You misunderstand the paradox. It's not merely 'rationalizing' to recognize that the paradox demands that we do not tolerate intolerance. The system simply does not work if we tolerate the intolerant.
These are hardly extraordinary claims. If you survey the daily news from dozens of media outlets for the past 3 years, what was described above is barely scratching the surface of the platform in question. The content itself, on the other hand, is certainly extraordinary in a perverse way. It's why event organizers have to take action against individuals who promote it.
Demonstrating a lack of ethical values in personal life seems like a good measuring stick to whether one might demonstrate ethical values in a professional setting. But more importantly, how can participants interact with any event or process of an organization if they cannot trust those involved?
It's important to recognize that the ethical concerns with the current administration go far beyond the scope of simple politics. That's the fundamental issue at stake here. Are we willing to hold the line on ethics, while our political system is in turmoil. The political sphere may be willing to look the other way, but that does not mean our private intellectual organizations have to follow suit.
It's a mistake to classify ethical norms as politics. We just happen to be living in an of era populism where rampant unethical normalization is masquerading as politics.
There appears to be a sizable segment of society that is unwittingly expanding their definition of politics to encompass civility and human decency. To treat them as if these are somehow merely political opinions, rather than the foundations of professional ethics. We're living in an era of political extremism and populism, and it's going to clash with everyday and professional life. This is not the fault of those holding the line of ethics. It should be seen as a wake up call that the things being touted as opinion and politics are actually far outside the realm of normal. And while this is somehow being tolerated in the political sphere, there's no reason to expect that to be the case in smaller more intellectual areas, such as the Linux Foundation.
Treating the idea of regulation as a binary operation makes this problem seem artificially harder than it really is. If regulations scaled proportional to market impact/value, then you can still have smaller companies that can afford to innovate without clamping down, because the impact of their usage is small. Similarly, you can expect more from larger companies with massive influence, because firstly, the vastness of their influence matters more, and secondly, because of that influence, they also have much higher revenues and can afford to make those changes.
We need to enter an era of more fluid and dynamic regulations.
Largley because of a paralyzed legislative branch, heavily indebted to corporate donors, compounded by a polarized public that is largely too distracted to focus on this fundamental problem.
Demanding even the slightest level of accountability for blatantly misleading or false information does not make them the final arbiter. It's not a binary choice of absolute determination vs completely hands off.
"In the foundations of physics, we have not seen progress since the mid 1970s when the standard model of particle physics was completed."
This seems to discount the explosion of work in the foundations of theoretical physics. Most notably the many variations of String Theory. Just because the work has not yet produced experiments that can validate them do not mean they are not progress. It's some of the most exciting foundational work that's come for decades.
"The hamburger is a great example of “ugly simple”. You are purposely hiding the main structure that allows your users to move around your product freely behind an additional interaction. That is the opposite of simple."
The author appears to be confusing two forms of simplicity. The burger bar isn't there to simplify the number of user actions to navigate. It's there because navigation is not the main mode of interaction, rather a side-affair. Always showing that content actually increases the visual clutter and cognitive load placed on the user for ALL their interactions.
It's a fallacy to believe that the ability to determine the truthfulness of the content of an ad is binary. 100% or 0%. It's a spectrum. There are obvious truths, shades of gray, blatant misinformation, and everything in between. At the very least, they should clearly disallow verifiably false information. An advertisement aimed at Black voters with the wrong day for voting? That's clearly voter disinformation aimed at voter suppression. How close Facebook gets to the gray areas is by no means an easy problem, but it's patently false to pretend they can do nothing.
I've read assessments from climate scientists that don't paint nearly as dark a situation in terms of what we CAN do. The hard part is simply making it a political reality.
But even ignoring that, it's important to define "worse". Worse than a year round fire season constantly threatening to burn down your home? Worse than 50 year floods every single year? As the impacts of climate change become more real to individuals, I think you'll find the "worse" situation is not doing anything.
Except individual actions pale in comparison to the impact of industry. The single most impactful action individuals can take to combat climate change is not fly less, or use less water. It's voting for politicians that actually enact meaningful policy. Without that, the number of flights we all take is irrelevant.
The spontaneous social justice movements of the past 10 years were not actually spontaneous, their origins have clear lineage back to the 60s and 70s, and the mechanism used to affect this social change helps to partially explain both why it has come about in the form it has, and why some of its less savory elements were not filtered out by the usual process.
Known by experts of the field, the ones most qualified to evaluate claims of the field. The experts of this field are in strong consensus, to such a high degree of certainty that it's basically established fact.
What? Every engineering team I've been on has done standups at their office/desk/bullpen. It literally takes exactly the amount of time of talking. Then we sit back down and resume work. You don't have to make it a full blown meeting. In fact, you shouldn't.
In the very spirit of agile, if standups are not providing your team value, then by all means stop doing them. But, if you are not able to perform a quick functional standup that informs your team about the important work each person is doing, their blockers, etc, might I suggest this is a sign of a deeper team disfuction, rather than some inherent issue with standups generically.
I'd go further to say that if your standups consist merely of parroting words verbatim from JIRA, you're letting your team down by not providing additional detail and context that could be provided more easily in person than on such a tool.
Lastly, reading between the lines of your text, you seem very much "over it". Not standups, but team engineering. Possibly time to find a new environment better suited to what you enjoy.
This will escalate the impact of trolls on news articles. Currently, a well-received article might have hundreds or thousands of Likes and Loves, next to a 3-5 Laughs from those wishing to troll/deride the content. At least now you can click and see what the distribution is and verify yes, its just a few trolls. With this change, a single troll would surface a laugh which is seemingly on par with the other reactions. It's a poor metric, but this makes it worse.
Thank you for writing this. As an engineer reading these style of articles, I've witnessed two common reactions: Either the content resonates, and our eyes widen at the site of a simplified and intuitive explanation for phenomenon that we've somehow already observed, or... it doesn't. And maybe that's the source of much of the negativity we're seeing. These engineers haven't worked in domains, projects, or organizations where they could encounter how these lessons play out, and so they're dubious about the whole thing. One reaction to being in that position is to downplay the author and complain about lack of 'evidence'. The other, is to put down our egos, and consider that maybe we're just not there yet to appreciate what the author is trying to tell us.
Precisely. These aren't "merely" politics. These are the issues that shape peoples lives, for now and for future generations. One of the greatest cons of all time was the casting of Climate Change as a "political" issue. It's our lives we're talking about. Our very existence.
Don't mistake a lack of empowerment with hypocrisy. When someone advocates for policy to limit the emissions of vehicles produced by the automotive industry, but happens to drive their car to work everyday, that's not hypocrisy. That's a person who is coping with the system around them, still advocating to change that system in the only way that is meaningful. Systemic changes require large actions. To pretend that individual actions alone will get us out of this death spiral is at best naive.