> What you're missing is a proof that the only reason a community is not 'diverse' is due to 'biases' within the community.
There's an enormous amount of research and evidence showing that biases, conscious and unconscious, cause a lack of diversity. It's like saying we are missing proof that smoking leads to cancer.
But here's a simple way to look at it: For a long time in the West, white males enacted in law, in custom, and extralegally (lynchings, for example), explicit biases that excluded others. In 2018, we know that some white males today explicitly endorse the same biases, and many more do so quietly. In areas where we say there is a lack of diversity, the same group, the white males, has the power and the resources (jobs or whatever), and the same groups are excluded.
What is the hypothesis that explains these facts? Is it that it's really a meritocracy now and that the same outcomes as the non-meritocracy are coincidence? In my judgement, that is very unlikely and very irresponsible to believe, and letting other people suffer because we don't want to deal with the problem is the corruption that comes with power.
What do you tell your small human about the current behavior of many prominent adults, or if the small one is too young to see what's happening, what will you tell them?
> Exciting, but not so ethical. We owe society to put our knowledge towards making it better for all people, not just "our team".
Our team promoted liberty and democracy worldwide (see below). The other promoted totalitarian dictatorship, labor camps, etc. If your team is liberty and democracy - self-determination for all - then it's not 'our team', it's everyone's team.
To address the elephant: Yes, there were many, many exceptions to the West's support of democracy, and many of them were awful (Indonesia, the Mideast, Zaire/Congo, and many others come to mind) but beyond a doubt, during the Cold War and after democracy and liberty exploded - stop and compare it to any other time in human history. Lots of bad things happened, but compare that with Soviet-dominated areas such as the USSR itself and Eastern Europe.
The goal, explicitly stated and often acted on in many contexts, is to disrupt international order and cooperation (including trade), and promote nationalistic competition by all countries. Recently his UN speech, for example, advocated it.
I wouldn't assume it's not happening on HN too. Think of the value of a prominent HN user's, or several users', positive comments about a product - in our industry, that's probably worth a lot more than the same on any subreddit (or on any blog or on Facebook). If advertisers have reached out to users on those platforms, why wouldn't they reach out to users here? If I were unscrupulous and had a product that HN users buy or influence, I'd definitely try it.
Being humans, we'd rather close our eyes to it unless we are compelled to face it - such things complicate every discussion and disrupt our happy community. And now you know why propaganda and advertising persist on Facebook and Reddit, and in society.
> wouldn't it be more helpful to just be more selective on what you subscribe to?
I am very selective! Otherwise there would be far more. There are many feeds I cut despite having some excellent, irreplaceable content, because they also add too many unread feed items (i.e., poor signal-to-noise).
That's a very interesting approach - pre-processing the feed items (if I understand you correctly). Here are a few more features I would need, as just one potential user:
* Ability to add feeds to your database. Some obscure feeds are important to me.
* Privacy: I don't want to share a list of everything I subscribe to and read. This is a deal-breaker for me; I'm happy to pay for the service.
* UI with no overhead in time and cognitive load. A learning curve is fine - I love Vim, for example - but when I'm reviewing feed items the UI shouldn't delay or distract me. In fact, a keyboard-based UI based on Vim would be awesome (though probably there's not a huge market for that).
I'll repeat my plea for an RSS reader that enables the user (i.e., me) to efficiently process 1,000+ feed items in maybe 20 minutes. Also, it needs to automate aspects of managing feeds (detect when the fail, maybe find a replacement, give me an interface for resolving the problem).
By "process" I mean: Read the headline and sometimes the summary, decide whether to read the story, open the story (if I'm reading it), delete the feed item. Repeat 1,000x.
Deduplication is necessary but will only cut items process by maybe 5%, I would guess.
'Grouping' is much more valuable - grouping feed items by topic. For example, after the big event last night, instead of skimming dozens of headlines interspersed among 1,000 others, group together the feed items for that event under a single headers. Then I can quickly pick out the item I want to read and discard the remainder en masse. I'd guess that it would reduce the feed items I need to process by well over 50%.
Other tricks are needed too: 1,000 in 20 minutes is just under 1 feed item per second.
There's an enormous amount of research and evidence showing that biases, conscious and unconscious, cause a lack of diversity. It's like saying we are missing proof that smoking leads to cancer.
But here's a simple way to look at it: For a long time in the West, white males enacted in law, in custom, and extralegally (lynchings, for example), explicit biases that excluded others. In 2018, we know that some white males today explicitly endorse the same biases, and many more do so quietly. In areas where we say there is a lack of diversity, the same group, the white males, has the power and the resources (jobs or whatever), and the same groups are excluded.
What is the hypothesis that explains these facts? Is it that it's really a meritocracy now and that the same outcomes as the non-meritocracy are coincidence? In my judgement, that is very unlikely and very irresponsible to believe, and letting other people suffer because we don't want to deal with the problem is the corruption that comes with power.