It's pointless to try to separate things as political or non-political. You always have politics when you have deep disagreement, especially on values, among people who interact.
Keeping things non-political at least implicitly means you're fine with the status quo, and sometimes a community is in agreement about the status quo being fine enough to work inside it.
There is no shortcut by simply discouraging or removing "politics". If the community is divided, there is no way around the friction. You can either fork off separate communities, or work on smoothing out the differences.
The bad consequences are diffuse, abstract and distant (conspiracy-looking, tinfoil-like), while it's very easy to viscerally understand that "even if they just save one child, it's already worth it".
They should give precise numbers of how many such crimes are detected via such means or are expected to be detected per year, and how many of those are not possible to catch through regular investigative work. It just seems ridiculously out of proportion especially that with all this flurry around the topic, the criminals surely aren't using WhatsApp for this any more, but especially won't be once the law is adopted. Sure, many are likely stupid but if they are so stupid, won't they fall into other honeypots?
Why are chat apps the best leverage for uncovering this? They'd have to justify this with some sort of data and numbers.
Because later they can just come back and say, well unfortunately they are now all using other means, so now we need to break https,we need to ban e2e, we need to ban vpns, tor and foss operating systems etc etc.
I live in a country with free college. It still delays maturation and life stages and makes the youth unproductive in their prime years.
For some fields it's clearly important, you can't learn everything about bridge design and civil engineering on the job, the structure and the topics that build on each other in an order definitely benefit from a well designed multi-year curriculum.
But for many people it simply functions as a conscientiousness signal stamped by a prestigious institution, when the material is not connected to the job.
Now, sure leasurely education is nice. I like to learn about medieval history myself, or about geology from YouTube and maybe if I had infinite time I'd learn more about music and the wonderful world of fungi. I guess this is nice, and if people learn such leasurely subjects to their pleasure, it can be seen as a good thing, a better life. But the truth is that most people don't really derive pleasure from learning abstract things like this. They are forced to do this because this is the way to get a job. It's a multi year initiation rite.
It's a bit phosophical though. If you had a huge cohort of smart and capable people on the job market who didn't go to college, the job market would adjust its requirements. Currently the filter regarding a degree gives high enough signal,and it's generally considered legally acceptable, while other types of filters are more legally risky.
Everything is connected to everything else. Things respond to changes in other things.
Of course as an individual the actionable recommendation is a different thing than diagnosing the overall societal scale usefulness of pushing so many people though college.
Analogy: is binding your daughter's foot good for her future prospects? Under a certain cultural context it was "good" for the marriage prospects. But the causation goes through a social-cultural consideration, that can shift and still "work" well. So whether the modern world could drop the college ritual or not is a question that's still up for debate even if the individual advice remains "go to college / bind the feet".
I think the negativity is due to the vibes and framing of the "spa" for rich people to hang out and do some low-key "health optimization", it ties to Silicon Valley longevity stuff, pattern matches with the vibe of cryogenics and other quantified self stuff etc, instead of a vibe of making something that broadly improves the health of the masses and lower classes.
You'd need a comparison group who are just as intelligent and conscientious and equally rich as the college graduating population for comparison. They would likely find ways to demonstrate their value in other ways if forced not to attend college.
PhD experiences vary much much more than bachelor's and master's programs that cover a fairly standard set of topics worldwide. PhD depends a lot on your specific topic, the specific supervisor, their other time commitments, their funding situation, how similar the other PhD students' topics are to yours, how hot the topic is or how the hotness changes over your PhD duration, how much teaching you have to do, how hands off the supervisor is (it is extremely common to have extremely disengaged supervisors, even famous ones, likely engagement and fame are anticorrelated), the expected publication venue tiers etc.
In most of Europe, the PhD contains no formal training. It's just what you informally pick up while working with other PhD students, if you do collaborations (depends on whether the supervisor likes that), or from postdocs (if there are postdocs), or from your rare meetings with the supervisor (which are often about updating the supervisor on new developments, not getting much actionable insight from them), but many many are simply left to their own devices and just do stuff and cope with the inevitable rejections, etc. At other places the supervisor organizes things like retreats, internal poster sessions, lots of internal presentations, discussions among the group etc. While in other places there is none of that, in some places many PhD students simply work from home and don't even meet much.
