
Ask HN: Wildly Unpopular Opinions - artsyca
This is a judgement-free zone if you&#x27;re looking for something to downvote go look somewhere else.<p>Surely we can escape the collective groupthink a little to share some of our most unpopular opinions and theories?<p>I&#x27;ve got a few of my own so I&#x27;ll kick it off in the comments --
======
alexmingoia
\- Public school and forcing kids to go to school is incredibly harmful to
children, parents, families, and society. Forcing children to go to school is
completely unnecessary.

\- 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.

~~~
easytiger
> Public school and forcing kids to go to school is incredibly harmful to
> children, parents, families, and society. Forcing children to go to school
> is completely unnecessary

The vast majority of parents are lazy, feckless and incapable of educating a
child. Not to mention the character benefits of socialisation, conflict
experience and discipline that might be met at school.

I also refuse to believe that something as ancient as group schooling isn't
inherently positive. There is a school in England that has been in active
operation for 1400 years

~~~
kazinator
> conflict experience

That one is supposedly not allowed in American schools any longer.

------
krapp
┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)

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.

(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

~~~
artsyca
My dude! I'm feeling these items. Especially the white space. I've used
coffeescript so I totally get it.

As for RMS from what I just looked up it seems he was making one of those
computer scientist arguments like "all the aliens in the room are green"
(because there are zero aliens in the room) type of no true scotsman arguments
about an issue way too soon.

Again with LISP -- people can't get the syntax so they assume it can't be got.

    
    
       (f u c k (t h a) (h a t e r s))

------
kazinator
The majority of popular prejudices are statistically true, reliably arising
from the collective observations of a large number of people over many
generations.

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.

------
sethammons
Seemingly unpopular opinion (with a lens of Go programming): Don't mock
dependencies. It is brittle. Stub/fake with dependency injection. It is
unimportant that a function was called N times with arguments foo and bar.
What is important is that unit tests validate that units output what they
should output (success and error cases) and that integration tests ensure
things work together.

~~~
artsyca
By the way don't take my words in the other reply to heart bro. Nobody has
ever worked in a dress up environment but everyone is convinced it's not for
them but I've seen it firsthand and it's way better and different.

It's like when we emphasize the work over anything it's laying the foundation
for toxic behaviours whereas then we emphasize the attitude that goes into the
work the whole culture changes.

Most people will probably never experience it in their whole lives.. But
they'll go to their deaths in uncomfortable outfits, yuck.

------
TechBro8615
Hiring “woke” people is a liability for a small company as they can turn
around and attack you at any time. If you post your political opinions
publicly on social media, I don’t want to work with you, and if I have the
choice, I will not hire you.

------
artsyca
How we dress at work makes way more of a difference than we understand.

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.

~~~
sethammons
I fully disagree with dressing up at work as being important. I fully agree
that many of our problems at work stem from folks trying to prove that they
are competent/best at something they are largely ignorant at. Some of these
people dress up professionally to help hide their lack of effectiveness.

Dressing up for work is value signalling. "oh, a blazer? They are important."
When it comes to client interactions, depending on the culture of the
industry, being more professionally dressed is important. First impressions
and all that. Self-confidence can be boosted by your appearance and that can
help when interacting with folks. I've seen it work for folks that talk on the
phone to customers. The other thing that helps boost confidence? Actually
knowing what you are talking about :) I may not trust an investment
representative as much if they are in their sweat pants compared to a suit.
But for knowledge workers, I think there is a boon to being comfortable.

~~~
artsyca
Bro I appreciate your reply and I want to remind you this is a wildly
unpopular opinions thread so I'd encourage you to try to look at things from a
different angle than playing the "I disagree" card which carries no merit here
whatsoever.

As a hint I'd like to convey that the blazer is actually a dress down apparel
compared to the outfits it replaced and the suit is designed as the ultimate
comfort and convenience garment so if you can't feel comfortable in a suit and
assume therefore it's impossible to for anyone to be comfortable in one, maybe
you just haven't found the right tailor you know?

Which goes to my point that people don't understand what dressing up even
means let alone how to do it.

~~~
flukus
> if you can't feel comfortable in a suit and assume therefore it's impossible
> to for anyone to be comfortable in one,

I don't think you can't be comfortable, I just think they're less comfortable.
No one spends a lazy Sunday afternoon on the couch watching TV while wearing a
suit, if they were more comfortable than other clothes this would be common.
Either way your solution of getting better suits or a tailor is an unnecessary
expense I can do without.

As far as signalling goes it generally means the opposite of it's intention to
me, if I see someone in a suite I'm more likely to think used car salesman,
mormon or boss. I'm immediately much more skeptical and defensive because
they'll want to sell me something or control me.

