Mr Beast throwing out viral video ideas sounds like the Family Guy joke generator from South Park[0].
Doing a quick web search, it seems several people have made idea generators based off his formula.
Come up with contrived BS that caters to younger audiences, micromanage anyone who is holding you up, and attempt to game a blackbox algorithm on a site you don't pay for (YouTube)
The whole modern social media / influencer sphere seems like a huge bubble that will pop eventually. Google has already started wiping inactive accounts[0] presumably because storage isn't truly infinite or cheap. I imagine YT will also take the same path eventually.
0: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/12418290?hl=en
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goal_(novel) [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17255186-the-phoenix-pro...
I think this is a really interesting document, despite having very few lessons I would adopt for my own work (as I said at the bottom of the post).
I would be thrilled to read documents providing a level of cultural and operational detail like this from ANY company.
Another one I find really interesting is the 37signals handbook: https://basecamp.com/handbook
(Sorry, my mistake: the page 19 bit is indeed “no does not mean no” which is unfortunate wording given a current scandal! The scandal I referred to is the one about leaving contestants in the sun for three+ hours)
https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-smoke-most
I think social media lands somewhere between tobacco and sugar. We don't need tobacco. We need carbohydrates but not refined sugar. Social media can be useful sometimes, but is often a disservice. The feeling of usefulness probably makes it more addictive than smoking. At least for me.
That is, most programmers aren’t good programmers, most managers aren’t good managers, most salaries aren’t good salaries, most salespeople aren’t good salespersons, most workflows aren’t efficient, most team communications aren’t effective.
If Dan Luu is right, it shouldn’t take extraordinary effort to do better (excepting the case where “trying” is extraordinary). If he’s wrong why does it take Herculean effort to outdo a bunch of average companies?
Hard disagree. Is he making the most profitable, most clicked, or most viral videos? Maybe. That’s objectively quantifiable and I’ll give you that. But “best” is very subjective. I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass if Mr Beast stopped making videos and deleted his account today. His videos are the audiovisual equivalent of junk food: not good for you; negatively addictive; and big shady business.
Give me Folding Ideas any day. Now those are some quality and entertaining videos. The kind I save up to savour with some wine. That’s my definition of best. Yours will differ, but that’s the point.
As I understand it, MrBeast helped fund the creation of ViewStats [0] in order to gather more data on thumbnails and channel / video performance over time. Then this knowledge is applied to their own content in order to make it even more successful. At this point there's probably multiple people who specialize just in thumbnail optimization.
Another key detail about MrBeast production is that they target a global audience, so they hire famous voice actors of every major language to do their voice-overs. A few years before YouTube supported multiple audio tracks, they had different channels for various languages and regions. Now it's just a drop-down in the video settings. Many products fail to take internationalization and localization seriously, so their products are unable to penetrate non-western markets.
Speaking of international reach, I saw in an interview a few years back that MrBeast was trying to expand to the Chinese market, but none of his public interviews since then have discussed how he's doing there. This goes a bit against the extreme focus on YouTube as his primary platform. A quick search on bilibili (which I believe is the Chinese equivalent of YouTube), shows his latest video hitting 1.6 million views and 8k comments, which isn't bad but it doesn't really compare to the amount of attention that he gets on YouTube. It seems like even the most skilled content creators in the West still struggle to break into the Chinese market.
In the US in the past few decades? Yes. Absolutely.
Going back to at least the 1990s a kid could watch cartoons before school and then for several hours afterwards on broadcast channels.
For households with basic cable there were also very popular networks running all day full of children’s content (Disney Channel, Nickelodeon etc.)
