greenduck's comments

I feel like I should leave these here:

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Association: 1-800-662-HELP

National Suicide Prevention Helpline: 1-800-273-TALK

Free Crisis Text Helpline: 741-741

Trevor project Helpline (crisis intervention specialized in LGBT issues) : 1-866-488-7386

> Hundreds of thousands of doctoral students investing huge amounts of time and money to chase a relatively tiny pool of prestigious teaching and research positions.

That's a pretty cynical take on academia. There are plenty of good reasons to go for a PhD that don't amount to prestige chasing and it isn't accurate to view PhD programs as a jobs training program to push you into academia similar to a coding bootcamp, but longer and more expensive.

The experience of learning research by generating new knowledge with the top experts in your field is intrinsically valuable even if you don't use it every day. The one high school teacher I had who had done her PhD was by far the best teacher at the whole school. Everyone benefits from having a more educated society. Plus, most PhDs are funded. That money doesn't get thrown on a fire. It is paid for by the student teaching undergrads (which is a huge profit driver for universities if you need a selfish reason to support PhDs) and then is turned around into research which benefits society. Most PhDs don't end up going back into academia either. In fact the profit from cheap teaching assistants in the form of PhD students is probably the biggest driver of getting more of them at the university level, not some sort of academic circle jerk. Universities just want money.

Hard disagree. Whatever magic they had back when I spent time on there is gone and it isn't coming back anytime soon. They've been overrun by neo-nazi circle jerking as nazi's have been excised from other platforms.

I am not getting my hopes up until all of the ballots are counted. Even then, there will be a few legal fights (hopefully easy wins, but still).

That's not an argument against e-voting, but rather the election media circus and craziness of the electoral college. With e-voting you get the complexity of both.

> relies on the words of "spooky experts telling [them] what to believe".

Widespread distrust of subject matter experts already exists in the US. You can't just tell people to shut up and listen to the experts.

The efficacy of vaccines is one of those things that is almost impossible for the average person to verify. I can get in a plane and confirm for myself that it doesn't fall out of the sky. I can't get a vaccine and directly compare it with my chances of catching the flu without one. That's the reason why people widely trust the safety of planes, but there exists an anti-vax movement in the US.

Even with alternatives to first past the post, the complexity is of a wildly different scale than blockchain. I can sit down with someone and go step by step how ranked-choice works right now without looking up material. I'd have to pull out reference material and then start with the basics of hash functions or something to explain blockchain.

Science and engineering don't care if people believe in them or not.

If people don't believe the results of an election, then it is de facto illegitimate.

Tom Scott still has the best argument against e-voting IMO [1].

Briefly: an election only counts if everybody can believe the results. Making an expert level understanding of CS a requirement to verify your voting system means that Joe Q. Average who doesn't hold a PhD (or maybe even a college degree) has to rely on spooky experts telling him what to believe. If I were in his shoes then I would have no confidence that I participated in a fair and valid election.

We kind of live in a bubble here on HN where most people are sort of in the tech space and could take a weekend or two to understand blockchain. I think its easy to forget that most people don't have the required background to learn it easily (or would want to use up their time to understand it). I almost have a PhD in the hard sciences and I don't fully understand the finer details of block chain. I think I would have to write my own implementation to fully appreciate it.

Simplicity and the ability to explain the system to every American is a requirement of any voting system.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs&t=12s

Expanding on what katbyte said, the Hays code was adopted by every major studio in the US to replace state run censors. They did this because of the same battle going on right now in social media: "if we self regulate, then we won't need government regulation placed on us." When an entire industry agrees to follow the code and has enforcement options available and does it with the threat of government action if they don't follow it, the only difference between it and a real law are the name. The consequences to ignoring it were that your funding was dropped, the offending scenes were removed from the film, or you were kicked out and blacklisted from the industry. They were apparently pretty strict about it. You can tell that by how stringently it was followed for decades.

Not only is our view of free speech different today, but the US has a long history of censoring minority groups. Take the Hays code for instance which made it de facto against the law for movies to portray gay men in a positive way or "race mixing" at all. That was around until nearly the 70s. That's still within living memory [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Co...

