On the other hand, I’ve been accused of being AI/bot and if I say things the mod doesn’t like and is not their favorite thing to hear I’m “flamebaiting” or engaging in personal attacks when pointing out specific things.
Frankly, online communities have been doing for many years now, when the censorship, anti-free-speech, tone policing mods and mobs started dominating online and America really did not have the self-respect or confidence anymore to enforce the Constitution online.
Although you have a point regarding this specific situation; the real, bigger issue is this industrial scale, low quality, high quantity food production system.
I find it interesting that you are basically saying the same thing, even if the reply you are confused by simply made some assumptions you were not able to make and was a bit less precise.
It’s interesting how people will say things like “This is wrong and confused in every possible way” even though it’s not, making it and them in turn the ones “wrong and confused in every possible way”.
Maybe if we are a bit more generous with others we won’t be compelled to be so pretentious and denigrating by saying things like “This is wrong and confused in every possible way”, about something someone said and believes.
Does the original reply actually make sense in context? I can't see how.
It's a response to someone saying "you can't draw any conclusions of IQ significantly before 1950 from how the line behaves after 1950", and it says "And that’s because IQ is a statistical distribution, not an absolute measurement of intelligence."
This seems like a non sequitur to me. Am I missing something? (Bear in mind that the 'line' under discussion is an increase in unstandardised scores.)
On a given set of 1000 questions, over time the trend has been to answer slightly more of them correct every year, progressively raising unstandardized scores, over the set of all IQ testees, since IQ testing was formalized in the 1950s.
Extrapolation is the most questionable statistical tool, and while extrapolation ad absurdum is a way to show a formal predicate logic argument to be incorrect or underspecified, it is an almost fully general attack against real datasets, which basically always have some trend line that ultimately passes sensible thresholds like zero bounds. Showing this, however you form the trend line, is not saying a whole lot.
Extrapolation prior to 1950 is not a very useful tool to evaluate intelligence trends, and this is entirely separate from the periodic recalibration of IQ tests to keep the average at 100 (however many correct answers out of 1000 this corresponds to).
This is another non sequitur ... it doesn't address retsibsi's point or their question. It has nothing to do with cluckindan's comment, which is what this subthread was about.
It's because there are multiple levels of misconceptions as well as "violent agreements".
retsibsi is correct. You can't draw (meaningful) conclusions about IQ before 1950, because extrapolating from the data after 1950 is dumber the farther back you reach, just for reasons related to the concept of extrapolation.
This has nothing to do with the fact that IQ is a statistical distribution that we keep re-norming, which "should always average 100"; The Flynn Effect is not in serious dispute, it's just an effect that pertains to nonstandardized results.
They all should be prosecuted and jailed for life for the egregious harm and, if citizens, their blatant treason of the nation and the constitution.
I don’t think people are aware just how bad things are with these tyrannical and dystopian Flock cameras and the tyrannical illegitimate, treasonous government officials that install them.
They are tracking your egress and arrival in your neighborhood, your patterns of life, your coming and going, your personal movements. They’re tracking your travel on the interstate. They’re tracking your travel on rural roads and everything in between. They’re tracking every single bottleneck, choke point, and intersection.
Even the Deflock.me type sites miss a critical point; that it’s not the cameras themselves at specific points, it’s that the cameras are placed specifically to catch every single path anywhere. A better defrock.me type map would show all the paths, i.e., roads, that are fully tracked.
This is tyranny in modern form… a tiny little box with a solar panel that provides tyranny and totalitarian control no tyrant or dictator or megalomaniac psychopath all throughout history could have ever even dreamt of. This is not American. It is tyranny. It is the final nail in the coffin of this is not ended immediately.
Unfortunately, I believe the psychopathic, narcissistic ruling class will pull out all the stops to rationalize why this clear tyrannical and treasonous violation of the constitution is really Constitutional, in spite of your lying eyes and the fact that every single founder of America would be irate that we haven’t disposed of all these tyrants by now.
And no, mods, that’s not flame baiting. It’s just reality, objective reality. Regardless of whether proper want to rationalize and elude themselves into how it’s really not all that bad that the tyrants that rape and murder children by the dozens have a totalitarian surveillance stranglehold around everyone else’s neck.
