Upvoting and downvoting especially incentivizes echo chambers. I take it you've never had people follow you around threads and downvote everything you posted? Happens bizarrely often.
HN disappoints me more than the average Reddit or Twitter thread because some of the highs are really high here, but when you see brilliant people arguing about stuff they were arguing about six years ago, or adults that are so ideological that they aren't even rational, that happens all the time on HN and I feel in a way it is worse because we should know better.
I think HN, as a place for nerds, largely succeeds, but it also has a very very limited demographic.
Sure. Comparatively, I find it far less ideological and more cerebral than most places. Nothing's perfect.
I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems. As it happens, the less dogmatic are people who gravitate toward hacking solutions to things. People might deride that as seeking technological fixes to intractable problems, but it's essentially apolitical - and critiquing logic in the form of code is immune to emotional arguments to some extent, even though those arguments arise around the borders of what code is used for.
I have a kind of similar view about Judaism and Buddhism. You can argue endlessly about the state of the universe but you have to agree that logic is logic. Weirdly, we live in a world where that agreement is vanishingly rare in everyday discourse.
>I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems.
Why is "ideology" a bad thing? I have ideological positions that can't be rationally derived from first principles: universal human rights, belief in freedom, belief in tolerance. Why are people with strong values and beliefs mere drones, while the people in the "centre" are the rational people interested in solving problems?
> the less dogmatic are people who gravitate toward hacking solutions to things. People might deride that as seeking technological fixes to intractable problems, but it's essentially apolitical
There is nothing apolitical about this. Accepting the current broad system and ruling class and trying only for "small fixes" is a political position.
You're assuming that technologically-focused folks "accept[] the current broad system and ruling class" and have only small ambitions. Neither of these assumptions seems especially warranted.
@luffapi
Taking into account what I meant by "ideological", the northbound side of the authoritarian axis is fully covered by those groups. You're right, I took it for granted that anti-authoritarian sentiment was a prerequisite for the third set of society I'm describing. But I don't view that as a political opinion.
I'm not trying to describe the prevailing group-think technocratic culture in silicon valley. But ideologically, anyone who has no ideology except answering logical problems fits into a category that is always going to be reviled by people who have a political agenda, because their answers won't necessarily comport with what you want them to look like.
There exists a left and a right on the southbound axis as well. For instance, authoritarian left is communism while libertarian left is anarchism. Authoritarian right is fascism and libertarian right is unregulated free market capitalism.
I don’t agree that you can exist in a pure “logic” state outside of this model. If you pay taxes and have opinions about that, you exist somewhere on this spectrum and it’s highly likely that your ideology is influencing your logic (which does exist for all ideologies even if we don’t agree with it).
I see your point. Reasonably, people will have opinions about individual matters, and these add up to having "politics". But these are not politics as an identity, or politics you push on others through persuasion, or a set of pet causes, or whatever passes for debate on Twitter or news outlets.
You may be right that the group I'm describing skews south-east into center-right libertarianism (although I'm pretty far southwest myself). The point I was trying to make was that it's not possible to be an ideologue when your head is in a cloud of math and code; and when you look up, you're the one with your fingers in running the system that runs the platforms that all these know-nothing people use to amplify their pet politics and shout at each other all day. What I'm saying is that to run the machine you actually have to be post-political, and the third group in modern culture are the people who can switch tabs as necessary, or just don't care because they're more concerned with making things function.
I'd be excoriated as being "privileged" by most progressive ideological friends for even suggesting that there exists a neutral position free from racial or historical advantage; and maybe it's not free of those things. But it exists and it attempts to be neutral to the extent that the biggest debate in the country right now is about what some website should or shouldn't censor, while the government itself can barely function, and the people who work for that website only care about making it more responsive and profitable. There is clearly a third group of people to whom most of the left/right debate is just unserious noise. As far as their day-to-day reality, we probably don't disagree that much on what that consists of.
