ANewFormation

I imagine if you polled all HN users vastly more would sympathise with this essay than not. But the YC flag (and voting) system still seems relatively straightforward, and consequently enables small groups of activists to have quite a significant capability to censor (or promote) topics/comments.

This is one reason I think community notes style algorithms is where we'll probably see pretty much all community voting/moderation head over time. It's just objectively better since it basically fixes this 'glitch' in straightforward systems.

Things are not stable between the mass extinctions - the mass extinction events are just extreme events of high relevance.

The thing is that Earth is constantly shifting in unpredictable ways. There was an interesting paper recently published working to reconstruct the temperature record of the last 500 million years. [1]

The paper concluded that global mean temperatures varied (over time) in a range from 11c to 36c. We're currently around 15. And temperature is but one of countless variables, most all of which are constantly changing.

This makes longterm equilibriums basically impossible because each time things change, it disrupts the existing balance and there will be new winners and new losers.

[1] - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705

The world is far bigger than most realize. Split completely equally there's enough room for more than 200,000 square feet per person. [1] Thats about 4 football fields of area for every single man, woman, and child alive today.

Factor in that some people enjoy living in urban areas, most won't leave in any case, and so on - and we're realistically talking about tens to hundreds of football fields per person. It's a big world out there.

[1] - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=land+area+of+earth+%2F...

The reason examples are generally those from the past it's because those from the present are, by definition, controversial and so it mostly would just derail the topic.

It just so happens that controversial views on one era frequently end up being seen as 'right and proper' in another, and vice versa.

Here's a 'safe one' unless you actually think about the implications of what it means I'm saying - forcing people, against their will, to kill (or be killed) is a fundamentally unacceptable violation of human dignity and human rights, that should never be tolerated under any circumstance.

That's probably safe to say, yet now apply it to certain situations and suddenly it becomes tabboo. Of course in the future it will probably be as plainly obviously correct as the notion that slavery is wrong.

You know in the 'bad guy countries' where political enemies are imprisoned by the political establishment? They also still generally hold trials for them, and convict them, while still offering them the rights and liberties afforded to any other defendant.

For instance in Russia, their Supreme Court actually threw out the first conviction of Navalny on embezzlement charges. The local case itself was a shit show, but what else would you call a conviction in a case based largely on the words of a serial liar of undoubtedly near zero character, who also had a financial and vindictive motivation to lie? And I'm not talking about Navalny's case there, but imagine I was. Your opinion should not change if you're being logically consistent.

This is the reason that these trials sent Trump's popularity surging, and very possibly being the reason he won the popular vote. It seems that not only were they shit shows, but because they are seen as being motivated by the person being charged, rather than by the acts alleged.

FWIW, this does not mean he's innocent. It just means that if he wasn't who he is, none of these cases, all launched just in time to try to interfere with the election, would have happened.

Or 3. They think the ban will eventually be overturned, and in the mean time some percent of those who want to use it will simply find work-arounds.

I don't think it's people just wanting to live in 'popular' neighborhoods, but safe neighborhoods. In the places you're describing you don't go out after dark, crime is common, and you also get to enjoy things like SUVs slowly cruising around at 1am with sound systems more fit for a stadium than a car.

In places, like most countries in Asia, where crime rates are vastly lower, you'll see far greater levels of socioeconomic mixing with defacto mansions near rather modest houses. The same is also true to some degree in rural areas in the states, where you'll see a trailer on a couple of acres with a truck husk or two in the front yard right beside a house that you'd be more inclined to call an 'estate.'

Yip the reality that the speed of light is fixed, but the 'speed' of time is variable is just so intuitively absurd.

This is the reason that I find things like the Fermi Paradox no more than mildly interesting.

It implicitly assumes we have a sound understanding of the fundamentals of the universe yet each revolutionary discovery we make soundly refutes that assumption.

And with the vast number of 'known unknowns' and an unknowable number of unknown unknowns, it seems ridiculous to imagine we're anywhere near the end of revolutionary discoveries.

Relativistic mass increases are an observed effect. So if you're on the relativistic starship (as these are usually called) your mass does not change as your relative velocity does.

But for an at rest observer, your ship's mass would approach infinity as its speed approaches the speed of light. This is the reason the ship would never be observed as hitting the speed of light.

In practical terms this is also why particle accelerators can't just infinitely accelerate the particles - their apparent mass exponentially increases and so too does the amount of energy required to continue to accelerate them.