These networks were very successful because they excelled at grabbing attention and keeping eyeballs on screens. For one example of these corners of hyper-popular children’s entertainment that kept kids glued to screens before YouTube just look at the works of Dan Schneider. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Schneider
not exact match, if i see the bac one again i'll share it.
but this is somewhat typical of the drama, only missing element is a generic slop voiceover that interjects every 2 minutes with two sentences: 1. vague statement about what's happened so far that could apply to any video. 2. "...but they weren't prepared for what happened next!" (nothing crazy ever happens) (except on the 'cop gets arrested for DUI' ones where they think they're gonna get a favor like its 1994 still)
EDIT: this ones a good subtle example of the adult baby video https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jan_KjEZd20
Shades of "What You Can't Say"[0].
According to this Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-subscribed_YouTub... he finally achieved that goal on June 2, 2024.
So definitely successful by his own chosen metric.
The blog post happens to miss a few of the points in the original document that would raise a lot of eyebrows and I'm not sure that it's a fair take on "what it takes to run a massive scale viral YouTube operation" if it lands you in all sorts of management trouble and potentially criminal allegations.
How is this different than any other technique to maximize engagement/readership, eg. inverted pyramid format for newspaper articles? It's probably designed to draw people in and sell copies. Is that also "gaming the algorithm"?
The Rolling Stone profile has a good breakdown of his content cerca 2022: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/mrbeas...
There are many more discussing all that has come out recently about that channel.
It alleges that many of the “contests” are staged and artificially manipulated and potentially violate laws around such games. I think to many that might feel like fraud.
They do not describe the same process everyone else uses to make content. They are much more specific than that.
In the disagreement hierarchy(https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html) this is level 4 or 5, but pretending to be level 6. Like using a bug to say that the software lacks basic value.
Your description well fits someone who is not on HN (and is well known for being very anti-HN). <>>40826280 >
The fact there is some useful educational content is a byproduct of the machine of lucrative trash of the capitalist hellhole spiral, and the written word will always prevail comparatively. You can always bet on text. https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
Also, as you likely know, YouTube is owned by Google so it’s very silly to say it’s “more important.”
Has a lot in common with Roger Corman's "How I made a hundred movies in Hollywood and never lost a dime."
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...
I would hope not, because that's not really a thing to be "considered", because it's not factual (as implied by the word "understanding"), but an opinion.
There's very little empirical evidence for the claim that "everything has been turned only into profit maximization". It's not something that's true or false - it's a worldview, an emotional outlook. One can imagine other worldviews like "the profit maximization is a direct result of the government not doing its job to break up monopolies" or "I disagree, very few of the companies I interact with are doing profit maximization in a way that significantly negatively impacts me". You can argue about which of those is "true" and find various factoids on the internet that "back them up", but ultimately they're just ways that you look at the world with little empirical basis.
As such, predicating all of your comments on them and pushing them at every turn is boring, and against the purpose of HN, which is intellectual curiosity. Reviewing the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) should pretty quickly tell you why this content isn't appropriate for HN:
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
These "sour grapes" comments and cynicism-without-substance comments are very clearly not gratifying to one's intellectual curiosity, and almost always fall into the realm of generic tangents and internet tropes.
There's a place for activism, but it's not here.
For instance, much of the initial research into the harms of smoking was done in Germany in Nazi times. While the results were largely correct (and later confirmed elsewhere), it was much easier for tobacco proponents to contest or reject them on the grounds of the Nazi Germany origins.
[1]: https://davidsamson.substack.com/p/tribaltheory-002-tribalis...
I don't know what "cost us $500,000" refers to though.
Considering we used a monumental wealth of nazi research, and the existence of operation paper clip. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190723-the-ethics-of-us...
Even though you’re correct that Nazi rhetoric impacted creating permissive tobacco policies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2736555/
To clarify, I think it’s because it’s an extreme example, that while technically perhaps accurate, misses that it’s a hard one for a reader to relate to effectively and misses a subtext of: shouldn’t any research from that source (of which what are the ethics of using it as well?) especially in a lens of 1940/1950, be subjected to extreme skepticism? Where additional replication may not be practical or possible.
If you think that this is an entirely artificial example, consider the fact that the same man designed the V-2 rockets which were hitting London during WWII, and the Saturn-5 rockets which brought astronauts to Moon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/through-the-lens...
