homefree

> The issue at hand isn't perceived bias in universities, it's voting tendencies of people who have higher education.

Arguably they go hand in hand, take young people and immerse them in a political/ideological monoculture for four formative years and it's not surprising many come out saying the same things and voting the same way all of their professors did, there's a lack of viewpoint diversity. Most people are mimetic, exposure to the best arguments from an intellectually diverse curriculum would be great but that's not what universities (broadly) are today. It's very hard to think for yourself, even harder when immersed in a place where ideological conformity is rigidly enforced.

FWIW I thought your comment was in good faith, we just don't agree.

What is "education"? Is it degrees? There are a lot of problems with this. It's hardly a sign that someone "thinks critically".

A lot mediocre students I knew in school stayed on to do more school because they were not able to do something else. A lot of degrees and classes are frankly bullshit and this problem has gotten worse since the 60s - the details matter. Time wasted studying pseudo-intellectual nonsense doesn't imply someone has a better understanding of the world than someone else (often the opposite) - just that they wasted time getting indoctrinated in a particular culture (often subsidized by others if not the taxpayer).

What about the people doing interesting and useful things in society, building stuff, creating wealth - what these people think matters a lot more than someone that got a PHD on olfactory ethics. Not all education is equal.

Even then, the meta analysis matters less than the details of the actual underlying argument. Appeal to authority and experts is a poor substitute for rigorous good faith debate of the actual issues.

There's a reason William F. Buckley said he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people listed in the phone book than by the faculty members from Harvard.

"I am obliged to confess that I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University. Not, heaven knows, because I hold lightly the brainpower or knowledge or generosity or even the affability of the Harvard faculty: but because I greatly fear intellectual arrogance, and that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise."

So it's not that I dispute the data that there's a lefty bias in universities (there obviously is), I dispute what that actually means.

It's exactly what a partisan reddit midwit would say and they're overrepresented when it comes to Elon Musk hatred.

There used to be less of that on HN, my theory is younger accounts that are more politically extreme/lefty are now here as the younger generation graduates school and posts more on HN.

There's some historical irony too since communism came out of highly educated academic elites and is responsible for an enormous amount of death and value destruction. Ideological driven academics that think they're better than everyone are particularly good at crafting insane ideologies someone outside of that insular community would not, then leveraging institutional and cultural power to force it on everyone else. The woke and gender ideologies share similar origins, same for DEI.

It's a political and ideological monoculture and it's a dangerous mixture of incredibly confidently smug and wrong.

Worth picking up Peter Thiel's first book which goes into this in some detail (he wrote it pretty young, observing the early start of this when he was at Stanford). It's wildly prescient and was from the mid 90s iirc.

Oh please - it’s an honest assessment not a personal attack and it’s likely accurate. That you think otherwise says more about you than it does about me.

I prefer honest truth to polite fiction.

It’s better to attempt to see the world as it is than delude yourself with bullshit.

My guess of what the author of this blog post looks like is 15-19yrs old & male, probably aspie.

Also should probably be a little more careful with risking the CFAA, but they seem really young so I'm guessing that's the main explanation.

In SF non profits actively make the problems they’re attempting (in theory) to solve worse, while enriching themselves at (often gratuitous) cost to the tax payer.

I understand your argument, but in practice SF would benefit from these shutting down.

At a minimum they shouldn’t be tax payer funded. Even philanthropic non-profits are often funded by children (or spouses) via inherited wealth from the people that actually built things. This then funds actively harmful policy and orgs because the people throwing money around have no idea how to achieve what they want and there is a class of specialized NGO vultures that go after the money while accomplishing nothing.

This is anecdotal, but what I’ve seen of friends that work at these places is wild. People stealing money, extreme entitlement, stupid policy, enormous waste, no accountability. It’s bad.

+1 Europe (especially) and the UK largely don't matter - it's a battle between the US and China, the gap will only grow wider and faster than it already has (and it's already getting really noticeable).

