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Let's go. Give me your downvotes. 1. The best approximation for writing maintainable and fast code is to be a craftsman trying to write beautiful code. To find
by mywaifuismeta 5y ago
Let's go. Give me your downvotes.
1. The best approximation for writing maintainable and fast code is to be a craftsman trying to write beautiful code. To find joy in the art of coding, not race towards making something that works.
2. Machine Learning and AI is significantly overhyped and overfunded, even more so than crypto.
3. The current iteration of the internet, speficially social services, was a great technological advancement for humanity, but it was a step backwards towards making our lives happy and fulfilling. We did not evolve to deal with this technology and we're becoming more and more miserable. This thing may be our downfall.
4. Related to 3. I think the internet and its power of communication had a negative effect on science. Science is now mostly social and status game. This has always been true to some extent, but the ability for instant global communication and comparison has made it worse. It's regression to the mean when everyone wants to work on the current global hot topic, which has only been possible in recent decades.
5. The whole gender equality movement and cancel culture from the US is a bunch of BS and just people trying to make careers out of it, or people frustrated with themselves and their own lives. And a great way to exact revenge for emotionally unstable female persons.
6. Cars suck and should be abandoned worldwide outside of car racing for fun.
7. In a few hundred years we will look at today's science the way we're looking at religions today
8. Crypto is good, even it's just a big global casino. I believe we need a big global casino and gambling should be legal and fun. But people should be educated about gambling and probability theory.
9. Probability Theory and Bayesian statistics should be the most important subject in middle/high school
10. Governments and countries make no sense. Nobody would come up with this stuff if we were to design to system from scratch today with the internet in mind.
I could go on, but let's stop here.
- yucky 5y ago>Cars suck and should be abandoned worldwide outside of car racing for fun. Spoken like a born and raised urbanite.
- mywaifuismeta 5y agoOr like someone who didn't grow up in the US.
- yucky 5y agoAh, I thought you had said "worldwide", meaning you had considered the ramifications of this manifesto on others.
- version_five 5y agoI think you could find most of those opinions in HN discussions where they might apply. Actually that's a good thing I think, overall it's pretty hard to really be "contrarian" here. There is a groupthink and people with an agenda will down vote your nonconforming posts, but it's actually pretty tough to find a unique position that everybody else dismisses. I'd like to see someone argue for something ridiculous, like "open source is a fad and more control of IP will be better for society" (I don't believe this) or some other truly contrarian and interesting position
- oneoff786 5y ago> Crypto is good, even it's just a big global casino. I believe we need a big global casino and gambling should be legal and fun. But people should be educated about gambling and probability theory. People like to say investing is just gambling but gambling in games of chance is not at all like putting money into a market full of asymmetric information, irrational players, and fraud. Probability theory won’t help you parse the outcomes of crypto markets
- mywaifuismeta 5y agoPart of thinking probabilistically is understanding when not to place a bet. You take into account your own technical savviness, your own understanding of blockchain technologies and protocols, the amount of scams and rug pulls and insider trading, and then you can make a decision on whether you want t gamble on something in crypto or not. But you are right that the casino analogy is bad since games inside a Casino are fairer on average and easier to model probabilistically. Still, that doesn't change my point about thinking of investments as gambles.
- azth 5y ago> In a few hundred years we will look at today's science the way we're looking at religions today Who's "we"? Just because the West is secular does not mean the entire world is. Ironically, scientism is the West's latest religion.
- JamisonM 5y ago> 7. In a few hundred years we will look at today's science the way we're looking at religions today This take I find particularly hilarious because if you look back at the science from a few hundred years ago.. it is pretty recognizable as science! Newtonian physics.. pretty good! A future where we think of today's science as akin to religion is a world where Newtonian physics is obviously seen as the same.. that seems wildly implausible!
- woleium 5y agoStrong survivorship bias here. Not all science 200 years ago was good :)
- mywaifuismeta 5y agoNo, that's not what I meant. My point is that because of how science has evolved, with social media and citation hacks and tenure ladders, it is not as effective as it was during Newton's time.
- JamisonM 5y agoI am frankly still not understanding your point, sorry.