pannSun

Oh it's useful - it's just that the stated purpose doesn't match the intended purpose.

> Why not take it on good faith that this work was guided by research that asked more blind people than you have?

Since they propose to replace Hispanic with Latinx, a term that most Hispanics reject [1], such faith is unwarranted.

> You can either care about how blind people feel through your usage of language or not care.

I propose an alternative dichotomy: I can prioritize truth, or I can prioritize the asserted feelings of the loudest complainers.

And as a commenter pointed out, "blind" in "blind review" is a positive, not a negative! A blind review is objectively better and more socially desirable than a non-blind one (and, correct me if I'm wrong, but is becoming prevalent in academia, so it is also normal instead of abnormal). We have more than enough evidence to conclude this document is insincere.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

> Committed to a cause, lives up to one's commitments, committed a patch, etc.

It's so easy. Almost every word has positive and negative connotations. Find such a word in your opponent's vocabulary, claim they intended the negative connotations, and thus declare him a sinner. Reference this Stanford document to support your accusation.

> I would not have survived the last few years if I had characterized my impairments as being abnormal and negative. [..] Happy to answer any questions if you have ‘em!

Why not? I have several traits I consider abnormal, and some I consider negative (i.e. unlike the merely abnormal ones, I wish to overcome them. And some cannot be overcome but are very normal - e.g. mortality.) - why should that characterization impair my effort or desire to survive and thrive? Or rather, why does it impair yours?

> There’s an approach out there called the “social model” of disability where impairment is regarded as a neutral (neither good nor bad) experience and the good or bad experience is how the impairment changes interaction with society.

If I may speculate, is this the answer? You want to be seen as good and desirable by society, so if any of the multiple meanings of a word used to describe you carry negative implications, that results in a reduction of your self-worth? Even when a word is merely objective description, used without moral baggage, its mere proximity to alternate meanings taints it?

> Instead of "blind review", consider using "anonymous review". Context: Unintentionally perpetuates that disability is somehow abnormal or negative, furthering an ableist culture.

But.. disability is abnormal and negative? How tortured of a definition of 'normal' must one use to make blindness normal? And I suspect if the author of that sentence were offered, say, $100,000 to undergo a painless but irreversible blinding surgery, they would very quickly admit blindness is a negative - a greater negative than missing out on $100,000. In fact I suspect most people wouldn't accept that offer even if it had many more zeros.

But still we must pretend?

> Instead of "committed suicide", consider using "died by suicide". Context: Ableist language that trivializes the experiences of people living with mental health conditions.

And with this they tip their hand. The mental contortions required to conclude that "committed suicide" trivializes something, but "died by suicide" doesn't, are so extreme that I cannot believe anyone honestly holds that opinion. That leaves as the most likely conclusion that this document is not an honest effort to eliminate 'harm', but a mine-field, a list of sins and prohibitions, to be used as ammo against opponents.

From that thread: Some were domestic takedowns of, say, QAnon accounts

So it was not limited to foreign government operations (or to QAnon, since it is phrased as a mere example).

I will take a guess:

German man raided by police after calling politician a “dick” on Twitter - https://reclaimthenet.org/german-man-raided-by-police-after-...

German prosecutors raid far-right AfD's headquarters - https://www.dw.com/en/germany-prosecutors-raid-far-right-afd... (Since Deutsche Welle is a 'respectable' news outlet, they have omitted the context that the raid, on 28th September 2022, happened 11 days ahead of the state election [1], over allegations from 2016-2018)

Germany: Migration background abolished in police database - https://www.bild.de/regional/berlin/berlin-aktuell/wegen-dat... (If you don't like journalists reporting on statistics, simply don't collect the statistics, then turn around and say there's "no evidence" of their claims. Not all press control is done by force.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Lower_Saxony_state_electi...

With the recent exception of COVID, there has not been a significant reduction of even legal immigration during the periods when the supposedly "anti-immigration" party was in power.

I wonder if the realization that control over the media is a non-benign power will remain limited to TikTok/China. Are people willing to admit that the media they were immersed in could also not have had their best interests in mind?