And also Vrba–Wetzler report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrba–Wetzler_report
I don't want someone to think that i'm blaming someone for reading stuff. I just think and see that sometimes for people it is very easy to forget or miss bad things (harm to society) when their salary (or income) depends on ignoring this.
That's not psychology. That's torture for dubious gains. By that stretch of imagination, you can construe any gulag or concentration camp as an examination of psychology.
Psychology would require a double-blind experiment, some kind of control group, etc.
> Possible. But then again you have no evidence to back that up that it's entirely fake.
https://www.uniladtech.com/social-media/youtube/mrbeast-resp...
He already faked videos before.
Most of how reality TV works is by live editing to create narratives and guiding players along what the audience wants to see. It's lies by omission and exaggeration.
> The leaked document doesn't mention anything about faking anything.
Well, of course the official manual isn't going to spell it out, that's stuff that's admissible in court. But learn to read between the lines.
No CEO is going to tell his employees, lie, cheat and steal to get our taxes to appear as low as possible, and our revenue as high as possible. They will say: "Be a go getter. Get those KPIs in the green. Only you can make a difference! Make me proud! Etc."
That said, the leaked production document is alarming even by these standards. "NO DOES NOT MEAN NO" stands head and shoulders above the rest in its implication, even if it didn't sound like a rapist's mantra.
(Regarding tobacco, see a different thread: >>41552737 )
if an actual one, to me it is another interesting perspective inside the minds of a privately-owned, internet-based party that hold a significant mind-share in its domain.
No. Examining all human behavior under all circumstances is psychology. EVEN torture.
Even so. You call it torture and that's way over the top and offensive because what's happening here is NOT torture. These people are there voluntarily and are experiencing NOTHING even close to torture. I have family members who were in concentration camps so I know this.
>He already faked videos before.
Should've presented this first. I find it quite likely he faked some videos and others aren't fake.
>Well, of course the official manual isn't going to spell it out, that's stuff that's admissible in court. But learn to read between the lines.
I mentioned the manual because you didn't bring ANY evidence to the table. The only other official document on the table was the original article and I said IT had no evidence. There is no reading between the lines. Present evidence.
Your link here: https://www.uniladtech.com/social-media/youtube/mrbeast-resp... is good. But again it doesn't mean his whole operation is fake. AND this link is a mild and weak accusation at best that the abandoned city is near a popular beach or can't be reached by car. I happened to watch this video and he never mentioned it was completely remote like that. Those accusations are like saying yosemite isn't the wilderness because buses and shuttles drive around inside of the park.
>rapist's mantra.
Rapist? You're over the top describing things like this. Rape is a crime. What Mr. Beast does as bad as you think it is, is nowhere even close to rape.
Psychology is a science. Or at least tries to be. What you describe is sadism.
> Should've presented this first.
You should have investigated Mr. Beast a bit better before coming into this discussion.
> There is no reading between the lines. Present evidence.
Have you ever worked in a corporate environment? Honest question. Because I did, and such behavior is standard practice. Never write anything that's incriminating, only discuss in private.
Hell, just read about Google and how engineers were told to not use the M(arket) -word in any written communication.
https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2020/08/07/google-doc...
> Rapist? Whatever this guy is, he's not a rapist. Your language is way over the top.
Step 1. Please read what I said. Step 2. Don't add words to my sentences.
I said SOUNDS LIKE a rapist's mantra. "No means no" is the female anti-rape slogan. What do you get when you negate an anti-rape mantra? A rapist's mantra.
-----
That aside, the 'No doesn't mean No' part sounds absolutely Machiavellian for a guidebook for new employees.
He is trully obsessive about getting the most views, almost soullessly designing the perfect viral content, caring about every second. He literally starts with the thumbnail and title and only then works out the rest of the video!
