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> it is definitely not unbiased.

Can one really reach that conclusion from your evidence? A person can recieve sponsorships without allowing that fact to influence the person's writing.


That’s true, but my view is even if the original article is unbiased, the selection process by which it was chosen to appear on this periodical with the reach it has introduces some statistical bias.


That's perhaps a bit pendatic. Maybe vested interest would be a more accurate term, but the idea is quite clear from context.


Yes, a person peddling a harmful substance donates to making a broader set of harmful substances more acceptable.


I agree all those cheseburgers French fries and cheese platters need to go!


Only theoritically, in an abstract sense only applicable in lab settings.

In real life and in practice there is always some influencing, some internal censorship, some gloves being kept on, and so on. And it's ten times so if the person wants to continue to receive more sponsorships in the future...


> A person can recieve sponsorships without allowing that fact to influence the person's writing.

yeah right.


Are Philip morris getting into the ecstasy business? Seems unlikely.


No but if more harmful things get normalised, then users of their product can feel less guilty.

It's a variation on the "commoditize your complement" pattern.

(before someone says: "actually x is less harmful than y", I mean their perception by the general public)


Does the general public perceive cigarettes to be safer than ecstasy?

I was going to make the actual harm comment before your edit, but I still wonder about the premise.


I assume most parents would be less concerned by cigarette-use, but attitudes may differ from one country to the other.


>Does the general public perceive cigarettes to be safer than ecstasy?

Obviously so?


Obvious based on what? Is there recent polling on this?

This doesn't seem like an obvious conclusion at all in 2022, with major shifts in understanding about the risks of smoking and rapidly evolving/shifting sentiment about recreational drugs in general.


I think you're overblowing both the "major shifts in understanding about the risks of smoking" and the "shifting sentiment about recreational drugs in general".

Some (all?) states legalized weed use in some cases, it's not like it's some welcome acceptable thing in the average global working/middle/upper class family, and E/MDMA much less so...


I don’t agree that this is overblown at all, and I was primarily asking exploratory questions.

There is strong evidence of a major shift right in front of us in the form of new laws (federal/country-wide in some locations), legal dispensaries, and a new and exploding (legal) industry that is bringing in significant money. Main stream documentaries on Netflix about Mushrooms, a shift in tone regarding drug use in popular media, etc.

These laws are passing with increasing frequency because of that major shift in sentiment. If that shift had not occurred, these laws would not be as popular as they are.

Does that automatically translate to similar shifts for MDMA? That is less clear, but at a minimum, there is strong evidence that people do not buy the historical fear mongering that has always cast a shadow on marijuana.

Anecdotally, I know multiple people who now enjoy the occasional edible despite having very anti-drug views in decades past.

Minds are changing.


They probably would, if it was legal.


Don’t give them any ideas


Here's an article by Gumroad's founder that covers how many employees Gumroad has: https://sahillavingia.com/work

25 people work at Gumroad, but none full time.



How exactly does one go about signing this pledge?


Nevermind


I would say his work in linguistics is philosophy.


In so far as “Philosophy is a language game” [1] then anyone who makes a significant contribution to linguistics also contributes to philosophy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)


You mean non-empirical? ;-)


Nope. His work on the questions of the nature of thought, language, and mind is both extremely influential & deeply philosophical.

Some of his work on linguistics you can argue is not philosophy. Some I think clearly is.


I don't think that works.

It will show the dead, but not their children.


Hmm. Could you point out an example? If something related to the showdead mechanics have changed, that would be quite interesting.

For me, it’s always reliably shown everything.


Sure.

Here's a recent comment from the user dang: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34271566

And here's his page, where the comment can't be seen: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang

---

And here's another comment, also from dang, where he talked about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34264605

> this how HN's software works these days. We didn't do anything specific to the thread; it's just that users flagged the root comment.


That’s interesting. I suspect it’s special cased for admin accounts specifically.

The reason might be that users often pick fights with mods. Dan’s comment page might be overwhelmed by such threads if left unchecked. pg once noted that pg’s own account was highly watched relative to other accounts, so maybe users were following Dan around and adding fuel to the very fires he was trying to put out.

The reason I say that is because I can’t find any examples of this phenomenon except his account. Do you know of any? E.g. this thread does show up on the flagged user’s profile page, contrary to what others were saying. It’s right below this one for me: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=breck&next=34266186#...

It also seems to show up on everyone else’s page: mine, tptacek’s, etc.

Cheers for pointing that out. Stuff like this is fascinating, and we rarely get the chance to nerd out about it.

EDIT: interestingly, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34265016 does show up.


