Ahmed FASIH @22@octodon.social

“Humility in the face of the game is extremely different than humility in the face of your opponents.” —Annie Duke, professional poker player, quoted by Tetlock/Gardner.

“The humility required for good judgment is not self-doubt—the sense that you are untalented, unintelligent, or unworthy. It is *intellectual* humility. It is a recognition that reality is profoundly complex, that seeing things clearly is a constant struggle, when it can be done at all, and that human judgment must therefore be riddled with mistakes.” —Tetlock/Gardner. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction.

Dr Vera Rubin's three basic assumptions, that I've verified (well, the first and last, I yield to the census people for the second):

1) There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman.

2) Worldwide, half of all brains are in women.

3) We all need permission to do science, but, for reasons that are deeply ingrained in history, this permission is more often given to men than to women.

(via https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/26/507022497/vera-rubin-who-confirmed-existence-of-dark-matter-dies-at-88)

Now I am taking these Implicit Association Test (IAT, a bias test):

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/index.jsp

'Your data suggest a slight automatic association for Male with Science and Female with Liberal Arts.' 😢 it was a *lot* easier for me to hit the right key for
- "male OR science"/"female OR liberal arts" than
- "male OR liberal arts"/"female OR science".

I personally live by Vera Rubin's principles and this is something to think about.

https://octodon.social/media/TtDPAuLMpE-yRV3z_zY

https://stackoverflow.blog/2018/04/26/stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change/?cb=1

StackOverflow to becoming more welcoming. 👏

For me (cis het dude with monster-sized Asian tech privilege), learning to StackOverflow properly was certainly a learning experience, and I have the closed questions to prove it. I've also gotten enough useful feedback through it (and other StackExchanges, like GIS and statistics) that I try to give back by "mentoring" & showing how to improve the question.

Downvoting unhelpful comments is a great start. I see that too much.

So this must be what it felt like to wake up and see Nixon and Mao shake hands, combined with waking up to hear the Berlin Wall was coming own.

History in the making makes me cry every time.

#Korea!

Now replanning all our travel plans for the next several years.

I really enjoyed #Noragami because it was fun to see Tenjin, Ebisu, and Bishamon (kami and Buddhist deities) portrayed the way they were. Poetic license and pastiche collision!

http://www.crunchyroll.com/noragami

More deities stories please! I'm working through Kamichu, and we looooved Uchouten Kazoku (Eccentric Family).

“The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.” —E.H. Carr, *What is #history?* 🤥

@groceryheist @mako you're the only ones I can ask. Here's a plot of Chinese Wikipedia daily editors. The story here, of a community that overcame exponential growth and found stable linear growth, is mirrored in the daily edits curve (and to a lesser extent, the new articles curve; not so much the bytes added, that's been flat for many years).

My question: is this story real? Are they actually mentoring editors, growing quality, and expanding? Or is this just PRC vs ROC turf wars, or spam?

Oh in case it was unclear, Vedantam is saying that changing how people think is NOT necessary nor sufficient to changing their behavior. Information, education, and persuasion are NOT great ways to change behavior.

“If you want to shape how people behave, you must first change the way they think” is a bad assumption.

“One of the messages of this radio program was, you should dissent against authority; you should make your voice heard.” —Dr Betsy Paluck on Hidden Brain.

I don’t like it when people claim that questioning authority is a uniquely American feature. It isn’t, but it is awesome, and it deserves to be spread with more vigor. It won’t solve everything but it will make life everywhere more interesting.

Question authority.
Nullius in verba.
Prepare to be confused.
Don’t expect everything.
Be nice.

“We like to think we change people's behavior through information, through education, through persuasion. Now, these things often don't work, but we keep doing them because we have an unshakable faith in a core assumption about human nature. If you want to shape how people behave, you must first change the way they think.”

Hidden Brain podcast: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=602872309

I love this because it’s super-important (#Holocaust, #Rwanda 🇷🇼) but also subverts our Galen-ish ideas about how things change.

Forgers warning their readers not to read forgeries. How very meta.

Reading *Forged: writing in the name of God—why the Bible’s authors are not who we think they are* by University of North Carolina professor Bart #Ehrman.

Daily new users signup on #Wikipedia for English, French, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew.

So.

What happened around the world (or in the underworld) July/August 2014 and lasted up to March–May 2015 that saw so much more new user signups on so many Wikipedias? Something good? Something heinous?

So. Two hashtags.

#NulliusInVerba: take no one’s 🤬 word for it.

#TBIC: Toxic Brew of Ignorance and Confidence.

“What people didn’t grasp is that the only alternative to a controlled experiment that delivers real insight is an uncontrolled experiment that produces merely the illusion of insight. … [Some] would say it worked; their opponents would say it failed. But nobody would really know. … [The government] had just assumed that its policy would work as expected. This was the same toxic brew of ignorance and confidence that had kept medicine in the dark ages for millennia.”

(https://gist.github.com/fasiha/447258e2d26eeb8f9405f5a2f989ec1f)

#NulliusInVerba

“When hospitals created cardiac care units to treat patients recovering from heart attacks, Cochrane proposed a randomized trial to determine whether the new units delivered better results than the old treatment, which was to send the patient home for monitoring and bed rest. Physicians balked. It was obvious the cardiac care units were superior, they said, and denying patients the best care would be unethical.…” —Tetlock/Gardner.

We all know how this go.

Regarding my last boost:
- git cloning the Linux kernel (done; took a few minutes, 3.1 GB on disk)
- git log the lines changed per commit (doing, seems to be averaging a month every 2-3 seconds)
- merge the log into number of lines changed (added+deleted) each day (todo)
- plot daily activity in Linux kernel.
Does the Linux kernel follow the Wikipedia rise and decline pattern?