khawkins

The point is that the 49% eventually leave when their every contribution get bombed to the bottom immediately. Then the 49% of the remaining 51% get bullied out.

Reddit's system encourages purity spirals, especially when the main topic of discussion is how terrible everyone else is.

I'm very confident that orders of magnitude more man-hours have been spent thinking about P=NP in the past 20 years than were spent in the whole 358 years on Fermat's theorem. The number of people in academic situations to work on hard problems has increased exponentially.

I think it's fair to assume that there are potentially asymptotic limits to what can be achieved, but it's not that we default to one conclusion or the other, but that we conclude that whatever might be the real solution, the complexity of the proof is insurmountable or doesn't exist.

Most people are openly taught about the misdeeds of the McCarthy era in schools and in public discussions. This wasn't swept under the rug, most people agree that it happened and wasn't a good thing.

This was the original idea, that some people with genuine traumatic experiences and were currently suffering from mental illness could choose to opt-out before proceeding on to read/watch something. But the concept got wildly out of hand as activists, especially younger adults, began obsessively applying it to nearly any piece of written word and anything they could frame as traumatic.

For example, if you're about to present a movie to a captive audience that involves depictions of rape, it would be good that someone who has experienced rape, especially recently, knows that it will ahead of time and has the ability to opt-out because it might trigger a traumatic episode. The circumstances where you have a captive audience and it's not clear from the context what will be depicted are actually quite rare, so its usage should be rare.

But young people, trying to signal their virtuous compassion and understanding to like-minded individuals, would put "trigger warnings" at the top of blog posts about things like "racism" or "homophobia", and all that would be discussed would be that they overheard a slur at the store.

At some point, the dominant use of trigger warnings was by people with thin skins, ready to get offended on behalf of "victims" who had suffered, at worst, nothing more than people being rude or mean to them. Pretending like these kinds of negative encounters are anything close to the mind-breaking trauma of getting raped or watching your fellow soldiers explode in front of you is disgusting, and eventually everyone caught on that the activists were trying to equivocate real trauma with "hurt feelings". Worse, they were effectively teaching young people to internalize and exaggerate negative experiences so that they could identify as someone with PTSD. That doing this made them unique and gave them extra attention from others who wanted to actively show compassion to victimized people. For lonely young people who want a cause, it was extremely attractive because it gave them identity, purpose, and community. But in reality, it was largely a perverted roleplay which coddled everyone involved and made them emotionally fragile.

The original concept of trigger warnings is solid, but should be practiced only where necessary and never attached to the phrase "trigger warning", as that nomenclature has been ceded to the activists.

The divorce rate is higher and it's easier to be comfortable living independently, both of which are stated in the article and are unquestionable. There might be other reasons, but these are definitely breaking down relationships.

Tie the ability for a student to take out a loan to go to a particular school to the ability for its graduated students to pay back said loans. Put simply, incoming Colombia film students can only borrow money Colombia film graduates have paid back.

Schools that have always graduated successful people with valuable degrees will prosper, and schools which prey upon idealistic young people will quickly find themselves only able to entertain rich dumb kids.

It's an indirect solution which will fix future and past wrongs, without giving any University the right to sue. It doesn't impose any unreasonable burden on institutions, other than the most reasonable one, that they're giving young people educations that actually have value.

>We want to incentivize people to own homes and buy electric cars and a thousand other things, and we use the tax code to do that.

[If we want] to incentivize...

While it's true that incentivization necessitates tax code complexity, we don't all agree on the necessity of incentivization in the first place.

It's the natural outcome of publishing being cheap and supply of aspiring authors being much higher than the demand for novels. The money which used to be concentrated in the hands of the few who could convince publishers to do business with them is now spread thin among many niche authors.

Further, every modern author is competing with every author who ever lived. I could read the science fiction you wrote last year or I could read Asimov, Herbert, Card, etc. and they're often cheaper and more socially relevant.

Companies like Google and Facebook were running around screaming Chicken Little about how companies like Verizon and Comcast will use their monopolistic powers to dominate public speech, screw over users, and screw over startup competitors. Interesting where we ended up today.

The propaganda framed it like sites like Netflix would be really fast because they could afford to pay for it and startup competitors would be very slow, but economic incentives would have actually caused the exact opposite. A startup video hosting site is of relatively no burden to an ISP compared to a behemoth like Netflix so they would have no reason to slow down the startup speeds. If the startup succeeds because it has a competitive advantage to Netflix, then when they become big they get a new customer they can bully into keeping their speeds high.

Yes ISPs will take a cut of the fees they charge content providers, but they will also be able to pass those savings onto the average consumer because the Netflix customer, who is already using most of the internet bandwidth, is helping pay for the service connection. Market forces would force streaming services to go up in price and ISP costs to go down. It would be generally fairer.

It certainly was at one point, but near the end it definitely wasn't. Whether it was soft censorship, hard censorship, or a declining user base, I struggled to find videos I could sometimes even find on Twitter or Youtube. Videos whose place was obviously LiveLeak, based on their standards from 5 years ago.

As much as I lament the death of LiveLeak, it died well before today.

She's still accepting the premise that more female success, as a whole, is something she values. But validating that it is okay for women to choose to be less successful in order to focus on their family is clearly going to result in less female career success.

Deep down I think we all agree that both startups and involving yourself in your children's lives take a lot of time and effort, and that we should respect an individual's free choice to determine what balance works for them. But many are struggling with an opposing ideal that necessarily cannot coexist. For example, by declining the CEO position, she's actively working against the ideal of having an equal number of female CEOs to male CEOs.

The author makes a lot of good points until the last paragraph:

>We can’t expect more women to succeed in the startup world until we’re able to talk honestly about how much harder startups are for those who want to spend a lot of time with their kids...We’ll never reach our potential as female founders until we acknowledge that each woman’s attitude towards children is different.

The idea that just "talking honestly" will change the inescapable realities of everything discussed before this paragraph nearly dismantles the point she's trying to make. She acknowledges that "on the whole" women want their time to be consumed more by kids than by career success. She acknowledges that even she herself has turned down a position that would grant her more success and power, but did so for a cause she deemed valuable and does not regret it. The logical conclusion of her argument and personal life experience is that not all women are the same, but that women are more likely to decline more successful positions, not because of discrimination or some systemic barrier, but because they'd rather focus on their family.

But instead of suggesting that we accept that fewer women are going to succeed in the startup world, she's suggesting that "honest talk" about how hard it is will magically increase their success. How would "honest talk" have changed her totally rational and uncompelled decision to decline a CEO position? How would recognizing that the potential of some female founders is limited by their priorities towards children help other, possibly childless, female founders reach their potential?

The last paragraph reads as an apology for what would have been the natural conclusion of her argument, but which she dare not say because suggesting that we accept anything less that full parity of success between men and women in positions of power is forbidden. She should have stuck to the idea that people need to be treated like individuals with different priorities and not to the idea that women need to be treated like a group collective.