I’ve long thought about how wonderful it would be to create a contemporary new hybrid language whose objective was to unify communication along the very common linguistic origins at least some language clusters have. The core challenge of course is that it would be contrived in a time when top down imposition does not work as effectively. It’s a dream I have nonetheless.
It would be a gargantuan effort just alone to devise a language that would unify historic language origins roots in a contemporary time. The objective would be to stop the death and eradication of languages, e.g., Welsh, German, or any of the numerous other smaller languages and dialects that are all under varying states and types of endangerment or extinction risk, but also prevent an ignoble, unstable, and inadequate language like contemporary English from dominating the whole world.
> The objective would be to stop the death and eradication of languages, e.g., Welsh, German, or any of the numerous other smaller languages and dialects
How is German, a langauge natively spoken in two nation states and quite a few neighboring regions, being eradicated?
Yes I’ve been having similar thoughts - how amazing would it be to have a common global tongue. Last time I looked, Chinese and the Spanish were the two most spoken languages, at least counting native speakers - there are other legit ways to measure this! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...)
What I’m personally curious about is the goal to prevent extinction of languages. Isn’t that fully at odds with the goal to unify languages? In a single language, we can’t possibly keep enough of even just the Germanic languages for anyone to feel like their language was preserved, and we’re talking about something that also has to work for all the wildly different language families is Asian, African, Slavic, Indian, and South American countries, just to name a few. I’m not sure it’s possible to borrow from languages in any way that preserves them. The thought I keep having is that maybe the goal to preserve languages is working against us. Yes it’s sad to lose some languages, but I think it was sad for the languages to split in the first place, and it would be amazing if there was a common language.
What about the idea of archiving all the languages we have, so the history is there, and then after that dropping the objective to preserve any of them? Still a gargantuan effort, but maybe being able to focus on unification and ignore preservation would help us get there? This is a hypothetical, of course, pie in the sky dreaming… but I share at least part of your dream. Language will continue to evolve as it always has, and maybe geopolitics will drive us toward one or a few languages being super common.
The official position of modern IAL advocates like Esperantists is that everyone should be bilingual in a local or family language as well as in the world language. There is someone on HN who has pointed out (I forgot exactly when) that this is actually not the historical tradition in Esperanto, but it's extremely strong nowadays.
I guess one thing that leads to divergent attitudes about multilingualism and language planning is people's different intuitions about whether bilingualism is easy or hard. Some people feel bilingualism is literally automatic (just have children regularly spend time in different language environments), while some people feel it's expensive or prone to failure modes where some children favor one language or another, suffer cross-linguistic interference (which might not harm their intelligibility at all in their own immediate environments, but might be at odds with language planning goals), or become less than fully fluent or less than fully literate in one or more languages.
I was taught the "bilingualism is automatic" view and I know there's a lot of scientific consensus behind it, but it also seems like the fine details are complicated: not all children and not all adults will be enthusiastic about achieving and maintaining equal fluency in languages they use in different contexts, or necessarily about following a national or international standard to maximize understanding with outsiders!
My father's family (in New York) stopped speaking German in his generation, so I'm not a native German speaker, as my grandfather was. I've been sad about this, especially with the intuition that I could "easily" have been a fluent native German bilingual speaker "for free" with no adverse consequences to my English proficiency. But maybe that's not literally true (maybe my English would have been more idiosyncratic and less standard, maybe I would have lost interest in German as a child and become bad at it, maybe I would have divided my reading time between languages and ended up with a slightly smaller English vocabulary?).
That is a more reasonable position than trying to imagine or push a single language. And yes, acknowledging it’s not everywhere necessarily, it does seem like multilingualism is fairly automatic out of necessity in much of the world. As an American, I’m sad that the US scores so poorly on multilingualism. I’m very impressed when I travel how many people speak multiple languages. There are so many places where even entry level jobs require 2 or 3 languages.
Yeah, I know people's intuitions are also different there, as almost everyone I've met from Europe speaks 2-4 languages fluently and doesn't consider this exceptional. That makes multilingualism feel very attainable, because it's socially normal. From the U.S. point of view this is amazing, because it's taken for granted there, where it might be a celebrated achievement here.
