I agree, but even online is now heavily censored. It's harder and harder to find a place to express even slightly non-PC opinions. In my opinion this is not gonna produce good results in the long run.
I think there's a difference between an opinion being hard to find, and a place to express the opinion being hard to find.
The more suppressed a view is, the more extreme the place where that view is allowed ends up being.
Those places don't normally allow rational debate either. They're just a different kind of toxic, and have their own rules for what will get you dog piled.
Finding out that the people that share your views are people that you wouldn't want to associate with (I'm putting words in your mouth here, I'm sorry) is how I find I was able to grow up intellectually.
There have been places where reasonable debate was possible, but I suspect they were far more ephemeral than OP's recollection.
It's kinda sad to watch places you enjoyed fall into it, though. One particular subreddit that I've never seen be overtly political before now has an effectively endorsed opinion on someone (not Trump). There's no point engaging with it, because piling on more hate is the only socially acceptable opinion there.
On the other hand I find it the lamest and most annoying "feature" of the last 10 years. The article itself is a good demonstration (at least on my M1 MBP): as soon as an image has a single pixels row displayed, the luminosity of the whole page fades, and the reverse happens when no image is in sight. The comparison video is the first time ever I see the tech doing anything else than changing the luminosity of the screen.
I bought an early 2015 MBP (my favorite design) when the 2016 models where announced and waited until the M1 to buy a new one again, and the keyboard is good again.
I've seen faddishnes and questionable authorship in a top-3 Japan university too. The lab I was in was a paper mill, the professor even explicitly told student than quantity > quality. I'm glad in France things are getting a bit slower but deeper (from my observations).
I'm giving a programming class and students uses LLMs all the time. I see it as a big problem because:
- it puts focus on syntax instead of the big picture. Instead of finding articles or posts on Stack explaining things beyond how to write them. AI give them the "how" so they don't think of the "why"
- students almost don't ask questions anymore. Why would they when an AI give them code?
- AI output contains notions, syntax and API not seen in class, adding to the confusion
Even the best students have a difficult time answering basic questions about what have been seen on the last (3 hours) class.
Job market will verify those students, but the outcome may be potentially disheartening for you, because those guys may actually succeed one way or another. Think punched cards: they are gone along with the mindset of "need to implement it correctly on first try".
students pay for education such that at the end, they know something. if the job market filters them out because they suck, the school did a bad job teaching.
the teachers still need to figure out how to teach with LLMs around
It's less hilarious when whole country policies are made on those assumptions thus ruining it economically (notably), and voicing any concerns is threatened with legal force.
In France the official dogma of the educated is that every difference is cultural, and races don't exist. My father for example strongly held and defend those beliefs. Somehow he gets very angry when I ask why there is wide academic achievement difference between his children despite growing in the same environment, or how Japanese people could instantly guess I'm a foreigner while not uttering a single words. I think that deep down all those people know the truth but they don't want to admit it, nor admit it to other for fear of the social consequences.
> why there is wide academic achievement difference between his children despite growing in the same environment
Why are there wide academic achievement differences between children who have the same "race" who grow up in the same environment? According to you, this should not be the case.
> how Japanese people could instantly guess I'm a foreigner while not uttering a single words
Do you think they can do so for any given person? I guarantee you there are foreign people who Japanese people don't guess are foreign, and non-foreign people who Japanese people guess are foreign. How can this be?
I can sympathize with your father getting angry. Considering how trivial it is to come up with counter arguments, it must be frustrating to have this brought up more than once.
Most of the definitions around race are tied to a subjective view of a person’s physical appearance.
Is Obama (the son of a black Kenyan man and a white American woman) black or white? If neither, what is this new race to be called? Would he be a different race if his father was also mixed race?
I find that often times asking people this question leads us back to something akin to the one-drop rule and I don’t see any value in that.
This [1] discussion on X includes a gene prevalence graph, showing varied groups mostly easily identifiable by DNA sequencing. Such graphs use the prevalence of 2 genes amongst different samples of populations. Including more genes develops a much sharper image.
> Democracies around the world are increasingly looking to surveil and expose private data of their citizens, and introducing laws where simple act of defiance will become criminal.
Not only that, but also trying to ban platforms that don't follow their censorship guidelines (TikTok in the US, X under scrutiny in UE) and even voiding elections when the result is not good (Romania) under very slim technology-related pretense (somehow a few ads are deemed enough to cancel an election, but 24/7 oriented news from every established newspapers in another country like France is totally OK). It's becoming harder and harder to believe in said democracy when the methods are all but looking like the ones used in non-democracies.
Also because the candidate who won the first round and was almost guaranteed to win (not the nut job TikTok guy who came second) didn’t belong to any of the major parties. So the government wasn’t particularly excited about that…
2) why wasn't the person/party that broke the law penalized then? PNL was found to have paid for the TikTok ads for Georgescu. Did they get even a slap on the wrist?
Maybe the insecurity of the city since he mentions the evening? Hardly somethings specific to mathematicians tho. It's seems like a weird AI-generated rant.
I have a theory for a long time that "democracy" as a concept is pushed so strongly in the West not because it really favors people nor for its effectiveness but because it nulls political assassinations and delegitimates them. Thus it is an extremely good system for the rulers.
A system with fewer assassinations is a better system, if all else is equal. Unfortunately, all else is not equal.
Democracy should be an alternative to violence: Instead of murdering the next Hitler, you can just vote him out. Unfortunately, this only applies as long as it works. American democracy has not worked for a very long time.
