ElmntOfSurprise

A shame that having plain paragraphs and pictures does not work (Android dropped support since N).

Commenting on the design, as a slow reader and non-native English speaker I felt annoyed at having to read against the clock ticking away for each slide (or alternatively, having to click 'pause' again for each slide individually). I hope whatever package this page is based on changes their default settings in future releases.

The charts are not really "Why Americans Spend Much on Health Care", just "Americans Spend Much on Health Care (or More than Others and More than They Used To, Anyway)". Believable causes that I have read being suggested are "demographics", "lack of single payer health care", "unhealthy lifestyle", "inefficient allocation of resources towards terminally ill patients", "Americans pay for drug research that inhabitants of other countries get for free", "expensive safeguards against malpractice lawsuits". Lobbying, taxation and opacity to consumers seems like a poor explanation of why healthcare in the US is so much more expensive than in other countries, and more expensive than in the past.

If Apple user visits contribute less to the earnings of a certain class of websites (news sites, for example), then these could lose interest in the visitors and not optimize content for them. This could e.g. lead to websites breaking when visited by Safari.

I believe similar reasons led Firefox to formerly only offer their tracking protection feature in privacy browsing mode. Possibly their analytics showed that it turns out that most people don't activate that feature, so they now offer it in all modes. Privacy-conscious FF users in a way free-ride on the masses who use FF without knowing / caring about the feature.

It will probably go similar for Apple: They make the feature opt-in, most people don't care and leave it off, nobody gets hurt.

Just the threat that a big company has the capacity to lower prices drastically can keep small companies from entering a market.

Quality threads in HN: "But [outgroup] would disagree!"

Absolutely the right decision. If a topic has many smart people arguing both sides, then there is probably some merit for both, and you should not antagonize your coworkers over it.

Also:

> Altheide’s account provides a counterpoint to the description of Google by former engineers James Damore and David Gudeman

Damore's memo got leaked within weeks (days?), he got bullied internally, threatened publicly and eventually fired, while Altheide's memo is made public only now, apparently by himself.

I don't live in California, but I hear that if you do, and if you work in tech or academia, it is quite hard to find anyone in your social network who watches Fox News or listens to right-wing radio unironically. As I said, Damore doesn't need to fear for his life, but the people who have the greatest influence on his day-to-day wellbeing are absolutely willing to start a witch hunt as soon as he tries to argue for something that is not the Obvious Truth.

>I am baffled by the idea that liberals dominate discourse and conservatives have to hide in the shadows

So I guess you are quite surprised to find that the only people who work in tech in SV, and who put themselves on the side of Damore, do so pseudonymously, while the ones who argue against him do so in plain sight on twitter etc., with their professional identities?

Yeah, writing about how conservatives are the worst? You'd probably have to get in line.

I think his point is, you can't fight all the battles.

I actually think Galileo vs. religion is a quite fitting analogy for these kinds of issues today. There is a prevailing ideology that, if you are seen as disagreeing with it, and if you doing so is visible enough, can get you ousted from polite society. This ideology has a set of dogmatic views about the world which may not be challenged, some of which are seen as axioms of morality. Even though a good argument can be made for both sides of the fence based on the observable evidence available, the standard of proof for one side[1] is set insurmountably high, while just-so stories are widely accepted justifications for the other. Instead of looking for hypotheses that best describe the evidence available to us, we add epicycles to the models dictated to us by the orthodox view whenever discrepancies to reality get too obvious.

Damore is not "literally" Galileo, he does not fear for his life or freedom, he did not publish an original work but instead summarized thoughts that have been around elsewhere, so it is not a perfect analogy, of course.

[1] Standard of proof, but also otherwise standard it is held to: The worst possible interpretation of the document is being discussed, after liberal reading between the lines, looking for dog-whistles, and a telephone game of bad faith summaries. Case in point: > 'manifesto' accusing his colleagues of having inferior genes

"Not writing as well as Scott Alexander" is a pretty high bar you're setting there.

While the document may have been influenced by that post, and while both authors seem to have a similar "non-feminist left" political position, it has a different focus: Acknowledge people's natural strengths, weaknesses, preferences and accept diversity of political views vs. influence of sexist microagressions on gender representation.

Note however that Gizmodo say

> Two charts and several hyperlinks are also omitted

The links that were removed are probably relevant. Some passages in the text even have quotation marks around them where I assume that links to sources were removed.