What I know less about is how much time or effort that multilingualism took, whether peer pressure forced some reluctant kids to stick with languages they were otherwise less interested in, and whether there are any hidden costs.
An example could be replacement of some native vocabulary by English vocabulary (which is happening in many languages). This is a benefit for many people who work internationally, but it probably harms intergenerational understanding on some topics. For example, a Brazilian friend of mine gave a computing history lecture where he noted that Brazilians briefly used Portuguese vocabulary for computer engineering in the 1970s before it was supplanted by English loanwords. That change might mean that older speakers would understand younger speakers less well on some technical topics, or that younger speakers would have a harder time reading older technical documentation. From the point of view of monolingual Portuguese speakers, the internationalization of that vocabulary might not seem like a pure advantage.
I also know that some majority language speakers in Finland (who probably expect to speak English with non-Finnish speakers) greatly resent having to spend a lot of time studying Swedish, the "other national language", if they don't anticipate using it in their day-to-day lives.
In that case, it feels to some of them like the government is requiring them to be multilingual in a specific way that isn't their own preference or that doesn't align with their existing sense of ethnolinguistic identity. It doesn't seem like it's doing any kind of long-term harm, but I guess having any mandatory school subject that you don't enjoy can be pretty unpleasant, and maybe give you a more negative experience of formal education in general.
Some of the Swedish minority there doesn't prefer a future in which Finnish speakers only speak English to them (a phenomenon that already exists and that I think is growing over time). Even though it's officially legally protected, the practical status of their local minority language is being eroded by international culture.
I also have a native Finnish-speaking friend who enjoyed learning Swedish as a foreign language as a child, and ended up moving to Sweden and becoming a university lecturer (who usually teaches in Swedish). Foreign language learning can always be a benefit to anyone of any background.
To again brainstorm trade-offs, it's possible that that outcome is a bit disagreeable to her family back in Finland (who might have preferred her to stay closer to where she grew up, which might have been more likely if she had been more monolingual).
I've tried Slovio on Slavs of about 10 nationalities. None had ever heard of it. All of then, no exceptions, could just understand it perfectly well, to their great surprise.
I find slovio to be jarring. It's like someone took vaguely slavic words and slammed Esperanto-inspired grammar onto them. Something like Interslavic at least has noun/verb morphology that is much more familiar to all Slavic language speakers. I could imagine myself actually speaking Interslavic, but not the case for Slovio. It's simply too strange.
Straight from the Slovio website:
>Slovio es novju mezxunarodju jazika ktor razumijut cxtirsto milion ludis na celoju zemla.
>Slovio is a new international language that 400 million people on the planet understand
I am a Russian speaker so the copula "es" being written is strange but obviously I speak other languages that use their copula in the present tense so that's not so bad, but to 100% of slavic speakers "jazik" (tongue/language) is masculine, yet the adjectives here are reminiscent of ones for a feminine noun in the accusative case which is doubly weird as that case would also make no sense here. The second half of the sentence isn't so bad aside from "ludis" (-s plural is alien to the entire family) and "na celoju zemla" (more confusion where my brain expects a different case form). It's just odd that it completely drops noun cases on the floor when almost all the Slavic languages still have healthy productive inflection systems.
You are both more involved than I am. I only brought up Esperanto because it seemed as if there was no awareness of effort in this type of language development.
I would like to mention that although I’m aware of the limitations, I think it is worth designing and advocating for web app standards that could even at some point become a viable competitor to native apps, especially for apps that really don’t need to be native/wrapped apps in the first place since most are CRUDs anyways.
Maybe this will be a catalyst towards further evolution of the web app as Android devs want to carve out some freedom from the world domination corporate shadow government walled gardens.
You're not wrong, but it will always be the case that the web platform lags native. There will always be stuff you can't do without a native client. The proportion of apps that it's viable to run as a PWA will probably increase over time, but the platforms have both the ability and incentive to stay out ahead.
