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Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber
Get rid of the BS political handwringing - Who the hell CARES if a company uses the patent system to make a profit? Take their money, say thank you, and then be inspired to go fix the patent system. Want more women in FIRST? Don't harass me about how my friends aren't diverse enough, help me recruit more women to STEM.
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Frankly, the discussions of the political, societal and cultural implications of ideas—whether or not they have anything to do with robotics—were historically some of the most interesting conversations on the forums.
The increasing ease with which anyone can access our posts leads us to self-censor our opinions out of fear of the consequences. As a result, here (and elsewhere on the Internet), people now tend to be more cautious and less willing to postulate something unconventional or advocate for something unpopular. While one can argue that the risks of heated discussion or iconoclastic behaviour outweigh the benefits of discussions among people with common interests but diverse viewpoints, I worry that we're overcompensating for the perceived harms and will soon find ourselves in an online echo chamber, with nothing consequential to talk about.
Today's students participating on ChiefDelphi are missing out on the kind of high-quality conversations—and outright debates—that used to be commonplace. In those cases, it wasn't so much that the outcome of the debate was especially important, it's that by having the debate in a quasi-public place, everyone learned something about the issue at hand—and for some people, that was probably their introduction to the issue.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Taylor
It's also important to understand that CD is a public and searchable forum. My wife was looking up information about Jane Cosmetics, and one of the top Google responses was the CD thread.
She glanced through it, and commented to me, "That's a poor way to treat a sponsor."
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Speaking of an echo chamber, do we want a ChiefDelphi where people can't have that discussion for fear of offending a sponsor?
It's one thing to cause deliberate offence with malicious intent. It's quite another to recognize that a foreseeable consequence of constructive criticism is that people might recognize that mistakes were indeed made—and to criticize anyway, because that same criticism could plausibly lead to useful improvements. Certainly we have a moral duty to be judicious, but I don't think that moral duty compels us to be silent when we have nothing nice to say.
(Also, the magnitude of the problem may be overstated: Google is probably biasing your search results by personalizing them based on your inferred interests.)