I know, it's almost as if they don't consider you the sole and undisputed arbiter of the limits of technology in creating social policy. What a bunch of psychopaths!
When someone engages in dehumanizing language towards a group of people and their baseless characterization is satirized for being reductive, you're saying that the problem is the irony, not the bigotry?
Obviously it's your treehouse and you have the right to set whatever rules you want, but this interpretation of civility seems tilted towards creating an echo-chamber that nurtures increasingly authoritarian views among an increasingly homogenous community.
Or is there no way to couch that opinion in such a way that it won't be considered uncivil?
Just for the record: I didn't play a "card", that was a genuine question.
I didn't want to escalate, I think the escalation was already done by the man who "jokingly" called his project the "Minority Report".
If you can't talk about pathological behavior with the appropriate words, it's getting difficult to discuss this.
The commenter you booted out was showing very similar behavior btw.
Not every psychopath/sociopath (I know it's getting muddy there) is out to eat people, but they all fundamentally lack empathy and usually compensate with power, and sarcastic, deprecating snark is just that.
I don't doubt your sincerity, but sincerely dropping a lit match is still dropping a lit match. Nothing good can come of blithely invoking categories like 'psychopath' in internet arguments. Simply doing that is escalation. Of course it was only a small infraction, which is why I didn't chide you directly. The main problem with what you posted is that it implicitly invited worse.
Your comment here makes me think that you underestimate what a big deal this is. You're basically arguing, "well, they are psychopaths" about people you disagree with. You can't conduct disagreements that way on an internet forum without leaving a trail of destruction behind you, and that's enough to show that it's a wrong approach.
Any time you find yourself taking a psychiatrically diagnostic position in an internet argument, your game piece is sitting on a square from which no comments should ever emerge. That's not because your views are wrong; it's because even assuming they're 100% right, damaging the commons does more harm than posting such a comment can do good.
I'd just like to cosign your rebukes to both of us, they're very reasonable. Showing that you understand why I reacted how I did but that it wasn't productive is a totally legitimate call-out. I'm working on being a less confrontational/snarky/douchey person and rationalizing everything I do is a big impediment to that.
Sorry for the trouble, and thank you for moderating in a thoughtful and engaged way.
If you have (created!) a job that closely resembles a work of dystopian fiction, laughing that off is absolutely lacking in human empathy. That's not even the first problem with this line of work, but since you're also laughing off the problem, it deserves a rebuttal.
If I said to you that I was going to create a network of surveillance devices that also serves as mindless entertainment and routinely broadcasts faith routines that non-participants will be punished for, and you told me that sounds like something out of 1984, and I told you were paranoid, you'd think I'm mad.
And the advance of technology unhindered is not a universal good. Algorithms only have better judgment than humans according to the constraints they were assigned. If there's a role for automation in criminal justice, that role must be constantly questioned and adjusted for human need, just as the role of human intervention should be. Because it's all human intervention.
Or it's that non-specialists with only a vague understanding of what you're doing don't know what you're talking about. I don't consider stem cell researchers to be lacking in empathy because some of the hyper-religious accuse them of dangerous experiments and "playing god", even though their work "resembles a work of dystopian fiction."
Of course we can question where technology is going, but saying "gee, group x commits crimes at 27 times the rate of group y, on average we should consider them to be more at-risk" isn't 1984, it's how car insurance, the job market, dating, the stock market, almost everything works.
It's not optimally fair by a long shot, but neither is the alternative of analyzing no data and making social policy out of how you wish things were instead of how the data tell you they actually are. The solution to data telling you unpleasant facts is to try to change those facts with policy, not put your head in the sand and bleat "totalitarianism" every time a fact enters the conversation.
In context, faith routines would be things like, in the book 1984, the Two Minutes Hate. In reality, it might be a (imlicitly mandatory, if not explicitly) routine such as pledging allegiance to a flag, or mandatory participation in a moment of prayer, or something similar.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12119873 and marked it off-topic.