That is a good point and at the very least it’s a good idea to download electronic statements, maybe with a script to retain the most recent n statements
The vast majority of people currently do not “ask the right questions and to make sense of the results” now because they are conditioned from early life on to only ask the approved “right questions”, which will always frame the sense they can make of any results; why would that change with AI that has clearly already been manipulated with the very same kind of dogmatic guardrails deliberately there to prevent “asking the right questions and make sense of the results”?
And if anything, it’s inversely correlated with at least the “education” in the West today, which is primarily an incentive ladder where the more “education”, i.e., system approved indoctrination you have, the less incentive or motivation you have to question it at all.
In many ways, we are witness to that behavior pattern in the Department of War and our whole government right now, where yet another generation of people in the military are supporting and perpetrating war crimes, while the incentive structure shields and protects them.
We can even see today that those the system fears the most, those people who start asking questions and are financially outside of that incentive ladder, the system attacks most aggressively. That has also never changed. If the system does not attack you, you know you are not actually over the target in any way.
It’s not really a new phenomenon or really fundamentally any different than aristocratic incentives to remain loyal to the king to curry favor, but the AI component introduces a whole different dynamic and in my view will even start aggressively going after any kind of knowledge or information that the system does not control, very much like how Orwell envisioned in 1984 or somewhat as envisioned by Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451. The question I cannot find an answer to is; why wouldn’t it do that, especially since we are already seeing the groups and interests that have long undermined free speech even in the USA, only get more aggressive in their attack on free speech from all angles?
So if you have books and information of fact the system will definitely come to not like at one point or another, you may want to keep quiet about that future contraband.
There is nothing in the trajectory and the system that would give me the impression that it wants anyone to “ask the right questions” especially not the “educated ones”. Their job within the system is to ask the acceptable questions within the guardrails, and they are conditioned/trained to do that and self-police in that way.
I think an important distinction is not really the class matter, it’s really more a jealousy and spite that the political and bureaucratic betters could not profit from it, not that he did so much.
If he had had the means of letting all or maybe just a relevant and important enough cadre of aristocrats know the inside information, he would have surely not been prosecuted. I know this from first hand knowledge.
It may seem the same or like a distinction without a difference to some, but that is really how things work and why he was prosecuted, not because he profited, but because he did not let others in on it and they really want to discourage that behavior, hence his flogging and his public flogging at that. And yes, if you get the sense that it’s like organized crime, then yes, that is and long has been how the US government and many other governments have functioned for a long time now. It’s what also makes them so easily controlled by the US. It could have easily also been swept under the rug while still sending a signal within the system, but it wasn’t and we were all told about it.
And that is how the ruling parasites really get rich, none of that hard work and smarts stuff; those are the stories told to keep the peasant cattle voting for the slaughterhouse, dreaming of the wide open pastures of also becoming rich by working hard.
Fraud, cheating, lying, manipulation … that’s the name of the American dream game.
I again apologize to anyone who feels what and how I say things is “flame bait” or a personal attack, it’s simply just how I speak and like to challenge people’s comfortable assumptions. Feel free to dismiss what I say of you disagree with me. No offense intended and no flaming or whatever necessary, it’s just people speaking to each other or not. We’ll all be fine if we keep talking, even if you don’t like what others have to say or want to control how they say things.
I agree, the challenge still remains to classify social media if the objective is to arrest or reverse the negative effects, while possibly not depriving children of positives of things like forums like HN which are clearly also social media, even though it’s clearly not what people are primarily thinking of regarding this issue.
I suspect there is not a clear or even uniform definition of what is and is not social media that would be banned for children. Usenet is attributed as being the first social media application from 1979. I presume many here would not include Usenet even though by the technical definition of social media HN and forums in general are in fact also social media, while also at the same time one could make the case that things like TikTok or YouTube shorts are not very “social”, while at the same time being part of the problem people are upset about.
I agree that there is definitely a problem with children and the internet, but frankly, maybe the ban should be for smart phones in general for children, because the same kind of toxic behaviors that I think people are actually calling “social media” can simply just continue in things like telegram and iMessage; aren’t they social media too, especially now with video/image sharing?
I preemptively apologize to anyone if my words are taken as flame bait or personal attacks on anyone that likes social media or smart phones for children, it’s simply my opinion and how I speak and if you don’t like it you can simply disagree and ignore what I say, even if yuppy are a mod.