I'm not one to nitpick tools to grok things but I think this could confuse more than help!

Because everything is relative to something else - and your example of the pendulum on a ship is suggestive of a "real" velocity, which does not exist.

I think a far easier scario to imagine is some ship flying away from Earth, and this ship has a magic button to release an impulse enough to give it a 10% of the speed of light boost in speed.

So what happens the tenth, or hundredth time that button is pushed? For those on the ship they would begin to observe (out the window) length contraction and of course time dilation - if they could somehow see Earth, everything would be in fast forward.

And vice versa, what happens on Earth? The ships observed speed would asymptotically approach the speed of light, but never reach it with its "apparent mass" approaching infinity, and thus the amount of velocity boost from each impulse approaching 0.

If our ship travels 20,000 light years in 40 years (from the perspective of those on the ship) then that would take a "real" 20,000 years from the perspective of those on Earth, who for many centuries would be able to track it moving away. If they somehow had a magic eye to look in the ship, things would seem to be going in extremely slow motion.

It's this nature of velocity (and dilation/etc) always and only being relative to something else that's really at the guts of all of this.

Most people it seems so know social media is bad for them. But people knowingly use many things that are bad for themselves.

I don't understand why you think there would have been 0 evidence. The countless respiratory illnesses associated with smoking are readily obvious by taking even a small sample of longterm smokers - a decent chunk of them will sound like smokers, be occasionally hacking up a lung, and so on.

People obviously knew smoking was unhealthy, but chose to do so anyhow. And companies naturally worked to trt to strengthen that cognitive dissonance. Same thing today, but it's slightly more subtle. For instance in a typical Coke ad you'll generally see people that look nothing like regular Coke drinkers - health, fitness, and good body weights abounds.

Ronaldo's Coke/water moment gave me a vast amount of respect for him - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=x2ZLS1V3iMw&pp=ygUbUm9uYWxkbyd... It's how the sort of people Coke gets to pose with their product actually feel about it.

Having been on both sides of the fence here, this is highly contrary to my experience. Large institutions are more than happy, in many cases, to bully anybody when it benefits them. But as soon as possible legal/media issues emerge they're going to suddenly be your best friend looking to make things right as quickly and cleanly as possible.

The ombudsman is definitely not a bad idea, but in most cases the mere hint of legal involvement would get this resolved without any legal involvement - just going on for a consultation doesn't mean one has to go to the next step, and in all probability you won't have to.

The statistics on early detection are very different than most think. Colonoscopies were one of the only tests with a statistically significant positive outcome, but even that has been challenged recently by multiple studies. [1]

I don't know the exact cause colonoscopies are not performing as thought, but for breast cancer it's quite interesting - basically treatment was improving at the exact same time early screening was being heavily promoted. And so years of survival continued to increase in a strongly proportional way to early screenings.

Naturally people assumed the correlation was causal, but it turns out screening mammograms are only marginally effective and that women are significantly more likely to receive unnecessary treatment (treating small tumors that would not have developed into large malignant tumors) than to receive beneficial treatment. [2]

If screening provides someone with piece of mind, then more power to them, but you're unlikely to meaningfully extend your life.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03228-z

[2] - https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1600249

Another example of this was chess with Bobby Fischer. Before Fischer there was minimal interest in chess on the US. But he caused a 3000%+ increase in membership of the US Chess Federation, to say nothing of casual players, and is largely responsible for the growth of chess in the US.

BBB accreditation is a big deal for most major companies, and it includes an obligation to resolve issues (exactly like this one) with their arbitration. I've used them 3 times, with 3 positive (and rapid) outcomes.

Next time you have a straightforward 'they're wrong' issue with a company where you're getting outsourced flowcharts for support, try out the bbb. They're great.

Small claims would obviously also work, but that's a major investment in time/bureaucrazy, while a bbb complaint can be completed online in 10 minutes with maybe one or two brief follow-ups, but usually all it is, is them getting in contact with a human who can do things - and for cases like this, they obviously try to make it right.

Btw, 'informal' agreements, even oral only, are legally binding, though it may (?) vary by state. For example an email is legally binding.

In a case like this,there's not even the need for small claims - if you just contacted the better business bureau, you'd have gotten reimbursed the shipping and then something reasonable on top as 'an apology for the misunderstanding.'

You're conflating global/local norms, which is the whole point. They are different. If I talk to a random American, I can safely assume they do not typically believe stoning people is a proper punishment for adultery, and even for the few Americans who do think that's reasonable, they also understand that's a fringe view.

