I watched Angela Collier, an astrophysicist, on YT the other day. I'll paraphrase an off-hand remark she made:
This is a really cool technology, but then you think how big companies are going to ruin it for profit, as they do with everything. It's hard to get excited about technology these days.
I think this is the root of problem. If you want to make technology cool again, you need to cut out the gold rush that's ruining everything. Almost tautologically, the motivation for a society to do things must be something else than "make more money".
I‘ll probably get downvoted for this, but big companies do not ruin everything for profit. Google Calendar, for example, is a simple tool which is very well implemented on various systems and it just works. And if you want more privacy, then you can go to Proton Calendar.
Also a typical argument is made that more should be done against anti-competitive behaviour. The problem is that there is no better alternative. If you regulate competition too much then people will not spend their time and/or money on moonshot ideas anymore. Why take a massive amount of risk if you aren’t allowed to reap the rewards? This is what happened in the Soviet Union and nowadays partially in China. Innovation stalls and all you can do is copy. Russia, for example, tried to make chips by copying the American designs, but without understanding the fundamentals. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work.
So complete regulation for anti-competitive behaviour doesn’t work. Then governments should probably just regulate a little bit? This is precisely what the US is doing. Yes, sometimes corporations push it too far and consumers are negatively affected. However, the alternative is less innovation which will also negatively affect customers.
For the counterargument that technology doesn’t make things better. (Even this is nowadays a common argument.) Compare living today with living in the 1980s. Transportation, education, medical aid, and entertainment are in general much better. Yes, there are some negative sides, but I wouldn’t want to be born 40 years earlier. Having to write letters to your family when they are overseas. No YouTube. Internet measured in kB/s. Sending patches via email on repositories without CI/CD. No thanks.
While the latter part of your statement is reasonable, it is also only opinion. Many people would prefer a less technically advanced society. This forum, for instance, is about as simple as it gets and that is to it's credit.
The initial point misses a fairly significant consideration though. A huge number of advancements are publicly funded. That public funding turns into private profit. People largely unaware of that fact, recently were made aware with the massive vaccine development spending that led to record shattering profits for pharma companies. To cite just one prominent example in the last few years.
Science was never meant to be a political tool where you can bludgeon those who dont agree with you as being unscientific. The more you use it as a weapon the more people will start resenting it for being used on them.
Still as people moved from religion to ideologies like communism and nazism as their new God, now they abandoned those and moved to science as the single spring of truth and morality. For most laypeople science is now a religion that must be "trusted" instead of a tool fundamentally based on falsification.It is not a tool for establishing principles of morality and conduct.
If you think you can trust the "science" then you are fundamentally unscientific, science is based on finding counterexamples not on trusting.
They’ve moved past science even. There’s a really good YouTube video of Richard Dawkins talking about what became of the atheist movement of the 2000s. Basically, they abandoned science in favor of “social justice.”
Science is a tool. I'm sure most people would have a positive view of science if it was performed by people or institutions they trust, for goals that they hold.
Sadly, due to some scientists no longer including ethics in their research, by fudging data to keep their funding, siding with corporate interests, and showing their elitism by treating their word for gospel as if they're infallible.
Covid is a very big part of the answer to this question. Unfortunately on HN covid is a heavily moderated topic and only one opinion is allowed.
So I'd like to tell you from my point of view, but my posts were removed for being pro science. On HN. So since this is turning into reddit.. where have all the techies gone?
Science allowed itself to be politicized. On the one hand, we are told to trust the science, but on the other hand, we are told to believe things that are absolutely contradictory to science, and common sense. It's no wonder people have lost faith.
If you want to talk about politics... In two-party system anything that does not align with chosen party is wrong. And one must defend the party at all cost, otherwise other would win.
Scientists, like everyone are not without errors. But there is active anti-science push in some media. There are several reasons for that. For example topic of climate change is in contrast with profits of some companies. Another example are vaccines. Exploiting believes and fears that can not be proven is easy way to obtain support.
When everyone agreed that there was only two biological sexes, and the two were immutable. When vaccines were accepted as a good thing by the vast majority of the public. Those are the two most hotly contested scientific issues in recent memory
>> "When everyone agreed that there was only two biological sexes, and the two were immutable."
I had people like Galileo and Darwin in mind. So no, politics in science is not new. And no, there has never been universal agreement on...that. We'll call it a "statement" to not run afoul of the guidelines. You would have to restrict your view to a fantastically thin and non-contiguous slice of geography, history, and ideology to consider it true, and it would be absurd to take someone who does that seriously.
You are politicizing science. Mind your glass house.
I asked when. You pointed at some vague notion of an era that never existed.
