Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

E Pur Si Muove

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 853 posts

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#291

Post by geofft »

dominotw wrote: post #213
pmyteh wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, sorry. You said "results of this debate disagree with you", so I took that to be the debate's results (the vote), not the debate itself. (And as a side point, no to the straw poll question - there are certain statistical guarantees on the representativeness of polls as long as they're drawn from a random sample of the public, with debates about how far you can deviate from a random sample and still have results t…

> Self-selected polls, on the other hand, pretty much mean nothing. Isn't our democracy built upon "self selected polling" , people who chose to go excesrice their right to vote. Its all meaningless?

There's a single democracy. There's no shortage of random polling websites. Telling me "You are ruled by this person, who was selected in a process you knew about since childhood" is one thing; telling me "This is likely true because people on this website you've never heard of say it's true" is another.

(And yes, governments where there are ad-hoc rationalizations for who gets to vote or where the procedures aren't publicly announced are in fact illegitmate and widely recognized as such.)

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#292

Post by dmode »

throwaway34689 wrote: post #148

Of the places I've lived (not necessarily in order): - Deep South (18 years - born + raised) - Boston MA (5 years @ college then job) - NYC (6+ years) - Los Angeles (1yr @ startup) - San Diego (1yr @ startup) - Bay Area (6 years, including 4+ at household name tech company) I found the Bay Area (and SF in particular) to be the most intolerant, rigid and inflexible culture I've ever lived and worked in. I've never enc…

Considering that 50% of the people in the Bay Area are foreign born, and have no experience of the South, I find your comment "a self-righteous, smug and viscerally hostile attitude to other parts of the country" to be hyperbolic. May be you are projecting based upon a few interactions ?

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#293

Post by carapace »

fvdessen wrote: post #254
amdavidson wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because a person uses the words "What about" does not make their argument whataboutism. Their argument is 100% relevant to the sentiment that was expressed. If the stated benefit of excluding one group to allow for the free expression of the other is increased scientific discourse, how do we balance that against the loss of discourse from the excluded?

Sam is asking people to be more inclusive of different ideas, not excluding one group for the benefit of the other. I don't quite get how one jumps from 'we have to tolerate different ideas' to 'people will be excluded'. How does tolerating different ideas excludes people ?

"allow people to say disparaging things about gay people"

tolerating [this] different ideas excludes [gay] people

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#294

Post by unityByFreedom »

> I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco.

Ideas about what? Did you try discussing free speech or democracy? Did you try to show a flag of Tibet or Taiwan?

It's true that a lot of people in China are free from the same political concerns of Americans, yet, how has that turned out for them in the long term? Per capita GDP?

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#295

Post by nine_k »

hellcow wrote: post #87
ealexhudson wrote: post #6

I think this is a radical simplification of what is a complex problem. Genetic engineering as a whole is known to be an area strewn with moral hazards, and not least harks back to some of the darkest days of 20th century science. Having an ethical outlook isn't a form of heresy, it's a form of societal safety. We need to accept that some of these ideas (probably not all - it's always difficult to get on the right sid…

> We need to accept that some of these ideas ... are inherently dangerous. This line of reasoning leads to censorship. It's the same line of reasoning used by every dictator and demagogue as well as China today. Why? The idea of democracy seems dangerous to a king. Ideas are not dangerous. Ideas are never dangerous. Ideas acted upon might cause danger or harm, but an idea itself never does, never has, and never will…

Yes, some ideas are inherently dangerous. An idea of atoms splitting leads to an atomic bomb, for instance.

Some substances, tools, machines, etc are also inherently dangerous, and can't be made not to be.

Does this mean that we should never use a saw, light a fire, or discuss [insert a controversial topic here]?

Somehow people came up with protocols to work with inherently dangerous material things that lower the risk of a serious injury to acceptable bounds. I don't see why this would not apply to inherently dangerous ideas.

I'd hazard to say that for the last 2500 years quite a few devices were invented in this space, allowing to think much of the previously unthinkable without turning into ravaging monsters or becoming insane. I suspect that we could just continue using these devices (e.g. "freedom of speech", "critical thinking", separation of author's personality form their ideas, etc), instead of running in terror from "dangerous ideas" while swinging a banhammer.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#296

Post by dominotw »

pmyteh wrote: post #278
dominotw wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Self-selected polls, on the other hand, pretty much mean nothing. Isn't our democracy built upon "self selected polling" , people who chose to go excesrice their right to vote. Its all meaningless?

If few enough people vote, arguably yes (though that's a fairly complex question and depends a lot on what your conception of democracy is). But in essence, an election is a full-population poll: like a random sample with probability 1 of being chosen. So it's statistically maximally valid. We (political scientists) tend to squint a bit and say the opportunity to vote is equivalent to actually voting, so non-voting d…

So if am I reading this correctly.

Previously you said "any self selected polling is meaningless"

Now you are saying "Self selected polling is meaningful when people who didn't self select had the opportunity to do so" .

Ok. So by that definition the poll I linked, everyone had the opportunity to participate in the debate, theoretically. What makes it meaningless ?

PS: Fixing democracy ect is not interesting to me in this context, I want to focus your claim self-selected = meaningless.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#297

Post by kinkrtyavimoodh »

kbenson wrote: post #285
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If your startup can't survive unless it's right next to Silicon Valley then it probably deserves to die anyway." Do you actually genuinely believe these absolutist statements, or you make them just coz they make for good sound bites?

You just classified a statement that includes "probably" as absolutist. Perhaps you should reexamine it and consider whether your own context is causing you to interpret it slightly differently than intended.

You can't just throw 'probably' in clearly inflammatory statements and expect the reader to pick up the burden of proof.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#298

Post by maxerickson »

Cshelton wrote: post #282
maxerickson wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, in Texas at least, don't know about other areas of the south, many people will be surprised from how open people are in the cities. Now, in rural areas... yeah, no promise there. Rural people will love you at first site, but if you mention anything anything that contradicts their bible or the right to have a gun, most likely not. The cities surprise people who visit here though. They were not expecting the a…

No, I'm saying there is a difference between Dallas, Austin, Houston, San Antonio and the rest of Texas, like rural east and west Texas. I think you have to compare apples to apples here. San Fran to Dallas/Houston/etc. You can't compare rural west Texas to San Fran or the rural wine country around SF to Dallas.

I understood what you meant, I was wondering if you noticed that you, as a self-proclaimed open-minded Houstonite, made a broad brush stereotype about "Rural people".

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#299

Post by MrJagil »

dmode wrote: post #274

I have no idea what this article was about. As someone who grew up in India, lived extensively in Europe and Arizona before settling down in the Bay Area, and travel to China 2-3 times a year, I find Bay Area by far to be the most open, tolerant, accepting places I have ever lived. And it is not even comparable. And it is borne out by simple stats. People vote with their feet. Bay Area is almost a majority minority a…

Can you expand on your experience as a brown man in Denmark? Where did you live? I would like your take on it.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#300

Post by reverius42 »

BenchRouter wrote: post #169
cjbprime wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that life extension is dangerous and wrong and therefore people dedicating their lives to it today are unethical people. I haven't censored anyone or shut down any argument by saying this, and neither was I attempting to, so your point seems to be confused.

> I think that life extension is dangerous and wrong and therefore people dedicating their lives to it today are unethical people. > I haven't shut down any argument by saying this You're being naive if you think that saying this doesn't end any hope of a reasonable discussion.

Nobody owes anyone else a "reasonable discussion."

One person's reasonable discussion is another person's interminable sea lion. http://wondermark.com/1k62/

Post reply on HN