If you're going to start this whole SJW/Reactionary drama shit, then please don't stay at Hubski. The tagline here is "a thoughtful web", not "take sides and do battle".

I just came from Reddit. I'm pretty sure they're in the process of preparing the site to sell off to marketers.

This is far from an unpopular opinion! Not only is the userbase there thoroughly juvenile, they've collectively been branded officially as the most hateful place on the Internet by the Southern Poverty Law Center. I think it has a lot to do with the way the site is designed itself; the highly segregated subreddits and confrontational voting system promote groupthink, breed radicalism, and enhance hatred of those one disagrees with. It was inevitable that the aggressive hate would eventually get so bad that the admins would have to intervene heavy-handedly.

Specialized communities like the academic subs are pretty much the only reason why I go on there anymore.

Go somewhere else. You wouldn't like Hubski, and Hubski wouldn't like your shitty attitude.

Lol

The CEO of Reddit recently made a comment denying that this was true.

Apparently, more rumors have appeared that Reddit is about to be bought out by Google or Microsoft. I don't believe that either.

So how guilty should some random 16-year-old white person feel about slavery, considering he had precisely nothing to do with it?

It's not meaningful to talk about personal responsibility or guilt when it comes to dealing with issues of systemic racism. The idea is that we ought to sympathize with the struggle of oppressed groups and turn that into a push to reform the system; not out of white guilt, but out of moral conviction.

Can our white, Western culture be both hypersensitive about racial issues and racist at the same time?

Yes. Interpersonal racism is treated as an unforgivable sin and a taboo, while systemic racism lies basically untouched. "SJWs" on the internet love to shame individual people, but they never manage to do more than talk about fixing systemic racism because nobody has the courage or sheer ability to organize and engage in direct political action IRL anymore. It's all displaced rage arising from feelings of political impotence.

You know, it's difficult for me to conceptualize how Hubski is supposed to work in a simple way. Reddit is very easy to understand; it is, at its heart, a decentralized collection of subreddit-fiefdoms dedicated to different topics. 4chan is just a bunch of open boards where you can freely post threads. Tumblr is a network of blogs following each other.

But Hubski at this point is a mishmash of a whole different bunch of functionalities, some of which appear quite redundant. For instance, I don't see what the point of chatter is. It just presents a bunch of disjointed conversations. Sure, it can lead you to where the action is, but then so can sorting by activity, right?

The way I understand "Hubski in a nutshell" right now is that it is like one giant RSS feed of threads from which different parts, like particular tags or domains or people, can be filtered at will in various ways for private viewing. I think that's nice because the centralized nature of it brings people together for discussion, while still allowing them to focus on things they find interesting and ignore things they don't.

It's a wonderful movie. Pixar did really well this time!

SPOILERS:

I especially liked how the moral of the story was that it is ok, and sometimes necessary, to express sadness. The rest of our culture is obsessed with telling us that we ought to be happy all the time, and if not, we should consume until we are. Inside Out was a welcome and refreshing corrective to this.

We must seize the Memes of Production! Rise up and unite against the bourgeoise scum!

But really, I'm not sure what an internet forum being owned by its users would entail. If the site isn't a for-profit startup that the admins want to cash in at some point, then wouldn't a run-of-the-mill combination of ads, donation drives, and "freemium" perks be sufficient to keep the servers running in perpetuity, and perhaps help the admins make a living as a bonus?

A large portion of the exodus is just people tired of arbitrary censorship.

The censorship isn't arbitrary though. People don't understand the underlying pattern because they think of Reddit as a free speech free-for-all, when really it is fundamentally based in libertarian principles of property rights.

The idea is that the mods and subscribers of a subreddit have absolute control over their subreddit and the absolute right to the integrity of their subreddit community, in the same way that people in the real world have an absolute right to their property. The admins only oppose censorship as a policy insofar as it interferes with this right (so banning a sub just because they have offensive content would be against the principles of Reddit).

However, if certain communities are interfering with the culture and functioning of other communities (violating the non-aggression principle, so to speak) or posing a threat to the site as a whole, then they can and do get banned.