I also like this 2 years old video of visiting his studio. This guy literally sleeps in his giant studio, everything is super optimized.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUzpK0tGFcE
Of course the end result is entirely pointless. But still. I respect the grind.
(I also love when he "builds 1000 houses in Africa" or whatever, and he usually never even mentions the country or the place name. It's not that important. But at least he does some good, I guess.)
Link: https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmplo...
If you replace "wheel" with "jerrycan", then that's exactly what happened.
Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerrycan :
> Such was the appreciation of the cans in the war effort that President Franklin Roosevelt noted, "Without these cans it would have been impossible for our armies to cut their way across France at a lightning pace which exceeded the German Blitzkrieg of 1940."
But I agree, it's so tempting to get internally focused, or focused on "improvement" that really shifts the focus to something else entirely (hollywood style movies, tv shows, whatever).
Personally I'm no fan of the youtube-ism and youtube generally, but it's clear that game is it's own game. It's not making a movie, it's not a TV show, it's not even tiktok. It's its own thing and it is pretty clear that generally you have to play that platform's game.
My kids play a lot of roblox, and while there's a lot of copy cat games based on traditional gaming, there's almost a system on roblox as far as what games are popular as far as ease of jumping in goes and so on. And there's a lot of weird creativity you find nowhere else as far as the topics of the games (want to be a bug? you can do that). That's it's own space too.
If you are OK on alternatives, YouTube channel ProjectFarm has some vacuum reviews.
We do generally want nice things, but we can't be experts in all the things. In markets where you have mostly responsible actors, that can work out fine. But absent effective regulation or other feedback mechanisms, in many markets an actor who only cares about short-term cash extraction can beat out the people focused on long-term value by taking advantage of consumer ignorance.
A good example here is food. Before the rise of industrial meat production, you would process meat yourself or buy it from a local butcher. You had a lot of information about the meat because the processing chain was short and local. You knew the people touching your food and could smell how clean they kept the butcher shop.
But scaling that up created a lot of opacity. Suddenly it was much harder to know what went into your sausage. It was tens, hundreds, thousands of people involved, spread over many miles. Some dubious people took advantage, and so we ended up with food standards like the Federal Meat Inspection Act. [1] The system that grew out of that works pretty well; things Boar's Head recently killing 9 people [2] are surprisingly rare.
For things less risky than safety, I think a lot of good is done by people like Consumer Reports and Wirecutter. Less ignorance about which products are really good is less room for bad actors to exploit consumers. If people really didn't want nice things, those would be much less popular. Instead, I think they're a sign that people do want nice things, but just have an awful lot to do, and so can't spend much time on a single purchasing decision unless it's a really big deal for them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Meat_Inspection_Act, with a nod to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_listeriosis...
This is false. HN is hosted by YC, and as such promotes YC ventures. On the front page right now is the following link (with disallowed comments and upvotes):
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/continue/jobs/smcxRnM-...
[sic] means "I copied the word as written in its original, and it was already written that way" [0].
Seen some ERP's for mid-sized customers and the good ones makes it easy to build views and otherwise customize the software up to a point for non-engineers. The code is shit but they've also produced a lot of things needed internally that we wouldn't have gotten done quickly enough by doing it manually.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaG9xpu-WQKBPUi8yQ4HaDYQLUS...
As one of many examples, the ww2 channel is quite different but also financially successful: https://www.youtube.com/@WorldWarTwo
The goal would be to be more customer-focused in those cases.
"No one prospers without rendering benefit to others." — Tadao Yoshida, founder of YKK zippers, https://ykkamericas.com/our-philosophy/
With MrBeast, the "best YOUTUBE video" would be one that causes engagement with the viewer throughout the video:
> The creative process for every video they produce starts with the title and thumbnail. These set the expectations for the viewer, and everything that follows needs to be defined with those in mind. If a viewer feels their expectations are not being matched, they’ll click away - driving down the crucial Average View Duration that informs how much the video is promoted by YouTube’s all-important mystical algorithms.
