Ahmed FASIH @22@octodon.social

Of course the other reason I liked #Noragami is that a major rescue late in the second season relies on a high schooler’s mastery of a jinmeiyou #kanji.

@wim_v12e yes it’s very ignorant and unjust, like all discrimination—having a prior on a person’s ability/behavior based on some visible group marker, and possibly never updating those beliefs, instead of just having uninformative priors and evaluating evidence as it arrives, looking for the good & bad both in each person.

I sometimes think we’re so close to defeating discrimination, between object lessons on its destructiveness and the benefits of openness and the usefulness of meditation but…

@wim_v12e Ugh, I can guess that being told you've had it easy your whole life is very very obnoxious. That is exactly the same thing my spouse (a woman) complained about too: “you’re the diversity hire”, “your boyfriend helped you with your your homework”. The worst I got of that was my mom saying “eat your lima beans, kids are starving in Africa!” Which wasn’t even in the same league.

Thanks for reminding me about this. For me privilege was silent (Guo). I will remember for others it’s not.

Digital designers (of CPUs)—is Moore's Law really a self-fulfilling prophecy? Or is it just a business thing, where the only way to get people to buy a new computer is to make it faster (or "faster")?

Like, we don't have Moore's Law for cars—cars might have some dimension that could see exponential growth for decades (fuel economy? speed? um, size?) but probably not.

But is there a Moore's Law for financial transactions? Visa, bank wires, stock/futures/options exchanges, M-Pesa, etc.?

A lot of times you can see a situation is bad, like a car going too fast in the snow starts spinning out of control—you don't know whether it'll crash through the guardrail and off the cliff, or if it'll just break the left headlight, or if absolutely nothing bad happens.

Or a dry forest. You know a fire is imminent. You don't know which tree will be hit first. You don't know which of the ~ten sources will start it. But you know the system has evolved to a catastrophic state.

"That's a very interesting conundrum that we encounter, which is that some forecasters can be radically wrong in the short-term, but radically right in the long-term. You need mechanisms for factoring that possibility into your decision calculus if you're an organization relying on forecasting tournaments for probability inputs into decisions."

☝️ this. This ☝️ is key for fat-tailed Black Swan risks+predictions—earthquakes, nuclear accidents, pandemics, etc., anything with systemic roots.

@brennen Then, as you encounter questions/answers, you can up/downvote them, publishing your vote on ActivityPub, thus helping people in your network improve their ability to find questions and answers.

I'm hugely sorry for posting all this to you, I'm sure it makes negative-1000% sense, but your comments were magic and contemplating them made this crazy hare-brained scheme materialize :P I will clean it up and write up a proper something about it.

@brennen I mean, when we write blog posts/articles/code/etc., we have in mind someone who arrives there through a web search, with a question. We should be able to formalize that—have a system that publishes people's questions (think Quora) and let people publish blog posts etc. specifically answering that; with version control and permalinking and backups (combining Wikipedia and Archive.org).

@brennen Like Tetlock says, questions and answers are both very hard to get right :) power/territory seem inevitable when you have a real system to make/run, but mayyybe we can apply some p2p decentralized magic (à la Beaker Browser et al.) to it: think about how search engines work: we type in questions (sometimes generic like 'jay-z' meaning 'what this jay-z thing', sometimes exact: 'why should you not be buried with feet facing north') and they suggest pages with answers. Can we invert this?

@brennen Thanks for these thoughtful and cogent responses. Slightly unrelated—one thing that kind of forces me to answer questions on StackOverflow is questions from students whose professors are obviously awful and who just need one or four ideas presented to them (or two or six wrong ideas removed) for them to make rapid strides. There are people without colleagues to bounce ideas off of, and when they show up on SO, I'm moved by their plight to try and help—sympathy miseducation's victims 🙃

@wim_v12e And actually, no, when I say "Asian tech man privilege", I don't at all mean to say, 'I have privilege but its circumscribed to tech'—that might be true perhaps?, but then again, I'm a tall, skinny, healthy, light-skinned dude with PhD parents, I'm pretty aware that I have privilege in spades outside tech too. Reginald Braithwaite (awesome JavaScript dev/author) on this: https://twitter.com/raganwald/status/750028776549920768

I just mean, "I don't just have tech privilege, I have *ASIAN MAN* tech privilege 🧞‍♂️!"