I did find a few good subreddits where there was a culture of intellectual virtue and quality just as you describe. Are you familiar with the badacademics subs?

This test is ridiculous and incorrect at a fundamental level. You cannot conceptualize political ideologies as things that exist in ratios of adherence to a single quantifiable set of principles.

The reason is because political ideologies all hold different principles and different interpretations of the same principles. A libertarian and a Marxist, for instance, see "equality" as completely different things, and so do not share the fundamental ground required to place them both on a single hypothetical chart with "equality" as an axis.

Furthermore, political beliefs always exist within a cultural context that can differ from place to place. For instance, this compass sees support for LGBT rights as being integral to libertarianism, when really this is only true of Western political cultures. In East Asia, LGBT rights don't make any sense because they already don't care if you are gay; Chinese and Japanese social conservatism expresses itself through a desire to uphold entrenched Confucian social relationships and traditions, not to police "sinful" sexual deviance.

I'll probably sound like an asshole saying this, but I'm kind of entertained by what's going on. I like seeing big things fall apart.

I feel you.

I'm trying to get the people from the badacademics subs to consider splitting their time between there and here.

Your entire attitude is wrong.

It seems like you are distant from, uncomfortable with, and perhaps even deeply intimidated by, the girl you are courting. No matter what you say to her in this state or how well thought out it is, the insecurity will be visible through your body language, and it will not be attractive to anyone.

Relationships are primarily emotional and physical in nature. The first things you have to ask yourself are 1) whether you can be comfortable being very close friends with this girl, and 2) is it reasonable that she could find you physically attractive? If the answer to either of these questions is no, then either fix the problem with yourself, or seek out a relationship with a different person.

You just said you weren't American in your last comment. How do you know what it's really like for black people over here?

I see. That's close to what I suspected was the idea behind it, that Hubski was a single giant, raw RSS feed that can be filtered, split up, and organized in whatever way the individual wants. Like how a single text can be analyzed through many different critical theories or read in many different ways.

You're implying that feminists are literally as destructive as Nazis?

We're not on Reddit anymore, bro. There's no gender wars here, and no need for hyperbole and radicalism. Feminism is a legit and mainstream movement that has generally been a good thing for humanity, even if it has it's blind spots and flaws that we can criticize like any other movement. It is also incredibly diverse and always changing, so that different criticisms and generalizations may not necessarily apply to different kinds of feminisms.

No, tags aren't like subreddits. They're more like Twitter tags.

Think of Hubski as being one single feed and community that you can "extract" parts from to view privately.

It's not so much that it's "silly", it's that it's putting the responsibility on the potential victims, instead of potential perpetrators.

The reason, historically, that that was a problem at all is because putting the responsibility on women always entailed restricting what women were allowed to do, which obviously doesn't work to stop rape because it disempowers women.

This particular program is fundamentally different in that it seeks to empower women relative to men. It's no wonder that it has been a success.

That's not what the article said at all though. A massive "database of facts" had to be downloaded into the machine. And as any philosopher of science can tell you, those facts can only come within the context of an implicit research paradigm.

I , too, love Flatland. It's also a pretty on-point satire of Victorian society.

Never got into HPMOR though. Yudkowski's writing style is kind of headache inducing, and complicates otherwise simple concepts in an effort to impress and overawe. Sometimes when the point is explained plainly, contradictions in his ideas become obvious. Like the chapter where he goes on about how "the map is not the territory", yet does the transfiguration be reifying the "map" that is quantum field theory anyways.

The point is that people will discriminate in favour of women, not against.

If you weren't so absurdly politically biased, you would recognize immediately that this statement doesn't follow from the conclusion of the study you linked. People "associating more positive attributes" with women is inherently tied to discrimination against women; it means they're treated like children and not like adults.

People have the same bias towards evaluating children positively too, but we don't allow children to have any responsibility.

As for the first study you linked, there's another study that follows almost an identical methodology and comes to exactly the opposite result. It's a gross distortion to present your single study as the last word of SCIENCE!!!! on gender equality in stem. Here is a good overview of the problem. Personally, I feel that college labs at least strive to be quite gender neutral on the whole (even if sometimes they don't quite succeed), and the conclusions of both studies simply reflect the known political biases of their authors.