I attribute it mostly to a cultural problem and I don't think they can fix their politics from the downward spiral they're on. It's why they have a number that rounds to zero of billion dollar software companies and why all their ambitious people do their best to get to the US.

This is sort of the problem with nonprofits and NGOs generally - they have bad incentives, are easily corrupted, and attract people that don't create any value.

It's the communist form of a company and shares similar failures. IMO we're better off just not having them for the most part.

FWIW I don’t think the same about autism and OCD (at least not to the same extent). There are some similar problems with the soft diagnosis, but there is more going on there imo.

They both do have problems with variableness (particularly autism), but it’s more distinct from the general public.

I enjoy cigars and notice the positive effect, my fear with the patches or Lucy/zyn is that it not being self limiting seems to lead to people having one in their lip literally every waking minute when they’re not eating.

The diagnosis criteria in that consensus is pretty weak imo and part of the subjectivity I’m talking about.

They claim there are observable differences, but none of these alone can be used for diagnosis.

> The diagnosis of ADHD has been criticized as being subjective because it is not based on a biological test. This criticism is unfounded. ADHD meets standard criteria for validity of a mental disorder established by Robins and Guze (Faraone, 2005; 1970). The disorder is considered valid because: 1) well-trained professionals in a variety of settings and cultures agree on its presence or absence using well-defined criteria and 2) the diagnosis is useful for predicting a) additional problems the patient may have (e.g., difficulties learning in school); b) future patient outcomes (e.g., risk for future drug abuse); c) response to treatment (e.g., medications and psychological treatments); and d) features that indicate a consistent set of causes for the disorder (e.g., findings from genetics or brain imaging)

I don’t find this very persuasive and it’s a problem in the field generally.

I’m willing to update, but a lot of “science” is bullshit.

My criticism is not that the criteria don’t apply or that people don’t think they do - but that most people reading it seem to describe what you’re saying.

It seems more like a horoscope to me - everyone can find themselves in the criteria. It’s an observable thing, I’m just not sure I buy its special distinction.

People also used to make the claim that the stimulant drugs had special effects (or even opposite effects) on those with ADHD vs. the non ADHD population which always seemed like bullshit to me, but I don’t see that claim being made here anymore.

Edit: after writing this comments others in the thread started making this claim

My hypothesis about this for a long time has been stimulants help everyone be more productive (with some tradeoffs) and ADHD is kind of a weakly differentiated diagnosis that could apply to most people.

Probably something like this was lost when people stopped smoking, obviously beneficial for health - but a huge amount of the public was taking stimulants regularly via nicotine until relatively recently.

I'd much rather talk to an AI than have this sort of human discourse.

It’s better than that because it includes the content - more akin to searching and putting the result you find in the comments as a guess.

The anti AI HN comments are the new anti Bitcoin - your replies are much worse than someone sharing the gpt output.

You’ve been here since 2007, you’re not dumb. Stating it’s “much easier” when it’s obviously not betrays something.

We likely agree that doing it without drugs is probably better, but it’s definitely harder and it’s not clear yet how much better it will even be.

I’ve successfully lost 70lbs (250->180) three times and gotten fit, but it’s a constant effort and psychic drain to maintain the lower weight. If the drug (which I haven’t taken yet) made it easy that’d be a relief. It’s much easier to just manage exercise.

I suspect people that don’t have as much difficulty just get a different amount of joy from eating. For me I felt I could relate to the way an alcoholic described trying to quit drinking, except it’s harder in a way because you have to eat.

My hypothesis is addiction is generally a secondary application of overeating. Getting pleasure from eating a surplus when you’re not hungry is adaptive (or at least was for most of human history).

In a lot of ways these other behaviors are similar, it wouldn’t shock me if it’s a shared underlying mechanism originally to encourage eating a calorie surplus.

Obviously it’s not much easier or the drug wouldn’t be so valuable.