You have to both entice the viewer with the thumbnail/title, and meet the expectations of the viewer so they continue watching.
Your counterexamples are a bunch of instances where the company did not meet customer expectations.
Note this is MrBeast doing it to himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_CbgLpvH9E
I think that changes the ethics a bit. If he decides to potentially psychologically torment himself for his channel, I don't think it's a big deal that he didn't give himself a mental health evaluation beforehand.
(I'm aware he has a similar video with random contestants as well. But either way, I think this particular criticism is a little too hand-wringy. It's not being forced upon anyone and they can leave at any time.)
IMO the biggest issue is the allegation he rigs some of the game shows. That's definitely unethical.
This is a nit-pick, but for the record, The Pinto didn't explode at higher rates than other similar automobiles, also there wasn't an internal Ford Memo, it was an attachment to a letter to the NHTSA --but all people remember is the this so called "memo" Anyhow a myth was born and it seemingly refuses to die. By the numbers:
In 1975-76, the Pinto averaged 310 fatalities a year. But the similar-size Toyota Corolla averaged 313, the VW Beetle 374 and the Datsun 1200/210 came in at 405.
Additional info: https://newmarksdoor.typepad.com/mainblog/2005/07/the_pinto_...
"#TeamTrees vs. REALITY" (2019, Phil Mason) https://youtu.be/gqht2bIQXIY
They were the ones that stirred up a bunch of controversy, but had some former employee experiences in them.
I have no idea about he greater situation but I think that’s what the comment is referencing.
oh really did you try searching because I found one in about two seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1qXIkr05tk
Power tool batteries have BMS, better chargers, and if you have multiple batteries, you get infinite vacuuming powers.
This is the intractable and unavoidable problem with the use of KPIs as a management tool: Goodhart's Law -- any metric used as a target ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
You are -- literally -- telling the team, "go make this KPI number go up. Your entire job performance will be evaluated on that basis." It is unsurprising that the team therefore focuses on making that number go up.
If you want teams to consider the goals of the company, or anything at all besides their KPIs, don't use KPIs.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/14/24101023/ftc-doj-comment-...
However most concretely, back in 2000, American removed a few rows of coach across its entire narrow body fleet to give passengers an extra 3-5 inches of legroom throughout coach. They did not recover the costs and walked it back. jetBlue provides more legroom through all of coach, and even I as a very tall person, don't go out of my way to book them.
Some people will pay more for extra legroom, and I think the current split of seating in planes is likely right around the optimal distribution based on who will and won't pay.
> Two, people can certainly be fooled; for a long time airlines have been playing a game of gradually ratcheting back amenities without being up front about it.
Kind of but not really. Yeah they're not going to put out a press release when they take the olives off your salad. Airlines are an incredibly low margin commodity business. Many years they're negative margins. American's current operating margin is 3.41% [1] This is typical. These aren't B2B SaaS margins we're talking about.
So generally when they take the olives off your salad, instead of putting out a press release they just lower fares on competitive routes. Because most people book on fare or based on corporate contract, which is a second-order effect of fare.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAL/american-airli...
• Fourth Wing and Iron Flame are poorly written fantasy romances that blew up on TikTok.
• Haunting Adeline and Hunting Adeline are poorly written dark romances(https://www.reddit.com/r/RomanceBooks/comments/uu1age/what_d... they're also antisemitic QAnon fan fiction.
• Three books with bare chested men on the covers. These indicate that there's lots of sex scenes; no one reads them for plot.
• Icebreaker is a poorly written hockey romance. The author is ignorant about college, hockey, and the US to say the least.
• Credence is a contemporary romance that's best known for sex scenes and toxic relationships.
• A Court of Thorns and Roses and A Court of Mist and Fury. Both of these are mediocre fantasy romances by Sarah J. Maas; she's the Dan Brown of romance.
I'm sure there's some disgruntled employee complaining somewhere, but I have not seen any legitimate complaints about him. All those "Mr Beast is a fraud!?!" videos have no substance, and are just people using his name for views.
