[paroneayea]

That's almost every article on HN, though. Don't use inheritance, don't use C, use Kubernetes, don't use Kubernetes, etc etc.

I suspect the thing that's bothering people in the comments here isn't as much that the author is making an argument but that the author is making an argument on cultural grounds?

[userbinator]

People are fed up with the constant identity-politics culture-war bait. Mainstream news is already full of that stuff. HN in general is far more interested in the technical articles of the author.

[scarecrowbob]

It's kind of fun because any comment can be stated in a an objectionable way, I think.

"Don't talk about identiy politics and things that seem like "dentity-politics culture-war bait".

It's a fun game. You could do the same thing to this comment if you chose.

I don't like Kant, but there might be something to the principle of unverisality...

[ta8645]

The difference being that the culture isn't awash in people demanding adherence to Kant. It seems that every time someone voices an objection to the tiresome identity-politics that is so prevalent today, others will ensure the conversation devolves into a discussion of slippery definitions and pedantic dismissals of the complainant's understanding.

The truth is, _many_ people are fed up with the dominant leftist dogma that permeates almost every area of culture, government, and the economy today. We can argue until the sun goes down about the nature and specifics of what that entails, but people are reacting to _something_; it does exist, irrespective of any failure to describe it well.

[ternnoburn]

It's not leftist dogma. Leftists aren't capitalists, friend. Hard to argue the government and economy are post capitalist.

And most leftists I know absolutely hate performative progressivism. Dems are widely mocked in leftist circles for doing stunts but not doing anything to help. Like Pelosi wearing Kente cloth while doing nothing to aid African people.

So please, you might actually have people who agree with you in the leftist camp, stop bundling us with the Dems.

[scarecrowbob]

That conflation of dems/leftists is central to one side of the "identity-politics culture-war bait". They aren't going to stop doing it.

However, when folks do it, you know that they are just un-self-critically engaging in something that they putatively dislike in other folks.

Not to get to annoying on the topic, but I do find it fun to unpack.

Ironically, the hated "I know this, so everyone should change their behaviour" position is central to the idea that "we [HN] are fed up with the constant identity-politics culture-war bait."

That claim is about who "we" are, and it's stated with a great deal of certainty, even if there is a bit of cowardly rhetorical hedging.

And that claim is supposedly consistent because the claimant has over-determined the "we":

so that claimant isn't making a universal statement, just a statement of "I" and the "We" to which that "I" belongs.

Which seems like a pretty normal move- notice the concern with "_many_ people" and the demand that we don't look too far into what that population might actually mean.

I've been on HN for a decade, have some karma, and no, I am not part of that "we" apparently- a fact for which I am grateful, as I am grateful I don't feel compelled to vote for capitalist Democrats.

Still, I think that it really is worth not looking too deeply into what they are saying because their point will be lost: they get to say who "we" are and what kinds of things "We" are sick of, and they don't feel bad about it because it's not univeral, so the cowardly hedging that they did means they aren't being hypocritical.

I personally don't care if folks are hypocrites though, because it makes for a pretty cool set of tea leaves to read about where folks minds are at.

I come here specifically because I try not to hang out with the kinds of sociopaths that wreak havoc on my world via badly implemented technology, but it's an easy place to check their general mental weather.

So, yeah, they aren't gonna agree, see the internal contraditions, understand the distance between lefitsts and performative DEI folks, etc.

But, happily for me, they will keep displaying their terrible opinions so I don't have to rebuild connections with real-life assholes just to keep my ear to the ground about what horrible new thing is coming to our world.

[smolder]

I thought the article was interesting and informative even though I won't recoil at use of the term. Getting upset at the authors opinion is just as useless as getting upset about the thing they complain about, but boy do these comments do the former.

[rors]

This seems to be a characteristic of many high functioning people, especially successful engineers. There is a "correct" way of living your life, conducting your business, using your text editor, etc. It's helpful in that it ensures consistency and focus. The downside is that people become desensitised to nuance.

In this particular example, the word cargo in cargo cult is redundant. All cults have ridiculous ceremonies for cult members to engage in. These ceremonies come from human nature, our inability to distinguish correlation from causation. We're told to conduct a ceremony, get a good outcome, then believe it's the ceremonies that caused the outcome. Just call them ceremonies, because that's what they are.

However, when Feynman wrote his speech he must have thought that a cargo cult is a much more graphic metaphor than a dry lecture about stats and human biases.

[sehansen]

Cargo cults are a specific kind of cult where the ceremonies come from imitating some other community. And complaints about cargo cult programming aren't only about people doing ineffective things, it's also about people seeing someone else doing something effectively but then not doing the work to understand why it's effective. It's a complaint about people being so close to being much more effective, but then snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

[culi]

Did you read the article? That is very much the pop sci definition of cargo cult that is incorrect.

The cargo cults were made by people who were enslaved and violently oppressed and then believed that cargo they were forced to create for their oppressors (e.g. flour, rice, tobacco, and other trade) should belong to them

[Nursie]

> believed that cargo they were forced to create for their oppressors

I'm not sure that was in the article was it? These were exotic goods brought from overseas.

I'm not trying to say there was no oppression, but the examples in which they believed the trade goods should belong to them were still about trade goods which arrived by boat.

"[The leader proclaimed] that the ancestors were coming back in the persons of the white people in the country and that all the things introduced by the white people and the ships that brought them belonged really to their ancestors and themselves."

(edit - certainly these goods may well have been produced through the oppression of other peoples elsewhere!)