It should be noted that I've put that little circle next to the bigger circle every single person who's disagreed with me here, as far as I know. That said. In 7th grade, I took an SAT test without preparing for it at all, it was spur-of-the-moment, I knew about it about an hour ahead of time and didn't do any research or anything. I scored higher on it than the average person using it to apply for college in my area. An IQ test has shown me to be in the 99.9th percentile for IQ. This is the highest result the test I was given reaches; anything further and they'd consider it to be within the margin of error for that test. My mother's boyfriend of 8 years is an aerospace engineer who graduated Virginia Tech. At the age of 15, I understand physics better than him, and I owe very little of it to him, as he would rarely give me a decent explanation of anything, just tell me that my ideas were wrong and become aggravated with me for not quite understanding thermodynamics. He's not particularly successful as an engineer, but I've met lots of other engineers who aren't as good as me at physics, so I'm guessing that's not just a result of him being bad at it. I'm also pretty good at engineering. I don't have a degree, and other than physics I don't have a better understanding of any aspect of engineering than any actual engineer, but I have lots of ingenuity for inventing new things. For example, I independently invented regenerative brakes before finding out what they were, and I was only seven or eight years old when I started inventing wireless electricity solutions (my first idea being to use a powerful infrared laser to transmit energy; admittedly not the best plan). I have independently thought of basically every branch of philosophy I've come across. Every question of existentialism which I've seen discussed in SMBC or xkcd or Reddit or anywhere else, the thoughts haven't been new to me. Philosophy has pretty much gotten trivial for me; I've considered taking a philosophy course just to see how easy it is. Psychology, I actually understand better than people with degrees. Unlike engineering, there's no aspect of psychology which I don't have a very good understanding of. I can debunk many of even Sigmund Freud's theories. I'm a good enough writer that I'm writing a book and so far everybody who's read any of it has said it was really good and plausible to expect to have published. And that's not just, like, me and family members, that counts strangers on the Internet. I've heard zero negative appraisal of it so far; people have critiqued it, but not insulted it. I don't know if that will suffice as evidence that I'm intelligent. I'm done with it, though, because I'd rather defend my maturity, since it's what you've spent the most time attacking. The following are some examples of my morals and ethical code. I believe firmly that everybody deserves a future. If we were to capture Hitler at the end of WWII, I would be against executing him. In fact, if we had any way of rehabilitating him and knowing that he wasn't just faking it, I'd even support the concept of letting him go free. This is essentially because I think that whoever you are in the present is a separate entity from who you were in the past and who you are in the future, and while your present self should take responsibility for your past self's actions, it shouldn't be punished for them simply for the sake of punishment, especially if the present self regrets the actions of the past self and feels genuine guilt about them. I don't believe in judgement of people based on their personal choices as long as those personal choices aren't harming others. I don't have any issue with any type of sexuality whatsoever (short of physically acting out necrophilia, pedophilia, or other acts which have a harmful affect on others - but I don't care what a person's fantasies consist of, as long as they recognize the difference between reality and fiction and can separate them). I don't have any issue with anybody over what type of music they listen to, or clothes they wear, etc. I know that's not really an impressive moral, but it's unfortunately rare; a great many people, especially those my age, are judgmental about these things. I love everyone, even people I hate. I wish my worst enemies good fortune and happiness. Rick Perry is a vile, piece of shit human being, deserving of zero respect, but I wish for him to change for the better and live the best life possible. I wish this for everyone. I'm pretty much a pacifist. I've taken a broken nose without fighting back or seeking retribution, because the guy stopped punching after that. The only time I'll fight back is if 1) the person attacking me shows no signs of stopping and 2) if I don't attack, I'll come out worse than the other person will if I do. In other words, if fighting someone is going to end up being more harmful to them than just letting them go will be to me, I don't fight back. I've therefore never had a reason to fight back against anyone in anything serious, because my ability to take pain has so far made it so that I'm never in a situation where I'll be worse off after a fight. If I'm not going to get any hospitalizing injuries, I really don't care. The only exception is if someone is going after my life. Even then, I'll do the minimum amount of harm to them that I possibly can in protecting myself. If someone points a gun at me and I can get out of it without harming them, I'd prefer to do that over killing them. I consider myself a feminist. I don't believe in enforced or uniform gender roles; they may happen naturally, but they should never be coerced into happening unnaturally. As in, the societal pressure for gender roles should really go, even if it'll turn out that the majority of relationships continue operating the same way of their own accord. I treat women with the same outlook I treat men, and never participate in the old Reddit "women are crazy" circlejerk, because there are multiple women out there and each have different personalities just like there are multiple men out there and each with different personalities. I don't think you do much of anything except scare off the awesome women out there by going on and on about the ones who aren't awesome. That doesn't mean I look for places to victimize women, I just don't believe it's fair to make generalizations such as the one about women acting like everything's OK when it's really not (and that's a particularly harsh example, because all humans do that). I'm kind of tired of citing these examples and I'm guessing you're getting tired of reading them, if you've even made it this far. In closing, the people who know me in real life all respect me, as do a great many people in the Reddit brony community, where I spend most of my time and where I'm pretty known for being helpful around the community. A lot of people in my segment of the community are depressed or going through hard times, and I spend a lot of time giving advice and support to people there. Yesterday someone quoted a case of me doing this in a post asking everyone what their favorite motivational/inspirational quote was, and that comment was second to the top, so I guess other people agreed (though, granted, it was a pretty low-traffic post, only about a dozen competing comments). And, uh, I'm a pretty good moderator. All that, and I think your behavior in this thread was totally assholish. So what do you think, now that you at least slightly know me?