People make such a moral crusade of this - the drug works, people will take it. Behavior modification works in theory and fails for most in practice. Even for those that can make it work usually don’t hold out indefinitely.

It’s like any other field, most suck and it requires effort to find the smart ones.

Cocomelon is particularly bad and weaponized intentionally against kid attention: https://www.readtrung.com/p/why-i-love-bluey-and-hate-cocome...

That's one criticism I've heard about it actually, but not sure how much it's actually true. Basically that people love Bluey because it appeals more to adults, but that may make it not as good as other shows for child development (which adults might find boring).

I don't know that I buy that though, I think the shows that claim they're for child development but are insufferable to adults would be better of just skipped entirely, probably those skills are better learned from real life play and interaction than tv.

Of course there's also the mad science of cocomelon and their 'distractatron' https://www.readtrung.com/p/why-i-love-bluey-and-hate-cocome... - nothing can be worse than that.

There won't be peace when one side has an explicit goal to kill all the Jews, the other side is Jews that don't want to be killed and neither is willing to compromise.

You can ignore that underlying moral framing, but it's the basis of the conflict and it's why Israel has a morally superior position.

The Palestinians have over and over again said they don't want two states, they want to destroy Israel and kill Jews - the idea they want two states only exists in the minds of western leftists, it's a failure to understand Islamic Jihad and the Muslim Brotherhood.

I generally don’t think your understanding of the settler issue is accurate, but I’m also not an expert on those details.

In general Jews living in west bank communities they created seems fine, I don’t think it’s acceptable for Palestinians to ban Jews. Arabs and Jews live in peace alongside each other as equals in Israel. I think Israel does police the violence on their own side.

That land is secured by Israel as the result of previous wars, it’s complicated. The result of losing a war you start can be losing sovereignty. 2005 Gaza withdrawal suggests giving up that control as a gesture for peace is a serious mistake.

With the aid, Israel has and continues to give tons of aid which Hamas steals to fund themselves. This is not a trivial problem to solve, GHF is an attempt. The press has since the start lied repeatedly about this. My personal view is it’s not clear to me that giving aid to the enemy is the responsibility of the people that were attacked, especially when your people are still held hostage. But that’s irrelevant because despite my view (and some others in the gov) they have given tons of aid.

The world generally is morally confused on this broadly and thinks because Hamas is weak, that must mean they’re good or it’s some sort of economic issue. They do not understand Islamic Jihad and the nature of this ideology. They look at it with a western lens and make a serious error.

The truth is those of us in the west are all living in Israel, just some of us haven’t realized it yet.

Hamas leaves traps in the buildings with explosives when they leave an area to kill Israelis. The IDF has to detonate these traps to make an area safe, this is the cause of most of the destruction. John Spencer talks about the details if you're genuinely curious.

Basically nothing portrayed by the main stream media / international press on this issue is accurately represented. Most of it is either wildly ignorant or actively hostile (or both).

The Free Press, Call Me Back (podcast), and Breaking Israeli History (podcast) do a good job. Also we will dance again and October 8 (films). I'd also recommend Douglas Murray's On Democracies and Death Cults to get some perspective if you're curious, generally people don't bother on online discussion forums on this topic because it's not productive, but for earnestly curious friends I make the case below. From my perspective, Jews outside of Israel have become more united because the nature of a lot of the western response after 10/7 ironically shows why Jews need a state and an army to protect themselves.

I’m all for high minded debate, but a lot of the anti-Israel protesting isn’t that, the people celebrating or excusing 10/7 on 10/8 before Israel responded, the guy that recently executed two young people leaving a jewish event in DC and then screamed “Free Palestine”, the guy that murdered an old woman at a hostage march in boulder, the “death, death to the IDF” shouted from the stage in Glastonbury to a cheering crowd, the “river to the sea” and “intifada” chants/harassing of jews on college campuses, the repeated negative press narrowly focused on Israel from BBC, Guardian, NYT, the ‘genocide’ claims and other false blood libels, people marching waving islamic republic of Iran and Hezbollah flags in NYC, smashing up jewish owned businesses, etc. - these people are not motivated by some idea of nuanced democratic values or a ‘two state solution’, they’re motivated by old Jewish hatred under a new name. Islamism blended with lefty socialism united in their support of “anti-zionism” i.e. the destruction of Israel.