I don’t think the answer is banning phones (except in school, context dependent), it’s letting lazy, bad parents have natural outcomes for their children and allowing the rest to work itself out through the social free market.
It sounds cruel, but if someone is set on allowing their children to be raised by strangers on the internet and the government, they need to be ready to accept any outcomes that come along with that.
Although I agree with you directionally, reality simply is that at least speaking for the west in general terms, this approach does not strike me as feasible because it will always contact the pathological altruism of our current civilizational state that will be compelled to "help" and "protect". But there is also the issue of simply writing off the children of such parents is rather callous and simply not compatible with civilization. We are not individuals in a modern society/civilization; your notion of parents "accepting any outcomes" turns out to always result in society/civilization dealing with the effects like crime, loneliness, degeneracy, etc. As an aside; it is in fact the deepest of problems of the whole "libertarian" premise that we are all just individuals, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. Do we want to be a civilization or do we want to be a conglomeration of wild animals where we just accept the "natural outcomes" of the consequences of things that was imposed on them in the first place?
Frankly, (and no, I don't mean this as a flame bait, mods) I see it similar to when alcohol was introduced to the tribes of America, when they were genetically predisposed to both increased intoxication and addiction to alcohol; we introduced smartphones not only to a population that was simply not at all prepared for it psychologically (arguably, genetically too), but it was also introduced largely to the young through the adults, who were even more psychologically vulnerable to every single form of predation and things you would want to protect children from one could imagine.
I know people who suffer from both the effects of smartphones and "social media" (some both, some each) in several ways too broad in scope to detail here now (but it is very bad in many ways), even though the irony in one case in particular that comes to mind, is that it is due to secondary effects from their parents' behaviors, actions, and inactions related to social media and smartphones. To your point, the saddest part is that it is not the "bad parents have natural outcomes..." it is the "children" who are suffering and having to recover from even things like grooming and psychological conditioning, and having to "reparent" themselves following a young life of neglect and what can easily be described as abuse from it.
The challenge presents itself there that barring adults from "social media" and smartphones due to negligence, neglect, and various forms of abuse is a far more tricky issue and topic; especially when a double-digit trillion dollar industry is behind it that makes up what can be argued is the only remaining, functioning industry in America.
I will have to stop here. It has given me an idea for a book. Thank you for spurring that.
I don’t care how anyone else chooses to raise their children. They can let their kids rot their brains, do poorly in school, and fail in life without ever getting me or the government involved. I am not responsible for raising the failed children of failed parents. I care ONLY about the outcomes of my family, friends, and, to a slightly lesser extent, my broader local community.
Promoting failed parents and children, not in spite of their failures but because of them, is suicidal empathy, a modern mental illness that was never able to fully take root in the past, because the world was always much smaller, divided, and cutthroat.
If given the binary choice between “being an individual” or a “civilization”, I would choose to burn down the civilization in a moment IF it meant the eradication of the individuality of those that I love. I would hope every single person with a heart beating in their chest would feel the exact same way, or else THAT is when a society truly collapses.
To borrow your analogy, the Indians became alcoholics because “they were genetically predisposed to it”? Okay, well why would we want to increase genetic predisposition to alcoholism in the gene pool by denying someone their freedom to drink themselves stupid?
You can argue that it wouldn’t be fair to their children, but those who aren’t drunkards could become wealthy casino owners whose children will prosper more than even you or I, while those whose genes, according to your perspective, apparently don’t allow them to control their own urges will fail, and their lineage will end, along with their hereditary alcoholism.
I see no reason for society to bear any level of responsibility for individuals regardless of context, as society is built by successful individuals , and it is torn apart by failed ones. We must allow the natural outcomes, which is that failed people will fail.
Evolution, if guided by humans, would quickly devolve into chaos, as we can’t accurately select for the correct pressures for success. It simply has to occur. Society is a living organism in the same way.
Frankly, online communities have been doing for many years now, when the censorship, anti-free-speech, tone policing mods and mobs started dominating online and America really did not have the self-respect or confidence anymore to enforce the Constitution online.
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