Fixed!

"Do a handful of people drive the conversations on twitter?"

Analysts do look for the sorts of users who can say something, or start a hashtag and get it started. Twitter does, even considering how massive it is, have people who frequently kick off ideas and set the tone. I imagine the lower volume of higher density content could strengthen that trend here.

Or eliminate that trend, who knows! I just wanted to point out that the answer to your rhetorical question isn't as clearcut as you might think.

But remember the founding fathers had a far less federalist understanding of government than we do today. This is even true of the party at the time which was called the federalist party. If it's not in the Constitution, it doesn't mean the founding fathers absolutely wanted government staying out of it, it either meant the founding fathers thought it wasn't the role of government, or they were leaving that power to the states.

States could and did have official religions. I don't think the founding fathers prevented the federal government from making one national state religion because they were trying to banish religion from government, they were just leaving it to the states.

That reinforces thenewgreen's point that these people were, overwhelmingly, Christians.

To be fair, that's a different problem.

The fact that the first few votes are weighted so heavily over there, and that you need to get your first couple dozen as quickly as possible to avoid falling off /new encourages content which can be digested in about a half a second. The algorithm encourages crap content, definitely. Hubski, from what I can see, fixes that.

But the linked commenter is right in that power users have more pull here than they do on Reddit. Your power as a power user on Reddit is determined by your reputation. Which, considering the two easiest ways to grow a reputation are to be the victim of a witch hunt or to have a ridiculous amount of pictures of barely-legal tits on your hard drive you're willing to share, doesn't confer much power. Whereas on Hubski, my ability to influence what users see and what the talking points are is pretty much decided entirely by how many followers I have.

This would be a superb opportunity for me to check if Hubski puts a character limit on comments.

I think the idea is that a lot of grammatical knowledge comes down to an eye for detail and a desire to appear professional.

Think about its vs it's. If you didn't just brute memorize which to use when, you could work it out with a moment's thought. Yes, it's odd that a branch might simultaneously be the tree's branch and its branch, but if you think about it, its fits in with hers and his. On the flip side, if I'm shortening 'it is' then I really do need that apostrophe to designate the contraction. The ability to do that kind of thinking (and the willingness to apply it to things which might appear trifling) is an important job skill generally.

I am slightly concerned the author might not include speaking AAVE an extenuating circumstance (which I think is what matdesigner was alluding too when he mentioned racist issues), but I'd rather not damn him for that until I actually see wrongdoing.