DaUR · HackerTrans

There's a difference between "government sources" for hard facts (CDC), facts about the world (e.g. DoJ travel warnings, CIA factbook, DoE energy savings tips), for facts about the government (e.g. for Trump's EO, the suggested snippet would be to the text of the EO), and claims from the government. These are easily distinguished.

DaUR

9년 전discuss

Google wants to avoid editorializing, and be able to throw their hands up and say "not our fault!" due to the plausible deniability of "algorithms".

They can't pull that off anymore.

There needs to be a shift towards a Web-of-Trust-like system, where some sources are recognized as authoritative. Government websites, like the CDC, for example. Big media outlets. Scientific associations (IPCC, APA, etc). Not all information is equal. Even if, for example, government dietary recommendations are outdated in some ways, that should be the authoritative answer Google provides, unless there is an equally-reputable but more accurate source (here, prioritize medical sources over governmental ones).

A high school dropout doesn't know more about academic subjects than a PhD grad. A blog isn't as authoritative as a reputable source. This is easy stuff.

Then the question becomes: "some people don't see reputable sources as reputable". That isn't Google's problem, and it can't be fixed at their level.

DaUR

9년 전discuss

> Work to change the cultural baggage around one's value being tied to one's day job. Make it sexy to be a poet, writer, singer, househusband, whatever, derive personal/interpersonal value from something other than a career. (And again, work at a local level to make it OK not to have a big thriving career, since it's not gonna happen for a lot of folks.)

I really hate (nothing personal) this "wishful-thinking" type of activism ("we really need to do...!". You want to change women's sexual preferences? How, through CRISPR? How will you "work at a local level" to make fat 50 year olds with high school diplomas more attractive to women?

> "men are worth something because of their career" is broken, and will never come back

Instead of saying that, how about saying that everybody, including 50 year olds in mainland America, deserves the opportunity of a good job? It's like saying "fat people should be just as attractive" instead of just losing weight.

The current situation is not a refutation of "men are worth something because of their career", just a confirmation. It doesn't "have to come back", because it never left. This is how it has been, is, and will be. You're saying men without ambition or money are entitled to relationships, which they're not. Some people just can't compete, doesn't make the competition obsolete.

DaUR

9년 전discuss

Great comment. Agree with you on the solutions (sourcing).

I don't have a clearly defined political identity, so, mostly by accident at first, I tried changing my own ideology. I discovered every ideology has a pretty much coherent worldview. Just frame the world in a way that's unjust, and threatens you personally in some way, assign low social status to opponents, and make it a part of my identity. It's crazy how I managed to identify with everyone from the social-justice-left to the alt-right, including the Clintonites, Trumpers and social conservatives in between). Fun to do if you want to learn about cognitive dissonance.

The only thing that determines which ideology you end up with isn't facts, but temperament (personality) and social circle.

All of these ideologies are coherent, and therefore don't provoke much cognitive dissonance (if they did these ideologies wouldn't be evolutionarily "fit", and the ideologies would die out). BTW, if Facebook wanted to be more evil/involved, they could change the political opinions of vast swathes of the population by deliberately triggering cognitive dissonance, and then exposing them to material from the other side when they're much more receptive to it. The only reason why that doesn't work so often currently is that cognitive dissonance hasn't yet been completely weaponized, but as we understand it more, it will be.

DaUR

9년 전discuss

When your views are so contrary to HN-orthodoxy as well as societal orthodoxy, you can't just debate with a quip (like yours).

DaUR

9년 전discuss

> It literally cannot prescribe complex social roles

It absolutely can. Evolutionary psychology is science, and it's based on the scientific method (ironically, unlike the sociology that's obsessed with "gender roles", which isn't based on science at all). Check out Gad Saad's podcast on Joe Rogan.

DaUR

9년 전discuss

Your comment is the epitome of social-justice dogma.

> marvel at the unchecked support for the idea that women should be stay-at-home mothers.

Learn the difference between positive and normative. There is a huge difference between "mothers should be stay-at-home mothers", and "widespread celibacy will cause societal instability"?

> women only stay in relationships because they require a partner's income to survive

Obviously, taking GP's point to an absurd (strawman) and then dismissing that isn't a reasonable debate strategy. People get married for a whole load of reasons. Many women, if their partners lose their jobs, will divorce them. No, that doesn't mean they're abused victims. (is that parody?)

Turning an interesting question based on trends into a moral outrage, and hijacking the conversation, is infinitely puerile. Please don't do that.

DaUR

9년 전discuss

Except dystopia isn't "everyone lives in a bad, mean world". It's societal dislocation. For some, the dystopia is real, right now. For others, it never will be.

DaUR

9년 전discuss

These are often not kids of the lower-classes, who are more likely to end up on the streets caught up in crime than in their bedroom playing video games. It's the middle or even upper middle class children often doing this, not just for economic reasons.

