Surely we can escape the collective groupthink a little to share some of our most unpopular opinions and theories?
I've got a few of my own so I'll kick it off in the comments --
- Mutual credit is a superior monetary system to our current one in every way: An elastic money supply, no bank runs, access to credit for everyone, no inflation, decentralized with no central bank, no moral hazard from seigniorage.
- Advertising is a wonderful sustainable business model that benefits both the consumer and business. There is no privacy issue that causes anyone harm from advertising.
- Business with large or complete market share is not bad at all or harmful to consumers, and the only true monopoly comes from government legally protecting a business from competition.
The mainstream media is often more factual and less biased than alternative media.
The modern web is superior by almost any objective measure, including quality of content, to the web of the 90s. Yes, this even includes content on services and social media.
RMS got what he deserved.
Significant whitespace is just a slightly messier form of brackets using non-printing characters. The elegance is an illusion.
Languages which compile to javascript are just linters with delusions of grandeur.
Firefox > Chrome
Lisp has syntax.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Most people are kind and feel bad about harboring prejudices; they actively look for evidence to dislodge a prejudice, and make excuses to dismiss evidence supporting the prejudice. Those prejudices that remain in circulation are those for which the supporting evidence prevails nonetheless.
The main reason startup culture sucks people up and spits out their bones is because we've taken the worst parts of corporacy and left all the best ones to rot.
If a manager doesn't understand the importance of dressing up at least a few days a week he doesn't deserve the responsibility and most of the problems in this corporate world are down to young men who haven't discovered themselves but are willing to sacrifice all their energies in proving they're the best at something they know very little about.
Hardware engineers tend to be less corrupt than software engineers.
The most ethical and meritocratic, and the least racist, group of people in America is the military.
The F-4 was the best fighter-bomber ever made. The A-6 was the best close-air support aircraft ever made.
ANSI C is the best commonly-used programming language. Python is a distant second. Rust is fun only because of its complexity.
1) the value of their consciousness (how overall good or bad it feels to be them) 2) their expected instrumental effects on the nature of all expected future people's consciousness.
Because of the vast numbers of future people which could exist, and the uncertainty of this due to the landscape of existential threats humanity faces, the magnitude of the value of most people's expected instrumental effects vastly outsizes the value of their qualia.
This either makes the typical person's life overwhelmingly valuable, or overwhelmingly deleterious. It's either one, but it's not easy to confidently say which, as it's not perfectly clear whether your average person net adds or substracts to humanity's net risk of extinction. Unfortunately, most people display rather abysmal epistemology and are adding more to technological progress then they are philosophical/epistemic/coordination progress.
This makes it plausible to me that their lives are net-harmful.
Non Political:
- There is no saving the media/journalism, and it's best not to try. Newspapers/TV news/radio news/etc is dying and it won't come back.
- Advertising isn't that bad. Without it, small businesses/new creators would find it harder to compete, not easier.
- Robots will never replace humans in all jobs, even if they can do them better.
- The last series of Doctor Who wasn't all that bad.
Political:
- The left shifted focus from economic issues to identity issues due to powerful forces realising poor/unpopular people made better scapegoats than billionaires
- Tech companies shouldn't be trying to police the internet, and it's deeply disturbing how easy 'deplatforming' someone is now
- Government responses to COVID-19 weren't as bad as people make them out to be, and were flawed because of misguided optimism rather than malice.
Software Engineers are idiots hiding behind numbers. No real progress is made through software itself and the world would be better of with advanced social behaviour then faster servers.
Open Source is a marketing term to lure more people into software development so corporations can exploit more people for cheaper.
Capitalism is currently just exploiting the dumbness of people. If you would have the time and mental energy to learn basic finance, the whole system would work better.
White people don't have culture and envy black/asian culture.
- COVID-19 is just a dress rehearsal for something even more deadly.
- Since there is no apex predator for humans, viruses will likely rise to become the leading cause of death
- Modern society is, by definition, carbon positive
- The one time that society allowed young people to explore their interests, to not work (the 60s), the establishment was so scared at the revolution they never wanted that freedom to ever be available again
- Universal healthcare in the US would cause massive economic shock due to the unemployment
- Affordable college education would also cause massive economic shock with unemployment as this would mean removal of government backing for student loans
- Racism is a cultural disease sort of like cancer that has many forms, mild and severe. It is individual and cannot be cured.
- Those who lack money problems always have problems. Humans need drama in their lives to feel alive.
- The attention economy that Facebook started is destroying normal human behavior year by year
- To be a producer in the new visual economy (IG), it helps to be conventionally attractive. But that if not enough, you also have to demonstrate that you are not perfect, whether fake or human
- Political correctness and its evil twin Virtue Signaling are dividing all of us, perhaps on purpose
- Everything is faked or polished to be better than it really is at some level. Technology has been good enough to do it for a while to do it offline. Lookup Melodyne for singing. Now technology is getting to the point where it can do it live
- We may not make it past the Great Filter
- Smartphones are actually dumb phones because they make us dumb
- Time is everyone's most precious resource, yet we give it away sometimes like it were free "Do you have a minute?"
- Using headphones in an office to concentrate is training your brain to require headphones to concentrate
- Caffeine is the most successful drug
- Capitalism is the only economic model that works because it gives people something to aspire towards
- You cannot have capitalism without personal debt.
- Capitalism is unsustainable as you cannot expect to grow X percent a year and not eventually run out of Y.
- The Pareto Principle can be applied to anything. For example, how many people in a company actually do useful work (20% do 80%)
- Education is the most powerful force
- Sex doesn’t just sell. Sex is everything.
- Happiness is biologically meant to be fleeting. Otherwise we would eat once, have sex once... and then die.
- Companies spend large sums of money to create controlled, temperature controlled environments to make people focus on work called offices
- Some people think they are wealthy. They are not. You are only wealthy if you can maintain your preferred lifestyle without having to work.
- Monogamy is a cultural construct
- Without biological or technological adaptation to combat radiation in space, long-term space travel is impossible