That sounds like standard goal-oriented planning. Amazon starts with the product's press release. "The Amazon working backward method is a product development approach that starts with the team imagining the product is ready to ship. The product team’s first step is to draft a press release announcing the product’s availability. The audience for this press release is the product’s customer."
https://www.productplan.com/glossary/working-backward-amazon...
"I Built 100 Houses And Gave Them Away!" 127M views, mentions Jamaica 45 seconds in: https://youtu.be/KkCXLABwHP0?si=3oMfNy0iAGVrTwqo&t=45
"I Built 100 Wells In Africa" 202M views, mentions Kenya 12 seconds in: https://youtu.be/mwKJfNYwvm8?si=qYc8jZWsYXwF1qrm&t=11
"We Powered a Village in Africa" 26M views (different channel), mentions Kenya 12 seconds in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FQvRZg3bcg
No, being unemployed is the coercive factor here. It's not fair to treat at-will employment as non-coercive unless non-employment is actually zero. Non-employment currently stands at about 7.7%: https://www.richmondfed.org/research/national_economy/non_em...
Why would anyone turn down a chance to make a living if a job is offered? Why do you think the fed ensures that there are never enough jobs for everyone? Why do you think the fed and the business world talks about the economy in terms of "jobs" and "unemployment" when these are metrics largely unrelated to stuff like "am I actually getting a fair wage" and "is housing priced anywhere near rationally"? etc—the non-coercive labor market is a complete illusion.
Cause and effect requires observation, which means there will be a time delay between when a company does something shady and when the customers realize the rug was pulled out from under them. You can't know a pinto is going to blow up before it blows up. Once people realized, it almost destroyed the company [1]. The time delay between a correction in a company is even longer, because it requires another layer of observation.
None of these are proof that the error correction mechanism is broken, or that the quote is somehow untrue/fragile. Most of the egregious examples of broken feedback are those companies that make the red and blue politicians multi millionaires by the time they retire, usually with no-consequences government contracts.
edit: and, this fails miserably if you don't pay any attention to the end goal, which I've seen several times.
[1] https://www.autoweek.com/news/a2099001/ford-100-defective-pi...
Yes, everything in the movies/TV is derived from comic book. Comic books are extremely niche so movie content is new and novel to most movie viewers.
Multiverse / reboots / retcons also helped kill comic book popularity. It was a bad idea there as well! https://youtu.be/0PlwDbSYicM?si=iOlB2xYP8Cm1PwXc
> they've milked every bit of nostalgia you may have for their characters
No, it's not nostalgia. Marvel Film's greatest achievement is they took C and D tier characters and made them A tier. Iron Man was not super popular prior to the films. No one had even heard of Guardians of the Galaxy. Prior to the Marvel Cinematic Universe the most popular Marvel characters were Spider-Man and X-men. The film rights of whom had been previously sold to Sony and Fox.
In any case, I don't see how any of this makes them "shady". Not entertaining? Maybe. Shady? I honestly don't even know what that means in this context. Superhero movies strike me as extremely low on the scale of evil. Making mass market entertainment? Oh no the horror! /s
I wouldn't wish "obsession" on anyone. It is extremely unpleasant and harmful to experience. Willingly giving your life to a company is not obsession, it's a choice.
1. Windshield wiper motor failure.
2. Loose trim from the bed.
3. Accelerator pedal can stick.
4. Wrong sized font used for the warning lights.
Wiper was fixed with OTA update. Accelerator pedal was fixed on all trucks within the first week after it was discovered.
> And it still has this bizarre cult behind it.
That doesn't mean sales haven't been hurt, but anyone actually interested will see that the above list isn't an issue. Toyota had a similar recall some years ago, and it hurt their sales too [3]. It's a good idea to skip first model years of any car.