> The point I was trying to make was that it's not possible to be an ideologue when your head is in a cloud of math and code; and when you look up, you're the one with your fingers in running the system that runs the platforms that all these know-nothing people use to amplify their pet politics and shout at each other all day.
This isn’t true though. The very platforms you’re talking about have many employees that are keeping the systems running and also steeped in politics. There are tons of very overt and loud neo-liberals in tech. Same goes for leftists and libertarians.
You seem to dislike social media activism. Fair enough, but like I said it’s orthogonal to one’s politics and technical competence.
> I think society these days is divided into three. The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems.
The difficult problems haven't changed much in hundreds or thousands of years. What happens when "people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems" have spent a few centuries actually doing this?
Yep, ideologies. That is, semi-consistent sets of beliefs, assumptions and values that explain why things are the way they are, how they ought to be different and (sometimes) how to go about making the changes. I know it can seem hard to believe, but it turns out that even when extraordinarily smart people think about difficult problems, they don't all converge on the same answers.
If you want to start over from scratch ever generation, be my guest. In your rejection of ideology, you're really just throwing away the work done by our ancestors.
So, no liberalism, no marxism, no capitalism, no Keynsian economics (probably no economics), no psychotherapy, no rock music ... the list is long for the things we can't reach consensus about.
What's left tends to be not so much "common sense" as "the stuff that supports the status quo, whatever it is", because human psychology tends to have a strong pro-status quo bias.
Couldn't we also say that stripped of their dogmas, these are all useful lenses? They're tools we have access to. Options. We've also collected a lot of information about when they might and might not be the appropriate device, or when they might even be harmful. The idea isn't to throw out history, nor to maintain the status quo. It's to solve individual problems using the best tools for the job, without getting emotional or activistic or wearing a t-shirt or waving a flag or joining the cult that revolves around the tool.
* how do you distribute a resource that isn't evenly distributed on the planet?
* what, if anything, do you do about the variation in abilities across different people?
* what, if anything do you as various people in a community start to gain (and wield) more power than others?
* how do you address free riders?
There are so many more. The answers to these questions are not "right" and "wrong". They're not even of the form "this is best compromise we could come up with". The answers someone feels are best will be highly dependent on their values, which we know vary significantly. You can't just wish away the differences between what an eco-socialist would say about these things and an anarcho-capitalist. They are real differences, representing fundamentally different ideas about the nature of humanity, the role of government, the purpose of society and much more.
And as I said above, people have thought about these questions for centuries, and their answers generally fall into distinct groups (even if they are not all identical). We call these "ideologies".
> The ideological left, ideological right, and the people who are more interested in reasoning through difficult problems.
This is a gross simplification that ironically lacks logical rigor. As long as you live in a society and have opinions about how it should work, you have politics. The two dimensional left/right spectrum is less than helpful. The quadrant model that includes authoritarian->libertarian is slightly more useful. The “politic free” group you’re speaking about are presumably the classic center-right libertarians. It’s definitely an ideology.
I think that's the real issue in all of this discussion: there is simply no will.
It's too hard, it's too impossible, we've decided big tech has already won, we've ceded decades of open progress in tech to moguls who don't give the fuck about us, or we're so ideological that any step to the "left" or "right" is perceived as abdicating principles of freedom.
My gp was a former-Jew (thanks anti-semites) that flew over nazi germany. My other grandfather served in Europe after that whole debacle. I feel I have as much right as anyone to say that it's bullshit going on Reddit and running into the same hateful misinformation on every thread, of "arguing" with holocaust deniers on conspiracy that think Sly Stallone kisses dolphins, use the same canards they've been suing for 2k years, and I can promise you were the first to notice my crypto-Jewishness. These same dummies love Q and have never found covid information that fit their narrative that they didn't love.
We really gonna relitigate (and lose) historical issues like the Holocaust for the next 10,000 years? We gonna sit by and whine about "principles" as people are murdered on a daily basis because of misinformation like that? That's not good enough.
