What about a student who excels in some areas but is bad at writing, or has trouble making friends, or doesn't understand much about politics and stuff that goes on in the world (you can probably tell I didn't spend much time in high school, but you get the idea)
Chemistry is something which one can get by not knowing. A lot of other stuff learned at school, not so much.
Yes, I realize you're being sarcastic (at least I think you are), illustrating the point.
A government which bans things because they aren't deemed "healthy" (by said government) is not the right course of action (in my humble opinion). When it comes to something like alcohol, it's only "unhealthy" when its consumption is not moderated. Not to mention, what nutritionists recommend (and subsequently, what governments adopt) as health guidelines for food consumption is widely subject to change. The food pyramid that some of us were taught in the '90s is greatly recognized as being largely incorrect and is no longer taught.
Of course, the question becomes, where do we draw the line? Is it better for society for something like cocaine to be outright banned by the government or is it better for society that the government legally allows its distribution but regulates it similar to the way that it does tobacco and alcohol (effectively cutting out the market share and profits of the black market and cartels)? I don't have the answer to this question.
My point was that society/people by and large don't care about unhealthiness and/or the negative effects of addition, they simply want things that they dislike or disagree with (usually from a weird moral or intellectual high horse) to be banned. Else Americans would all be on the streets protesting the continued legality of alcohol consumption or the ridiculous amount of sugars pumped into so much of their food and drink; why the pearl-clutching over teenagers being teenagers and fooling around on a frivolous app compared to the monumental damage to society those two things inflict?
The only point I've made is that something being addictive and harmful is a reasonable quality to ban something for. This was in response to the user who said "there are plenty of reasons to ban tiktok, but this ain't it" (from memory, but close enough).
This doesn't mean that I think all things which are addictive and harmful should be banned. A total ban on alcohol would probably not be effective, and would lead to more harm than good, so I wouldn't support it.
Your friends sound like they probably believe that admission is a privilege - it's just that they also believe they deserve and have earned that privilege.
Especially true considering that some of these people accused of wrongthink might actually be onto something. It's not a good idea to assume that popular views are certainly the correct ones.
I don't think universities should only be for people who share popular views.
Seventy years ago universities had very different views. If they had had an effective way of screening out students whose views they considered dangerous or harmful, then perhaps we would have a worse society than we do now.
Wealth gives a person power. The people who get very wealthy (in our current system) are not generally the people who will do the best things with power. This seems like a situation which could be improved on.
A person or group with immense power can trivially achieve great good.
However, if you consider systems A and B, where system A is a bit better at using immense power for good than system B, you will notice that system A will result in a lot more good than system B. Therefore, if you care even a little bit about good things happening, you will be very keen to have system A instead of system B.
The fact that someone with immense power does something good becomes a lot less reassuring when you consider the opportunity cost of not having someone or some people who are a lot better at achieving good have that immense power.
Someone a lot better a doing good were not apparently good enough at getting the resources to do good.
You can't just dump a lot of power into someone you think that does good, because you have know way to know if (s)he is even able to manage that to start to do go.
At least bezos continues to improve the world infrastructure through amazon, and financing the space industry though blue origin.
If (s)he can't get/create resources, how can he do good? It seems you would just put a waster in power.
It's the difference between charity orgs with fading impact, and the ones that change people lives. Same applies to corporations, plenty changed the world for the better.
But this begets the question: How do we know that this system with Jeff Bezos is not already System A?
There are a lot of people who think they know what System A is and believe we are in System B but there's no lack of examples of people who get their chance to implement what they believe is System B and cause far more misery because they didn't know we were in System A (relatively speaking)
Personally, a system that generally rewards competency and is based on voluntary transactions to me is trending towards System A because people who amass power in such a system and maintain it generally do so because they are good at getting results through transactions that on the whole are generally voluntary and mutually beneficial.
>Personally, a system that generally rewards competency and is based on voluntary transactions to me is trending towards System A because people who amass power in such a system and maintain it generally do so because they are good at getting results through transactions that on the whole are generally voluntary and mutually beneficial.
It's easy to imagine systems which have more freedom and are better at rewarding competency. Like anarcho-syndicalism. If freedom and the rewarding of competency are what you value, why dismiss systems such as this? Throughout history humanity has gone through several systems. I'm not sure your justifications for believing the current one is the best would hold up to scrutiny.
The problem with more equal systems is that no one has that immense power to do good. So you end up needing to solve huge coordination problems that historically we are very bad at in order to achieve such projects. Governments have a bad track record of achieving such things relative to the private sector and they seem to be the best vehicle available for said coordination problems.
In my view, anyone who trusts ddg is a bit silly - founder has a bad track record on user privacy. Founded Names Database[1], a social media website designed to collect user information as aggressively as possible, before selling all the information to classmates.com.