> if this is such a clear ToS violation then maybe it shouldn’t have been approved?

Maybe user software shouldn't be enforcing arbitrary ToS, but should instead obey the user? Do we really want corporations colluding with each-other to enforce their whims over us through their products that we are surrounded by, and are becoming necessary for modern life? What next, disk firmware scanning for copyright violations?

I'm sorry if this comes off as harsh, but I am sick of people using the ToS (that a company can make up at will) as any kind of justification, pro- or against. They can and do write anything they want there.

> HOAs are great and necessary for maintaining common property

There is a fundamental, qualitative difference between rules and obligations for maintaining common areas, versus private ones. That for some reason both fall under the "HOA" term only confuses the discussion - it's not "a communal organization calling itself a HOA" that's the issue, but its intrusion on private property.

The US constitution requires that treaties be kept secret, even from congress, during negotiations? I'd like a citation on that, and an explanation on why wikipedia implies the secrecy around TPP as unusual - if such secrecy were so standard and great, one would not expect it to be criticized this way.

But the new house that you will have to buy will also be cheaper. On average, you are no worse off.

> “But our work shows that before success comes connection between the student and others in her peer community. From high-quality peer relationships within the academic environment, especially relationships with peers who share a common identity, comes the confidence and motivation to persist" [..] “We must prioritize culturally aware mentoring and research in the UMass system"

Those terms sound much friendlier than sex- or race-segregated mentoring. I guess this is one of those cases where diversity, at least within an mentor-mentee relationship, is not a strength?

So it should be 16, not 15 or 14? And should the age of consent match it? Since kids are so mature and responsible by that age.

Edit: Oh, and they should be able to sign up for the Army at that age, too? The voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 because of the absurdity of drafting teens into a war when they can't even vote on yet. I would have preferred the opposite solution - raise the draft to 21.

> You seem to be hinting that [..] younger voters have worse decision making abilities

I'm not hinting at it - I'm saying so outright. Have your decision-making abilities not progressed since you were 16?

> How do you get out of the trap of thinking that people who vote in their self-interest or disagree with you are incapable of making good voting decisions?

The majority of people above the age of 21 will vote in ways I disagree with, so I don't see how it is relevant to raising or lowering the voting age.

> Teens who have jobs, pay income tax, teens who buy things pay sales tax

So because a kid can get a part-time job at 13, that should be the new voting age? Unless you put the voting age at 0, for some part of our lives, we all must live in a society whose laws we can't vote on. After that it's no longer a philosophical question of where rights come from, but a pragmatic balancing act between representation and an informed voting body.

It's so strange. If it was food or clothes or medicine, cheaper prices would be obviously good. Who can we thank that shelter getting more affordable has become a bad thing?

I'm guessing here, but probably the same people reaping the most profit from it.

The text of the treaty was kept secret even from congress [0], and to read it, they had to request the exact (single) chapter ahead of time, and were not allowed to bring any means of copying into the room where they read it in solitude. If they even got the text itself, and not a 'summary' [1].

Meanwhile, "industry representatives" had free access to it, and were largely the ones writing it.

The TPP (and other similar trade agreements) are nothing but backdoor means of subverting national legislations in favor of corporations. If four years were lost to China, the corporate authors of the TPP have only themselves to blame, as it was so hideous and anti-consumer, it was one of the few things Trump and Bernie Sanders agreed was bad.

[0] But, obviously, not from the other governments negotiating it, showing that the secrecy was not to gain an advantage over the other parties, but over ones own voters and politicians.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership#Secr...

> It's why we don't let them vote (or don't seriously talk about it).

How I wish that were true:

Dems in several states push measures to lower voting age to 16 - https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dems-several-states-push-me...

Majority of House Democrats vote in favor of lowering voting age to 16 - https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-democrats-hr-1-lower-...

Lest anyone think this is limited to the Democrats or the US, there has been serious talk of similar changes in other countries as well, though I cannot find a source at the moment. Then there is this gem of a justification:

Lowering the voting age to 16 in the US could increase the voting rate for the entire country, improving our democracy in the process. - https://nypost.com/2019/03/02/this-is-why-16-year-olds-shoul...