What marketplace of ideas? How many serious challenges have there been to big tech by any company in the last decade? What freedom is there if you can't walk out your front door without being directly impacted by disinformation of various kinds on a daily basis?
I'm sorry but I don't quite understand how Reddit--a bastion for young 20-somethings, among which leftism is a major demographic, could ever be construed as a Q-Anon stronghold.
I feel as though this may more reflect your fears than the state of the site, and I feel as though so reflexively writing off a population that already largely agree with you illumines the opposite argument--that reaction to speech is largely an overreaction, and we will, without careful consideration, largely consider any bloc to be constituted of what we fear.
You seem to be projecting onto me what you think I'm projecting. ;)
I didn't call it a stronghold. There are certain subreddits that were aligned. The donald before it moved, conspiracy, conservative, etc. You ever see the greatawakening subreddit where they were acting like Trump was giving secret messages in speeches and calling for executions?
If that exists on a site with leftism as a major demographic, what does it look like elsewhere? You're making my point for me.
BTW, one of the longest-running mods of conspiracy that finally got banned has admitted that they are a Russian national. Not that this means anything, but it's interesting that a subreddit could be dominated by an individual with such strong beliefs about politics in another country.
To give context, I'm very much what some people would mock as an "enlightened centrist" (I felt so sad when I realized this is bad?). I think much of the "hateful mistinformation" is actually more aligned torwards the left. I can't read a thread about pitbulls or my home state without people frothing at the mouth and acting like my dog should be put down today or that my state is an ISIS stronghold.
But consitutionally? If someone is being an asshole on your property, it's your right to kick them off.
I don't believe I am, though--you are, if I'm not mistaken, asserting that it's some prolific iniquitous undercurrent which these platforms are subtending in some manner. (Which would seem somewhat misleading to me, as your assertion that r/TheDonald moved was of their own volition, rather than a banning by the site.)
Any platform harboring content will, as a matter of course, simply through the caprice of a moderator, let slip by insane opinions--but opining that these are some growing tide and, more dangerously, representative of their moderate counterparts (a la the r/Conservative subreddit, which seems constituted of largely by-the-numbers right of centers,) seems disrespectful to all parties involved and serves only to distract from your central assertion that communicating these ideas will in some way seed wanton chaos. (Comparing the ideas directly to those that precipitated the tragedy of the Holocaust.)
Edit, as I'd written my reply to a previous version of your own:
I am sympathetic to the idea that seeing these more fringe ideals is unfortunate--but the argument which I believe bears greater importance is that acting in this manner against them, striking them from the whole of our public discourse and pre-empting any who could, in some way, divine inspiration from the muck is far more deleterious to discourse. It serves all too easily as a means to silence disquiet and cast a veneer of unanimity.
I think the number of discussions that are off-limits should be very small and platforms should be much much more transparent.
However, if allowing certain discussions means also allowing other discussions, I'm not broken up if sites like reddit were to ban a subreddit like conspiracy or at least try to reshape it to something much more objective.
If the owners a property decide certain views are abhorrent, that's their right, I can't think of a valid moral or legal complaint against that - it is their property. If we lack competition that is an issue of market competitiveness more than propaganda.
You're correct in that it's really a market capture problem as things are. But the popular proposals that try to co-opt Big Tech into the censorship game are popular precisely because of that market capture - it's a way to make it extensive without putting the government in charge of it explicitly.
So we can't really treat these two as completely separate right now. Indeed, if those schemes are allowed to go forward, the next thing you'll hear is that we can't break Facebook etc up, because doing so will limit how effectively some information can be suppressed. The more power is concentrated, the more it seeks to sustain that state of affairs, and the better it is at that - so why would we hand those companies so much power when they already are a major problem?
There're certainly multiple places one could draw the line--the efficacy of a given position for these sorts of things varies by your objective or simply the severity one perceives.
