Depends on what they’re studying and where. If you’re a PhD student English Literature at Directional State University most of your compensation is consumption value, not the promise of a career[1] or pecuniary compensation.
[1] For the huge majority of PhD students in the Arts and Humanities there are virtually no jobs in their fields and it’s not that much better in the social or exact sciences, though there is at least some extra academic demand for their skills. There are very, very few fields outside academia where a doctorate is a necessary qualification or close to it and those are ~all a terrible investment if what you want is a remunerative career; things like biomedical research where you do a doctorate, then a postdoc and then get a job paying what an MBA from a top tier business school gets their first year out.
Advice I got from an ex-cancer biologist working at a devices company: get your masters, and get out. PhD programs will always be there, but compound interest won’t.
> Across the Western world, appointed administrators have gained power at the expense of elected legislators. More and more of the most consequential political decisions are made by bureaucrats and judges, while fewer are made by congresses and parliaments. This trend has been slowly underway since the World Wars, and especially in this millennium.
> In the US, Congress has quietly walked away from most of its former duties. Major policy changes once came through legislation like the Social Security Act of 1935, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Clean Air Act of 1970, or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, or the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. There have been no bills like these for a generation. Today, to the extent that policy changes, it is a result of executive agencies using powers granted by these 20th century laws, or federal judges reinterpreting their meaning. The most significant bills of my adult lifetime were the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, both of 2010, and both were marginal updates to preexisting 20th century bureaucracies.
> European policymakers are so convinced of Australia’s offshore processing success that Britain’s government appointed an Australian official to help draft its Rwanda plan. It even copied Australia’s ‘Stop the boats’ slogan. Meanwhile, officials from Denmark’s immigration ministry traveled 13,000 kilometers in 2024 for a fact-finding trip to a processing site on Nauru, the small island nation off Australia’s northeast coast.
> There is just one problem with this narrative: offshore processing did not stop asylum seekers from trying to reach Australia. Instead, Australia’s success lay in turning boats back to their country of origin before they reached Australian shores.
> Many readers will disagree that it is ever right to discourage people from seeking asylum in safe, developed countries. Nevertheless, there are three reasons to take Australia’s example seriously. The first is that many European voters want to reduce the number of asylum seekers coming to their countries, and their elected officials are looking for ways to do that. If they misunderstand the example they are trying to follow, they will spend billions of euros on an approach that is both less effective and less humane than it should be.
> Before I had a baby I was pretty agnostic about the idea of daycare. I could imagine various pros and cons but I didn’t have a strong overall opinion. Then I started mentioning the idea to various people. Every parent I spoke to brought up a consideration I hadn’t thought about before—the illnesses.
> A number of parents, including family members, told me they had sent their baby to daycare only for them to become constantly ill, sometimes severely, until they decided to take them out. This worried me so I asked around some more. Invariably every single parent who had tried to send their babies or toddlers to daycare, or who had babies in daycare right now, told me that they were ill more often than not.
> In Joe Biden’s presidency, two great forces pushed the information state to the limits of its power. The first came from the administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The second came from its decision to use the arsenal of counterinsurgency against American citizens accused of domestic extremism. Both relied on the vast public-private apparatus of censorship and surveillance, originally built to combat foreign disinformation, to wage political battles at home.
[…]
> Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country”. Could constitutionally protected criticism of the US government be classified as malinformation? Only the information regulators could say for sure since all power rested in the authority to define the terms. The government seized the opportunity. In the very first month of the Biden administration, CISA rewrote its mission from focusing on foreign disinformation “to focus on general MDM”, an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — a three-part classification developed by the 2017 Harvard paper that coined “malinformation”. The machinery of the information state had completed its inward turn. Rather than defensively protecting critical infrastructure from outside attack, the agency would now “be responsive to current events” inside the US.
(a) The Biden/Harris administration was not one that I would consider Progressive, and I really have no interest in defending them broadly speaking
(b) I am quite aware of the actions and events described in the article you link, and do not approve of them. Even so, I think there is a legitimate question as to whether or not these actions constituted violations of the first amendment, at least legally if not in spirit. This is quite unlike the current administration's blatant violations which include:
(c) Jailing and attempting to deport people for political speech, attempting to revoke funding from universities that allow certain protests (freedom of assembly), defunding PBS and NPR on the basis of political viewpoints expressed, suing many other news outlets for unflattering coverage and threatening to revoke licenses via FCC. The list goes on. Also, Twitter is now owned by an honorary member of the Trump cabinet, and if you don't think he's putting his finger on the scale, boy do I have a bridge to sell you.
Scribd are quite annoying. The pitch was "the YouTube for documents" allowing stuff to be posted and shared but they tend to try and get subscription money off you to see anything unlike the likes of YouTube.
Scribd scrapes the web of all the .PDFs that it can find, then gates them behind a paywall and SEOs their way to the top of Google's rankings. That's it, that's all they do. They run a zero value tollbooth with other peoples' IP, taking advantage of users who don't have the search-fu to hunt down the documents themselves.
I think when making the claim a company is a net negative, it's necessary to explore what would have happened if the company hadn't been founded.
I find it unlikely, for example that there would not be a dominant centralized forum platform. People would have certainly started problematic communities on the dominant platform, and it's unlikely a platform with strict moderation would have gained dominance before 2015 or so. I do think a dominant player would have been established by 2015.
Do you think whatever you see as harmful about Reddit would not have occurred if the company didn't exist?
This comment assumes both that Reddit is harmful and the outcomes were predictable. The former is debatable, but I am sure the latter is not true; the founders of Reddit didn't know what they were building.
They thought it was a social bookmarking thing for people to find and share blog posts. It didn't even have comments for the first half year. For two more years, self-posts only existed as a hack where the poster had to predict the post's ID to make it link to itself. User-created subreddits didn't show up until about 2.5 years after the site launched.
