3 Black Teenage Scientists Had a Breakthrough, Then Came the Trolls

I wonder why we do social media voting at all. Even if it isn’t ruined by racist trolls it’s still kind of silly isn’t it?<p>How would a bunch of random strangers know which science project was good? And more importantly, why do we care what everyman Joe&#x2F;Jolie has to say about anything? We’ve always had village idiots or people who stood on cardboard boxes and yelled about our impending doom, but when did we decide that it was a good idea to give these people a megaphone?<p>Personally I think it’s rude as well. If I entered something cool into a science competition I’d appreachiate it if it was evaluated by people who actually knew something about science instead of entering some popularity contest.

I read about this a couple days ago. Apparently this started the nonsense: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Pash_away&#x2F;status&#x2F;988951710524583937" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Pash_away&#x2F;status&#x2F;988951710524583937</a><p>Lots of varying levels of &quot;wrong&quot; to go around IMO.

Slight off-topic. I&#x27;m sure this has been said before, but I&#x27;m saddened to catch myself doing it. All my life I&#x27;ve been indifferent to matters of race, and so if I&#x27;d read 10 years ago about 3 black girls doing whatever I wouldn&#x27;t have thought twice about it. But after what&#x27;s been happening in recent years, I just caught myself thinking: &quot;3 black girls? I wonder if they didn&#x27;t win as part of the diversity quota&quot; :-&#x2F; I maintain that &quot;affirmative action&quot; does more bad than good in the vast majority of the cases.<p>On-topic: In any case, prevalence of occurrences like the reported trolls are why I no longer give the benefit of the doubt to people who claim &quot;there&#x27;s no racism&quot;. For a while you had the excuse of not being aware, but now you&#x27;re just intentionally adding noise to the conversation.

It always bothers me when there are complaints of treating someone differently while also describing those persons as &quot;hyphenated Americans&quot;. I don&#x27;t think those, in this article, described themselves as such but you can&#x27;t be the same and different at the same time.

My solution- depersonalize all work. As in no faces, no interviews, no names- just a number and the work. Take the old web to reality- kick the whole social approach out of it. If writing styles or location give the work away, jumble and anonymize even that.<p>There will be no way human reeducation will ever work. There will no new - more human humanity appear by enough reeducation. So just make it one huge peer reviewed anonymized contest, even distribute some slang into other papers&#x2F; works and lets leave this all behind.

I know there is a lot of confusion about the internet in the Eternal iPhone September, but why is NPR feeding the trolls?<p>The headline is effectively: &quot;[thing happpend], [trolls trolled the thing].&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t like trolls either, but as best we can tell, they&#x27;re an emergent phenomenon of the system. Either NPR doesn&#x27;t understand the internet, or is trying to change the internet.

I&#x27;ve always wondered whether &#x27;freedom&#x27; encompasses freedom to be racist or hateful. But then again, the moment you bound the freedom, you have to allow others to bound other freedoms in their societies as well, which could very well lead to oppression, or even enslavement. It&#x27;s a tough call.

&gt; Hundreds of schools across the United States have drinking water that is contaminated by lead<p>How?

Meta-Comment: While I really don&#x27;t doubt a bunch of racist trolls would do something like this, I&#x27;ve seen &#x2F;b&#x2F; do enough dumb shit over the years, but I don&#x27;t see why these papers (NPR, WaPo) don&#x27;t at least include an example, i.e. screen-shot, of the calls for vote-rigging. Would make the cynic in me, and hopefully others, thinking this is a stunt for free press, like with the Clock Kid, go away.