The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

Growing up with cats and dogs all my life I 100% agree with this. That has caused me to look at animals as individuals I can't communicate with instead of lower life forms that are brainless sacks of meat. They certainty are capable of thought and I am also convinced they share the same basic emotional states but humans have much more nuance and layers over them.

I mean this both flippantly in many cases and literally in many others. Academia in my orbit appears to be a risk factor for psychological problems.

I think this is broadly correct. I have had a sense for a while now that there are quite a few people express extreme versions of their opinions substituting amplitude for fidelity. A strongly held opinion isn't heard as much as a weakly held opinion forcefully expressed.

Part of this is down to mass communication and it occurs for all things. There are good apps for mobile phones that never get seen because the focus goes to the top few percent. The same is probably true for games on Steam. Most peoples' blogs will be read by fewer people than the number of blogs they read themselves for the simple reason that some blogs get millions of readers.

I can see the obvious frustration that must be felt when someone has an idea to share that they feel isn't being expressed. When it comes to emotional expression, small communities are required if you want to have a group that reciprocates attention. Most people don't want to be heard by everyone, they just want to be heard. What we have is an environment where a few people are heard by everyone and lots of people are unheard.

I think sites like HN, and the smaller subreddit communities along with discords (I miss IRC, It's still there, but the people aren't) work against that flow.

There's an element of social 'groupthink' pressure if communities of similar opinions cluster, more often against ideas than for, but I think that on these platforms it also meets a degree of resistance that helps balance things.

HN has Rust/AI/Bitcoin where there are always a few people who will express distain for the subject. Each of these seem weird if you actually consider the criticisms as being in good faith.

Why should people be annoyed about liking another programming language, or want to write things in it, or talk about it?

Why are there people who are certain AI is doomed to failure that are so concerned about the money of investors? Especially when many of the people who express such distain for AI generally do not look terribly kindly towards investors anyway. It's like they don't like rich people while simultaneously concerned that the rich might lose all their money.

Why are those who decry Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme so angry about the fact that other people, who they disagree with and denigrate, are doomed to lose their money? Why are they so concerned for the finances for people they don't like?

I think the motivation behind all of them is they want their dissenting position to be heard. When these things are talked about people can see some degree of popularity for an opinion that they don't hold. It seems it isn't enough to think "I don't think that will work, but good luck to them."

I often remind myself that we are in the golden age of LLMs, like the pre-enshitification days when Google would nearly always return relevant and useful results, and I felt like with access to the Internet I could learn anything.