Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
The dire warnings about minimum-wage increases keep proving to be wrong.
So much so that in a new paper, the authors behind an earlier study
predicting a negative impact have all but recanted their initial
conclusions. However, the authors still seem perplexed about why
they went awry in the first place.
...
But we can't emphasize enough just how wrong many of the
initial analyses of the wage increase have been. Cognitive
dissonance is a powerful force. If your ideology includes the
belief that all government attempts at raising living standards
are doomed, then of course you are going to be against mandated
minimum wages. The problem occurs when these folks are confronted
by facts that are at odds with their belief systems. The options
are to either rethink your ideology or alternatively ignore the
data. Most participants seem to have done the latter. Kudos
to the University of Washington team for at least trying to
incorporate the facts into their latest research.
The plan is no gift to the masses, but a tool for our further enslavement. Douglas Ruchkoff
To the rescue comes UBI. The policy was once thought of as a way
of taking extreme poverty off the table. In this new incarnation,
however, it merely serves as a way to keep the wealthiest people
(and their loyal vassals, the software developers) entrenched
at the very top of the economic operating system. Because of
course, the cash doled out to citizens by the government will
inevitably flow to them.
...
Whether its proponents are cynical or simply naive, UBI is not
the patch we need. A weekly handout doesn't promote economic
equality-- much less empowerment. The only meaningful
change we can make to the economic operating system is to
distribute ownership, control, and governance of the real world
to the people who live in it.
Throughout the past year, the report's four authors surveyed eight thousand randomly chosen Americans, asking questions about "core beliefs": moral values, attitudes toward parenting and personal responsibility, perceptions of threats, approaches to group identity. The authors then sorted people, based on their beliefs and values, into seven "tribes": Progressive Activists, Traditional Liberals, Passive Liberals, Politically Disengaged, Moderates, Traditional Conservatives, Devoted Conservatives. Progressive Activists, as described by the report, tend to be "younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry." The Politically Disengaged are "young, low income, distrustful, detached, patriotic, conspiratorial." Moderates are "engaged, civic-minded, middle-of-the-road, pessimistic, Protestant." Devoted Conservatives are "white, retired, highly engaged, uncompromising, patriotic."
More in Common found that "tribal membership predicts differences in Americans' views on various political issues better than demographic, ideological, and partisan groupings." In other words, whether or not you think creativity is more important than good behavior in children is a better indicator of your political views than is your gender, your race, your income, or your party affiliation. "Once we have the seven segments, their views on issues are highly correlated," Tim Dixon, an Australian political activist and a founder of More in Common, told me. He added, "We have too much opinion research and not enough value research."
Frequency Phobia in Spite of Probability Blindness
For more than 20 years, research has proven the beneficial effect of natural frequencies when it comes to solving Bayesian reasoning tasks (Gigerenzer and Hoffrage, 1995). In a recent meta-analysis, McDowell and Jacobs (2017) showed that presenting a task in natural frequency format increases performance rates to 24% compared to only 4% when the same task is presented in probability format. Nevertheless, on average three quarters of participants in their meta-analysis failed to obtain the correct solution for such a task in frequency format. In this paper, we present an empirical study on what participants typically do wrong when confronted with natural frequencies. We found that many of them did not actually use natural frequencies for their calculations, but translated them back into complicated probabilities instead. This switch from the intuitive presentation format to a less intuitive calculation format will be discussed within the framework of psychological theories (e.g., the Einstellung effect).
The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to
communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and
full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer
programs that generate data, and clean up data, and plot data,
and run statistical models on data. These programs tend to be
both so sloppily written and so central to the results that
it's contributed to a replication crisis, or put another way,
a failure of the paper to perform its most basic task: to report
what you've actually discovered, clearly enough that someone
else can discover it for themselves.
...
The idea for IPython's notebook interface came from
Mathematica.
Pérez admired the way that Mathematica notebooks
encouraged an exploratory style. "You would sketch something
out-because that's how you reason about a problem, that's
how you understand a problem." Computational notebooks,
he said, "bring that idea of live narrative out ... You can
think through the process, and you're effectively using the
computer, if you will, as a computational partner, and as a
thinking partner."
...
At every turn, IPython chose the way that was more inclusive,
to the point where it's no longer called "IPython": The
project rebranded itself as
"
Jupyter"
in 2014 to recognize
the fact that it was no longer just for Python. The Jupyter
notebook, as it's called, is like a Mathematica notebook but
for any programming language.
Also see, Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice.
Researchers asked women and men "friends" what they really think - and got very different answers.
The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women
experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted
to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely
than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to
them - a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men's estimates of how
attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing
to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything
to do with how the men themselves felt - basically, males assumed
that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were
blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female
friends. Women, too, were blind to the mindset of their opposite-sex
friends; because females generally were not attracted to their male
friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual.
...
Taken together, these studies suggest that men and women have
vastly different views of what it means to be "just friends"
- and that these differing views have the potential to lead to
trouble. Although women seem to be genuine in their belief that
opposite-sex friendships are platonic, men seem unable to turn off
their desire for something more. And even though both genders agree
overall that attraction between platonic friends is more negative
than positive, males are less likely than females to hold this view.
Women are not monolithic. Pretending they are holds everyone back. Meghan Daum
#MeToo is important. #BelieveWomen is hollow sloganeering that will ultimately set us back rather than move us forward. Like all movements, #MeToo will live or die by the degree to which it's willing to let people in. Until it makes room for examinations not just of toxic masculinity but also toxic femininity-and, even better, dispatch with these meaningless terms-it will continue to tell only half the story. Until it admits that women can be as manipulative and creepy and generally awful as men, the movement will continue to send a message that we're not really whole people. And why would anyone believe someone like that?
'Sokal Squared'
Three scholars - Helen Pluckrose, a self-described "exile from the humanities" who studies medieval religious writings about women; James A. Lindsay, an author and mathematician; and Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University - spent 10 months writing 20 hoax papers that illustrate and parody what they call "grievance studies," and submitted them to "the best journals in the relevant fields." Of the 20, seven papers were accepted, four were published online, and three were in process when the authors "had to take the project public prematurely and thus stop the study, before it could be properly concluded." A skeptical Wall Street Journal editorial writer, Jillian Kay Melchior, began raising questions about some of the papers over the summer.
Beyond the acceptances, the authors said, they also received four requests to peer-review other papers "as a result of our own exemplary scholarship." And one paper - about canine rape culture in dog parks in Portland, Ore. - "gained special recognition for excellence from its journal, Gender, Place, and Culture … as one of 12 leading pieces in feminist geography as a part of the journal's 25th anniversary celebration."
Many scholars argue that people who attribute human characteristics to genetic causes also tend to hold politically and socially problematic attitudes. More specifically, public acceptance of genetic influences is believed to be associated with intolerance, prejudice, and the legitimation of social inequities and laissez-faire policies. We test these expectations with original data from two nationally representative samples that allow us to identify the American public's attributional patterns across 18 diverse traits. Key findings are (1) genetic attributions are actually more likely to be made by liberals, not conservatives; (2) genetic attributions are associated with higher, not lower, levels of tolerance of vulnerable individuals; and (3) genetic attributions do not correlate with unseemly racial attitudes.
We need to bring the two worlds together, both for the intrinsic value of better understanding engineering, but also to help society better use engineering to improve overall well-being.
Bringing engineers and philosophers into deeper conversation allows for both to learn from each other, and can serve as a community to reflect on society's broader approach toward engineering and its governance. In this way, fPET research can also be seen as 'in family' with a lot of other humanties and 'science and technology studies' research that strives for a deeper engagement between science and the liberal arts.