Maybe it's field specific. In my subfield of physics, I've collaborated with three other groups across the US without any fear of people running off with our work.

It seems like the unfortunate reality of having a flag button and just giving everyone the ability to use it is that only the content that least offends people's political sensibilities makes it to the front page. If it makes people uncomfortable (such as the realities of police abuse in America) then it gets flagged off the first page.

I worry that it makes HN a bit of a bubble where the people who are made uncomfortable by certain truths and need to hear them the most are also the least likely to hear them because they will flag them away. You can kind of have an entire alternative reality here where police abuse doesn't exist and the police do face accountability for their actions. I wish there was a way to fix it.

In only the past few months: Rochester PD showed up in hoards outside of the courthouse where their fellow officers were being charged for shoving a frail old man to the ground on video.

The reason they showed up was to support the officers that hurt the old man. They cheered them on as the left the courthouse. There's clearly a culture problem that needs to be addressed here.

[1] https://triblive.com/news/world/buffalo-protester-pushed-by-...

I have to guess not much and that's part of the reason people are angry about how policing is conducted in the USA right now.

A personal anecdote: a friend of mine is a former cop and reported one of his colleagues for lying about an arrest. Not even a week later, he was fired for "not being a team player". From what he said, this type of stuff happens all the time.

Oh wow. Thanks for pointing this out. Even the first three links of the article are "What Greta Thunberg Forgets About Climate Change", "What Economists Can Teach Epidemiologists", and "An Avalanche of Failure" which is complaining about lockdowns again.

Then I looked up this "American Institute for Economic Research" and it's a conservative political non-profit dedicated to creating "a society based on property rights and open markets". That type of naming, trying to pass themselves off as a neutral research institute is some Prager U. level grossness.

As you said, the whole article is clearly politically motivated BS.

I'm worried that we are starting to see the realization of everybody's concerns over the rise of surveillance technology from the past decade. Federal mass surveillance, reports of stingray use at other protests, unmarked federal agents throwing people in the back of vans. I'm not a fan of where we are headed.

Some of that footage from Washington DC with peaceful protestors being gassed and rounded up by unmarked agents so that President Trump could walk across to a church for a photo op looked like it was straight out of a distopian sci-fi movie.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but people on HN eat up the argument of "do your own research, make up your own mind" as an excuse for not challenging even obvious the most obvious BS.

I don't know about you, but I don't have the time to do quality research of every guest he has on. Even if I did, I can't match the manpower or experience of a professional media outlet to do even basic fact checking. For stuff that isn't decided fact, I also don't necessarily have the breadth of knowledge to even know where to look for the competing opinions on a subject.

If I, a student, don't have the time to do that research, then what percent of a percent actually does? Like I was describing, what small fraction of that can even do that research effectively? My guess is that it goes to zero pretty quickly with the complexity of the subject.

That might not be a problem for the most controversial guests where I already have my defenses up. But, what about the more subtle guest who is pushing extreme views based on literal misinformation, but sounds plausible enough that I buy into it?

Didn't downvote, but outside of the internet this just doesn't correspond to my reality. Combine that with the perception of pushing a "both sides are bad" narrative makes it seem like a partisan statement used to justify any hatred towards the other side of the aisle.

> I don’t see why it should have to take longer than a few days to count ballots.

To snap back with an equally uniformed answer, I don't see why anyone could think something as complicated as certifying the vote of a country the size of the USA could only take a few days!

But, in seriousness, this is how the system has always worked and just saying that you, an outsider, doesn't understand it and wants to make demands on the timescale doesn't invalidate it. There's like a bazillion moving parts behind the scenes and stuff like waiting on mail in ballots takes time. That's the cost of having an election with integrity. Read more on it here [1].

[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/11/6/18066350/midterm-elections-201...

Maybe you're in a bubble? I work at one of the "liberal elite universities" if you believe the media rhetoric and nobody around me is just straight up ready to deny the election if their favorite team doesn't win.

Everybody I have contact with understands that it's a close race and isn't sure who is going to win. They understand that it is possible for Trump to win and not even that unlikely.