dlss

> (b) Pretty sure Thiel isn't going to shut up no matter what Sam Altman does.

The seeming dissonance here is interesting to me. Can you explain in more detail what outcome you're expecting will occur if Thiel is removed from YC, and how that will impact the election?

Re: group size being the primary cause... maybe?

There are plenty of non-split groups that are larger than the size the atheism community was before elevator gate, and most split groups (say, programmers divided by programming language) seem to coexist relatively peacefully.

To me, that suggests the size hypothesis is wrong. It'll need more variables if you'd like to explain the atheism community situation this without using elevatorgate (ie "a huge divisive political battle") as the primary cause.

Re: atheist headcount, this is why I referred to the "atheism community" rather than atheism generally. While I'm glad that atheism has grown, I find myself missing the conferences :/

Until the thousandth time you use this tactic, and the number of people shunned begins to outnumber the ones doing the shunning.

> when my grandchildren ask me in 40 years or so I want to be able to say "I did everything that's legal".

I'm sorry to hear this. I hope in time you can come to focus on the similarities you have to your fellow humans rather than what sounds like a myopic focus on purely ideological differences.

As I said in GGGP to excuse your actions:

> sometimes a person needs to make mistakes / destroy something beautiful in order to find the next level of understanding

Yes, I was the person who wrote that, and this is what I meant.

> as opposed to an outspoken atheist who said something stupid online and got publicly ridiculed for it.

... which then resulted in infighting over if it should be ridiculed, a mass exodus of the thought leaders, and general dwindling of the community. Seriously, Dawkins was shunned by major atheist conferences over his comments in my earlier link. Many atheists then shunned those conferences for shunning Dawkins. When's the last time you saw new material on athiesm in the news? Your answer is almost surely "before elevatorgate"

Right, I would call those moral truths rather than moral fashions.

The issue is that Trump's behavior hasn't been as clear cut as you're pretending it is (for example rather than actually jailing political opponents, he called for a special prosecutor and a jury trial). My fashion police comment was about the behavior in this thread relative to Trump's actual actions. For a hypothetical uber-Trump I'd be on the other side of this discussion.

See also http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-word...

> Option 1. They didn't lose market share across the board, and instead cherry picked non-representative markets for their 13 region hotel comparison.

(from higher up this comment chain)

It's fairly political, so even though a lot of it happened online you'll still have a hard time of getting a clear picture. "Elevator Gate" is the obvious starting search, http://www.conservapedia.com/Elevatorgate seems to be the most complete single page I can find as an introduction.

If you have a different solution than tossing out the heathens, I'm all ears. In Sam's blog post the solution he decides on is continuing dialogue. While this may be an imperfect solution, it seems to me a less imperfect solution than purging, as that generally results in communities being destroyed.

When I was younger I used to watch The Daily Show and laugh at how dumb the conservatives where -- they were trying to suppress rock and roll for fear of the devil's influence, etc. As I grew older I came to realize it wasn't conservatives generally who were the awful/dumb ones, it was a particular kind of person in a context where they felt they could dictate to others what was ethically right. Moral fashion police if you will.

I've lately seen more and more Moral Fashion Police on the democratic side of the isle, and I find it considerably more awful (it's closer to home). You might even say that I view these people as intolerant to the point that they threaten society.

However I wouldn't in a million years fire someone or yell at them, hate them, etc for being fashion police, even though I think they threaten society. Experience is the best teacher, and sometimes a person needs to make mistakes / destroy something beautiful in order to find the next level of understanding. Maybe for you that means destroying YC (though I hope you fail), and maybe for Trump voters that means (in a small way) destroying the US Government. I just wish you both wouldn't.

Right, I think GP was replying to your earlier statement that:

> Not many people are willing to part with $1.25M for someone they don't fanatically support.

Rather than trying to minimize the 1.25M

> This is not a principle, let alone a fundamental one, in any democracy or any other kind of society.

While this is literally true, I feel the need to point out that increased restrictions on speech, and increased repercussions for speech seem to correlate strongly with non-democracies.

Lol, yes, this is fair. The hotel market doubling in revenue would be headline news at the WSJ, etc though.

We can actually get a rough sense of what's happened to the market as a whole by looking at the stock prices and cashflows of the major hotel chains. Looks like Mariott has lost a bit of value in the last year[1], same for Hilton[2]. La Quinta holdings went way down[3]. Please check the hotel chain of your choice if you feel I cherry picked these examples (Motel 6 and Best Western were my first choices, but are privately held).

Which is to say it doesn't appear that the market doubled in size.

[1] https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

[2] https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

[3] https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

* Can hostfully.com identify suspicious data analysis? (no.)

* If given the chance, will Airbnb present misleading data for self-serving ends? (yes.)

* Will an already self-serving study be given an even more self-serving spin when presented by a sympathetic reporter? (yes.)

To understand what I'm talking about, consider the source cited by OP (http://hotelnewsnow.com/Articles/77191/New-Airbnb-data-sheds...). Going by that data we might be tempted to say that Airbnb is being out-competed by the hotel industry.

