembly programming or some language that uses GOTOs instead of structured control constructs ... or Brainfuck. Given infinite time and resources, you can implement anything in any language.

Claims about this or that language being unsuitable for a problem aren't really about stuff like Turing completeness, it's more about practical software engineering problems (e.g. does the language provide the right kind of support to the developers allow them to implement the required functionality in a reasonable amount of time with a reasonably small amount of bugs with the budget available).

>>>>>> nothing mass-produces racism and extremist political views more than treating an entire generation of young men as though they are automatically racist, regardless of their actions, or lack of action.

>> I'll turn it around: please provide some reason to believe that some recent generation of American young men has been more effectively manufactured into an army of racists than has ever occurred at any time or place in the past, excluding other times where the mechanism was the same kind of “treating an entire generation of young men as though they are automatically racist” as has supposedly occurred sometime recently in our history.

> It is difficult to parse what you are saying, your post consists of a single run -on sentence is too long to follow.

I think it's pretty clear: the original statement is clearly false, because there are obvious, well-known historical counterexamples to it. It's basically claiming the current American culture creates racist white men more effectively than Nazi Germany or the Jim Crow South, which just ain't so.

> Why does the intent of the person making the argument matter? The argument stands on its own merits or it doesn't.

That attitude might work for arguments like mathematical proofs, but we're talking about social policy here. It's too complex for that kind of certainty, so trust and good faith matter.

Also your argument was essentially like this: the Soviet Mars 2 probe failed to land on Mars. So did the Soviet Mars 2, 3, 6, and 7 probes. Therefore, NASA shouldn't try to land Viking 1 on Mars, since governments have been shown to not be able to do that kind of thing successfully.

> OK, let's run with your example....

> That's essentially what's happening. Nobody alive in the US today owns a slave, nor were they a slave. You can spend literally forever talking in circles about the effects of history on people of present day. Yes, things like slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining had bad impacts on black communities. Do we spend forever talking about it? No. And who gets to decide when the wrong has been "righted", anyway?

That is not in fact what's happening today, which is why the response consists of social policies like affirmative action instead of stuff like garnishing the wages of the descendants of slaveholders to repay the descendants of slaves. I even alluded to that.

Another way to look at it is the wrong wasn't solely committed by the individuals involved (e.g. slaveholders), but by the government and other institutions that enacted policies like slavery and Jim Crow. The government and those institutions still exist, and have the responsibility and ability to take corrective action.

Running with examples is like running with scissors; they're both bad ideas that can turn to serious errors.

> It’s continually amusing to me that some of the most outwardly “anti-religious” people (I’m reminded of this Silicon Valley scene [1]) adopt belief systems and act in ways that are nearly indistinguishable from American Protestantism, with the minor difference of the content of beliefs being different.

I used to hang out with a bunch of ex-Evangelicals, and I noticed the same thing. The content of their beliefs changed (radically), but their outlook and habits of mind stayed the same.

> They adjust and build on already-established modes of thought. I think this is called the Horseshoe theory, but that’s usually applied to politics.

I don't think that's Horseshoe theory. IIRC horseshoe theory is more about extremists from different "ends" of the political spectrum having uncanny commonalities, and establishing a kind of moderate/extremist political axis as its own thing.

> There seems to be a belief kicking around that if we could just help minorities in the right way, racism would go away faster.

> I don't think this is so. Time after time in US history, the government has tried to institute "helpful" social programs to lift black people up. Time after time, those efforts have failed. Any time that blacks start to build some wealth for themselves, the government comes in to "help" and screws it all up....

> There is work to be done, and most people don't dispute that. What is disputed is that fighting racism with racism is an effective strategy. It isn't.

One problem with this line of argument is that it is often advanced in bad faith by people whose actual goal is to avoid addressing the problem at all.

Another problem with the "do nothing and let it work itself on its own" approach is that it goes against many conceptions of justice. If you repeatedly stole money from me, most people wouldn't consider the matter settled if you got to keep what you stole and were merely prevented from stealing yet more in the future: justice requires at least some effort to repair the past damage, even though those efforts usually quite imperfect (e.g. monetary compensation for wrongful death).

I would guess that a significant contributor to the problems you outlined was an unwillingness to go the full measure to address the problems, often for illegitimate reasons (e.g. racists maintained enough power to block all but half-ass solutions) or legitimate ones (e.g. enough time passed that the direct perpetrators and victims are dead, but unjust effects nevertheless linger).

