Link Archive 5/3/17 – 7/8/17

THE “EFFECT IS TOO LARGE” HEURISTIC – “a Radiolab episode…mentioned a famous study on judges handing out harsher sentences before lunch than after lunch. …the percentage of favorable decisions drops from 65% to 0% over the number of cases that are decided upon. This sounded unlikely.”

 

In Defense of Individualist Culture – A strong counter to the current pro-communitarian trend. Still don’t know if this is great or awful.

“The idea of mankind as arbitrarily malleable is an appealing one to marketers, governments, therapists, or anyone who hopes that it’s easy to shift people’s behavior. But this doesn’t seem to be true. It might be worth rehabilitating the notion that people pretty much do what they’re going to do.
…Once you’re aware that you can pick your favorite way of life, you’re a modern. Sorry. You’ve got options now.
Which means that you can’t possibly go back to a premodern mindset unless you are brutally repressive about information about the outside world, and usually not even then.”

((I’m assuming a bit of background knowledge, based on what’s been floating around the Rationalist Sphere lately, but it does have a good summary:
“The behaviorist or sociological view of the world would say that individualist cultures are gravely deficient because they don’t put any attention into setting up healthy defaults in environment or culture. If you don’t have rules or expectations or traditions about food, or a health-optimized cafeteria, you “can” choose whatever you want, but in practice a lot of people will default to junk. If you don’t have much in the way of enforcement of social expectations, in practice a lot of people will default to isolation or antisocial behavior. If you don’t craft an environment or uphold a culture that rewards diligence, in practice a lot of people will default to laziness. “Leaving people alone”, says this argument, leaves them in a pretty bad place. It may not even be best described as “leaving people alone” — it might be more like “ripping out the protections and traditions they started out with.””))

 

This is goddamn poetry!! Seriously good writing.  ‘Glow’ Star Betty Gilpin: What It’s Like to Have Pea-Sized Confidence With Watermelon-Sized Boobs
I feel it does it injustice to quote only a small snippet, but here’s a tiny bit: “at some point I realized the obvious truth that I was a hideous goblin under a bridge, that the sound of my voice was like audible feces, and the presence of my body in a room was like bringing a moose carcass to brunch. […] And then puberty was like, WA-BAM.”

 

Fascinating perspective. And unusually short for an SSC article!
“ordinary conversations are hard to predict because they’re designed to be so.
There was some interesting discussion about this on Autistic Tumblr, which centered around: why would someone do this? Why can’t people just say what they mean?
And the best answer I saw …explained that people were trying to spare their friends the burden of rejecting them.
But if there are people who are unusually bad at understanding social cues, like autistic people, then any cue calibrated to be on the exact border of neurotypical understanding is likely to fail for them more often than not.”

 

Sheep want to die?

 

Living Ohio man Donald Miller ruled ‘legally dead’

 

Surprising! “You are wrong about Adam West’s Batman” I am revising my opinion on the 60s Batman. Might even check out an episode or two when I have time. It’s strange how many opinions we simply inherit from our culture.

 

It’s a decent start, and I’m glad Colorado is leading the way. :) Gov. Hickenlooper signs controversial civil asset forfeiture bill, calls it “important first step” in addressing problems with practice.
I still surprised people are willing to go on the record being FOR forfeiture… which I think just speaks to my stupid naive optimism about humans, given the entire political landscape we currently inhabit. :/

 

Interesting bits from a flyer regarding police training on Phone Forensics Tools:
* Before an officer views or extracts cell phone or tablet data during the course of a criminal or administrative investigation, he or she will obtain a search warrant or “signed written consent” <— Remember this part and don’t give consent, so you can maybe get the case thrown out afterwards if they do it anyway.
Data that can be extracted includes:
 Text and Picture Messages
 Videos and Pictures (in some cases with GeoTag-location info) and creation date and time
 Audio Files
 Emails and Web Browsing Information (in some devices)
 GPS and Location Information (in some devices)
 Social Networking messages and contacts (in some devices)
 Deleted Data – Call Logs, Messages, Emails (in some devices)
 PIN Locked and Pattern Locked Bypass & Data Extraction – (on some devices – not all phones bypassed)

 

YES!!! The future is *slightly* less dystopian!! Supreme Court Rules Patent Laws Can’t Be Used to Prevent Reselling
“This was one of those fundamental-right-altering cases of which your average American tends not to be aware.”

