The thread is flagged, because HN is marketing branch of YCombinator, and publishing information that's inconvenient to their business partners isn't in their best interests.
Of course the admins will claim this isn't the case, but there's no reason to believe them, and lying is commercial companies' standard modus operandi.
The thread was flagged by community members. Admins didn't moderate it and in fact, after looking at the article (which a user emailed and asked us to do), I've turned the flags off.
This is bog standard HN moderation and has zero to do with "business partners", whoever those are.
> The thread is flagged, because HN is marketing branch of YCombinator, and publishing information that's inconvenient to their business partners isn't in their best interests.
No, it's flagged because it's one of those controversial political topics that often leads to polarized slapfights and flamewars.
And that's proven by the a number of inflammatory, flamebait comments already in this thread.
Funny I’ve seen threads like that hit the front page and never get flagged. Hell I’ve seen some pretty explicit violations of the guidelines hit the front page and stay there plenty of times. Where are all the rules lawyers in those threads?
You can claim that anyone who even hints that maybe two countries with very different demographics may in fact have differences due to those demographics is racist and that any comments along those lines are just inflammatory flamebait, but people will continue to ponder that theory because 1) it seems fucking obvious and 2) curious people (and people in general I guess) can't help but be interested in topics that they're told not to be interested in.
Now that you (and others) have flagged the thread, the people with showdead on will see that it has happened yet again, and they just might seek out a place where an actual discussion can be had.
>This is the same logic that China uses to ban all western apps
Except it doesn't. It's just that apps are required to follow local laws, and many companies - like Google - don't want to, because their entire business is exploiting users' privacy.
You do realize that using VPN makes the company you're paying for that VPN gather way more of your internet browsing history than the UK's surveillance program?
There's your problem - you're illiterate on that subject and are not willing to learn due to cognitive dissonance, probably because of your preexisting fringe beliefs. It's no different from being a flat earther.
Sure. One is so idiotic that it is akin to saying "my head is fireproof!".
One could simply light their hair on fire to test it. Or, in the specific flat-earth case under discussion here, climb a reasonably tall hill see the earth's curvature -- no airplane required.
OTOH, there is in fact an empirical, science-based, opinion-not-required basis for the judgement of "male" or "female". (Even though, yes, there is also a tiny percentage of genetically anomalous cases that defy such classification, it's not germane.)
Additionally, though, there are centuries of societal reinforcement of various gender expectations, based on the inseparability of gender vs biological sex. These still manifest today in all sorts of ways, in traditions handed down from previous generations. Heard by kids from their parents, grandparents; reinforced in adulthood by all sorts of people.
Even though I mostly agree with your diagnosis of cognitive dissonance and "fringe" (I would call them "legacy") beliefs making this hard to accept, it is completely unsurprising that it takes more time for many people to process the upending of these definitions -- which in many ways are/were the bedrock of all sorts of societal classifications and expectations -- than it does for them to accept scientific truths established 500+ years ago, and which are anyway taught in grade school AND self-evident based on nominal and easily accessible experimentation.
Also, I don't think this is as much an issue of scientific (or moral) consensus as it is of semantics. Are you pro-choice, or anti-choice? Pro-life, or anti-life?
I think the side that wants gender to be immutably tied to biological sex (again, ignoring the actual biological anomalies) is wrong. It seems obvious to me, scientifically, ethically, culinarily, metaphysically, ... I mean, duh. But even though I personally don't have all that baggage like But what would dead Grandpa think? What would The Pope think? OK fine but what would the _previous_ Pope think?? it is obvious to me that for many if not most people in the world and the history of it, sex and gender roles are some of the most fundamental things.
So as we (as a society/species) tease out the difference between "gender" and "sex", I don't expect it to come as quickly and easily as the (extremely obvious) fact that the world is, in fact, not flat.
>People who are worried about alignment issues are worried about the danger unaligned AI poses to humanity; the harm which can be done by some super-intelligent system optimizing for the wrong outcome.
Like the harm being done over the past couple of decades by economic neoliberalism destroying markets all over the western world? I wonder how did we manage to achieve that without AI?
Our failure to align economic entities that are made out of people to human values, despite most of the people actually making up those entities being decent and not sociopathic at a personal level, is not very reassuring with respect to our ability to align future far more alien intelligences. And if AI does kill us one day, it's very likely that neoliberal market competition worshipping short-term profit above all else plays a significant role.