I’m pretty sure all endless scroll social media has been scientifically proven to be harmful. Reddit also runs a 1:1 copy of TikTok.
I don’t really care to defend the morality of extremely wealthy VC firms like YC. They know the enshittification process that happens with 100% of the companies they fund.
They could create companies with charters and ownership structures that ensure they exist to better the world and make good products as their binding guiding principals, but they choose not to.
It would have happened more slowly at least, delaying the increase in populism, nihilism and depression in the Western world, the anglosphere in particular.
What traits specific to Reddit as opposed to a hypothetical generic alternative forum platform do you think are major contributors to those social trends?
Recommendation engine pushing users into ideological bubbles, public voting mechanism creating incentive for conformity which then creates purity spirals, lack of moderation.
Early Reddit had a recommended tab, but that didn't last long. The current recommendation features are relatively recent - this decade at least.
It would surprise me if the winner in that space didn't have a public voting mechanism. Digg, Reddit's early major competitor had one, and heavy-handed moderation surrounding the HD-DVD decryption key leak was one of the major inflection points that drove users from Digg to Reddit. Stricter moderation during that time period would have been a losing strategy.
It is productive to decline to use propaganda terms. If, every time someone says they support affirmative action they are asked if they support having higher standards for Asian applicants to medical school than for white applicants that’s good because forcing people to defend their support of racist policies reduces support for them. By the same token pointing out that affordable housing doesn’t mean housing people can afford, it means politician allocated housing paid for by the general taxpayer, reduces support. Reducing support for bad things is good.
Its also helpful to know that there is a specific (US) program called "affordable housing" that subsidizes rents for low income people. The economic effect of that program is to increase rents (but not home prices). This especially hits the working poor who make just a bit too much to have subsidized rents.
This is not a program, it is a term used by the HUD and very explicitly does not relate to income levels. That is the point I keep making, when the modern (<5y) left keeps touting “affordable housing” they are misusing the term simply because they don’t want to say “low income housing” even though everybody acknowledges they are actually referring to “low income housing.”
It is very important to distinguish the two because “affordable housing” is a marketing term that could reasonably convince someone that the policy is meant to help 80% of people including themselves, when in actuality it is low income housing which is restricted to <20% of the area population and even fewer voters.
> When my son was in first grade, he came home from school in tears saying that he hated math. My wife and I are both engineers, so this was the sort of all-hands-on-deck shock that demanded our immediate attention. Before this my son had loved math. He would demand that we challenge him with math problems to do in his head in the car and over dinner. He loved doing flashcards. He played math games on his tablet unsupervised for hours. Even now, years later in 4th grade, he has decided he wants to learn calculus, so he insisted I start explaining it to him as best I could in the car, and started working through pre-algebra in Khan Academy on his own. How is it possible that a kid like this had decided he hated math?
> His misery was all due to i-Ready, the software product our district had purchased for math work and testing. During that period my kids’ happiness at the end of the school day was entirely determined by how much time their school had made them spend on i-Ready. If they hadn’t touched i-Ready, they were happy. If they were forced to do it, they were sad. If they had to spend an unusual amount of time on it, they were in tears. I started asking around to the other kids’ parents, and I heard similar stories from all of them. Their kids described it as torture. Some of them would hide in the bathroom to avoid it. None of the parents felt that their kids were learning anything at all from it.
> Executive Summary
Citizens’ Assemblies, in which a representative selection of members of the public
are invited to consider policy on contentious areas, are increasingly in the news.
Supporters claim they will enhance public confidence in democracy, and could
also break the deadlock on issues from assisted dying to climate change. They are
claimed to give politicians and policy makers insight into what an informed
common ground might look like.
This paper examines the case for these claims. We have reviewed over 700
initiatives covered in an OECD database, focusing in particular on 17 examples
from Ireland, several US states and two Canadian provinces where the
deliberation of a citizens’ assembly was followed by a public vote on the same
subject. We have then analysed the results in the light of academic literature on
political behaviour and opinion forming.
Our conclusion is that citizens’ assemblies are a poor predictor of what the public
is likely to decide if asked. With the recommendation of citizens’ assemblies
rejected on 10 out of 17 occasions, they are worse at forecasting the public mood
than tossing a coin. Even in cases where assemblies were praised for anticipating
the popular vote, like on abortion or gay marriage in Ireland, the winning margin
at the assembly was around 40 percentage points higher than at the referendum.
The error is consistently in the same direction - assemblies were more supportive
than the general public of progressive policies on 15 of 17 occasions1 and the
proportion of people who voted for the progressive option was, on average, 25
percentage points higher in the citizens’ assembly than in the subsequent
referendum. Even when every effort is made to conduct them robustly, the
structure of these assemblies seems highly vulnerable to a series of biases, in
particular selection bias, issue framing and ‘polarization effects’ – a type of group
think. There is good evidence that the contentious issues for which they are most
often proposed, like assisted dying, might be the very ones for which citizens’
assemblies are least suited.
> America has more murders because we make murder easy. No other country is awash in guns.
Switzerland, Canada. The US has more illegal guns but ~every adult male Swiss citizen has access to a gun and training in how to use it. Hunting is as popular in Canada as it is with similar demographics in the US and having plenty of guns around does not make them anomalously murderous.
[1] For the huge majority of PhD students in the Arts and Humanities there are virtually no jobs in their fields and it’s not that much better in the social or exact sciences, though there is at least some extra academic demand for their skills. There are very, very few fields outside academia where a doctorate is a necessary qualification or close to it and those are ~all a terrible investment if what you want is a remunerative career; things like biomedical research where you do a doctorate, then a postdoc and then get a job paying what an MBA from a top tier business school gets their first year out.
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