For the same reasons that people like Boghossian and anyone else who dares to speak outside of the desired narrative gets harassed by the mob: to quell dissent.
It is an oddity of the current crop of authoritarians that they in one breath manage to claim that there is no absolute truth but a multitude of 'lived experiences' while at the same time decrying anyone who dares to speak outside of the desired narrative. Of course the same people deny the validity of logic by calling it an example of 'white supremacy' so its application to their behaviour is a losing proposition.
Once enough people have been pushed out of those parts of academia which have been infected by critical theory it stands to reason that they will end up creating new venues for academic research structured in such a way that they can not be taken over - as to what this structure would look like is still up for grabs. Given that those new institutions can be assumed to be based on meritocracy where identity politics and 'diversity initiatives' are driving factors in their previous institutions it is likely that the former will end up producing higher-quality research than the latter - which will promptly be labelled as the result of some combination of *-isms/*-phobias by the authoritarians.
Personally, I find it rather uninteresting and not the kind of article that raises the standard of HN comments, which are the reason I visit. I perceive these types of threads as not-useful flame wars supported by opinions presented as insights.
The amount of projection in this thread regarding the collective motivations of the HN Hive Mind is fascinating.
The subject is dear to heart for many, if not most people who frequent HN. Boghossian is a well-known author in this context who was instrumental in bringing these issues up for discussion outside of academia. He was the last of the authors of the grievance studies hoax articles who was still employed in academia so his resignation is sort of a milestone, in what direction remains to be seen. The discussions around these issues often do end up in polarised factional disputes but that is part and parcel of the problem and not something which can be avoided by not discussing it in the first place.
For me the desired outcome of these discussions is that those who have been supportive of the introduction of indentitarian policies in academia realise the deleterious effects these have on institutional and, lately, societal cohesion - more or less in the same way that Marxists in the 20's of the previous century started to realise that the Soviet Union did not develop into the workers and farmers paradise they were told it would. This can only happen if the subject can be discussed in those places where it matters, in other words in places frequented by people who have been part of or are still part of academia. HN is one of those places.
Fair perspective, I grant you. I just don’t think it’s particularly well suited to the HN that I want to see. It seems more fitting for a philosophy board than a startup/technology board.
I do realize that politics is sometimes ok on Hn. I’m just saying I think that degrades the quality of the forum, and dilutes the topics I prefer.
> I just don’t think it’s particularly well suited to the HN that I want to see. It seems more fitting for a philosophy board than a startup/technology board.
Had the problem been limited to academia - and, more specifically, the humanities - I would have concurred. Now that it escaped out into the wild where it is wreaking havoc with societal institutions and commercial entities it has become something which directly concerns the areas of interest for this board and as such should be dealt with.
One of the best ways for dealing with these authoritarians is for people to just say "no, I will not be bullied into submission". As long as there are only a few people doing so they can be singled out, demonised and de-platformed by the authoritarian 'new puritans' but this becomes ineffective in the face of growing resistance. Once they can no longer scare people into submission they will lose their power, once they lose power the problems they created can be dealt with and true academic freedom can return. Once true academic freedom returns there will still be space in academia for critical theory and related 'grievance studies' [1] but they will no longer be able to force their ideologies upon the institutions.
Resistance is not futile, we will not be assimilated.
[1] ...although I suspect they will not be able to find enough funding to keep going nor will there be many employment opportunities for those with a degree in one of these fields - which will eventually lead to their demise.
Within the unversity cluster that Boghossian worked, this activity is predominantly progressive liberal because that describes the makeup of the campus. There is a very different orthodoxy if you visit conservative colleges.
Sorry, got a chuckle at that. Liberal Progressive is a pretty big oxymoron.
Neoliberals downvote anything that disagrees with their superior worldview and are identity politics proponents because it's an effective way to disrupt class and labor movements.
Progressives are the ones who want things like universal healthcare, a federal voting holiday, an end to private prisons, and for their taxes to go towards safety nets for their neighbors and communities instead of corporate bailouts and forever wars.
Neolibs want global trade agreements, stable monopsonies, and to have wage workers pay for their own healthcare, benefits and retirement on top of all of their taxes out of the same paycheck. They're largely coastal elites and other class signalers that punch hard left against any platform that might benefit their idea of a "deplorable" even if it helps other people.
What? Don't use TikTok? Encourage kids to read a book? The train has passed on this one. Pretty sure it's considered child abuse in the lower 48 if your toddler doesn't have their own smart phone and a 24/7 internet connection. I'm only slightly exaggerating.
if you dont allow your children tiktok/insta/etc, they get completely excluded from their community.
a possibility is to move into a community that does not use social networks that much, so not using them is normalized, but sadly this is not easy in western europe (at least for me).
It's still very slow - retrieval times >30s for files that aren't cached on cloudflare or ipfs.io. Also, those two providers each have multiple periods of downtime every year.
If the files are cached and the services are up, it's plenty fast for static data but dynamic data (IPNS) is still very slow.
We've built a competitor called Skynet that is much faster (less than 200ms for files that aren't in the cache) and scales better. It's currently hosting tens of millions of files across 200+ TB of data.
We really like the vision that IPFS had and we think decentralized data is the future of the Internet. We're proud to have put in the legwork to make it practical.
The blockchain gets us a decentralized marketplace for decentralized storage providers. Anyone can join as a provider and get paid, and the blockchain can act as a decentralized escrow that holds the payment until proof is provided that the storage contract was properly fulfilled.
98% of our technology is off-chain. Only a little tiny sliver (the file contract open and close) is actually posted to the blockchain.
I'm writing a more direct comparison this week, we just recently (less than 30 days ago) hit full feature parity with ipfs, any webapp or file deployed on IPFS should work natively on Skynet now as well. The link/identifier will be different but you shouldn't need to change any code
You can always run a host yourself and pin it to your own host.
The main reason we chose a host-based architecture instead of a pin based architecture is that we saw on IPFS that having people pin their own data resulted in really poor uptimes, a lot of file rot, and it also substantially reduced scalability and increased fetch times. And after all of those tradeoffs, the vast majority of accessible content on IPFS is hosted via a pinning service anyway.
Makes sense. I’ve just been looking at creating a distributed YT archive on IPFS, but as you said, load times are absolutely terrible, especially for big files like video. I’ve been following sia since 2016-ish, and skynet looks awesome, just worried about maturity. I will try hosting my own files as you described, thanks!
> You can always run a host yourself and pin it to your own host.
(It sounds like it, but) to clarify, can you do this completely for free, with no cooperation from a third party (eg, you don't need to pay a existing host to vouch for you)?
I got turned off it because things that I'd pinned, and knew I'd pinned, would eventually become mysteriously inaccessible unless accessed through the node that I pinned it on, and I couldn't work out why. It's a great idea, but I found it too flakey to satisfy me.
there was a scotus case lately about this. pretty sure the police were covered under qualified immunity. my google fu is weak but it was in the past year.
cops (allegedly) stole $225000 but QI had them covered in the 9th circuit. scotus declined to pick up the case. for some background, the courts have declined to do anything about QI. they say it's legislator's job to fix it. odds are slim anything will happen.
it's funny, there is no prior legal framework for this and the judiciary isn't supposed to magic things out of their dignified assholes, but there it is. legislation really needs to lay down the law here, if anywhere. a no-knock warrant on one of our congress-critters ending in execution-by-cop might fix it.
Forgive me if this is a dumb question, since I'm not that well educated about this. Why can't they sue the police department or some similar body instead of the individuals? My understanding is that QI protects the individuals, but not the government itself from being sued; however, I don't see any discussion of that route when this defense is brought up.
