Censoring people who disagree with you is not the same as no censorship.

Which leaves me asking: why are you still there?

Some good tech content and the regular thrill of telling racists their mom regrets not getting that abortion.

You are not aware of all evidence in existence, and what "is evidence for" something is a subjective matter, downstream from your conditioned biases.

These conversations are a train wreck, I don't understand how people expect to stop war if you can't be bothered to even try to speak truthfully.

Do yourself a favour and look up the origins of the stories Trump has been saying - Zelensky a dictator - Messing with WW3 - Not wearing a suit - VIP tours of the front line

They're all Kremlin lines/tropes commonly found in state media.

And then TASS was allowed in to the Whitehouse and PA News aren't?

When someone is hired into a professional job, is there something in the laws of physics that prevent them from doing wrong?

> When someone is hired into a professional job, is there something in the laws of physics that prevent them from doing wrong?

No, but work of journalists is highly visible. Probably, this creates more incentive to write according to rules of the trade. There are examples of journalists who went with ruling regime and got monetary prizes. Some are switching to it now, betting that regime change again and their dedication will bring rewards.

What is the job anyway?

Almost all of the publishing is ultimately funded by ads, therefore the primary job of everyone involved is to generate ad impressions.

What's being attributed to "professionals" in this thread is actually the opposite of what the job pays for.

It is very funny how humans experience reality eh? Like, the literal assignment of a word to something can cause the representation of it in a person's mind (aka the reality) to change. Also weird: it is essentially not possible to talk about the phenomenon in a serious way (participants range of possible actions become highly constrained, and therefore highly predictable).

I really wonder if this normative phenomenon will be able to survive in the age of AI.

Rare is the individual who does not make numerous errors while engaging in fact checking, in no small part because of our cultural norms of cognition.

The paper "is pedantic" and rejected by everyone except "pedants".

"...there’s no reasoning involved...wait, could I just be succumbing to my heuristic intuitions of what is (seems to be) true....let's reconsider using System 2 thinking..."

Or there is no objective reality (well there isn’t, check out the study), and reality is just a rendering of the few state variables that keep track of your simple life.

A little context about you:

- person

- has hands, reads HN

These few state variables are enough to generate a believable enough frame in your rendering.

If the rendering doesn’t look believable to you, you modify state variables to make the render more believable, eg:

Context:

- person

- with hands

- incredulous demeanor

- reading HN

Now I can render you more accurately based on your “reasoning”, but truly I never needed all that data to see you.

Reasoning as we know it could just be a mechanism to fill in gaps in obviously sparse data (we absolutely do not have all the data to render reality accurately, you are seeing an illusion). Go reason about it all you want.

Is this a clever rhetorical trick to make it appear that your prior claim was correct?

If not: what am I intended to take away from this? What is its relevance to my comment?

You made a joke about questioning reality, I simply entertained it. You can do whatever you want with it, wasn’t a slight at all.

It may have been in the form of a joke, but I certainly wasn't joking.

I think it is interesting what actions cannot be done by humans.

I wasn’t joking either. Things are just getting started with this AI stuff, and I feel like programmers will experience that “de ja vu” phenomenon that they talk about in the Matrix, that eerie feeling something isn’t right.

Look, why have game developers spent so much time lazy loading parts of the game world? Very rarely do they just load the whole world, even in 2025. See, the worlds get bigger, so even as the tech gets better, we will always lazy load worlds in.

It’s a context issue right? Developers have just recently been given this thing called “context”.

But yeah man, why do we think just because we walked from our house to the supermarket that this reality didn’t lazy load things. That’s how programmers have been doing it all along …

Anyways

A more parsimonious explanation: consciousness is generative, like an LLM. And, according to cultural conditioning, this generated scenario is referred to as reality.

I like this version for at least two reasons:

1. It is 100% compliant with large quantities of scientific findings (psychology and neuroscience), whreas I believe yours has a conservation of mass problem at least

2. Everyone dislikes it at least in certain scenarios (say, when reference is made to it during an object level disagreement)

>So, back to the old "white guys only" astronaut hiring policy of the moon landings era?

Do you have any control over this?

I don't understand what you mean? Nobody has control over historical events? I don't control the astronaut policy?

This = hallucinating reality.

Now: in what way will you avoid addressing the point (if you do reply)....will it be in the heart of the distribution as usual, or can you generate an anomaly....

Considering he more or less said women are less intelligent than men, I would guess at least about half were very offended.

No, he didn't say that. Don't misquote.

He posited that women might be less inclined towards programming due to inherent traits, such as being more people-oriented, suggesting that biological and psychological differences between men and women might explain the underrepresentation of women in tech.

So, maybe, not less intelligent, but, maybe, a poorer fit for a software engineer position than a person less "people oriented" and, therefore, that a lot of the women working as software engineers at Google were hired over more fitting men, because they were women.

This is closer to correct.

Damore said that women tend to choose to work with people rather than things. He said that, therefore, a way to increase women in the workforce is to enhance the peopleness of it, by incorporating more pair programming and collaboration.

He did not say that women were a poor fit for software engineering, nor that they were hired over more fitting men. Those words are from a bogeyman of your own imagination.

> So, maybe, not less intelligent, but, maybe, a poorer fit for a software engineer position than a person less "people oriented" and, therefore, that a lot of the women working as software engineers at Google were hired over more fitting men, because they were women.

Closer, but still wrong. His point is that women are less likely to enter the field of software or engineering. Not that the subset of women who do enter those fields are less capable than men.

Imagine someone demands that we address the inequitable murder convictions with outcome based goals on the gender distribution of murder convictions. If I say that I believe that the disparity in murder convictions stems from the fact that men commit more murder, not bias in police or courts, does that make me a misandrist?

If women make up ~18% of software developers, why would we expect a non discriminatory hiring process to hire more than 18% women in software development roles?

Arguing about the meaning of what Damore wrote, and what he thought/intended, is a huge waste of time. Just about everybody who read it comes to a different interpretation of what he meant to imply. Then folks argue endlessly (on forums like this, memegen, elsewhere) about their different interpretations.

A better writer with more experience could have written a doc that was basically "some aspects of the training in our DEI classes is not scientifically supported, but is being used as a cudgel to change people's behavior" with a few examples.

The problem is you trying to "interpret" what he wrote. Let's stick to what he actually said:

https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...

His writing is very clear. He is talking about the Ideological Echo Chamber at Google. He is not railing against women.

I've read the document (before it was widely published- it was posted internally at the time) several times and I don't think I said anything at all that wasn't technically correct.

>Arguing about the meaning of what Damore wrote, and what he thought/intended, is a huge waste of time. Just about everybody who read it comes to a different interpretation of what he meant to imply.

Studying the literal fundamental nature of reality doesn't seem like a waste of time to me.

>As things get worse, theres going to be even more incitement with utterly fabricated content.

Speaking of fabricated content, are you describing the actual future or a simulation of it?

Hmm. Dunno, I can't really answer that without sounding like I am tooting my own horn. Would it help further if I said that my day job is about disinfo/ fraudulent content, and that I make these statements based on work experience?

I could add that I've made these calls, since 2008, and they've been predictable.

Thing is, any rando online can claim these things, so I don't know how to answer your comment.

So what would you look for to differentiate between prediction and simulation?

You seem to realize you are making a prediction, at least to some degree, now.

However, that one has the capability sometimes is no guarantee that they can do it at all times, or even on demand.

Consciousness is generally not considered to be a part of the stack, despite it being the majority of it.