Thanks a ton for providing the opportunity for some discussion on this!
Every day? No. But when it's 2021 and you gotta worry about getting gunned down for being a Jew?
Putin loves to use anti-Semitic rhetoric when convenient. Which is the big part of this...the stand pat and do nothing approach doesn't work when the resources of nation states can (logically) and have been behind harnessing disinformation.
The Jewish issue isn't the only issue, better examples might be the Christchurch shooting where the gunman was livestreaming on and because of 4chan.
If you get a chance check out HBO's doc about Jim Watkins and Q.
Christchurch shooting is a good example, because the follow-up crackdown on associated content showed just how far this can go. Remember his "manifesto"? In NZ, its distribution was banned outright by law (or rather government order, but they have laws on the books that allow for it). Not so in Australia - they couldn't find any legal means to restrict it, so the government basically informally asked the ISPs to "do something".
And they did - to the point where a bunch of websites with forums were blocked outright because of their hands-off policy wrt comments (usually in some particular subforum; it's a fairly common way to keep it civil elsewhere) meant that there were a bunch of posts with links to the document.
The end result is that a bunch of completely unrelated stuff was blocked in Australia outright for a while, by private companies in charge of communications acting in unison - effectively, a censorship cartel - with no political or judicial recourse, since the government was not involved in it, and the ISPs were in their right, legally speaking.
Ironically, someone (6f8986c3) replied to this claiming to be Jewish and sharing his experiences...and his post was flagged and removed... In a thread about censorship.
>I like weed as a productive drug, it's stronger than caffeine for me, but I develop tolerance and addiction quickly. Any solution to the tolerance problem? Quitting/breaks is obvious.
This is not something I've solved but are you consuming large amounts? I can stay high for months on end, using every hour and while it's not going to hit me like the first hit, I say up. I'd like to be more regular in consumption (every 4 hours), but your guess is as good as mine
>Is investing in weed stocks encouraging drug addiction/use? Is it ethical to promote drug use?
Is investing in any US-based company encouraging war? Is investing in any company that uses Chinese production promoting slavery? Caffeine is a drug. We take lots of drugs. We are in the infancy of understanding many of them because we're young and because we've been prudes.
I'd rather see companies and people I'd trust pushing and producing drug products of any kind rather than abusers. You can see this happening in the hemp adjacent markets - lots and lots of shady fly by night companies have popped up but slowly the good ones are rising to the top. 3chi, for example is a popular and I think solid d8 company.
But as I told my dad, every single person that was selling pot on the street is trying to get into the drug business and has been for more than a decade...good luck picking winners.
>Has anyone been able to convince a fortune 500 company that they need(medical) marijuana for work? As mentioned I'm significantly more focused, but I don't like the social stigma. I already have the job, it's purely a cultural/social problem.
> Are my memory problems due to weed or is this just age? (When not using) I feel like I've lost lots of childhood memories and I have more difficulty than ever with names.
This is my main concern (and lung damange). I do notice lapses in short-term memory (though I am high when this happens, I haven't noticed a huge drop). The literature sugests it's relatively small over decades IIRC. Willie Nelson and Snoop (sample of 2) are doing ok.
>If my focus is better on weed, is there something else I can do for focus that isn't drug related?
Caffeine is a drug. We take lots of drugs. We are in the infancy of understanding many of them because we're young and because we've been prudes.
Personally, I don't think it's going to be all that long before society's mental model of cannabis is fully turned on it's head from where it was 20 years ago. The dose makes the poison (or drug), after all.
Fundamentally, I see cannabinoids as less like alcohol, and more like a potential new category of vitamin. As we continue to learn more about the endocannabinoid system and build up increasing experimental evidence tying common maladies to endocannabinoid deficiencies, I see cannabinoid supplements eventually becoming as commonplace as e.g. B-complex and incorporated into mainstream multivitamins.
Going back to GP's questions:
Is there a way to microdose? I'd like to be able to have tiny, controlled amounts every time.