However, stagnant growth on the part of AirBnb seems like it would have been widely reported. And yet it hasn't. Googling we find a seemingly contradictory datapoint: Airbnb's revenue is up 89% this year (http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2016/09/01/airb...).

How can Airbnb's revenue have almost doubled while still losing market share across the board?

Option 1. They didn't lose market share across the board, and instead cherry picked non-representative markets for their 13 region hotel comparison.

Option 2. They lost large numbers of low-margin bookings across the board, while gaining (taking market share from hotels) higher margin bookings. [Note this would contradict OP's article.]

In both cases, Airbnb's data is misleading.

Yes, right. They used it as a way of naming the thing they were seeing, not using it like someone familiar with it.

> What about the additional part about a shadowy cabal that you ignored?

I just rechecked the article. What shadowy cabal part?

> If I offer a reward for proof that aliens abducted Elvis, you don't consider that lending credence to a conspiracy theory?

I think a reward initially signals interest in the area, and then longer term acts as a disproof of the theory. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranormal_... for a famous example of this effect.

> Why is Wikileaks in the business of "fact checking a conspiracy theory"? I thought they were about, you know, leaks.

Leaks of significance are of course worth more. Soliciting leaks is absolutely something they do (and should do).

> No it doesn't. It just requires that if someone else figures out the actual cause they deny it. Zero cost.

Well, except that denying hard evidence doesn't usually work (#include those who have been leak subjects). Also people all over the web are having conversations like this one, so the situation degenerating into a head-said/she-said situation would have a cost. Which as I pointed out before was an obvious outcome of their tweet.

Happy travels :)

That they'd never heard of the key? (I hadn't, as the slate reporter seemed to anticipate with their "might be a little hard to follow" comment)

> http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/08/09/wikileaks_...

Offering a reward is not the same as "[posting] wild conspiracy theories," which is what you claimed they did. Posting a wild conspiracy theory in this case would be openly accusing a specific person or group of people of murder with no evidence.

I would call this "wanting to fact check a conspiracy theory," which I view as a good thing generally, and especially good in the case of wikileaks.

> Intentionally misleading/lying isn't being incompetent. They could know or think that it was an accident, but intentionally spin it as foul play to reinforce the narrative they've been spinning.

They could, but this would require them to assume no one would figure out the actual cause -- aka a lot of cost with no benefit. Seems surprisingly stupid/pointless/shortsighted.

I was surprised by your claim that wikileaks posted something antisemitic, so I googled for it.

Is http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/07/25/what_wikil... what you're talking about? I don't agree that's antisemetic in any honest sense of that word (ie "hostility, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews"). Like, the article's explanation of why it's anti-semitic starts off with "this might be a little hard to follow" -- not something you'd expect in an article throwing around serious accusations.

Hanlon's razor is the obvious objection, and goes unaddressed. --reputation[Slate];

> and wild conspiracy theories

Interesting, any you'd care to link?

> You're also assuming that whoever posts to the Wikileaks twitter account doesn't want people to believe the most sympathetic, conspiratorial possibility.

I'm merely assuming they aren't going to be obviously incompetent? Like, maybe the phrasing will be self-serving... but look at GP... he's seriously suggesting that they may have mistaken a gardening accident for a state actor...

Which seems like a rather large issue with your theory.

Agreed. (Though FWIW $1.25M is the amount he invested)

Here's the current state of things with references as to why: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite... although I have some emotional disagreement with those policies at times, I can't say I'm well read enough on the topic to really have a strong disagreement personally.

As near as I can tell, the political process converts ideas from logical propositions into group signaling devices. Once a idea becomes a signal, any question of its truth or falsehood is commonly ignored for several human generations.

Keeping ideas that have already become signals quarantined, and minimizing overlap between groups in a context where they are likely to "go tribal" and convert more ideas into signals seems vitally important to me. That online discourse seems to have shifted towards a war of tribes rather than a crowd of individuals is (to me) a tragedy of the highest order.

> This is the nationalist mindset. "Create more walls. Diversity is difficult."

I do not think this course of action appeals to me because of a "nationalist mindset," but rather from a desire to see less topics become part of such mindsets. I guess I'd agree with "Create more walls. Partisanship is difficult." (though on the condition that the walls were around already partisan topics, and not in general)

> We all know what happens when we stop reaching across the divide. We go into our holes, there is miscommunication, and small disagreements turn into wars.

This is a shocking/wrong statement to me. We see tribal wars precisely when there is political outreach, not when there is focus on other things.

Consider HackerNews. Lately it has been taken over by heated discussions centered around political topics, in my model mostly because of the increased outreach due to this being an election year. Once the election passes, I hope, we will go back to discussing technical topics in blissful/ignorant harmony.

> Focusing on the areas where we disagree widens the chasm. We can bridge it by looking for common goals.

Yes exactly, hence the importance of keeping walls around partisan topics...

According to the literature it's relatively easy for study participants when given a couple tries to get it "right": http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2004-17684-002

Worth a read IMO: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html