As if the quantity of votes were the sole measure of the health of a democracy, and not how informed and mature they are. How many of us think a person makes better decisions at 16, vs. at 18 or 21? Yes there is a tradeoff between the average maturity of voters, and people having a say in how they are governed. But to think that tradeoff is optimal at 16, when even 18 is low..

There's a step between making untamperable black-boxes, and designing for repairability: don't use anti-tampering measures, and make available the code, schematics, and documentation the company itself uses for repairs.

> End users are free to remove them.

Let's not pretend we don't know the power of defaults, or that we expect users to learn about and modify the obscure and technical innards of their browsers. Even expert users can be fooled, such as when the NSA bribed a company to default to a weak cipher [1].

> Microsoft, Mozilla and others already provide you with a list of who you’re going to trust by default.

If I use Firefox, I choose to trust Mozilla. But now, whichever browser I choose, I am forced to trust its maker and the government and intelligence agencies of every EU member state.

I can spend my limited time learning how to fix this, but is it legal to share my solution in a convenient form (such as a browser that by-default trusts CAs based on merit, not government order), or would that make me a browser vendor, and compel me to backdoor my software?

This is, in effect, prohibiting cooperation to fight surveillance.

> It would be more outrageous if the current CAs were some sort of gold standard, but the whole system is flawed.

I don't see how the current system being flawed makes a government mandate to default-trust hypothetical known-untrustworthy CAs less bad. It is a red herring - is a system being "flawed" justification for government intrusion? And does this intrusion even attempt to fix those flaws??

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5231006/nsa-paid-10-mill...

> the fact that, 150+ years after 1868, a reputable source is can bin by {Black, Hispanic, White} and get a distinct signal is mind-boggling

Is it really? Compared to how long people have been competing along tribal lines, 150 years is less than negligible.

> The most obvious change in American politics this century is the sorting of voters along educational lines. [..] Voters with impressive educational credentials tend to be Democrats, and those without them lean strongly Republican.

This is overstating it. Among white voters, college graduates preferred not just Republicans, but Trump, by a 4% margin (and by 14% in 2012) [1]. The sorting along racial lines seems the more obvious one.

Given things such as the (attempted) explicitly racially discriminatory prioritizing of funding by the Biden administration [2], can we really be surprised?

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trum...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/us/politics/biden-debt-re...

CAs that you choose to trust are more trustworthy than those you are compelled to trust. See RobotToaster's comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33967192

While 'bricked' is inaccurate (they are merely unsupported, with no way of fixing them when they fail), think of this case when someone says insisting on free software and the right to repair is merely "ideological".

They're mandating who your privately-owned computer must trust. That is a severe overstepping of boundaries, and the concern shown is, if anything, too small.

> What do you expect the AI to answer with when you give it a loaded question that only really asked on a site like "stormfront.com"?

Are such questions asked only on stormfront? The wiki article [1] cites quite a few studies on the subject, including by the APA.

On the other hand, supposing that were true, and only stormfront and its ilk asked such questions. How can then respectable supposed experts claim we are all the same, if they didn't even check?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Test_sco...

Interesting. I did a few web searches, but they failed to find something as basic a the average IQ by race. The wikipedia article [1] admits differences were found (including by the APA), yet doesn't show the results, except for

A 2001 meta-analysis of the results of 6,246,729 participants tested for cognitive ability or aptitude found a difference in average scores between black people and white people of 1.1 standard deviations.

Nevertheless, the NCES published SAT scores [2] that seem consistent with those IQ scores.

So if the results of The Bell Curve have been debunked, they're very discreet about it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence#Test_sco...

[2] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=171

That book has been largely debunked [1], and mostly concerned itself with science that was outdated even at the time of its publication.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html

> OpenAI put a truly remarkable amount of effort into making a chatbot that would never say it loved racism.

This is what that looks like by the way: https://postimg.cc/d7p8Qw50