thepompano

That's not what Karl Marx said. He said: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people"

To these ends I agree that oral traditions wouldn't "scale up" quite as well as written ones - but we're talking about pretty small groups of people, so they're going to have less viewpoints on the whole and therefore less need of a system that helps them manage intellectual pluralism. And as a side note, I'd think you don't really need multiple viewpoints to engage in deductive reasoning, if we're counting that as critical reasoning.

great orators with really bad messages could easily sway people down all kinds of wrong directions

Massive lapses of critical reasoning also affect post-literate Western societies.

think of the first time you read a comment on HN which you impulsively disagreed with...

You can impulsively disagree with someone and subsequently change your mind without the need to write everything they said down. You probably do this every day in casual conversation - especially if you're a software engineer - I'd bet most programmers are no strangers to impulsive disagreement. So I think your blessing here is really self-reflection - not a writing system. I think self-reflection falls under critical reasoning.

Now imagine what happened the last time you verbally disagreed with someone...

When you say that oral discourse has "all kinds of meaning ascribed to intonations", you're making it sound like speech is sort of a richer, more complex style of interchange than something purely textual like an email. Like, a speech act can have all kinds of richness and ambiguity. So wouldn't it then require more critical reasoning to parse out a speech than an email?

You wouldn't know from the article, because the author of the article doesn't cite any studies and just sort of takes Neil Postman's word for it.

I hate to defend the world's largest algorithmically-enforced echo chamber, but is this a really strong claim - is this seriously true? Like, a measurable reduction in curiosity across the board for Facebook users? What about if your friends are thoughtful and use Facebook primarily as a means of textual interchange?

And if the inverse is true - that being shown what we do not want and do not think makes us more curious - how does the author explain polarization? And are those irrelevant Youtube ads supposed to make me more curious about the world?

Reforms will also include cutting the red tape at the FDA: there are over 4,000 drugs awaiting approval, and we especially want to speed the approval of life-saving medications.

https://assets.donaldjtrump.com/_landings/contract/O-TRU-102...

I take your position to be that 1. you're in favor of providing financial support to people on disability, but 2. concerned that college-educated people on disability potentially stand to qualify for more benefits than non-college-educated people on disability.

If this program's stated intent was to fully subsidize education for people who would definitely not be able to procure work in their academic area of focus (like subsidizing music degrees for deaf people or whatever), I would concede that the program would be economically counter-productive. Otherwise I think the government should extend more financial assistance to people who are at greater risk of ruin.

Probably not, but considering that the forgiveness program the government is talking about mainly targets people with debt who can't pay it back - like people who are seriously disabled and can't get a job - you would likely be subsidizing people less privileged than you, which is a good thing.

> If and when they start making money can I expect a discount on their services?

No, but they're not making money now and they won't be in the future and that is why the government is considering discharging their loan debt.

Agreed, but to that point, I'd imagine that the primary consumers of student loans are people in their late-teens who are on-the-whole less financially responsible than homeowners. And for a lot of those people, they're under a lot of social pressure to go to college despite the fact that it's a gamble that might not pay off.