> 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.