Hacker News Reader

jphwon Scientists avoid gender bias when they know they’re being tested for bias

Why is there this implicit assumption that there needs to be exactly 50% of each gender?

jphwon Do you want to live for 1k years?

Would I like time to seem to last longer than it does?

Undoubtedly yes. Life is too short.

Extending life arbitrarily to 1000 years would lead to some very strange outcomes. Presumably reproductive cycles would stay the same length. This would cause an uncontrollable population boom. It would also mean that you’d be living at the same time as your grand-grand-grand-[...]-grand-children. The family dynamic would become totally different, and I’m not sure that would be a good thing.

jphwon Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings (2015)

Can you cite some evidence on this? I haven’t heard about any right-wing terror cells in the US. The attackers appear to be “lone wolves”. They may have been radicalised to be right-wing online, but I haven’t seen any evidence of some organised group arranging or encouraging these attacks.

Either way, the two (radicalisation and contagion) aren’t mutually exclusive. In my opinion a large part of the motivation behind these shootings is the potential for fame and for the actions to be seen by the whole world - regardless of whether they’ve been radicalised or not.