So the curiosity is when people hold fringe views that they begin to think are normal.

There was a time when cocaine was not only legal but ubiquitous and being used in everything medical tonics, CocaCola, wines, employers were providing it to laborers, and so on endlessly.

But it's not like cocaine became worse over time - it still had all the harmful and addictive characteristics that cocaine is known for.

And so it was eventually banned because it was indeed 'abusing each generation.' The point I make is that something can gave beneficial and desirable characteristics, yet if the negatives are sufficiently large, then those positives are mostly irrelevant.

Another example of this is people putting code, intended to be shared, up on e.g. Github without a licence.

Many people seem to think that no licence = public domain, but it's still under strong copyright protection. This is the point of things like the Unlicense license.

Now that you mention it, I'm quite surprised that none of the typical fanatical IP lawsuiters had sued arguing (reasonably I think) that the output of the LLMs is strongly suggestive that they have been trained on copyrighted materials. Get the lawsuit to discovery, and those data centers become fair game.

Perhaps 'strongly suggestive' isn't enough.

This is also the biggest surprise for me, but I'd frame it as people largely just handwaving in the assumption of a (at scale) isotropic universe, even though that's highly questionable.

I think the practical issue is that that assumption let a lot more work get done than would have been possible otherwise. Of course if it turns out the universe is not isotropic then most all of that work is worth less than nothing. So publish or perish strikes again?

You literally quoted me saying as much in the other thread, then tried to mock it:

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[me, quoted by you] maintaining power without relatively widespread support is quite difficult

[you] Strange claim in a thread about the Korean peninsula.

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I'm sure you know that Yoon was/is extremely unpopular. This was the crux of the issue. If Yoon had an 80% approval, I believe he would be the dictator of South Korea today instead of impeached and with a warrant out for his arrest.

Now obviously you agree with that as well. So where did we disagree? Right, on what happens when an unpopular man tries to declare himself dictator.

It alluded rather strongly to the perception gap [1] in multiple parts of the paper. That gap is greatly exasperated with social media usage.

That interpretation also eliminates the 'norms change' nuance many have mentioned because it's about objectively incorrect assessments of the norms/values of society, as opposed to oft liminal standards.

[1] - https://perceptiongap.us

The topic is about how people within these subsets of society begin to believe the norms of their subset are shared by society at large, or in other words - by people outside their subset.

Fwiw his not being arrested is probably something of a technicality at this point. The government tried to serve an arrest warrant on him but it resulted in a stand of between large numbers of police and large numbers of his entourage, some military, and so on. In the end the police backed down and the drama is only escalating.

Here is the link - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42307147

I don't think my paraphrasing was inaccurate.

Another example would be ctrl+alt+del, ctrl+c, ctrl+v, etc, etc.

Like you said people learn what they're expected to learn.

It was in the midst of the 'Korean crisis' about 30 days ago. We were initially debating on what would happen.

My debate partner was under the might makes right pov, and felt that a person in power defacto declaring themselves dictator was sufficient to enact such, regardless of their popularity, particularly when reasonably enabled by law.

I was arguing that autocracy, in spite of lack of accountability, generally cannot sustain itself without relatively broad support.

Once it became clear that South Korea was in no mood to let an unpopular man declare himself dictator, we then debated his fate. I predicted death/imprisonment (as is practically a tradition in South Korean politics) while my debate partner was expecting him to get away scot-free, impeached at worst, arguing that no laws were broken in the President's attempt.

I think you're missing the biggest strengths/weaknesses of the two systems.

The biggest strength of autocracy is the ability to be more long-sighted. Democracy, taken to it's natural extremes, leads to a system where you have representatives spending most of their time in office planning for the next election, which is to say fund raising and focusing on things that'll pay-off before the next election cycle.

So you get an obsession on the very short-term stuff, and a tendency to trend towards oligarchy (though Plato would claim it trends to tyranny).

But the problem with autocracy (that monarchy only exasperates) is that a single bad leader can undo generations of achievements of skilled leaders. Aurelius was one of the wisest and most capable leaders to have lived. His only son was one of the worst.

Democracy's weakness is it's strength there - even the most inept (or perhaps senile) leader can't do that much and they'll be out of office in a few years anyhow.

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Also, as I seem to end up debating with you in these little geopol threads often enough - let us hold one another to our predictions. Told ya on South Korea. ;)