The winning strategy for prolific professors is to get a good early-career reputation, then hire really smart and conscientious applicants (proven through already published papers) and let them carry out the research. It's nothing about training them in any practical way. There are some who do that but it doesn't scale. You have to hire 20 PhD students and they will deliver enough papers for you to preserve your status and be able to hire the smartest applicants again and again.
But again, there's huge variation. Even at good universities.
Regarding "university isn't worth it, you can just learn by doing, none of this theory matters in practice", I've usually heard this from people who weren't able to pass the math courses (or even the programming courses), so it seemed more like sour grapes.
I have to admit though that they were right, in that they were indeed able to make a career at some multinational companies even after barely getting through a bachelor's with bad grades and with many more years needed than the normal time.
Real mass-scale software jobs are indeed significantly easier than the math courses in CS university programs. At least in a cognitive capability sense. There can still be many other kinds of challenges that are more about social skills which are not much needed for passing college courses but are quite important in jobs.
Do you exist in reality? Or just in a virtual world made up of sensory signals? Do you have access to the Ding an sich any more than a (multimodal) LLM?
The classic paper format is just ergonomically what many of us are good at handling effectively as readers. For example in ML typically they all have an abstract, a teaser figure with a caption, Fig. 2 with a method overview/architecture (boxes and arrows). An intro starting with the motivation and the problem with prior work, their key idea, their experimental evidence, then a dense restatement of the contributions as bullet points. Then related work overview, then the method description in detail, then the experiments, dataset descriptions, protocols, metrics, then the results and their interpretations, then the conclusion, i.e. what they conclude from the results.
Its fairly rigid and newcomers often complain that it's too repetitive but if you read such papers for years, you learn to very quickly navigate such a paper that adheres to these conventions and you quickly see if it's something you care about right now or not. Blog posts don't have the same formal structure and it makes the quick skimming and assessment much harder.
Have you personally reviewed for big conferences or submitted and received reviews? It's a very noisy process that does toss out the lowest effort clueless stuff, but doesn't discriminate all that well between "meh" and "interesting", junior reviewers (the bulk) want proof of blood, sweat and tears. They want novel model modules and algo tweaks and complain about novelty that it's just A plus B, missing the point... They surely don't catch wrong results or incorrect claims because the catastrophic problems that invalidate papers are often in the implementation, not the nice math equations that motivate it.
In other words, Arxiv is what you use when you want to inform yourself on new research, conferences are for furthering your career by getting closer to your PhD graduation, expand your CV etc. And then to network and mingle with researchers in person and try to get hired.
Who shows them in "bad light"? Sane people see the condition itself in "bad light" not the people affected, who deserve compassion, help, accommodations etc.
Twisting things around to make people seem bigoted for saying that disability is bad (not that disabled people are bad) is just evil.
It has to be turned around 180 and we have to point out that this push is moral corruption and evil. Even if it comes in part from deaf people it is evil. It doesn't matter what mental acrobatics is developed around this, to wish for other people to become disabled is evil and morally outrageous.
It's the same with the "obesity is actually not unhealthy" crowd, all part of the same ideological matrix.
But then the same enlightened crowd turns around and pushes to legalize euthanasia for depressed people in their 20s...
I admire the naive optimism of someone who'd expect otherwise but why would you? If you want to pursue such a thing, get a lawyer because you're now legal enemies with the school leadership and this should be obvious the moment you start thinking getting yourself involved in such an affair.
Keeping things non-political at least implicitly means you're fine with the status quo, and sometimes a community is in agreement about the status quo being fine enough to work inside it.
There is no shortcut by simply discouraging or removing "politics". If the community is divided, there is no way around the friction. You can either fork off separate communities, or work on smoothing out the differences.