These days, just a retired guy who likes to hike.

  • 32 Posts
  • 143 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The dropdown lets you select the language of your target audience (or at least I find that the easiest way to think about it). If you select “English” then only people who select “English” in their settings will see that post.

    But because most people leave their settings at the default “Undetermined” those people won’t see a post that’s marked as “English”.

    So for the moment, the best practice is to just ignore that dropdown and leave everything as “Undetermined”.

    The warning banner looks to be duplicated from the Settings page, where it actually makes sense.



  • Avoiding dupes is, I think, an important one. We’ve had multiple instances on Beehaw of the same story showing up more than once. If you try to post a duplicate link, Lemmy will let you know (by showing the previous copies to you as crossposts). It’s harder to make sure you’re not posting the second or third story from a different source on the same topic. Perhaps we can just encourage people to search before posting.

    I’d like the rules to at least ask people to add an image description in their original post. https://beehaw.org/post/686974 would be good to link to here.

    And given the nature of many posts in the news, I think it would be good for this community to remind people to be(e) nice in their discussions.


  • My own high school debate days are decades in the past. From that perspective, though, the fact that you can easily look up the judges’ biases, and so prepare for them, is a huge advance that we would never have even dreamed of. To me that seems like explicitly addressing biases in a useful way.

    I’d be interested in a more serious analysis that went through all 47,000+ paradigms and categorized biases so some non-anecdotal conclusions could be drawn. That would take a lot more time and money than picking out a few instances that the writer knows about.

    And yes, if an alternative ends up being liked better by debate coaches, people will go in that direction. It’s entirely possible that debate competition will end up being as fragmented as national politics.


  • The article here takes a bit stronger stance than “losing debates because of tweets”:

    The NSDA has allowed hundreds of judges with explicit left-wing bias to infiltrate the organization. These judges proudly display their ideological leanings in statements—or “paradigms”—on a public database maintained by the NSDA called Tabroom, where they declare that debaters who argue in favor of capitalism, or Israel, or the police, will lose the rounds they’re judging.

    The article calls out five judges for being biased. The NSDA site shows 47,168 paradigms. So, while there may be an issue, there doesn’t seem to be much proof here. It could equally well be that the author is cherry-picking instances that fit his ideology.