Tinctures/oils. Sublingual absorption is the next best thing to pulmonary absorption in terms of efficiency, but it won't cause long-term damage as inhaling hot ashes and gases might, and it'll allow you to measure the dose down to the mg.
Is there a solution to munchies?
Speaking for myself, I've been microdosing 200mg of Sunsoil full-spectrum CBD oil and 50mg of 3Chi delta-8-THC oil first thing in the morning and before bed since around the end of April.
This helps with both my sleep quality/consistency and preventing semi-regular headaches that had been causing an unhealthy reliance on NSAIDs. It doesn't cause a high or any noticeable psychoactive effect.
However, rather than "munchies", it's actually significantly reduced my appetite. Without any other deliberate change to my routine, such as calorie counting/restriction, I've dropped from 210 to 186 over the past 2.5 months with no perceptible loss in muscle strength or mass, and so far see no signs of the trend stopping before I reach my goal BF%. (I use the term "deliberate" because, although I am currently only eating one meal per day around lunch - dinner time, it isn't an intentional IF/OMAD schedule; it's just the current limit of my appetite.)
That being said, I can't definitively attribute this effect to a particular compound. It could be the delta8, it could be the CBD, it could be a different cannabinoid, it could be the interactions between some or all of them, it could be the 200 calories of MCT oil that I'm now ingesting each day (on top of what I was already taking separately pre-workout), and/or it could be the interactions of any or all of the above with the fact that I've been keto for over nine years. YMMV.
I don't mean to ask the obvious question, but have you taken them to the doctor? It's very well possible that they literally can't "shut the hell up". You are frustrated, but they need your empathy.
If you have not taken them to a doctor (psychiatrist more specifically) please seriously consider doing so. My 14 year old adopted brother is going through similar issues and is embarrassed and afraid to take the steps he needs to take. I have to explain to him that if I could have this helped when I was 14 instead of 34...I sure as hell would have.
Yes they are prescribed medicine and have weekly counseling from a counselor. We limit the medication for school and special events as it’s not perfect, has side effects, and they can become tolerant. The counseling is for prior trauma from neglect not for ADHD.
It seems your concern, while well intended, is about the missing sensitivity and bluntness of a phrase.
Well people are already sorting themselves by moving between states based on political affiliation. If we strengthen States' rights and limit Federal government power in line with the original intent of the Constitution then I think we can all mostly get along. Americans get all worked up about who wins the Presidential election because the executive branch has gained so much power over every aspect of our lives but it doesn't have to be that way. We don't need to have all the same laws in Massachusetts and Montana.
How then shall we perform it?--At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it?-- Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!--All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
Think through your last two paragraphs. Yeah, people that feel good are probably going to be more productive than those feeling bad (assuming you're not feeling too good).
I can't do the stuff you're talking about when I'm not high (or couldn't) because I couldn't stop anxiety and other issues from getting in the way. Weed liberates me from that.
I have friends that hate weed, friends that become different people while high. It's just how it is, not for everyone, though I do prefer delta-8 way more than regular cannabis, not as intense of a high, much more about the focus.
I know a couple people who didn't get anxiety issues until they started smoking. I think there's a portion of the population (not necessarily you) who feel they need it when the anxiety is actually just a weed hangover.
It definitely hits different people differently. My wife doesn't get high. I've seen her smoke good weed and she didn't change in demeanor at all and claimed it didn't do anything.
Personally all it makes me do is think about how shitty my life is for hours (hint: my life is fine..it's just the weed) although some indica stuff will make me giggle for an hour before I pass out. I'm worse than useless when high.
Many drugs feel great but don't make you more productive.
Medical issues are a big exception yeah. I wasn't able to focus at all while high, at least not for a prolonged period of time... I guess it's just different for me. Mostly I stayed up way too late doing nonsense and got very little sleep as a result which impacted my day-to-day activities. It wasn't a good time.