>> "There are only two biological sexes, feel free to fact check."
There's the various forms of intersex if we just limit it to humans and modern concepts of sex. Branch out a little to the history leading up to that modern concept and things get wild.
Notions of immutable binary sex and gender themselves are political in their construction. It papered over an inconvenient truth for people whose worldview depended on neat, simple little boves.
>> "The story to be gleaned from reading Gill-Peterson can be put this way. Money, with his colleagues, largely rolled 1950’s norms over scientific data so as to defend against what that data showed. Without enough interest, in the deepest sense, to listen to children or even inform them about their treatment, Money embraced changeability with one hand while grasping at fixity with the other."
>> "[...] There’s your circle. Society, ignorant of medical research, makes a stigma out of something our bodies do quite naturally: not conform to a sexual binary. Thus, society’s enforced binary corrects a problem of its own making. And medicine complies, against its own research. Quite unlike later feminist notions — that gender is dynamic, changing, changeable, and capable of undermining social norms and their stigmatizing ways — Money’s 'gender' argued for something much more fixed and stigmatizing, all while purporting to sidestep stigma."
Then there's ZW, XO, ZO, etc. And of course numerous animals change sex over their lives or in response to environmental conditions.
So a XY person with androgen insensitivity syndrome is a man, even though they completely lack all male features (except a pair of testes hidden inside the lower abdomen) and have breasts and, in some cases, a uterus? And such a person can live their entire life as an (infertile) woman, never knowing about their genetic abnormality, they are a man?
And then we have X, XXX, XXY, XYY, XXXX, and XXYY people walking around, living and breathing, some of them fertile and presenting no recognizable signs.
It's crazy to me that someone would use knowledge of genetics to argue that there are only two "biological" sexes and nothing else exists. Biology is messy and full of edge cases that defy easy and clear definitions. To take a convenient rule of thumb (XX <=> female, XY <=> male) and declare it a universal rule is either ignorance or motivated reasoning.
After covid my trust in future of humanity has plummeted. It feels like every time I see people they're talking about "science" where they've actually thrown the science part out and are having a lot of feelings how things are. Apparently everything is impossible to know, even all the things that are extremely well studied and really simple, and you can replace all the modern science by reading some tweets, listening to bro science podcasts and feeling them out, and always ending up the result you were looking for anyways. It's hard to understand how people's understanding of complex subjects can be on so ridiculous level but still be thinking they know everything they need to know. Maybe my view is biased but it's always the same story everywhere I go, though I've stopped going out as I find it so frustrating and depressing. I even meet people who have been "studying science" for years but don't really know how scientific method works and obviously don't even know what scientific paper looks like.
Sadly, disinformation is here to stay I think. And AI generated crap will probably worsen this rather than help.
But I'm fairly confident that Darwin's "survival of the fittest" still applies.
Where "fittest" means those (groups of) people which are better informed than their science-denying peers. And as a result, better equipped to deal with the many challenges of life.
Here on HN, it shouldn't need explaining what effect even small differences in "fitness" can have over a # of generations.
Ok, I accept that. The problem was the doubling down by authorities of that choice as knowledge about the virus and its transmission increased. So at a certain point most people realized it was BS but authorities (both governmental and medical) were reluctant to admit that it was counter intuitive.
My opinion on extended lockdowns or anything else Covid-related really doesn't have much to do with my opinion that when forming strong opinions on complex subjects, especially ones that differ from consensus of experts, you should have good understanding of the basics of the subject as well as what are the experts basing their opinions on and why. Especially in science where the whole basis of the whole thing is evaluating how well your model performs predicting real world, throwing that all out and feeling things out really isn't as great method as many people seem to think.
Doesn't really mean they should proudly talk about scientific subjects like they really know their stuff when they mostly don't know the things you'd learn from first chapters of your first science book, does it?
It's not like this is only related to Covid. You can see people "doing their own research" on climate change as well, without knowing the basics of science, physics, systems science or actual climate science, but they've watched a podcast or read a blog. Covid just made this bro science stuff so mainstream that it's hard to have a beer in a bar without hearing about it.
Letting in whatever scientists spew from their mouth in uncritically seems like a very bad idea. It's very naive because scientists have political, economic, social etc biases that might be counter to yours, and as we've seen clearly during the last couple of years, they have no issue with talking about their biased ideas as if they are scientific truth. To such an extent that scientific truth, trust the science, etc etc have become jokes.
I adore how the side defending public policy for the last 3 years during covid has tried to pretend we didn’t hear or see the things that the “scientists” told us.
Face it, the established scientific organizations were blatantly wrong so many times in the last three years, anyone who actually paid attention has become permanent jaded, and no amount of damage control is going to repair the trust that has been broken anytime soon.