[1] https://www.cars.com/research/tesla-cybertruck/recalls/
[3] https://www.npr.org/2010/02/02/123283959/gas-pedal-woes-put-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it looks like we've been having to ask you to stop breaking the site guidelines for years:
>>39281820 (Feb 2024)
>>35656288 (April 2023)
>>34844518 (Feb 2023)
>>18585046 (Dec 2018)
>>18575831 (Dec 2018)
Continuing like this is eventually going to get your account banned. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review the rules and stick to them, that would be good.
If not and any criticism or even-surface-level inspection of how a question or statement is made, wouldn’t it be best to codify the “Yes, and…” improv rule (1) into your link (2)?
> You’re talking about formal science. Therapy and much of the things that take place in psychology aren’t formal.
It's not formal. It's the most common definition.
knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method
Look, if you can't actually use your theory to predict with any modicum of success, it's not science, it's philosophy. Which isn't bad per se, but it shouldn't be used for any real life application.
If you are familiar with psychology, then you are aware of the damage Freud ""theories"" that showed to be extremely unreliable. To me, that's the real danger of mixing philosophy with science. People confuse what they think is correct with reality.
According to Aristotelian Philosophy, there are only four elements and you can't disprove it. It's all the 5th element playing tricks on you.
> I can read between the lines but choose not to.
If you aren't ready to read it with a critical eye, then you'll fall for the PR in it. The point of the newcomer guidebook is to sell new guys on the benefits of organization, and push away people who don't fit that mold.
> “concentration camp” and torture
That's the extreme point of your statement. And you confirmed it. To me, that crosses several ethic and formalism bridges.
Even if it wasn't utterly immoral to do that test, it wouldn't give you any usable knowledge because of confounding factors.
> comparisons to rape
I made an offhand remark, that it's quite literally the anti-anti-rape slogan. And I discarded that, so why are you still going about it?
Mods on HN are people, and there's one person who posts publicly and responds to emails (dang). Moderator comments are not automated AFAICT, though they do lean heavily on standard language for all manner of self-evident reasons.
Mods also tend to get overwhelmed with busy threads and we've had a few particularly contentious ones in the past couple of days (middle-east conflicts).
Most HN moderation overall is accomplished through member votes and flags, and some automated tools to up- or down-rank submissions and automatically flag or kill submissions. There are a number of other factors at play, including the flamewar detector (<>>40437018 >, generally, posts with more comments than votes), and banned sites / userIDs. But none of those result in moderator comments to the thread.
If you have further questions, email mods with your concerns at hn@ycombinator.com. They're quite patient in explanations, which is how I know much of what I'm saying here, along with reading dang's mod comments, as I did when I found this thread.
I think his personal involvement in any given project is already quite limited. He’s created a huge, soulless machine that churns out videos for the sole purpose of achieving some YouTube high score, and he just pokes his nose in here and there to be the face of the operation and ensure it remains well-oiled.
Edit: that ”just” is obviously doing a ton of lifting because it’s likely still a huge amount of work on his part, but my point is that it’s not like he lovingly crafts all these clips by himself.
There's some severe information bias here. If you actually believe this, then you're basically restricted from buying most vehicles. Toyota is out [1] along with, BMW [2], Ford [3], Chevy [4], Honda [5], Volvo [6], Mercedes [7] and more. The cars affected in those are similar to orders of magnitude more. These were all first results, one vehicle, but I'm sure there are many more examples for each.
The odd tribalism is what I find most interesting about the Cybertruck. And no, I'm not interested in buying a Cybertruck.
[1] https://www.cars.com/articles/toyota-recalls-2-3-million-veh...
[2] https://repairpal.com/recall/04V409000
[3] https://repairpal.com/recall/99V265000
[4] https://www.asburyauto.com/gmc-accelerator-pedal-recall
[5] https://www.asburyauto.com/honda-accelerator-pedal-recall
[6] https://www.motorsafety.org/volvo-recalls-xc40-bev-suvs-that....
[7] https://www.panish.law/2012/08/stuck-gas-pedal-risk-prompts-...