I figured out at some point during the last decade that the only stimulant that works for me is THC. Caffeine won't do it. It doesn't matter what I do, if I eat healthy get 8 hours of sleep, exercise, etc, I can wake up and within 30 minutes of work feel so mentally and physically wiped that I have to sleep...rinse and repeat. I've managed to force myself to get through that repeatedly (it didn't really happen to the same extent as a kid - I guess life was more fun).
But weed? Scared the hell out of me the first few times (over years, I'm in an illegal state, but of course it's as easy to get as donuts). You know the usual introspection, whoa dude thoughts, the slightly different perspective you see yourself and the world, and on the high, every time...incredible anxiety. But once I got past that, I could work for 8 hours like I used to, and like most people can.
I was high 24/7 for about 4 or 5 years. I care about my health so I took different precautions (dealers, vapes, etc). However, I don't begin to smoke like some people (I'm not into pot culture), can't physically take those amounts.
Changed my life. I was able to work through major issues like OCD, etc. Guess what? Nobody at work or school nor my family or friends that I've only told recently know that I was high. Couldn't tell at all, entirely functional (more functional than the past).
The real save lately has been delta-8 (the way of the future). It (THC, drugs) is not for everyone and you should not abuse it too young (psychosis). Don't go buy weed off the street and get really high your first time, you might have the worst panic attack in your life.
I agree we shouldn't just rave about drugs like they don't have an impact, but some of you guys don't obviously have that much experience with what you are talking about (not you). No offense, but that's part of the issue. How many decades have we lost and how many tens of thousands of lives have been lost because we are too prudish to test this stuff as it should be?
The geniuses in my state, instead of grabbing the new industry were ready to ban delta-8 to protect the non-existent cannabis industry, or god, or something. It'll all be legal in 10 years anyway, why waste our time? I can't tell you how many small businesses I've visited in the last few months that would have out of business, and how many customers that might have been put in really bad mental spots.
There's a Cowboys player, Randy Gregory, that's lost 4 or 5 years of his career to bans because he smokes pot because it helps his anxiety and bipolar issues. That's criminal.
I drink, sometimes, too.
edit:
To save the Google, delta-8 is just a different form of THC, extracted from hemp produce federally legally due to the 2018 farm bill (magic). Of course there's also CBD from that (the original big industry) and lots of other things coming out Delta-10, etc.
Most people don't get extreme anxiety on THC, but some do... someone is going to correct me if I'm wrong, but THC is psychoactive (CBD is not), so when people are microdosing this or shrooms or whatever they're getting different effects but similar end results. It plays with your perspective and chemistry in a way that alcohol does not, especially at higher doses.
This is an interesting anecdote. I have gotten high several times during my college years and less so since I started my career. In all of the cases I got high, it was primarily for entertainment purposes. However, whenever I am high, I get some sense of clarity about problems that were irking me the week before (I usually do weed over the weekends). This led me to wonder, esp. lately, what if there is actually some connection between productivity and marijuana use (not abuse) and your experience seems to be inline with that. Ofcourse, there are trove of other anecdotes about how weed is used for creative/artistic purposes but I haven't come across ones related to programming.
Jobs always said acid was critical to his success. He dropped a good amount of acid, so that probably really would make you think differently.
People can mock it all they want, but I really do get very creative on weed. There's a reason creative companies don't test for it...
It's not something I've shared, but it always surprises me how often I smell weed on the street (again, "illegal"), how easy it is to get, and how many people I wouldn't expect "abused" it at one point or another. I was scared of telling my parents for a long time but came to find out they were both drug using hippies, anyway.
HN disappoints me more than the average Reddit or Twitter thread because some of the highs are really high here, but when you see brilliant people arguing about stuff they were arguing about six years ago, or adults that are so ideological that they aren't even rational, that happens all the time on HN and I feel in a way it is worse because we should know better.
I think HN, as a place for nerds, largely succeeds, but it also has a very very limited demographic.