DaUR

9년 전discuss

Take away their video games and drugs, and see what you end up with. Their video game addiction is obviously a sign of deep, fundamental and overwhelming distress. I think you're going for the "they're victims too, not violent inhumane monsters" which is true, but doesn't take away from GP's point that they're potentially volatile and therefore a threat to stability.

DaUR

9년 전discuss

> But increasing number of single mothers reduce the stigma of being a single mother, and allowing single mothers to "soldier on".

Is that a good thing? Is it something we should pursue?

http://www.fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-consequen...

It's much more complex than "we need to accept everybody! Every arrangement is just as good as any other!"

DaUR

9년 전discuss

The main downside is for the children. Believe me, you would not want to be the child of such a man or such a woman.[0] This is worse than lack of iodine, lead in the pipes, or congenital deformities from pregnant drug abuse. It's a societal time-bomb.

[0]: http://www.fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-consequen...

Some statistics:

> Children living in female headed families with no spouse present had a poverty rate of 47.6 percent, over 4 times the rate in married-couple families.

> The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states, “Fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse.”

> Children of single-parent homes are more than twice as likely to commit suicide.

> Children age 10 to 17 living with two biological or adoptive parents were significantly less likely to experience sexual assault, child maltreatment, other types of major violence, and non-victimization type of adversity, and were less likely to witness violence in their families compared to peers living in single-parent families and stepfamilies.

The "gender roles" crowd is deeply dogmatic and misguided, and it's having incredible consequences.

DaUR

9년 전discuss

Partly because the German currency is severely undervalued for its economy (because it's held down by the other eurozone countries), favoring exports. In a sense, the other eurozone countries are subsidizing German exports. If the euro went away, and Germany switched back to the Mark, exports would be corrected downwards, and jobs would leave since Made in Germany wouldn't be profitable anymore.

DaUR

9년 전discuss

That doesn't take into account the fact that (through no fault of their own, and meriting no shame), single parents are pretty systematically worse statistically than bioparents in a nuclear household. Take into account the impact of parental "abandonment" on the child, which is traumatic regardless of whether the abandonment was voluntary or not, and regardless of whether it's one parent no longer seeing a child at all, or the other parent seeing the child less because she has to work harder to provide; both count as "abandonment" emotionally, and can be traumatizing.

Single-parent families, step-families all require better parenting, management, and communication skills, since they're more complex, and these parents aren't more skilled than the average, with predictable consequences.

Check the statistics on "fatherless" households, children of single mothers perform worse on every single metric. Worse academically, commit more crime (and much more rape), more runaways, more addictions, the list goes on.

> Yes, old school partnerships are dying, but that doesn't make males more disposable.

Implies that "old school partnerships" are dying, but being replaced by something new. That's not the case. It's not a case of old-thing-evolving-into-a-new-thing. It isn't being replaced by anything, just being destroyed. I'll bet you single mothers are much less happy than married women, especially in their 50s and 60s, not to mention the increased likelihood of being abused by dates, strings of failed relationships, increased stress, and loneliness.

DaUR

9년 전discuss

Had to make another comment, since I reached the length limit.

> to jocks in high school

Also keep in mind that seeing everything under the lens of "power" is deeply misguided. You might say that the jock is "privileged", but he might have had a poor, neglectful, abusive childhood (trauma, which changes your brain deeply), and have as a result developed a more charming personality because his subconscious felt that this was the only way in which he would be accepted and loved. Some of the most sociable people you know are so because of a "people-pleaser" tendency and a desire to "fit in", not because they're on top of things, or more mature. I know some people who are very charming, more than the average, and well-respected by our friends. Yet I also know some things about their (painful) past, and wouldn't wish it on anyone. Would they then become "less privileged"? Except psychological pathologies (low self-esteem, excessive fears, reality distortion, trust disorders, inability to bond) are simply hereditary. If you were raised by parents that had very low self-esteem, were often overwhelmed, and had intimacy issues (meaning emotional, not physical; inability to give or receive love), you'll grow up with these exact same traits, or you'll be similarly wounded but in a different way than your parents. In addition, if your parents were neglectful or abusive, they likely grew up in a neglectful or abusive household, because psychologically wounded, decided to marry with an equally-wounded mate (as we all unconsciously seek to reproduce the nurturance-level of our childhood relationships in all relationships) and you'll raise wounded children in a low-nurturance family of your own. Who's "privileged", and who's not? Since psychological wounds are hereditary, there's no one to "blame", or more deserving of empathy than others. Other example: someone who was abused as a child goes on, as an adult, to abuse children himself. Most would see him as a monster, but I disagree. Gerry Spence said (paraphrased): "nobody is evil enough that you can't become empathic towards them if you really know them". His abusiveness towards others is his own doing, but it's also inseparable from what he went through as a vulnerable young child.

