> 100 years ago the education and financial support for scientific invention was largely a closed shop for European-descended upper middle class men.
i.e. exactly the people who were, by far, most likely to be living a comfortable, stress-free life back then. We should not underestimate the sheer amount of material progress and economic growth that has occurred since then. A lot more people can have the luxury of getting playfully obsessed about something than could back then.
800 karma in 73 days. I wonder what the highest karma gain in two months was, in HN’s history. (From comments only, and with the top comment removed from consideration to avoid one-offs.)
I probably should have specified “besides tptacek.” He’s a fascinating outlier. He once claimed he was worried some Russians were going to harm him due to his HN comments. I still wonder if he was just saying that to sound cool, but truth is often strange.
That average does put things into perspective though.
How did you read 'hate' into that? Genuinely curious.
As an aside, I recently feel at odds with the language many people are using. The mere word 'hate' seems to have grown weird political connotations, while is suddenly okay to hate 'hate'. Is this not fostering the very emotion you revile, under twisted pretense? I remember 'love thy enemy' to have been the twist of the knife in peaceful protest, not sinking to their level with 'justified hate'. It feels hollow. If we want a change, we need to reach out first. /rant
There is a trend to demonize the Chinese and Russians governments (it is always about governments but then it translates to companies and then to people). This trend is very useful to promote different kinds of online censorship and put people into political boxes (e.g., you like this then you are that). Basically, when every single piece of material about a country is negative, you get a set of feeling where hate is not the least common. Then you go full paranoia cycle and expect that these same people also will punish you for what you write about them. One can benefit from these tendencies and ride them to get attention and respect of like-minded people, basically sell hate.
I’ve consistently gained karma faster than that. By my estimate, there’s still a handful of people who are currently accumulating karma even faster than I am (one of whom has been mentioned here), though I expect to only really be sure in a year or so.
i.e. exactly the people who were, by far, most likely to be living a comfortable, stress-free life back then. We should not underestimate the sheer amount of material progress and economic growth that has occurred since then. A lot more people can have the luxury of getting playfully obsessed about something than could back then.