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The_God_of_Abraham278 karma

Was the decision to make Census Day on April Fools' something that people debated internally? Did anyone discuss or estimate the magnitude of bad data generated by people deciding to have a bit of a laugh at your expense?

I mean, my hunch would be that it's an insignificant effect. But when you run a critically important, once-a-decade statistical exercise, it's a question I'd expect to be taken seriously.

(FWIW, I always complete my census forms in good faith regardless of the date!)

The_God_of_Abraham132 karma

Glad someone asked after the obvious irony here. But you didn't really answer the question.

Your response was about how social media might help (or not help) people who are depressed. But the question was was to what degree might social media might be responsible for causing (or exacerbating) depression.

This seems like the massive elephant in the room. There are countless non-academic, often humorous (forgive the vulgarity) popular media references to the negative behavioral impact of the internet on humans, especially youth. But yet most academic research seems to take an approach like your answer above: take the depression for granted, then look at how a 'treatment' (like social media) impacts it.

I'd like to see much more attention given to the ways in which social media—anonymous and otherwise—affects the incidence of depression. My money is on a net negative influence, as we abstract away the complexities of human interaction into discrete and arbitrary quanta like karma and likes and retweets.

The_God_of_Abraham41 karma

The orders to remain open are coming directly from Secretary of the Interior, Trump appointee, David Bernhardt.

I'm sort of curious why are you pointing the finger at Bernhardt, instead of either going up the chain to Trump, or down the chain to Michael Reynolds, who is head of the National Park Service.

The NPS is only a small portion of Bernhardt's concerns. Surely Reynolds is the most reasonable person to pin this decision on?

The_God_of_Abraham33 karma

Any thoughts on the safety of the various oil extraction techniques for vaping? AFAICT, CO2 extraction seems to be the least likely to leave nasty stuff in the oil.

The_God_of_Abraham30 karma

The problem is that pretty much no one is interested in hiring diverse viewpoints. They just want to hire diverse skin colors and pretend that that automatically gets them diversity of thought.

But it's actually worse than that. Many places seek to actively exclude diversity of thought. Thought experiment:

  • A black woman with strong CS credentials applies for a job at a major social media company. SHe shows up for her interview wearing a BLM shirt. Does she get hired?

  • The same black woman shows up for an interview wearing a MAGA hat--indicating that she shares political values with roughly half the country. Does she get hired?

We all know that only one of those questions has a "yes" answer.