Many of these media orgs have been hollowed out by an activist ideology that doesn’t understand the history it’s swimming in and doesn’t pursue truth as much as push a political agenda. What ‘genocide’ provides aid to the people they’re supposedly trying to kill? Hamas is driven by a theologically motivated Jihad against the Jews with explicit genocidal intent, The Islamic Republic of Iran (distinct from its people) wants to destroy Israel and then the west and uses terrorism for this purpose and may have used a nuke if not for recent events. It is necessary to use lethal force to defend against this kind of threat. Anyone that cares about a positive future for Palestinians should recognize there is no possibility of such a future while Hamas remains in power.

Europe has largely been protected by the US providing its security and deterrence after WWII. Israel is on the front lines and can’t ignore the reality on the ground, their survival depends on it. You can fight this earlier or wait until the cost is higher to fight it later. Other Arab countries understand these problems, it’s why the UAE has banned the Muslim brotherhood and other extremist organizations, it’s why Saudi is leaning closer towards normalization with Israel and both are allied against Iran. They understand the risks of Islamic terror because they have to deal with it - it forces an accurate understanding. Something Europe (and anti-Israel protestors in the west) don’t grasp, but given Europe’s poor policy on this issue they likely will continue to experience more of first hand.

What Hamas did is joyfully murder, rape, and torture a bunch of lefty kibbutzniks (the kind bringing gaza kids to Israeli hospitals) and music festival kids, took hostages that they’re still holding, while filming it, laughing about it and celebrating it. They have an explicitly genocidal charter interested in killing all the Jews. There is no compatibility between the west and those interested in Islamic Jihad. Every third house in gaza has weapons in it (often hidden in kids rooms), Hamas uses hospitals and other civilian areas to try to maximize civilian casualties despite Israel’s effort to minimize them. They also kill civilians that go against them and have been launching rockets into Israel for years.

That action requires a military response to achieve political goals: return the hostages and destroy hamas / remove them from power. That is unavoidable without civilian deaths (always a tragedy in war), but the fault for this lies squarely with Hamas for starting the war. Few wars have moral grounding as clear as the war started because of 10/7. On October 8th people in the west were celebrating the invasion and killing carried about by Hamas, some mixture of ignorance and useful idiots (primarily on the political left) along with explicitly pro-hamas support. This was popular in American universities and across Europe before Israel had even responded chanting things like “globalize the intifada”. This is, at best, total moral confusion.

Also notice the attention placed on this conflict, but conspicuously absent from others. Why aren’t students protesting Bashar al-Assad? Or the civilian deaths in the conflict in Yemen? Or in Sudan? Why only the one Jewish state that was brutally attacked by a terrorist group that’s still holding its citizens hostage? This isn’t just an issue with Hamas either, it’s more complicated - many Palestinian civilians participated in the kidnapping, looting, and violence on 10/7. They helped harbor hostages. They would have lynched the hostages being returned if Hamas wasn’t preventing that and they of course elected Hamas to power in the first place. The population itself is radicalized with a deep hatred of Jews.