Literally 0 of that is true. And this is how it spreads. I bet you've read this a thousand times and thought to yourself you don't have to check if any of it is true, since so many people cannot be wrong.
I've got bad news for you then: The majority people on this planet believe in an afterlife with Allah. You better start preparing.
Or did you find that one doctor that out of frustration said "yes" to the question if the vaccine would 100% protect against an infection? Now you found proof that the vaccine doesn't 100% protect against infection and that makes you smarter than a doctor, in the field of medicine no less? All the other doctors that were telling you the truth, you chose to ignore. All of them said you should vaccinate and follow quarantine. I bet you broke a low of quarantine procedures to crave this disinformation. Luckily for you there's plenty available - you're even creating some yourself.
We ban accounts that post this abusively, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You forgot the one just recently, where I called a person insane for stating the US is in a good position to win a nuclear exchange with Russia.
I do not come to this site to have an open and fair debate with idiots. It is your job to have enough common sense and general education to tell whether something is worth debating over.
For example I feel a topic that is heavily under-debated is abortion. Maybe we should have a fair and balanced debate whether it's right to force women to carry out our children and on how easy we want to make it for people to kill babies? (this whole paragraph is an attempt at irony, I feel the need to point this out)
I understand you enforcing US exceptionalism to the extreme and removing any critique on it. But on the other side you're encouraging a debate on vaccine effectiveness as if it's apparently ambiguous.
The consequences of what you are doing, especially on a site that is supposed to be full of point dexters, are making this so immoral, it sometimes simply takes extra words to express it.
This is the sort of high-indignation rhetoric that just doesn't work here. We want curious conversation here. Curiosity withers (fries, actually) under this sort of heat and pressure.
You're making an awful lot of assumptions about me. I understand your point but strongly disagree. I was about to reiterate my point with a different example, but I suspect you already getting me, as I see no discussion on gender identity theories on HN for this very reason.
How about we discuss the currently trending Bin Laden letter? Also off limits. Not that I'd be interested. Still curious censorship.
I'm sorry you feel vaccine effectiveness is debate worthy. What is debate worthy are the falsified US vaccine effectiveness trials, shown as such by comparison to the EU and UN parallel studies. I never had any illusions I would be allowed discussing that.
High-indignation you say? An american philosopher once said "anger is a gift".
Edit: Thinking about it, I would give my left arm to get the number of flat earthers with an active HN account and how that number changes historically with ever tightening censorship on Covid, Ukraine, various US wars, now Palestine.
I'm talking about what you posted in your comments. That's the only thing we can know about, and also the only thing we care about. If you want to keep posting here, we need you to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.htmland stick to the rules from now on.
HN isn't an anything-goes site—we're trying to have a particular kind of forum here. You can call that censorship if you like, or moderation, curation, etc.—people use those words in different ways. The important thing is that we're playing one kind of game and not other. Just as chess is not football, football is not boxing, etc., HN is not for the political battle game. This is not a judgment and we don't care about your views. It's just not the place for that type of commenting. We don't have a choice about this, because if we allowed that type of commenting, it would soon dominate the site, and then the forum would no longer exist for its intended purpose.
Sounds reasonable the way you put it and I both understand and agree with it. The reason I went off topic is I saw an unrestricted debate on an off-topic subject and jumped in.
I have read the rules thoroughly when I made my account.
As my main focus of interest in propaganda and censorship in tech I would like a clear answer from you I can refer to in the future, whether I am allowed discussing this topic on this platform?
"propaganda and censorship in tech" again for clarity.
For HN purposes it's not a question of the topic, it's a question of the spirit in which you're discussing it, or (if you like) the place you're coming from. What we want is curious conversation. That's the intended spirit.
'Propaganda' and 'censorship' are hard to discuss from a curious place because people mostly use those words as weapons to fight against something they consider bad. If you're posting from a place of fighting badness, it's hard to get into the spirit of curiosity, which is lighter and more playful.
Does that make sense? It's not a question of these things being "offtopic", "banned", or "not allowed". It's a question of whether it's possible to discuss them in a certain way. People sometimes think this is about "tone", but that's much too superficial. It has more to do with the state one is in when they're posting—I would almost say their physiological state, but that's maybe getting a bit strange.
> a fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests
This is an oxymoron. A scientist who is purportedly acting in the public's best interests is not a scientist—cannot be a scientist. A scientist must follow the evidence wherever it leads, even if that means contradicting their own policy preferences.
I don't think there is a contradiction here like you suggest. Scientists can work towards an explicit goal, e.g. try to find a clean source of energy, which is explicitly in the public's interest, and still follow the evidence wherever it may lead.