~~~
artsyca
There are advantages for dressing up but you'll never understand them by
taking the majority view.

Nobody cares what anyone wears at home we're talking comfort at work.

And again, a suit is ultimately a dress down garment requiring less care to
put on than a track suit.

In all this discourse nobody ever bothered to ask what dressing is even
defined as and we're supposed to call ourselves software engineers.

Another hint: wearing swag is not equivalent to dressing up.

~~~
flukus
> Nobody cares what anyone wears at home we're talking comfort at work.

Comfort is independent of location, the only difference is that at home we
prioritize comfort and that translates to not wearing suits.

> And again, a suit is ultimately a dress down garment requiring less care to
> put on than a track suit.

In what world? Track pants you just pull on and maybe tie up if there's some
weight in your pockets, dress pants you have to pull on zip/button up and put
a belt on. Some with the upper half, it's easier to pull on a T shirt than
button one up. Neither are hardly arduous (hence my surprise that some people
take "pride in their appearance") but a suit is definitely not the easiest
option.

> In all this discourse nobody ever bothered to ask what dressing is even
> defined as and we're supposed to call ourselves software engineers.

Because we all have a functional shared understanding of what it means, if you
have a definition that differs or constrains this general understanding then
it would be much more useful to state it rather than vague hints.

------
BJBBB
Software engineers are, by both education and corporate training,
intellectually corrupt.

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.

~~~
throwaway666d
I agree about the American military, although they are not _necessarily_ an
ultimate force for good as they are an instrument largely of Congress and the
President (which aren't particularly likely to make ethical calls these days,
unfortunately). But by God they are a pretty decent instrument.

------
throwaway666d
The value of a human life stems from two components:

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.

------
CM30
Well, I might as well split my opinions into two categories here; political
and non political.

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.

------
throwaway666d
The risks posed by emerging technology is rapidly outpacing our ability to
manage them, both technologically and philosophically. Reservedly, I'm
convinced that the best thing that could happen to humanity would be some
event that drastically slows technological progress, such as an event which
reduces the population to somewhere between 10,000 and 1,000,000 individuals
but _without_ nearly causing extinction. Ideally, those remaining people would
be especially intelligent and pro-social. This would give us far more time to
get our act together by building a robust epistemology-driven civilization
where our ability to handle advanced tech outpaces the emergence of such tech.

------
potta_coffee
The governor of Washington and the mayor of Seattle are absolutely incompetent
and unfit to lead - at best - and insidious liars at worst.

------
fireandforget
The United States are just a more popular version of North Korea. The
brainwashing, flag waving nonsense going on in this country is hopefully going
down soon.

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.

~~~
thiht
> White people don't have culture and envy black/asian culture.

That's not unpopular, that's racist. And I cannot understand how can one
seriously say that there's no white culture. Just look around you?

~~~
giantg2
White culture? Black culture? Asian culture?

There are multiple cultures within each "race". You could see Irish and Polish
traditions and cultural differences if you have family on both sides.

So your response itself is racist too.

------
Raed667
Jeans are the worst kind of pants.

~~~
giantg2
Have you ever worn leather pants?

~~~
Raed667
Since I'm not in a Rock band, no.

~~~
giantg2
Would you consider them more comfortable than jeans?

------
zzo38computer
I have many, but perhaps too many so I will not write it on here right now.
When I think of something, then I will write it somewhere, and then it can be
read (I hope).

~~~
artsyca
Go on go on give us your top two. Speak to the heart.

------
el_dev_hell
The west is falling and all the solutions to prevent the fall are morally
awful. I find this depressing.

------
Vomzor
The Chinese cultural revolution is happening right now in America.

------
wallflower
\- There may not be a successful vaccine for COVID-19

\- 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

~~~
ud0
> "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"

Do you have any links or references, I'm particularly curious about how
society allowed young people to not work & pursue their interests. Was there
some sought of Universal basic income? A few more details will be greatly
appreciated.

~~~
wallflower
It wasn't really about UBI, as some of the participants were able to live
because they were financed by their parents. For example, the billions and
billions war on drugs/criminalization of drugs likely started out of a strong
reaction to counter the threat of the counter-culture movement. And we all
know what effect the war on drugs has had.

> "You want to know what this was really all about?" Ehrlichman asked,
> referring to the war on drugs.

> "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two
> enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying?
> We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black,
> but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks
> with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those
> communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their
> meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news."

> "Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did," he concluded,
> according to Baum.

[https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-
rich...](https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-
nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html)