Enormous amounts of foreign aid (hundreds of millions) has flowed into gaza of the last couple of decades. Enough to make the Hamas leaders billionaires whose families can live large in Qatar while supporting their investment of tunnels to support their terrorism. A lot of it is backed by Iran, but a lot of this aid is from western nations to organizations that worked directly with and supported Hamas (UNRWA). This money could have been used to build something after Israel’s "land for peace" withdrawal in 2005, instead it was used for terror. It’s more instructive to look at what motivates the groups today rather than litigate divergent historical narratives (i.e. Nakba was five Arab states attacking Israel and the ‘catastrophe’ was that they lost, the security checkpoints exist because of suicide bombing during the intifadas, etc.). If Hamas surrendered and returned the hostages it would end the fighting they started. If Israel laid down their weapons they’d all be killed. Palestinians have no interest in two states which they’ve repeatedly rejected, they’re interested in killing all the Jews, the destruction of Israel, and more broadly the destruction of the west (as Iran’s proxy). Meanwhile in Israel, Arabs and Jews live together peacefully as Israeli citizens.

Ideally it’d be possible to engage in war with perfect individual targeting and no civilian casualties. Israel does this as much as possible (Hezbollah pager attack was very narrowly targeted, targeted strikes on individuals in specific apartments, other civilian warning strategies), but it’s not perfect and civilian deaths are unavoidable, especially in dense urban conflict zones. The IDF has a better record on this than any other modern western army (including US when we took Mosul against ISIS). I see war as a means to achieve a specific political result when diplomacy is not possible (or after you’ve been attacked). In this case: remove Hamas from power and return the hostages. In the broader conflict: remove the threat from Hezbollah and Iran. I think it’s necessary to achieve these goals in order to achieve any lasting peace.

Some ideologies and enemies require total military defeat. If western civilization is not willing to do this despite its real costs, then power is ceded to enemies that don’t have the same moral concerns, or in this case, explicitly want to maximize civilian death and terror as they did on 10/7 and it'll just happen again. My view is Israel would like to live in peace with its neighbors if that’s a real option (and historically has tried many times), but it’s not. Israel's neighbors (driven by a particular theological view of Islam from the Muslim Brotherhood) are not interested in peaceful coexistence. Israel should not make concessions to an enemy still plotting to destroy them.

If we’re lucky an outcome of this conflict could be normalization with KSA / an extension of the Abraham accords and deeper partnership with other Arab countries in the region - maybe even a shift in some of the public’s ideology if people recognize that trying to destroy Israel/kill Jews leads to ruin (though this is hard with radicalization in the culture/schools, etc.) - it’s a generational project that will take time, but it’s not impossible. Currently, because the goals have not been achieved (Hamas still holds hostages, still wants to remain in power, still will not surrender) the war continues and sadly civilians continue to pay some of the cost. The allies (mostly US) fully administered Japan after WWII for 7 years, Japan lost their sovereignty during that time. An outcome of starting a war and losing it is you may lose your sovereignty and land. It’s possible to defeat evil ideologies, it happened in WWII with both Japan and Germany.

I think it’s very challenging to know what’s true given all the bad actors (UN, Hamas, Pallywood - they film fake videos to (effectively) manipulate western sentiment) and their repeated lying. I think that the GHF has weakened Hamas by removing their control over the aid which has threatened them, and lastly I’m personally not sure what responsibility there is to provide aid at all while hostages remain held in Gaza (this is a more controversial view) - that said, Israel has provided and continues to provide enormous amounts of civilian aid and works to move civilians outside of the areas of fighting despite this being a thankless task. War can be a moral act, the west exercising its power to defend its values against an evil ideology is an important and necessary thing.

Yeah I don’t disagree and do the same

It's one reason why founders matter so much and why founder led companies often have better outcomes.

Intel is in trouble, it's not clear how or if they'll be able to get out of the hole they're in. Their only saving grace is natsec concerns and even that may not be enough to save them. I was hoping Gelsinger would be able to do it, but it was too late.

In most cases with CCW if you were to actually need to use the weapon you would not have time to chamber a round. Even if you did have time (maybe you should run away?), doing so would draw attention to yourself (and might be fatal). The standard advice is to have one chambered or work to getting yourself comfortable with that over time.

If it was in the holster, most people don't teach that the muzzle direction rule applies (since in the holster it's supposed to be inert). A lot of carry methods have the muzzle pointing at things you would not want it pointing at when unholstered.