As is mentioned elsewhere a lot of that might be the case of just no one talking about it publicly. I went to high school in the era when smartphones just started to be a thing. No one was really talking about sex out loud, people would get caught with drugs occasionally (a lot of xanax and weed), but why would anyone talk to the person who sat at the lunch table with the kid who wore a tail everyday.

I was also in one of the first schools that issued laptops to all students. The use of them was similar to how the parent post described smart phones. The honors/ap kids would either type notes or just not use them. The CP kids would be on... whatever the unblocked site of the day was (people figured out pretty early on that google docs/google wave were good ways to chat). The weirdos like me were playing cat and mouse with the tech people hosting proxies, imageboards, and meebo (IM client) repeaters. I'll never forget the day we went to the stupid url we used for it, and it redirected to barney.com. We also had a rather robust sneakernet set up for distributing giant packs of flash games and early versions of minecraft.

It's not true that nobody's fucking. The LGBT kids fuck to an extent, as do some of the lower achievers, but even then it's nowhere near as much as I expected.

I'm surprised to hear you compliment my writing style. I always thought it was subpar - too many clauses, a slew of unnecessary qualifiers and weasel words, no shortage of kludges for things I can't express very well. I tend to be better at it after I've been reading a book for a while and have "effective rhetoric" somewhere in my brain's cache line.

> I'm surprised to hear you compliment my writing style.

Your comment had me on the edge of my seat, like a report from the trenches.

The fact that you know more brevity would improve your style puts you ahead of some English majors I went to University with.

I'm sure you're sick of hearing it, but your generation does give me optimism for the future. I believe you'll have to do more with less than your predecessors, and for my own failures in mitigating that you have my apologies. But you do make it plausible that we might just muddle through the upcoming troubles.

Your very articulate derision - of your own ability to articulate yourself - gave me a good laugh.

Mind sharing the title of the book?

Just some advice, since you said you're 16. When you get a compliment, I know it's tempting to downplay yourself and seem humble, but a "thank you" is almost more appropriate. Stand by yourself :)

Sometimes I agree: In this case, I read it more as telling us how much he appreciates the compliment because of the fact he generally feels subpar.

I am the same when I speak Norwegian: When I get a compliment, I feel as he does.

I read it as somewhat insulting to the complimenter. "You think this is good? My own standards are much higher."

Maybe that's unfair, but in the context of the author's prior description of being involved in trying to achieve, or join, or do things to stand out, the interpretation I gave feels more plausible.

It seems much more polite and appropriate to me to not react that way.

> The LGBT kids fuck to an extent, as do some of the lower achievers, but even then it's nowhere near as much as I expected.

I'm trying to be charitable and not over-interpret the juxtaposition of "LGBT" and "lower achievers". I'm surprised you have so much time to study who is having sex. Quite remarkable.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It might actually reflect your own prejudice a bit that you're interpreting it that way. Speaking as a rainbow myself over here, it's...not unlikely? Throw a bunch of teenagers or young adults in support groups together with the subtext that they all have the same sexual orientation with no chance of being shamed for making advances for what's effectively the first time in most of their lives, and it doesn't take a fortune teller to figure out what's probably going to be happening in greater rates for those kids.

And there's definitely evidence that lower academic investment is correlated with higher sexual activity; I've been up for dozens of hours now so forgive me for not throwing some papers in your direction, but they shouldn't be hard to find.

I don't think it's healthy for anyone to really analyze this stuff for any demographic, but acting like what he said was so awful was really out of line, and pretty clearly breaking HN's guidelines.

>Speaking as a rainbow myself over here, it's...not unlikely? Throw a bunch of teenagers or young adults in support groups together with the subtext that they all have the same sexual orientation with no chance of being shamed for making advances for what's effectively the first time in most of their lives, and it doesn't take a fortune teller to figure out what's probably going to be happening in greater rates for those kids.

Also rainbow, but I don't quite see that. The straight kids are already thrown together in all kinds of ways and for the most part know that each other are straight. On top of that, there's the issue of numbers. If there are, say, 20 out gay kids of a given gender in a high school, it's quite likely that there are no mutual attractions between any of them.

> Throw a bunch of teenagers or young adults in support groups together with the subtext that they all have the same sexual orientation with no chance of being shamed for making advances for what's effectively the first time in most of their lives, and it doesn't take a fortune teller to figure out what's probably going to be happening in greater rates for those kids.

Honestly, I think the bigger reason is that there's no chance of pregnancy in gay relationships, so one big barrier is just gone.

The way it was written makes out they have hard evidence of who is having sex broken down by grade and orientation. I don't believe that for a second.

I guess you just need to write assertively and nobody will question it.

It might surprise you to know (/s) that people in high school talk about sex. A lot. It's not unreasonable to assert that he does know roughly what's going on.

There isn't any way to accurately track how many people in a high school are having sex. We used to talk about sex a lot when I was in high school too, but I really have no idea how much actual sex was going on.

Those are orthogonal concepts anyway

I know that.

High school can be many things. And it's not just binned into stereotypes.

For me high school was full of sex and parties. And by far the most sex and partying was via robotics club, believe it or not. Which is also where I learned the most about engineering and really developed a hunger to go to university.

For my kids I want high school to be a whole experience. Equal measures social, sports, and academics. Maybe less sex.

This depends extremely strongly on the high school, I have found. Mine was fairly boring in that sense (the description given above would apply fairly well to it) and I had an interesting time listening to other people’s high school experiences when I came to college. (Though, it’s not like I spiced things up when I was there, either. I just heard about more stuff from people I actually knew who were involved in that kind of stuff, whereas in high school I couldn’t point to anyone I knew personally who might have gone to a party.)