Simple explanation, I'm afraid: I was dumb.

There are no exceptions (...at least, none that I'm currently aware of). Dang's "missing comment" actually is on his page, just not where I was looking.

The comment was new, but it was a descendant of one of dang's older comments, so it appears further back in his profile than where I looked.


It’s a surprisingly easy mistake to make. I thought it might be that, so I triple checked, and still missed it. So you’re not alone.

One time many years ago, I almost emailed a bug report claiming the very same thing. Luckily I noticed right beforehand.

It speaks to Dan’s dedication that he did so much for the site in a single day that both of us missed his comment buried in the avalanche. :)

In fairness, the discussion was a little confusing, since it was combining a few different topics (showdead, OPs thread, flagging, and admin’ing) so a mixup probably isn’t too surprising.

HN is completely fascinating, and I appreciated the analytical eye you were bringing to it. If you keep doing that, you’ll notice a ton of surprising little details over time. Minimaxir tried to document them in “undocumented features of hacker news” and the list is still far from complete. Plus it’s cool that the site is ever-evolving.

One of my favorite new features is that if you go to an old submission, e.g, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1 (or thereabouts), all the users’ names will show up in green if they were a new account at the time. I.e. it preserves the historical fact of someone being a new user in a given comment thread.

It’s such a small detail, yet there are quite literally thousands of such small details that all add up to something wonderful.

Regardless, have a good weekend, and cheers for the chat.


> Simple explanation, I'm afraid: I was dumb.

Probably 20% of the time I send an angry email to dang (generally about censorship), it turns out I did something dumb and read the site wrong.

I double check and triple check, but still often make silly mistakes. (He is always gracious about my mistakes).


It's not apparant to me. Cancer claim seemed like a conditional one.


> My 3 most important papers—that will go down as turning points in the history of computer science—have a combined 0 citations, and 2 of them not only were not in a journal, but they were even flagged and removed from arxiv

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34259358


Have you read the papers? Might be they're good, but rejected for dumb/annoying reasons.

Exagerating about these things is a personality trait, not a mental illness.

Maybe the papers are totally crank, but as I said, not immediately apparant


Not immediately apparent, but as I said, going through their HN submissions and Twitter, it is apparent. Many upvotes and other replies to their comments in the past few months agree.


It's not apparent to me.

HN users tend to think similarly to each other and are often wrong.


Are you saying that the simple fact that many people have come to the same conclusion disconfirms that conclusion?


No, it doesn't, but it doesn't follow straightforwardly from the rationale the previous commenter gave, and that's telling. It's not complicated; it's a pretty simple motte-and-bailey.

Notice how neither you nor my previous interlocutor skipped a beat about the racial hierarchy I laid out, despite that not being in either of the previous two definitions of HBD on this thread. That's because the bailey is so well-understood it usually doesn't even need to be said.


The reason akomtu and I adressed the "mott" is that it was the claim ascribed to HBD:

> HBD (or "human biodiversity") is a euphemism for the view that there are genetic racial differences in intelligence.

and the "bailey" can be split into two parts: one follows from the mott, that races could be ranking according to intelligence. There's obviously no MaB fallacy here. The second part is the specific racial ranking you provided. But no one had mentioned that until you got here, so it's clear that there's no intentional MaB fallacy going on.

No one was trying to affirm any specific ranking of races by intelligence. That's a closely related, but very different kind of question (a very empirical type question).


I don't think this is worth debating. I stand by what I said about this thread, but the question of what Scott Alexander meant is not in doubt; it's clarified in the email.


It seems to me that you just have a more specific issue with HBD than jasonhansel has.

jasonhansel takes issue with the idea that there are racial differences in intelligence

You take issue with another, related, one of HBD's ideas: a specific ranking of races by intelligence that it advances.

I was only supposing that the first claim seems likely to be true, so I'm not sure that there has been any substantive disagreement between us on those two matters.


This is a thread about an email chain from the author of this article, in which the context of "HBD" is made quite clear. There's no useful parsing to do here. If the term has other, more benign uses, I'm not aware of them, and am not super interested in discussing them; here, to be clear, we're most definitely talking about a malignant meaning.


I'm not suggesting that the term "HBD" has other more benign uses. I'm suggesting that it refers to a body of thought in which various claims are made, and that you are focused on one of those claims, whereas our ancestor comment was focused on another.


I just do it the old-fashioned way: memorisation.


I feel that you either have the best memory on earth, live offline and need to memorize only a couple of passwords, or you are doing something wrong (like using the same password over multiple services)


They only survived 6 days.


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