You have every reason to take pride in your work and how far you've come, but you're missing the point. "Slave labor" is of course an exaggeration (and an exaggeration that shouldn't be made lightly) but the point is you didn't have as much freedom in that job as your Western colleagues.
You had to work harder than the Swedes because the alternative was worse for you. It sounds like you're happy for your time at that company, but a lot of H1B workers find themselves in unpleasant work conditions that they don't have the same freedom to leave as their American counterparts. Their employers know they can subject them to a worse environment because they have more riding on it, whereas an American worker can simply leave and find a better job.
That's the point. It's more like indentured servitude than slavery in that regard anyway. The problem isn't that it doesn't make anyone's lives better in the end, the problem is that it's of concerning ethics on the part of the employer.
Yeah, people have been talking about the decreased Vitamin D levels in COVID patients and suggesting supplementation since almost the very beginning of the pandemic. Maybe they just don't want to draw attention away from the fact that vaccination and masking are still by far the best means of avoiding hospitalization.
I think they're saying to be mad about what data is collected. For example, be mad if they're storing your IP address and location and not be mad if they're just storing a counter of how many people visited their marketing page.
I appreciate that explanation. While awkward, I believe "efficiency zone" is a much clearer term to use, or at least it was worthwhile clarifying that that's what you meant.
While I understand what you're saying, I still don't think that ultimately matters when talking about what humans should or shouldn't be doing, what we're supposed to or not supposed to be doing, considering:
1. Human nature is not particularly efficient, and neither is evolution, at least on the surface. Peacocks' feathers are not particularly efficient features for them to develop. Yes, avoiding meat may seem harder than not avoiding meat, but the same could be said for following a religion, or organizing into a governing body, or adhering to some social norm, and yet humans have naturally done those for probably their entire existence. They do so because they at least perceive a benefit for them even if some might disagree on that benefit.
2. The human digestive system is not mono-faceted. It evolved to be multi-use and flexible. You are not using a hammer incorrectly by refraining from using the claw side because you've decided your problem can be solved perfectly fine with the hammer face. You are not using a TV incorrectly if you never visit channel 19 because you don't want to watch whatever is on channel 19.
I stand by my point. The fact that you can efficiently do something doesn't mean you're "supposed to" do that thing. It just gives you the option.
I don't think you're a creationist - this is just a very common distinction in thinking about evolution that results in all sorts of illogical fallacies.
This is my exact point: Your hands have no purpose. They evolved in a way that aided in survival. If someone is born mutated with their fingers fused together and then suddenly the entire earth floods and they find their solid hands help them swim better - were their hands evolved for the purpose of swimming? Were they designed? Is that human then "supposed to" swim?
We're finding microorganisms that can consume plastic. Does that mean they evolved for the purpose of eating plastic, a substance not typically found in nature?
In my worldview, no, they weren't. They can consume plastic, but that has no bearing on their purpose, and they aren't leaving part of their purpose unfulfilled if they don't eat plastic and instead eat other substances they evolved to be able to eat.
I think we're on the same page in believing that there's not an inherent morality to these behaviors. I'm not accusing of you to try to justify some morally evil act.
The comment you originally replied to said this:
> Weird how this is said without a shred of sympathy or concern for an intelligent, helpless creature
To which you replied:
> It's not weird at all. Biologically speaking, we are designed to eat meat.
> The weird thing is how we developed sympathy and concern for such things.
What I was responding to was the claim that because we evolved the capacity to eat meat, we should naturally be dispassionate to the killing of animals. What I'm saying is that since we evolved both the capacity for carnivory and sympathy, that our capacity for eating animals does not make our sympathy for animals at all unnatural.
It's not unnatural for us to want to kill animals for our survival. But it's also not unnatural for us to care about and feel sympathy towards animals. I feel that you've been using our capacity for meat-eating to deem vegetarianism, sympathy towards animals, etc. as against our nature.
With that, the point of my differentiating between the act of hunting and eating animals versus experimenting with them and their dead bodies is comparable to the difference in severity of humans fighting each other versus torturing each other. Humans clearly have the capacity for both, and yet one typically elicits a higher negative reaction in people than the other. Our ability to empathize with all sorts of pain falls along such an axis.
Edit:
To your last point, if people naturally develop an empathy towards animals so strong that it overrides their own sense of self-preservation, why is that unnatural? Is a human giving their life to save other humans unnatural? That's exactly why I keep repeating that there is no "design" - or if you'd prefer, "intent". There is no rule in nature that says species are supposed to prioritize the survival of their own, and so deviating from that nonexistent rule is not unnatural. If experimenting on animals is absolutely necessary to humanity's survival and humanity one day refuses, it will simply die out like millions of species before it. Going extinct isn't unnatural either.
I already said this in a different comment, but the difference is that we were not designed while a Swiss army knife was. Design implies intent— it implies that something was developed for a purpose, that it's supposed to be used in a certain way.
