tashi

One of the problems with trying to apply the Objectivist view to a situation like this is that often experts need to tell their patrons true things they don't want to hear. I'll leave any sociological or economic examples aside and say, to pick a couple that Ayn Rand herself didn't believe, that smoking causes cancer and air pollution is bad for the human body. If the patron doesn't want to believe this new fact they have been told, they might feel taken advantage of. They might feel that if a science department got public funding only to come to those conclusions, that the scientists should be fired.

I don't think that's what people have been taking away from the idea of stereotype threat at all. I think it's been much more likely for people to think, "Oh, instead of unchangeable genetic traits, the difference in outcomes might someday be reduced through deliberate social change.

A good idea unless it becomes popular.

I'm picturing bumper-to-bumper traffic on a highway with a cloud of drones overhead. Each person in their individual car using their individual drone to all report back the same thing: that everything is moving slowly because there are just too many cars on the road right now. With luck, the drones only crash into each other every once in a while, just like the cars below.

That reminds me of the difficult constraint they must have had in making art and architecture for the game The Witness: nothing could ever accidentally seem to be, from any viewing place, one of the world's simplest shapes. Only by design.

It's weird how, in the the second-to-last paragraph, the author takes the opportunity to attack a few unrelated composers he just thinks are overrated. Almost as if they were guilty by an association that exists entirely in his mind.

All the poor children you've met were addicted to drugs? Seems odd. Are you counting sugar as a drug?

And a song that uses it as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOCsdhzo6Jg

If we want to open the floodgates on being too pedantic, I think there are uncountably more irrational numbers close to any rational number than there are rational numbers close to an irrational number. But in both cases, it's definitely a bunch.

The article goes on further to explain that, "Shipwrecks create richer habitats that in turn boost fishing conditions, but only as long as the wreck is preserved."

Well, since lack of bank regulation almost destroyed the economy a little while ago, having a job that comes with incentives to reduce regulations is qualitatively different than those other options: more morally complicated, more dangerous.

The interviewer may have expected that fact to be self-evident to his readers, and that Barney Frank's unwillingness to engage with it, and to try to deflect in order to "win the argument," would speak for itself.

Well, he just introduces rudimentary technology to ancient humans and then stands back for thousands of years to watch it evolve.

He feels guilty that the chain of technological progress eventually leads to Hiroshima, but I don't think everybody would agree that it's his responsibility.

What political sermon? Do you just mean the diversity of the cast and crew, or did you find something in the story itself that sent a more coherent political message than, "If your boss tells you to blow up the world, say no."

That's surprising to me. What statistical measures did you use to make sure your conclusion wasn't confirmation bias?

Not to say they've found a good strategy(!), but when the market fails to price in externalities like pollution from cars, acting against the market would be the right thing to do, wouldn't it?

"Songs of Inaudible Automobiles" would have fit and been fun to say aloud.

For context: She's starting off the article with that obviously false malapropism sometimes attributed to George W. Bush as a springboard to talk about entrepreneurship in France, and it's clear that she is using it as a joke.

Is Sendhil Mullainathan the "black researcher and author" you're talking about? I'm trying to get a sense of how much fact-checking you've put into this.

I think your example fits the theory pretty well. If you flip a coin ten times and get mixed heads and tails, it's boring, but if you get ten heads in a row (so the theory goes), at some point your brain suddenly recognizes that you're dealing with an unexpected source of compressible data. Surprise!

https://archive.org/details/viva-variety-s-01e-01

That's a very impressive achievement, but I think this is one of those classic examples of the post hoc fallacy, "I succeeded by doing this, therefore those who do this will succeed." That logic is unsound.

Yes, to be 100% crystal clear, I'm saying the thing that feels so obvious to you that to deny it would be pure stupidity does not appear to be true.

There's a quick summary at https://languageattrition.org/use-or-lose/, from where you can get links to decades of research on language attrition. Apparently, for people who speak multiple languages, there's some kind of interference effect between languages that's very counterintuitive, which means there's not the correlation between time spent per language and fluency that you would think there would be.

You seem very certain, but that doesn't seem to be the consensus about how it works.

Is that how it works? Deep enough conversations, periodically, prevent language attrition? I don't know anything about this phenomenon, so that could be how it works. But the fact that she seems to have love and gratitude for her parents and the fact that her brothers are in the same boat makes me not jump to blame it on a bad relationship.

I feel like I read a different article than you! I thought she was saying that she had a pretty good relationship with her parents overall (other than some teenage resentment about their not learning English), that she lost her fluency unintentionally just from not being around other Cantonese speakers, and that the story had a fairly happy ending, as she was now re-learning enough to have more meaningful conversations with them again.

For people who haven't read the article, this is absolutely not a summary of it. It's short and interesting, so give it a shot.

I haven't seen any comments that praise him for cheating or stealing or faking his way through being a teacher. The only praise I see is for his learning to read and then coming out to tell his story.

Similarly, you probably meant "averse" instead of "adverse."

All these complicated incentives make it hard to figure out who's responsible, so let me ask a question:

What if a manufacturer lowered the price of insulin to $10 a month and gave no rebates at all? Would insurance companies refuse to cover it and pharmacies refuse to carry it?

Their claim is that if the pharma companies lowered the cost of insulin but then refused to give rebates to insurance companies for it, the insurance companies would stop covering insulin for diabetic patients? And they're using a diagram created by a pharmaceutical trade group to explain this? I'll be honest: I'm skeptical.

I test numbers for divisibility by 7 in my head almost every time I do a daily KenKen puzzle. There's usually a four or five-digit number in there whose factors I don't know off the top of my head, so I'll give it a quick check for sevens just to get my bearings.

But a python notebook could definitely beat me in a race.