@wim_v12e I usually think that privilege hurts those who have it just as much as those who lack it, directly (inaccurate self-image) and indirectly (society's loss of talent and skill)?

I hesitate to think that those with privilege have easier lives—that may derive from general Buddhist principles I subscribe to (everyone feels their life's suffering equally intensely, except Buddhist sages: apparently they feel everyone else's suffering 🙃).

@XavierJulep Hmm, you could encrypt messages with the public keys of your friends, which would be pretty easy to do client-side (like most things on SSB).

Y—yes, this is good, this is very good:

"Edge Master Class 2015 with Philip Tetlock—A Short Course in Superforecasting"

https://www.edge.org/conversation/philip_tetlock-edge-master-class-2015-a-short-course-in-superforecasting-class-i (1 of 5! very long transcripts)

I love Phil Tetlock's work because
1. it invites deep thinking, then
2. it invites deep action, then go to #1.

Tetlock's research and writings are making me start to make bets, set up news alerts, set up automatic trading algorithms, etc. Action! Too much reading makes you a dull couch potato, just like too much TV.

Ah, Tetlock acknowledges this here!!:

https://www.edge.org/conversation/philip_tetlock-edge-master-class-2015-a-short-course-in-superforecasting-class-ii

‘There is not such well-developed research literature on how to measure the quality of questions.’

‘“What does a clash in the South China Sea between the Philippines and the Chinese Navy tell us about Chinese geopolitical intent?” Well, perhaps not that much. What you’re looking for is creating clusters of resolvable indicators, each of which makes a significant incremental contribution to the resolution of a bigger question.’

Going back to this—I think Tetlock falls for WYSIATI—What You See Is All There Is (via Kahneman)—because Good Judgement Project/IARPA Challenge have short timescales that completely disrupt fat-tailed risk predictions. "Will China have a military engagement in the South China Sea in 2013?" wound up being a "yes" in late December IIRC, but if it'd happened in early January, then how to evaluate those predictions? And the real question could be "Will China fight a Real War in the South China Sea?"

And those war “statistics” may ignore things like the Rwandan and Guatemalan civil wars (where hundreds of thousands of lives were lost). That might be why Tetlock cites civil wars separately from “regular” wars, the former having only started “declining” (presumably in a linear regression sense?) since the 1990s. The nineties! Thirty years of declining civil wars! They’re well on their way to extinction! 😖😫🙄

Oh about the stupid idea how war-related deaths have been decreasing for a handful of decades. I’m really thinking about publishing an alternative analysis every year: an event costing how many lives would have to occur this year to totally invert those silly linear regressions. I bet it wouldn’t be that big.

That is, I’d guess if 25k deaths happened in an official war in 2018, none of those reports would be able to say “war has declined since 1950s!” without serious data cherry picking 🍒.

There’s been a few places in this book where I feel the authors forgot their own message. Did JFK’s team really improve between the Bay of Pigs catastrophe and its win during Cuban Missile Cdisis? Wouldn’t you need to test their performance over several geopolitical scares to establish that?

Did this forecaster really let his values misguide his prediction? Wouldn’t you need to run a specific experiment to verify it wasn’t any number of different things?

Well maybe we can forgive some lapses😒

“interstate wars have been declining since the 1950s and civil wars have been declining since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. This is reflected in the number of battle deaths per year, which, with a few blips, declined throughout the period.” —Tetlock/Gardner.

What absolute balderdash. Pure high-grade fertilizer 💩. Tetlock really should know better than incoming this pernicious Pinker thesis but alas, even a researcher on analytical thinking has to fail sometimes.