Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23953412

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Also, unless it's happening every week there's probably an element of, "well it doesn't make me regret the overall choice to use this service, so there's no sense being upset about it".

In the context of the discussion I was treating "bad-faith participants" as the pathogen, which I would absolutely say are uniformly harmful to the discourse. Of course subjectively the far right seems to take this approach more often than the far left, but that's not at all clear-cut and isn't the point I'm trying to make here.

(It is at this point I'd like to point out that I don't have a medical background and may be going out of my depth for the sake of analogy :P)

If social unrest is inflammation then it's easy to see how it's neither good nor bad without context. It incurs a cost, but in many cases that cost is worth the change that it creates. But not always. A fever can help kill an infection, but it can also kill or otherwise damage the host if it goes too far.

This is a really interesting dimension to the transition that I've never considered before. An actual change in correctness, not just compatibility. I would have thought for floats it would just add more decimal points

I would say it's more like a social cytokine storm. If distrust in general is an immune-system, we're reaching a point of autoimmune disease.

But I do think deplatforming is an important tool. At the risk of stretching the metaphor, it's more like antibiotics. It reduces inflammation instead of increasing it, and while some non-destructive entities may get caught up in it, they're generally nonessential, it's generally a small portion, and they'll recover.

It's always been a fantasy that the whole of society could accept all corners of a person's thoughts and feelings, as-is, laid bare. Before the internet, we could pretend the fantasy was true because of our mostly-local social spheres. But now the veil has been removed completely.

This isn't to say you should never vocalize controversial beliefs. But you should pick your battles. Ask yourself whether it really matters to society that X gets discussed - and that it's therefore worth risking offense and/or backlash - or whether you're just being pedantic.

I really liked this quote as a broader description of political correctness:

> Perhaps the solution is to appeal to politeness. If someone says they can hear a high-pitched noise that you can't, it's only polite to take them at their word, instead of demanding evidence that's impossible to produce, or simply denying that they hear anything. Imagine how rude that would seem.

I'm just so frustrated and exhausted. It's hard not to lose all hope for humanity in times like these.

I've heard theories that the outer mics can get clogged with ear wax over time, and I tried several different strategies for cleaning them. I even bought entirely new rubber caps, just in case that contributed. Nothing I did worked. Eventually I just gave up and bought another pair of the regular AirPods, which had always worked reliably (I gave away my first pair as a gift when I got the Pros).

It's honestly shameful that such an expensive product can be so problematic, but I got weary of being upset about it and just wanted to get on with my life.

> How Rice Farming Shaped Culture in Southern China