Arguably, reforming our labor laws and subsidizing childcare would increase women's agency and the choices that women can make in their lives by removing the heavy opportunity cost between career and family. And it is estimated to be a cause of a large portion of the overall gender wage gap as well.

If anything, we should both be able to agree that this is a good idea, even if our political frameworks are completely different!

I have to say, though it's nice to be able to have conversations like this, intractable as our positions may become, without all the hostility I'm used to seeing surrounding this sort of thing.

Ikr? Hubski is amazing.

Equality of opportunity is a great thing to aspire to, but insisting on equal outcomes is ridiculous. Just because women tend toward some fields while men trend toward others does not mean they're being oppressed.

I'm kind of unorthodox here in that I think what some would deem "equality of outcome" in certain general metrics is actually far more important than "equality of opportunity". If women (or indeed any class of people with particular shared interests), lack sufficient social, political, and economic leverage in society as a whole, then they won't be able to defend themselves from the attempts of men to exploit, control, or oppress them. It's like the balance of power with nation states, except applied to social classes.

Rather than calling this equality of opportunity or equality of outcome (which is a distinction that really doesn't make much sense if you accept that human behavior is deterministic), it makes more sense to call this "equality of power relations" or "relational equality" for short.

But I agree that perfect gender parity in STEM isn't strictly necessary for relational equality to exist, and that feminist activists might be obsessing over it too much. We just shouldn't have open sexist discrimination and bullying happening in laboratories and startups the way it currently is.

It will be interesting when we get some people who deliberately try to game the system and see how they dance around trying to inject their poisonous methods of discussion into threads. My feeling is that the self moderating functionality will do a good job.

Well, the main problem there is that those kinds of people are often accompanied by other people who agree with them and do appreciate their poisonous methods as "spreading the truth at any cost". It's possible that those people will end up forming their own "network" following each other, and then the same political tensions that make Reddit and Twitter toxic places will destroy Hubski as well.

Early Enlightenment-era theorists of liberal democracy didn't have the same knowledge of psychology that we do. Rousseau thought that people were naturally good and reasonable when allowed to be free, and most calls for expanded democracy implicitly feature this as a basic assumption.

The reality, of course, is that people naturally self-segregate into like minded blocs, view outgroups with hate and suspicion, and are prone to groupthink and collective shifts towards extremism. Hence, deliberative democracy rarely works as advertised; what always ends up happening is factionalization and interminable conflict without progress.

Another problem I've noticed is that people often make the mistake of thinking that majoritarian voting democracy is inherently founded in peaceful relations and consensus-building, when the reality is exactly the opposite. The kind of democracy that our government is based in grew out of the implicit threat of military conflict between factions, and is analogous to ritualized agonistic behavior found in the animal kingdom. It is a system where people divide themselves into rival camps, rhetorically "attack" the "opposition", and then in the end perform a vote, which is effectively a display of force in which the losing faction is forced to back down and is often humiliated. If you look at the way we usually describe democracy and debate, it is replete with military metaphors; violence is always a subtext. That isn't the kind of procedure that breeds peaceful relationships and consensus.

If you look at institutions that really are centered around consensus building, like village councils or scientific communities, they do not have voting or democracy at all. They have small groups of people linked together by mutual respect and guided by norms that encourage persuasiveness and objectivity.

Well as I remember, they justified their lack of interest in persecuting SRS by the fact that SRS simply doesn't brigade that much anymore, and that's completely right. If they were intent on being consistent, they might target AgainstMensRights or something, but I'm not sure.

I totally agree, despite supporting them on the whole, that Reddit admins are being stupid by refusing to properly clarify their rules. I think it's just the fact that they are completely, abysmally incompetent at PR that is the problem.

Huffman is standing firm on FPH being banned, so I guess that's a good thing.

Excluding dubs of Pokemon and Yu Gi Oh, my first anime was Elfen Lied.

I was hooked on anime ever since.