374 karma · joined August 26, 2022
That's not the American way of life. Americans love their cars. It's not just a necessity for moving around, but something a lot of people care about personally. Of course, there are pros and cons to that, but there's no reason to assume by default that it's objectively bad.
>>>0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more
>>>0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000-99,999 copies
>>>2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000-49,999 copies
>>>3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000-19,999 copies
>>>5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000-9,999 copies
>>>21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000-4,999 copies
>>>51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12-999 copies
>>>14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies
So, ~66.1% or 2/3 of books in their dataset sell under a thousand copies.
Of course it is. It's just not government censorship. Corporate censorship is a widely recognized concept. [1]
> I don't know why the obvious keeps having to be explained here.
Your claim is neither obvious, nor even true.
The comparison isn't to the people who are being harassed randomly. It's between two "mobs", the Twitter one and the KF one.
> Freedom of speech may protect against government consequences but it doesn't protect against social consequences.
The legal concept doesn't, but the ideal (and the social norm) does.
That's seems like a false equivalence to me. They don't have nearly as much as power and influence as the Twitter mobs. Which entire major websites do you think the KF "mob" can get off the internet by political/social pressure?
Also, if there's no avoiding the existence of mobs in the current political climate, it's better to allow all sides to have their own.
> I know who I think is more worthy of protection.
People with backing from almost all social major institutions, corporations, and academia?
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
Even if that wasn't against the First Amendment (which is a more complicated issue [1]), that wouldn't fly politically in the US. The side which likes law enforcement also currently puts emphasis on free speech, and the side which doesn't like the police wouldn't want them to be in charge of censorship.
I think a company doing that would make everyone their enemy, and generate a lot of bad PR.
[1]: For example, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
That's mostly true legally, but also irrelevant. We also have a right to criticize them for anything.
> They are not violating their free speech
They aren't violating the First Amendment, which is the legal concept. But what they are doing is corporate censorship, which is of course against the idea of allowing free expression.
In the US, we have the First Amendment, which prohibits government censorship. Of course, the government still sometimes uses political pressure to censor things, but there's a need to keep a semblance of rule of law.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis
However, there's a difference in the method for quantifying pungency. In the original Scoville test the extract (diluted in water and sugar) was given to a taste panel, decreasing the concentration until the majority (say 3 out of 5) of the panelists couldn't detect any pungency. The amount of dilution needed to achieve that was then used to get an estimate. [1]
That is now superseded by using chromatography (like what is done here) to get more precise and objective numbers. (but you could possibly argue that maybe data on the subjective effect is what we really want)
The "GC" in "miniGC" probably stands for gas chromatography.
That's a clever way of spinning the issue. But no amount of spinning can change the fact that you are clearly using doublespeak. Contrary to what you say in the post, this clearly isn't in the spirit of the policy you had promised [1], or even had advertised just a few days ago. [2]
You are mostly just giving in to pressure. I can't blame you for that, given that I have to use a pseudonym here myself.
Otherwise, if this was just a matter of different principles, you would also kick out media websites who regularly dox people, or publish dumps of hacked websites, etc.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/cloudflares-ceo-...
[2]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflares-abuse-policies-and-a...
Flagging on HN is mostly done by the users, not by the moderators.
Personal attacks are clearly against HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1]: https://easydns.com/blog/2020/07/20/turns-out-half-the-inter...
Then you are not a freedom speech absolutist (which is fine, and not completely unreasonable).
This is just doublespeak. No matter the merits of this decision, clearly this not the policy they advertised they have on Wednesday.
That's probably not true. Based on the charts here [1], it is safe to say that at least 20-30% of successful NSF grant applications have political/ideological terms used in the abstract.
Maybe more importantly, it's really hard to know how much research isn't being done or published because of the current political climate.
> And then COVID happened, making everybody an armchair epidemilogist overnight.
Well, I don't see that as a bad thing. Blind trust in authority isn't an admirable quality in my books. Also, the other option really was to become an armchair epistemologist. You had to somehow make decisions.
> Science is political
But it shouldn't be. At least not this much. We have choice to encourage or discourage that.
[1]: https://www.cspicenter.com/p/increasing-politicization-and-h...
But consequentialism/utilitarianism [1] isn't the only form of moral reasoning. By most forms of deontological [2] morality, saving someone's life is a good act by itself, even if the fella goes on to become a murderer later.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism
[2]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/
The current homogeneous politicization of science certainly isn't inevitable, as there are periods of rapid scientific progress in the past when this situation did not exist.
> People completely misrepresented Darwin.
I think that's overly intellectualizing things. Ethnic conflict and genocide probably don't have much to do with people's understanding of science, as there are still ethnic strifes around word, even though discussion of many genetic differences among populations is now generally frowned upon in academia. [1] And there has been ethnic conflicts everywhere since the dawn of time, since way before modern science, Darwin, or the contemporary history of eugenics.
> What cannot be published today?
Things like arguments made in "The Bell Curve" [2], or even "The Blank Slate" [3]? You can't really make those kinds of arguments without getting in trouble.
> I mean Journals like Mankind Quaterly still exist
I'd never heard of that journal before, but with an impact factor of 0.194 [4], it's probably safe to say that it has no influence whatsoever on science in general. (perhaps appropriately, as you say, I have no idea about the quality of papers it publishes) I'm sure many personal blogs are more influential.
But do you think you could conceivably publish a paper in Nature which cites something from that journal in a noncritical way? The barrier isn't due to low quality or the authors being ideologues, as there are papers cited in Nature with both of those defects.
[1]: E.g. https://noahcarl.substack.com/p/theyre-coming-for-behaviour-...
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
[3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate
[4] https://academic-accelerator.com/Impact-of-Journal/Mankind-Q...
But the question is: Should it be like that? Should we encourage or discourage that?
> (and can give you examples if you really want to read them)
Sure, I'd appreciate it. Especially if the articles/books covering them were not published in the recent years. I've read "Betrayers of the Truth" [1], so I know about the Piltdown Man [2] (which was apparently used to "prove" that earliest men were British), or that Cyril Burt [3] had most probably falsified data in his studies on heritability of IQ. Sometimes these exposés are themselves a tad biased though.
> some fringe gender science
It's not just social sciences, although they are much more affected. See the charts in the article linked in my original comment, for example.
And, IMO, it's not just a fringe part of gender studies. Its departments are essentially ideological think-tanks of the worst kind, with very little objective research being done by them.
> I don't see that much work like that anymore
But I'm sure you also know that there are certain things which are probably true, but almost no one would ever dare (or could) publish any kind of new evidence supporting them in the current climate.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayers_of_the_Truth