Many of those "progressive" academics put politics above truth and support curbing free speech if it's "harmful", acadamics who stray from the orthodoxy are silenced and lose their jobs. The fact that sociology, anthropology (especially things like Critical Social Justice Theory, Critical Race Theory) are considered to be scientific [1] and that studies that go counter to any common sense are spread by the media as fact add to that.
Any reasonable person can see that many academics in the humanities have the goal of bringing about social change and not actually finding the truth and that muddies the waters, so it's not surprising that people start doubting science as a whole, including STEM.
> Many of those "progressive" academics put politics above truth.
Such a claim needs a citation. So here it is:
157 university [institutional review boards] provided reviews of 9 hypothetical proposals that were identical in their treatment of human Ss but differed in sociopolitical sensitivity and in level of ethical concerns (e.g., presence or absence of deception, debriefing). [..] Nonsensitive proposals that did not involve ethical problems were approved 95% of the time vs only 40–50% of the time for comparable sensitive ones. Content analysis of the narratives that accompanied decisions revealed that the primary reason for rejection of sensitive proposals was the potential political impact of the proposed findings (e.g., discrediting of affirmative action policies). [0]
As for the Wikipedia article on political views of American academics, it's amusing to see it include a section on loyalty oaths during McCarthyism [1], but nothing on the fact that diversity statements are, today, required for one-fifth of academic jobs in the US [2].
Edit: I should clarify how damning a result the 50% vs 95% approval rate really is. At first glance it seems like there would be half as many published studies with politically unfavorable results than there should be. But it's far worse, because the people on the review boards are a sample of the researchers. If half the time they will deny a valid study for political reasons, how likely are they to propose such a study?
In other words, they're like goalkeepers. They let the opponent's ball score half the time. But there is nearly nobody on the opposing team. They have a 50% fail rate at defending their goal, they don't have a relative 50% chance at scoring an own goal.
This should be qualified that trust is lost in academic paper-mills and “expert” policy advisor scientists—in other words, any scientist who attends cocktail parties—not in the fruits of science itself.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Shannon solved this problem at the dawn of telco age when everyone was broadcasting and noise exceeded signal, by giving us error correcting codes, and clear limits above which the system turned useless etc.
We need something similar today or the thousands of orchestras playing different tunes will never sync or get coherent. HN front page is a great example of pure randomness. You can't produce focus and trust using such systems. Just endless distraction and confusion.
I'm not sure how that would translate into the real world.
For example, climate scientists are mostly united about anthropogenic climate change. But there is a huge dissenting crowd of pseudo-scientists - "noise". They sound convincing because they use big words and fancy graphs, and people believe them. And they're very good at arguing, because they're driven by religious levels of irrationality and fear.
Somehow, it's become much easier to sound like a scientist. There are pseudo-universities, and pseudo-qualifications. A doctorate doesn't seem to carry much weight any more. These people weave politics into the scientific numbers, and twist issues away from the hard-core science. And let's not even mention the conspiracy theorists...
If you go far enough back on https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu you'll start to find people who were writing theses on religious topics (what would now be doctors of divinity?). Our universities actually developed from what we would now consider pseudo-universities, so the mechanism for getting science (from what we would now consider pseudo-science) has worked in the past.
For an example of one very interesting and relevant recent work in the field of religious topics that you decry, may I recommend Jason Josephson-Storm's excellent "the myth of disenchantment"? It starts with Marie Currie's frequent visit to Medium Séances, continues onto the amazing statistics about belief in the American public, and gets better from there.
On those topics I prefer Barber & Barber, "When They Severed Earth from Sky".
If Josephson-Storm's thesis be true, at least given the existence proof that humanity has at least once decided that (a) the problem with studying inconsistent things is that it is too easy to make contradictory claims*, and therefore (b) we would be better off to study consistent things, allowing claims to be built upon claims, and hence at least ephemeral progress, we should expect the same process to remain possible after any future dark ages, whether it were to be carried out once more by humans, or —given our current level of destructive technology— perhaps even by remote descendants of the cockroaches.
* were I to write a DD, my topic would be: "The Rapture occurred on schedule, in 1000 AD", and so few (they who would have been There to witness the 2nd coming in 1007) were taken and so many were Left Behind, that we the remanent have no historical record.
This is a really cool technology, but then you think how big companies are going to ruin it for profit, as they do with everything. It's hard to get excited about technology these days.
I think this is the root of problem. If you want to make technology cool again, you need to cut out the gold rush that's ruining everything. Almost tautologically, the motivation for a society to do things must be something else than "make more money".