Just because Wikipedia says it, doesn't mean it's widely known or accurate. Labeling things as denialism is itself a common trick in misinformation. It flattens whatever the original argument was.
There is a common conflation today where criticism of X policy is confused with being anti-X.
The medical censorship is getting so bad that organizations like this now seem pretty useful and on point. I don't need to agree with all their claims to have common ground with them.
Certainly more than the people who see covid as an endless license to control what others are allowed to read or hear.
In a pandemic, we make weird friends. I much prefer some pro conservative anti abortion org asking for less censorship than a dozen woke newspapers and rumor mills calling me a fascist or antivaxxer because I don't treat science as an unquestionable holy cow. Or while propping up corrupt politicians because they're on the same team.
I don't need to agree with someone 100% in order to agree that doing X will make the world more like what i want it to be like.
In this case, if this org is wrong, the answer is counterspeech based on facts, not shooing people away from afar without a chance to listen. Because that is the tic of the authoritarian who is intellectually bankrupt.
There are intellectually honest organizations and groups that are asking questions and challenging censorship without being the garbage pile of ideologically-driven pseudoscience that AAPS advocates.
The real generational divide is people who feel this post in their bones and people who will nitpick at it because it's not in fact an unbiased survey.
The point about focus is very true. The socialization of development via online tools means people think sticking their nose in other people's code is a virtue instead of a bother. If you're not going to contribute, why are you interrupting me?
Which of these principles demands you let a cabal of intersectionalists flag their enemies off the front page? Just curious where the intellectual curiosity and lack of reflexiveness comes in.
I ask because if there's one thing I've noticed, it's that these people are unable to tell the difference between low quality arguments and low status arguments. Consistently.
Those are just 4 principles- there are dozens more where those came from. As Marshall McLuhan used to say, "You don’t like those ideas? I got others."
Everybody with ideological passions feels like their enemies always flag them off HN's front page and dominate HN in every other way too. This is not an accurate perception—it's produced by your passions. I don't mean that you're imagining the datapoints you see, but rather that you're filtering out the ones you don't see. Since there are more than enough datapoints to supply any perception, this creates von Neumann elephants (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) and false feelings of generality (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
In your case the passions are clear from how you swoop in with guns blazing—"cabal of intersectionalists" and so on. The people with opposite passions—your enemies—are just as shocked and dismayed by what they imagine, which is that you dominate HN. I can give you endless examples, but if you're able to make do with a few dozen, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870. The striking thing, to the rest of us, is how closely you and your enemies resemble each other. The comments and rhetoric are isomorphic—they just have the sign bit flipped.
During the Stallman saga of a couple months ago, we were getting all sorts of "why are RMS stories all being flagged off the front page" (note that word all) in comments and emails, even after 30+ major threads about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26713636. Similarly, during the George Floyd aftermath of a year ago, people were saying "any mention gets aggressively removed from discussion" (note that word any), even though it was the single most-discussed topic on HN by a long shot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624916. As I said at the time, when you're 10x bigger than Rust on HN, and someone calls that "aggressively removed from discussion", we seem to have left behind shared reality.
That is why I say that these perceptions are (a) inaccurate; (b) produced by political passions; and (c) isomorphic under ideological flippage.
The bias here is probably that you notice what you dislike and elide the rest (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). If you felt differently, you'd notice a different set of stories getting flagged and overlook different ones remaining on the front page. The filters are in you. By "you" I don't mean you personally, of course. We all do this.
There's a serious discussion to be had about how flagging actually works on HN, and I've posted many answers about that too, but when the "question" is so ideologically driven, my experience is that it doesn't help much. For anyone who's interested, you can find some of the past explanations here:
I believe I agree with the last paragraph and that the issue ends up becoming a status quo issue and unfairness.
I assume that’s what you mean by low status? Something that may be good, but isn’t of the status quo?
This is a much harder and rarely attacked or solved problem.
EDIT: it is all the harder when people like your sibling play the victim and say they are being oppressed. Which could be true for low status comments, but the oppressed/victim mindset/thinking is true across all quality of posts.
If you truly believe abortion is wrong but is better than the alternative of bringing unwanted children into the world, then you should also support fathers having the right to opt out from supporting a child they didn't want.
This would act as a strong incentive for women to think twice before bringing a child into the world by themselves, with a father who resents them. Fatherlessness and a lack of positive male role models is a real issue in certain communities (cough black America).
Funnily enough, this argument never flies, because "the interests of the child" is the excuse for why "the interests of the mother" take precedence.
Your attempt at couching your comment in disclaimers is hilarious. You don't just give supremacists ammunition, you make everyone laugh at the absurdity.
"Part of the culture" is bad... And "correlated with the culture" is good. But "exude pathological behavior" is where you end.
Have you figured out yet that language policing is just tiptoeing around the things you're not supposed to notice?
It also allows for plausible deniability to surgically remove certain viewpoints without anyone noticing. This is not an acceptable trade off if you value freedom of expression and have an understanding of how bad ideologues are at impartial moderation, confusing disagreement for low effort, lack of intelligence or insincerity.
HN has had a problem for years that heterodox views and facts on culture war issues are censored. The enforcement mechanisms are abused to do this. The mods deny it.
So either the mods are lying about their own actions, or they are not in control of their own site and sufficiently sophisticated flagging works to ban certain viewpoints.
If the latter is true, then shadowbanning is not getting rid of trolls, it is entrenching an elite of them.
The more you do the more they will rely on you. But this is on contributors too.
They start out hanging out in their clubhouse, working on their hobby, and people join in. Then a few years pass and you realize your chat is now a support channel for people who do not care and don't wish to care. Tough luck. Maybe it was never about building software after all, and more about learning, socializing, being valued, and pride.
That said, this part:
>the offer of the fellowship stipend for being a trans person in tech
It sounds like this person has made ample contributions, but they get a fellowship because they're queer. And they're happy with that? Okay. Personally I'd feel insulted.
There is a common conflation today where criticism of X policy is confused with being anti-X.
The medical censorship is getting so bad that organizations like this now seem pretty useful and on point. I don't need to agree with all their claims to have common ground with them.
Certainly more than the people who see covid as an endless license to control what others are allowed to read or hear.