> How does one even become a monarch? They weren't always hereditary, and it would be interesting to see what they were based on. Seems like you need some kind of divine recognition, as otherwise you're just a dictator.

IIRC, you conquer a territory, descend (biologically or legally) from someone who did, or politically maneuver to replace an existing monarch or heir (for instance, by assassinating them).

> In 2016, 266 black people were killed by police in the U.S. [1] In 2020, that value is estimated to be 233 [2]. That is out of 46 million black people in the U.S., or approximately 0.0006%. No data available on "public torture". While I would agree that any death at the hands of police is unfortunate (though NOT unavoidable), I think most reasonable people would agree that 0.0006% is hardly representative of a widespread or systemic issue that typifies the policing of black people.

I see a few flaws in your argument.

1. Death statistics likely do not represent the entire problem, but rather the tip of the iceberg. Deaths/murders are rare overall, but hard to hide.

2. Your 0.0006% is calculated in a way to give one of the smallest possible magnitudes, and doesn't really offer any useful comparison. You can do similar to minimize any issue. If you wanted to make an argument against there being a systemic issue here, you really ought to compare per-capita black deaths-by-police to per-capita white deaths-by police or something. This paper [1] (first result of my Google search) give such a comparison and states:

> The highest levels of inequality in mortality risk [from police use of force] are experienced by black men. Black men are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police over the life course than are white men. Black women are about 1.4 times more likely to be killed by police than are white women.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793

The OP was flagged to death yesterday, and this is an attempt to recreate a comment I couldn't submit.

> Black students must be admitted to schools via adjusted grade and test score standards to ensure a representative number of them and foster a diversity of views in classrooms. But it is racist to assume a black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences, and racist to expect them to represent the “diverse” view in classroom discussions.

I don't think this is the contradiction that he presents it as. I understand affirmative action to be an attempt to ameliorate the effects of unjust generational racism. It would undermine that goal to not have a taboo about "assume[ing] a black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences," because it would just maintain some of that racism in a different form. Both affirmative action and the taboo are interlocking efforts towards the same goal.

Some might object and say you have obviate the need for that taboo by just not having affirmative action, but the problem with that is that it might take orders of magnitude longer to wash away the effects of the unjust generational racism in the area in question.

> Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you're suggesting that philosophy can talk about anything that science can.

Science's original name was natural philosophy, so in a sense, yes.

> There are two kinds of pseudophilosophy, one mostly harmless and the other insidious. The first variety is usually found in popular scientific contexts. This is where writers, typically with a background in the natural sciences, walk self-confidently into philosophical territory without realising it, and without conscientious attention to relevant philosophical distinctions and arguments. Often implicit empiricist assumptions in epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of language are relied upon as if they were self-evident, and without awareness of the threat that those very assumptions pose to the author’s own reasoning. We can call this phenomenon scientistic pseudophilosophy.

This sounds similar to engineer's syndrome/engineer's disease: https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee... (which isn't limited to engineers, IIRC there's an equivalent term that I forget for medical doctors that overconfidently stray outside their area of competence).

> Trying to use Reddit without the app is maddening. I am aware of old.reddit.com- but it is so annoying to have to change 'www' to 'old' every time I want to read something. On IOS/Safari, visiting any Reddit page results in a full page prompt to use the stupid app. No, I don't want to use the app right now, which is why I'm using Safari! If reddit wants to do anything for their future, they should address these basic usability issues.

You could write a userscript to automatically change all intra-reddit links to old.reddit.com, and redirect you to old.reddit.com if you land there from somewhere else.

I had done something similar long ago when I actually used reddit.

> Pick a region at random. Zoom in, scroll a little, zoom in, scroll a little, repeat until you find a galaxy. There. You're likely the only human who has ever seen it and all the wonders it may contain. It's yours to hold. That's your little galaxy.

This one's mine: https://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=165.0972&dec=28.9753&lay...

>> And most of the cases I'm aware of where they've used that power is to suppress viral lies, which is a good thing. Even then they were late pulling the trigger.

> Why on earth would you suspect that the handful of incidents that they advertise are a remotely representative sample? Of course the highest profile censorship is going to be agreeable, but we have no idea what lurks below the surface because we have no transparency.

I'm not so concerned about that, because it's far from the most pressing issue. My impression is that the people who typically complain bitterly about Twitter's "censorship" are complaining about the stuff you call "agreeable censorship" (e.g. driving out Bugaloo Bois, QAnon, COVID misinformation, "stop the steal" cranks, etc.). For instance: the exodus from Twitter to Parler wasn't triggered so much by account closures/tweet deletions, but rather the labeling of election misinformation tweets.