You simply can't make assumptions about people and judge them on a one-dimensional scale, and you doing so is disrespectful to them because it removes their humanity. And again, it doesn't come from a position of empathy on your part, which would require the use of empathic listening, indiscriminately. Everyone has a story.

I repeat my point that the "privilege" narrative is psychologically-incorrect and made irrelevant (or worse) if one understands psychology, and people, properly. That's the most central point of my claims.

You seem to mistake me from some r/TumblerInAction regular, which is just not where I'm coming from (not least because I don't go to reddit).

DaUR

9년 전discuss

> No. That's a bizarre concept concocted by angry people on the Internet who have overdosed on Tumblr, attempted to derive a first-principles explanation for why people appear to believe strongly in the importance of otherkin rights, and arrived along the way at the notion that "privilege" means white people have done something intrinsically wrong just by being white.

You are making many assumptions on my beliefs, which are not true (Strawman!)

> Privilege as used in the real world (leaving out, perhaps, postmodern literature) is a simple, common-sense observation. Having privilege isn't wrong or evil; it's unavoidable.

Yet it's never used in the context of being grateful for the things one has going for them, but always used to discuss what others have received. "Privilege" is always tinged with negative connotations. It's always something that requires you to give away something else (going at the back of the BLM demonstration, for example, or "shutting up" and letting "less privileged" people speak). It's used to shame or guilt people into things. You could probably show scientifically in a lab setting that reminding men of their "privilege" would quickly lower their testosterone levels, make them more passive and submissive, and more self-effacing. This is a case of "raising waves where there is no wind". You're pretending that you're just making people "more aware" of themselves and the world, when it goes much beyond that, psychologically. Unfortunately, most people don't understand the psychology behind "privilege", and just focus on the fact that "privilege" superficially sounds "rational".

> where people experience benefits clearly attributable to some privilege

"Clear" is wrong. The world isn't black and white.

> and then claim that people who don't receive those benefits don't deserve them, when really they just lack the privilege.

"Privilege" is the mirror narrative of the "you only have what you deserve" crowd. It's another side to the same coin. Empathic listening is the solution to both. To the latter, I say: "not everything went their way, they're doing their best, always be generous to those in need" and to the former, I say: "don't assume that someone who has more than you didn't work to deserve it". That would be a psychologically-correct position.

> Knowingly and deliberately protecting some privilege, overtly denying benefits and recognition to those without it so that you can remain a member of an elite

You don't need this whole "privilege" narrative for that, only empathic listening to both sides (the one who feels wronged and the one who's accused) and reaching a conclusion yourself. Wanting to fit everything into a simpler ideology of "privilege" is dogmatic.

It's really mind-boggling how deeply the "privilege" narrative has been anchored in the minds of people who see themselves as rational, which is very insidious. A proper understanding of psychology can simply neutralize this "privilege" narrative, which is not based in empathy, or in a correct understanding of people, but in browbeating.

DaUR

9년 전discuss

The US has (Politifact, Snopes, etc). Many countries just don't have well-known companies doing this.

DaUR

9년 전discuss

> to every other in a thread

You're misrepresenting.

You: If he cuts back on foreign intervention, this extraordinary emphasis on "rebuilding" our military (whatever that means given the relative size of our military) makes even less sense.

Me: Yes it does, "Peace through Strength"

Followed by your hyper-aggressive, completely off-topic comment right here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13789479

Why did I need to write the above up?

DaUR

9년 전discuss

> The only justification they have to be frustrated is if they expected 'enjoy middle class life' to be the normal outcome of having a job, which is the essence of privilege

That's very uncharitable and reductionist of you. Average people, no matter who they are, lead average, unfulfilled lives with unrealized dreams.

Not only are your facts wrong, as pointed out below, but reality is always more complex than that, and it's incredibly manipulative to present it like you did. Women go to university more than men, for example. You're absolutely not entitled to determined whether which of their frustrations are "justified" or not, and everybody is frustrated for a whole range of reasons all the time, not just economic reasons, but psychological, emotional, relationships, hobbies, and more. Why are white men suiciding so much? Is that a privilege?

You're not saying any of this out of empathy, as some in your cohort like to pretend. You're generalizing people by their race, essentializing them to their economic status, which dehumanizes both "privileged" and "unprivileged" completely. It's just a cheap ploy to frame yourself as righteous and "good" ("pointing it out"), and without question this fake social "science" is the biggest problem I have with the left.

DaUR

9년 전discuss

"Privilege" is an original-sin like concept concocted entirely by sheltered sociologists who don't understand how to do science. It was predictable that they would come up with such a Puritanical and moralizing concept.

On a larger note, the "privilege" concept appeals to people on the left with moralizer- and justice-oriented, self-righteous personalities, who are in other words the psychological equivalent to the zealous religious conservative right (who they would likely have belonged to, had they been born a few decades earlier, since personality traits always precede political ideology). It's not just rationally incorrect, but pretty cringeworthy.

comments