 

The Social Justice Warriors are right – “the fight over Confederate symbols is just a thinly-veiled proxy for the biggest moral question that’s faced the United States through its history, and also the most urgent question facing it in 2017. Namely: Did the Union actually win the Civil War? Were the anti-Enlightenment forces—the slavers, the worshippers of blood and land and race and hierarchy—truly defeated? Do those forces acknowledge the finality and the rightness of their defeat”

 

A fantastic review of Logan. It’s more a video about how genre evolves, using Logan as a case study, and stating that we are right at the cusp of one such evolution right now. So good, must recommend! Plus NerdWriter is generally awesome.

Donald Trump supported me when I was wrongly accused of murder. What do I owe him? – “I owe my freedom to those people who saw reason beyond loyalty.”

 

“Let’s be honest: the recent success of Catholicism is the ultimate sign of our inability to deal with the world through anything other than a late capitalist lens of standardizaton, corporatism, and carefully-packaged pablum. It’s the perfect religion for the Age of Trump.”
(yes, it’s satire)

 

A Brief History of Goths. So neat to learn the word’s history!

 

People Around The World Throw “American” Theme Parties

 

An actual transcript of an actual interview with the actual president.
“Look at those very nicely dressed people. It’s religious liberty out there.”
(ending his answer to the question “Do you need to get Democratic support to get this tax plan passed?”)

 

Doing Business In Japan – ” “Most people want to become wealthy so they can consume social status. Japanese employers believe this is inefficient, and simply award social status directly.” The best employees aren’t compensated with large option grants or eye popping bonuses — they’re simply anointed as “princes”, given their pick of projects to work on, receive plum assignments, and get their status acknowledged (in ways great and small) by the other employees.”

” It is socially mandatory that your boss, in fulfillment of his duties to you, sees that you are set up with a young lady appropriate to your station. He is likely to attempt to do this first by matching you with a young lady in your office. There are, at all times, a number of unattached young ladies in your office. Most of them choose to quit right about when they get married or have children.

 

“In late March, Hypatia, a feminist-philosophy journal, published an article titled “In Defense of Transracialism” by Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, as part of its spring 2017 issue.
…Tuvel is now bearing the brunt of a massive internet witch-hunt..The biggest vehicle of misinformation about Tuvel’s articles comes from the “open letter to Hypatia” that has done a great deal to help spark the controversy.

It’s remarkable how many basic facts this letter gets wrong about Tuvel’s paper. Either the authors simply lied about the article’s contents, or they didn’t read it at all. Every single one of the hundreds of signatories on the open letter now has their name on a document that severely (and arguably maliciously) mischaracterizes the work of one of their colleagues. ”

 

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This is just a text post on facebook, link here, but I’ve pasted it below for those without the FB. It’s the most depressing thing ever.

> “The Endless September has ended and we’re in some kind of other state of internet discourse. The lack of reliable information and discussion means the open internet isn’t really a usable tool as a communication platform. Things have gotten weaponized very quickly – far faster than people seem to be capable of defending against. The Endless September was a coarsening of discourse, whereas what we have now is a directed corruption of communication tools, as well as the corruption of search and matching. Multiple actors (including state actors) pushing as much noise and propaganda into view that usability plummets. It does feel like a new era of internet trust/usability/identity crises that we haven’t actually pointed at and named.
> If I look at any article my default reaction is “I have no idea if this is real.” and often “No, really, I can’t tell if this is real or illusion.” If look at any science reporting my default reaction is “this is probably not what the paper actually claims, also the effect may not be reproducible, also whoever wrote this may have a political or social objective.” Forum comments are all suspect, analysis is questioned. The underlying theme is to ask “who wins if I were to believe this”? Sure, these are all good threads to run in any information environment but it is taxing and the answer is negative more often than positive.
> Tools that should enable us to reach out and observe beyond our immediate capacity are now suspect, as we have no way of ensuring the source of the observations are reliable and the number of unreliable signals has significantly grown. The problem here aren’t the obviously unreliable sources of information, it’s the persistence and ubiquity of just-reliable-enough-to-influence-beliefs and unreliable-in-increasingly-non-obvious-ways.”

— Brandon Reinhart (quoted w/ permission)

 

From Eliezer Yudkowsky – “I was just browsing Hacker News, and somebody called the Ethereum currency (one of the first genuinely different successors to Bitcoin, in which ether pays for arbitrary computing services) a “cult”.

Also another from Eliezer Yudkowsky on Markets as Post-Human Optimizers that can be broken very easily if you Disrupt The Ritual.  Too long to quote, sadly.