Whether or not I use the corkscrew on my Swiss army knife doesn't change the fact that someone built the corkscrew for the purpose of opening corked bottles.
The enzymes/features humans possess that enable us to consume meat were selected for because at some point in the history of our species they enabled our ancestors to survive while others without the related genes did not.
This can change at any point, for any species. If we are no longer in an environment where eating meat confers a significant survival advantage then the fact that we evolved to be able to eat meat has absolutely no bearing on whether or not we should.
Chasing an animal down, killing it, and eating it is in my opinion a significantly different activity than subjecting it to thirty likely-invasive procedures over the course of its life and then continuing to perform experiments on its dead body. Not saying it's more or less morally questionable, but significantly different.
Evolutionary biology is overused as justification for human behavior. We were not "designed" to eat meat because we were not designed. We evolved the capacity to eat meat just as we evolved a capacity for sympathy/empathy. Other animals have also been shown to "befriend"/care for/grieve over animals of different species, so our own capacity to sympathize for animals should be no surprise.
What do you mean "which personality I want to get"? You don't choose between five personalities, you find where you are on the scale of different personality traits that are present to some extent in everyone.
And yes, you can affect the outcome if you want. You can affect the results of any test if you want. I can make my IQ test look like I'm very stupid. I can cram for some certification exam and forget all the material the next day. The idea is that if people actually want an accurate reading then they will answer truthfully.
I feel like you're conflating two arguments that are unrelated. The fact that the results of psychometric tests can be misused and manipulated by bad actors is a separate issue to whether or not they are scientifically valid when administered properly and taken in good faith. You've admitting that various tests can provide useful --though not 100% accurate-- information. That's the whole point: To provide useful information, which can be further explored.
Psychologists creating and using a test to evaluate five personality traits does is not them saying that there are only five personality traits or that everyone with a given result is the same. The tests are basic, they are primitive in our understanding of how the mind and personalities work, and they have just been shown to be statistically valid enough to be useful in informing other things.
On that note, I completely agree that psych tests shouldn't be used to determine anything of importance outside of clinical settings. As I said, none of this is anything but a primitive understanding and shouldn't be used to determine career tracks or anything about our place in society. I hear about companies using the MBTI (which I personally loathe) to place people and I cringe so bad.
> If it were such a lousy deal for content creators, wouldn't they choose other work instead?
I don't disagree with you overall, but by the sheer number of people I know who hate their jobs yet feel like they can't leave, I can tell you it often doesn't work this way. Not saying you're doing this, but people have used "well if it's such a bad job then they should just find a different one" to justify everything from bad warehouse work conditions to underpaid fast food positions to sweat shops elsewhere. I think it's been well demonstrated that it is not always so simple for people to leave lousy jobs.
> We understand that some of you have used dislikes to help decide whether or not to watch a video – still, we believe this is the right thing to do for our platform
So basically, "We understand that this feature is useful in helping you determine where to spend your time and attention, but we're going to do it anyway because it benefits us."
> and to help create an inclusive and respectful environment where creators have the opportunity to succeed and feel safe to express themselves.
"Because we need our creators to get views and keep making content regardless of whether or not our users think it's worth watching."
I once had a coworker message me out of the blue asking if I'd be available to chat later that day. I said sure, thinking he'd follow up with the topic of the chat, but he just sent me a non-descriptive calendar invite. I didn't want to sound paranoid so I didn't ask (I should have), but in my head I was racking my brain for any possible reason he could want to talk to me one-on-one. I was pretty new to the company at the time so I was worried I'd done something wrong, but I couldn't think of anything so serious that he would need to schedule a chat about it and also he wasn't really my superior so that would have been really strange. I decided to just try not to worry about it.
In the end, it turned out he was leaving the company and wanted to tell his fellow engineers one by one. It was sweet and the secretiveness made sense in that context, but it did leave me a bit spooked.
Conversely, during a one-on-one my supervisor ended our small talk with, "So I have something a bit more serious that I want to talk about..." immediately followed by, "--it's nothing bad!" So luckily he was a bit better about not being spooky. Turned out they were promoting me.
Outrage is feedback. The people in that subreddit, the people in this HN thread, are all people who have had to apply for jobs and go through interviews, and thus are all potential customers. If your potential customers are outraged by the very idea of your business, that's feedback.
If you feel it's acceptable that having money/networks of people with money would give people an advantage in the world, the shock is understandable. However, others are vehemently opposed to the world working like this and anything that contributes to such a world, like this business idea.
Also:
1) unless you think it will be very common that people with money will take up sponsoring minorities for jobs, the fact that you personally would do it doesn't counteract the disadvantage of minorities in general through this system, and
2) if you want to pay to help people from underrepresented groups get jobs, there are already plenty of ways to do so, from sponsoring education to hiring interview coaches, and more.