Also worth mentioning they're closed-source, US-based and for-profit. Why exactly do people trust them? Simply because they write a few articles/ads saying "privacy is important"?
If you're willing to sacrifice search quality for privacy, as in switching from Google to DuckDuckGo, then you might as well take a step further and switch from Google to Searx/Ask.Moe.
Because they have a good privacy policy. They would face legal consequences if they were lying. Nation state actors can presumably override privacy polices but it's better than nothing.
The reason I use them is not because I trust them but because they do not put me in my own search bubble like Google does. I hate that part of using Google. Also as a bonus I do not get any AMP results.
I couldn't figure out which searx instance to use and found no good way of knowing who to trust, most of the engines i used were broken and telling me to find another searx engine.
It looks like it's pulling most of its info from duckduckgo anyway.
Personally I'd rather trust a known entity than an unknown entity anyday, especially when the unknown entity is slow, complicated, buggy and broken in many places.
They’re pulling info from all the other search engines, not just DuckDuckGo. FYI DuckDuckGo is also pulling their results from other search engines, the only difference is that DuckDuckGo aren’t being blocked/rate-limited by them, presumably because they’re paying for API access.
If you hosted your own instance then it would be a lot more reliable since the IP wouldn’t send a suspiciously high amount of requests.
As for your trust argument, I couldn’t disagree more. You choose to trust DuckDuckGo, who happens to be closed source, because of their branding. The same way people trust/trusted Google/Apple/etc. because of theirs. This thread is a perfect example why being open source is the most important thing for any privacy service (because otherwise this privacy leak likely wouldn’t have been discovered, and people wouldn’t have known that the company so carelessly violate people’s privacy and fail to correct it when people point it out.. it should really make you wonder what’s happening in the search engines codebase).
As a DDG user I don't feel like I'm sacrificing anything. Two sets of results are better than one (I can see Google results by adding !g, which I do less than once per day on average) and, ironically, DDG bangs are the easiest way to use even Google services like Translate and Scholar.
For me the fact that they’re open source. This thread is a prime example of why it’s so important. We really have no idea what DuckDuckGo is doing because they’re closed source. For all we know they could be forwarding users’ IP to Microsoft/Yandex/etc.
If you want to market yourself as a champion of privacy, then the absolute minimum criteria should in my opinion be that your codebase is open source.
I don't really think is an ad hominem fallacy. An ad homihem fallacy is when you attack the person making an argument rather than the argument. But no one here is attacking the people making the argument.
The argument is "Trust DDG". That argument is being attacked as "DDG's founder has done bad stuff in the past, it's likely DDG will do bad stuff, so I won't trust it". That seems to be attacking the argument to me, thus not an ad hominem.
[My opinion on trusting DDG] - [Reason for my opinion on trusting DDG].[More information about the reason]
In this case, because I don't use the "personal attack" to reach my conclusion that the person was wrong, I don't think it would be a case of argument ad hominem.
But if someone read it like this:
[One reason for my opinion on trusting DDG] - [Another reason for my opinion on trusting DDG].[More information about the second reason]
Then I am using the "personal attack" to reach my conclusion that the person was wrong, so I think it would be a case of argument ad hominem.
My comment wasn't written very well, and I'll try to write better comments in the future. Not that adding an ad hominem to a valid argument makes it invalid, I guess?. But it's still good to avoid fallacies, and to write one's comments so they're likely to be understood the way one meant them.
That’s not an ad hominem attack. The comment didn’t say that the person’s argument is wrong because that person is silly. Clearly the comment is saying that the argument itself is silly.
The intent of the comment was probably not ad hominem, as if it were rephrased like "trusting ddg is silly" because then silly is modifying the act of trusting. But as-written, silly is modifying anyone (a person) without distinguishing whether silliness is the cause or the effect; if silliness is the cause of the trust then it's an ad hominem attack. It would be more clear-cut if instead of "silly" they said "low intelligence."
A common fallacy I see, though I don't know if there's a name for it, is assuming that just because what someone is doing can be described by the name of a fallacy that what the person is doing is fallacious.
> Argument from fallacy is the formal fallacy of analyzing an argument and inferring that, since it contains a fallacy, its conclusion must be false. It is also called argument to logic (argumentum ad logicam), the fallacy fallacy, the fallacist's fallacy, and the bad reasons fallacy.
I'm talking about situations where no fallacy has actually occurred, not situations where a fallacy has occurred but a correct conclusion has been arrived at anyway.
So what does any fallacy tell me then? Especially the fallacy fallacy? If it does invalidate the invalidation of fallacies it is in itself untrue...bz...recursion error..bz stack overflow
Of course, it's gotten much worse still, since then.