> Or we kill Twitter. :) I say this half in-jest, but some people who are positively terrified about the collapse of democracy seem to take it as an article of faith that Twitter deserves to exist. I think there's some happy medium but if we fail to find it dispatching Twitter seems better than where we're heading.

I agree with this. Social media may be a technology that society should chose to abandon, Amish-style.

> It's not size, but power. Twitter's curation algorithms have massive unilateral influence on public opinion (reaching far beyond its own user-base) probably including the ability to sway national presidential elections. I'm not aware of any utility companies with such power.

And most of the cases I'm aware of where they've used that power is to suppress viral lies, which is a good thing. Even then they were late pulling the trigger.

> Moreover, social media introduces an entirely new dimension: it's multicast. Your telegraph or phone call conveyed information to 1 other party at a time. A Tweet can be seen by millions or more. The volume of communication on social media dwarfs that of other channels.

And that's what's dangerous about them: the filter got removed from broadcasting. People like to talk about filters like they're bad things, but that's not true. They're in fact a vitally necessary function to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (for instance: what is peer review? Answer: a filter). when you don't have filters, ideas spread in proportion to how quickly they can multiply, which isn't a good thing, because a lot of fast-spreading ideas are akin to cancer, and do nothing except weaken or kill the host.

If Twitter's to avoid killing its host, it needs an immune system to filter out those cancerous ideas.

>> Has bitcoin actually solved that problem though?

> Yes it has, anyone in the world can open their own "current account"/"deposit account" for free, right now.

Maybe, but it simultaneously un-solves many problems around fraud and theft, because it's (for instance) impossible to reverse a transaction.

> a statement like this is exactly why people still don't understand the value of Bitcoin. The usefulness of a store of value has no relation to its actual value. The value comes from the network effect of others also agreeing that it has value.

So basically fiat money, then.

> The OP said the only assets some poorer people will have will be some cash [in the bank]. Is this not correct? I’ve been near broke before. The only assets I had besides a dying car was money in between Venmo, PayPal, bank account, and actual cash.

Honestly, all the fretting about the debasing of value of a poor person's small pile of cash seems like outright misdirection to me. You have to look at the whole picture, and that whole picture is that the poor person might be trading say a <$10 loss to inflation on a small savings account for a $1000 stimulus check. That's a good bargain.

More broadly, the hard money/bitcoin people seems to want exchange the elimination of their hypothetical fear of (hyper)inflation for a very real likelihood of lingering recessions due to austerity policies. That doesn't seem like a good bargain to me.

> In this case it’s extremely important to distinguish between credible claims of genocide and the many who would without any basis in evidence be ready to support claims of genocide simply because they’ve seen pictures of mistreated Uighur and feel bad about them. You can’t have international political consequences be based on “I saw pictures on Facebook I don’t like, so China needs to be punished!”

> As such I think it’s extremely important when people routed in facts and evidence bring forwards a credible case for what China is doing being classified as genocide.

Actually, IIRC, the question here isn't so much about what's happening to the Uighurs, but what the definition of genocide is. Basically: does genocide require physical extermination or not? There are different views on that.

> Reading inaccurate information and taking it all seriously still leaves the reader ignorant, it just gives a false illusion of being well-informed.

> I try to take everything I read with a giant grain of salt while remaining humble and recognizing my own ignorance. If a topic really catches my interest I'll try digging into it by going through primary sources, but otherwise I try to not hold very strong opinions about things I haven't researched extensively. Even after I've done a bit more research on a subject I try to remain humble since there's often many concepts with which I'm unfamiliar.

I think that's a reasonable attitude, though it has the tradeoff of being maybe too indecisive.

> With social media you can now follow many real experts on a wide variety of subjects and they'll happily help explain new and interesting developments in their field. Although even in that situation it's still important to exercise caution, since the illusion of expertise is often abused as a means of advancing some political or financial agenda. Another possibility is that the person explaining the topic might not actually be that well informed or they might've even misunderstood certain parts.

There still aren't enough hours in the day for someone to do even that with any breadth. It's also worth noting that activity is basically journalism with an audience of one.

My general thrust though is to argue against the individualist rejection of institutions, which seems to be really common and I think is pretty misguided. While those institutions always have flaws, there's also good reasons for their existence and use, which are often weirdly forgotten. The reaction to those flaws are often individualist ideas that have even deeper flaws, and often don't actually correct the flaws they're responding to. To make an analogy: it's like a novice programmer reacting to seeing a few dozen Windows bugs and declaring they can't trust Microsoft anymore and they're going to write their own OS instead. That's a huge project, way bigger than one person, and a novice programmer is unlikely to actually do a better job than Microsoft (dispute its flaws and mistakes).

