rotw

Giving this album 9.1 is the most old-Pitchfork thing they've done in years. It's the anti-PR move to do.

The best and worst thing to happen to the album. It fully deserves the acclaim, but now loads of people are only going to listen to it through the prism of the hype rather than hear it for what it is

See, all of those sound "derivative" to me. Absolutely nothing against Japanese yacht rock/soft funk, but it's silly to blame musicians for using genre conventions when those are inherently part of the musical language IMO. Particularly given Cindy Lee works with 1940s-60s pop genre conventions of girl groups and also performs in drag, it's inherently a kind of music that repurposes familiar elements to say something new.

I've been a fan of Cindy Lee's work since before they started the project and were in the band Women, who're a sort of your favourites' favourite artist. Part of the hype around Diamond Jubilee is the context of that band, and the development of successor bands since.

But part of the hype is also that it comes from a very sincere place - it's a full-on auteurist work, the antithesis of "lo fi chill hip hop beats to study/relax to". It can aesthetically or artistically be your thing or not (it very much is mine), but it's a breath of fresh air to have such a fully-realized artistic statement that isn't a focus-grouped, try-hard Event get the acclaim it deserves.

That sounds like a great environment!

It seems like a tricky issue for people without the requisite know-how (and most of all, time), though. I worry that in the future, there might be a measurable decline in attention span and cognitive ability among children from poorer households, whose parents, through demands from long hours, lack of education, and lack of access to premium ad-free services, were unable to provide them with such an environment where they are protected from bombardment from technology. What kind of ready-made, low-information consumer level solutions would you consider important to expand here?

> It is because in practice these are politically motivated trojan horses meant to tear down things like a meritocracy, the very thing that created this great software.

1. Why is respecting gender identity a "trojan horse" - in what way is it deceptive?

2. How is a project a meritocracy if it scares away potentially better contributors with an antagonistic discussion climate?

> tried to do it to a guy who dared to express his conservative views on Twitter in a personal capacity etc..

I feel like you and the Medium post are missing out crucial information here. What were these views? How did they relate to the workplace? The Medium post mentions she is friends with James Damore - who was clearly fired because his manifesto by implication, but unmistakebly deemed women developers less competent than men, thereby creating a hostile work environment, which the author completely glosses over. This leads me to suspect that the "disagreeing with the narrative" is a euphemism for anti-women, anti-minority views and policies.

> so humanity will just have to deal with it and adapt over the next century. Shame about the planet and the natural ecosystem, though.

I don't think you understand that efforts to prevent climate change are efforts to preserve humanity - the planet will survive in any case, and just form new ecosystems. It's us who'll be the first victims.

> Erm, no.

Why do you bother commenting on this if you just flat-out refuse to accept scientific evidence in the original post?

> I prefer having bearable temperatures where I live, sleep and have visitors,

What gives you the right to all that at the direct expense of the people who can't afford it?

What about Signal?

Your comment is exactly the attitude the person you were replying to was mocking. What that person saying is that a lot of reasonably intelligent people who are nowhere near geniuses like to think of themselves as geniuses as a form of narcissistic self-flattery. For people good at math, sciences and computing and other occupations considered "nerdy", capability in these fields and stereotypes of intelligence associated with them become a point of pride and they begin to identify with people far smarter than they are, despite actually being unexceptionally intelligent. HN has talented people, sure, but I think it's definitely fair to say there's a large population of people who flatter themselves thinking they're geniuses who regularly post, upvote, and comment on this kind of article with "me too!" sentiments. Pointing this out has nothing to do with the kids in this article, who are genuinely exceptional and certainly worthy of sympathy and nurturing.

> If you are taking diversity into account, you are taking things other than merit into account and so it isn't a 'true' meritocracy.

Well, no. The point is that due to inherent unconscious biases (see my link for scientific papers documenting this), it's impossible to only take merit into account without social norms biased towards white men skewing the process. Diversity initiatives seek to eradicate this bias, in order to truly measure merit and compensate for the interfering factors.

> Not only that but it also suffers from the no true Scotsman fallacy.

I really don't see what that's got to do with anything here.

> To avoid unconscious bias, you would have to hire someone without knowing their age, sex, sexual orientation or anything else that you could consider discriminatory. That would mean hiring someone that you haven't and that's a little extreme.

Presumably you mean "you haven't met"? Well exactly. Hence, diversity initiatives that seek to compensate in practical ways.