Breadth in what you think about and active attempts to connect seemingly disparate pieces of information. IMO, "abstract" refers to something that is a pattern which applies to many things. As opposed to "concrete", which refers to specifics about a specific domain.
As a younger person, I agree, it is very disappointing. I would've guessed YC more prescient than to not realize there are tectonic cultural shifts heavily worth deep discussion happening.
I've noticed that sometimes, when people rise through ranks or otherwise mature in the world of business, they become disconnected from regular humanity and forget that emotions are real signals.
That might be a possible explanation, except the facts are the opposite: HN has had dozens of extensive discussions about these topics, with tens of thousands of posts. The claim that they've been suppressed or ignored is beyond wrong—they are the most discussed topics in the last month. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23624962 for an extreme list of examples.
I always ask myself how people arrive at these perceptions in the first place, and what makes them so sure that they're right that they will make rage posts about it on e.g. Twitter without even a small effort to find out the truth. Any ideas? Here are my theories: (1) we are much more likely to notice the things we dislike, and to weight them much more heavily, than the things we like or agree with—so people on all sides end up feeling like this community is against them; (2) everyone always feels like the stories they care the most about are under-represented on HN, no matter how well-represented they actually are—this is an artifact of frontpage space being so scarce.
As an older person, this is another iteration of the same shit and unfortunately nothing will change.
Part of the reason it won't change is that a bunch of upper-class white people try to make it all about their sociological theories instead of the really simple premise of "cops aren't accountable and that's not ok". They're spending their effort going after Scott Alexander, who's generally on their side on this stuff, for his insufficient group loyalty. It's a total self-own, constantly from these people, and it plays right into the cops' hands.
We're up against a lot of resistance and there's no room for selfishness like that.
Yea anti-racism is a modern religion. It's counterproductive, and I expect a net-negative backlash than useful reform and change. No longer is it ok to affirm the human dignity and the equality of minorities. Racism is assumed globally so the question now becomes how is a person instantiating racism, not if a person is instantiating racism. It's screwed up and bizarre.
It's especially screwed up and bizarre because this whole fuzzy, religious outlook thoroughly obscures the relevance of real, actual, systemic racism in the workings of institutions like criminal justice (including policing) in the United States. Here you have the clearest argument for systemic racism being a real dynamic even in a developed, largely-free country like the U.S. (and presumably it's no coincidence that CRT, from which we get this notion in the first place, originated from a subfield of legal studies), and yet you probably wouldn't know this from looking at the progressive debate on this issue, which simply sticks to its meaningless, mindless religious tropes. Quite mind-boggling.
Events lately have encouraged me to consider the nature of narrative, and the phenomenon of how human society collectively synthesizes meaning out of data. I wonder if there is any formalized research into how computer science concepts may model this. I've also long held feelings that compsci and information theory may reveal a solid theory of everything, including conscious experience and I wonder if anyone has seriously chased up that line of curiosity.
Personally, this feels different. The Golden Age fallacy is where one person goes "hey I dislike this because it's different". This is speedily increasing amounts of young people suffering mental illness. https://www.cdc.gov/childrensmentalhealth/data.html#:~:text=....
I agree. This is probably more akin to what the Japanese youth felt after the bubble burst in the 90s there. We didn't hear personal anecdotes about it then because no internet and language barriers.
We are larger and more diverse. It's like the difference between a lean small company and a bloated corporation. The reasons why SmallCo A and MegaCorp B are different could be infinitely variable, but at the population level, it's generally agreed that the differences between the small company and mega corporation populations are simply due to scale.
Agreed. A possible "between the lines" reading of what the author is saying is that good overall solutions are formed from the balance of many different ones.
Seriously. People oft forget there are two parts to critical thinking: the part where you figure out all the ways something could possibly be untrue, then the part where you figure out all the ways in which it could be true.
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