> Last I checked, major American newspapers barely run corrections anymore.

I'm not so sure about that, I see them fairly often and I'm not even looking for them.

What exactly is the "Save Journalism Committee," and what's it's agenda? The link "What is the Save Journalism Commitee" at the bottom of their pages brings you to this nothingburger: https://savingjournalism.substack.com/about, https://archive.is/pY8rd.

The author's Quora profile describes him as a "Messaging Consultant" (https://www.quora.com/profile/Jeremy-Arnold-4, https://archive.is/ch3uz), which sounds like PR to me.

> If I want truth, I read or watch primary source material. Everything else is commentary.

For the record, that is completely impractical for reasons so obvious that it's surprising people suggest it with the frequency they do.

Take science reporting, for instance. You think science reporting makes too many mistakes, so you're going to just go to the source and read the raw papers instead (a suggestion I've seen dozens of times). Well, there are so many of those that even scientists don't read everything related to their specialty, and at best only read everything related to their sub-sub-sub specialty. How the hell are you, as a layman, supposed to wade through that stuff to stay informed about science? You can't, since there aren't enough hours in the day. It's a recipe for ignorance.

> Not only not every, but in fact “slippery slope” rarely is a fallacy.

Personally, I think a ratchet is a better analogy. While it's theoretically possible to stop at any point, realistically each click is just one partial step towards a complete goal, and it's harder to go back than go forward.

> I know, that's why I used "restricted".

Well, I suppose that's technically correct (e.g. restricts ownership to people who can pay the $200 tax and fill out some forms), but I wouldn't describe that as a meaningful "restrict[ion on] ownership," which I think would be things like bans or hard-to-get licensing requirements.

> reversing the National Firearms Act that restricts ownership of fully automatic weapons, legalizing silencers, etc.

That's wrong. IIRC, the NFA only requires that machine guns and silencers be registered and taxed. See this Forgotten Weapons episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po715YGEzTY. It's for a fully automatic M-16 with a device that makes it sound like an AK-47 that's regulated as a silencer. It was up for auction, but the winner would have to pay double the tax because it's a "two stamp" gun.

> In opposition, the Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund spent $208,357.84

IIRC, Everytown for Gun Safety is basically a front group for Michael Bloomberg. That's the guy who also spent nearly a billion dollars on his vanity presidential campaign: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/us/politics/bloomberg-cam....

Your example might be more of an example of the corrosive effect of politically active billionaires, who have the ability to outspend actual citizens' groups. IIRC, the billionaire Koch bothers were able to similarly wield outsized influence by spending heavily in down-ballot state races.

> That isn't to say no criticism of the NRA is warranted. The accusations from the NYS AG that the organization has unfairly enriched its executives and their families seem spot on, even if the proposed remedy (dissolution) is unwarranted. And as a gun owner, I've been dismayed to see the NRA lean into guns as a partisan issue. I wish they'd stay out of politics if it was unrelated to guns. In what world should they be honoring FCC Chairman Ajit Pai?

From my read of the situation, this is exactly right. It sounds like the NRA leadership is corrupt and should be removed, but the attempt to dissolve the organization really seems like abusing the legal system to achieve a partisan aim. If anyone has been harmed by the NRA leadership, it's its members and donors, and I don't see how dissolution helps them.

Also, partisanship just seems totally damaging and unstrategic to any single-issue group: once the party you tied your fortune to goes out of power, there goes all your clout. It sounds like the unions made the same mistake: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/06/opinion/labor-unions-repu....

Full disclosure: I'm not a gun owner, but am thinking of getting in to shooting after binging on Forgotten Weapons (https://www.youtube.com/c/ForgottenWeapons).

> This is horrible. It’s like the media ignoring everything Hillary Clinton ever did because they were “with her” in protecting democracy.

You think this is horrible?

> The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

> It's one thing to be out of a personal computing device due to vendor policy

IMHO, the only reason people tolerate that is because the culture was habituated to it in the 90s/00s, when personal computers were improving so quickly that you'd likely want to replace yours even if it wasn't broken.

Cars are so expensive and the culture has been habituated to them having increasing life and reliability that I don't think a car company could pull off shortening their usable lifespan without burning their reputation. Until full self-driving capability gets to a deployable state, I don't really see any technological advancement that could ease people into a faster refresh cycle.