When to stop dating and settle down, according to math - The Washington Post - "The math problem is known by a lot of names – “the secretary problem,” “the fussy suitor problem,” “the sultan’s dowry problem” and “the optimal stopping problem.” Its answer is attributed to a handful of mathematicians but was popularized in 1960, when math enthusiast Martin Gardner wrote about it in Scientific American... The magic figure turns out to be 37 percent. To have the highest chance of picking the very best suitor, you should date and reject the first 37 percent of your total group of lifetime suitors. (If you're into math, it’s actually 1/e, which comes out to 0.368, or 36.8 percent.) Then you follow a simple rule: You pick the next person who is better than anyone you’ve ever dated before... In the scenario above, the goal was to maximize your chances of getting the very best suitor of the bunch -- you "won" if you found the very best suitor, and you "lost" if you ended up with anyone else. But a more realistic scenario, as mathematician Matt Parker writes, is that "getting something that is slightly below the best option will leave you only slightly less happy." You could still be quite happy with the second- or third-best of the bunch, and you'd also have a lower chance of ending up alone. If your goal is to just get someone who is good, rather than the absolute best of the bunch, the strategy changes a little. In this case, you review and reject the square root of n suitors, where n is the total number of suitors, before you decide to accept anyone. As in the formula above, this is the exact point where your odds of passing over your ideal match start to eclipse your odds of stopping too soon. For our group of 11 suitors, you'd date and reject the first 30 percent, compared with 37 percent in the model above."
Too bad you don't know your lifetime suitors
Fake Graph: The Actual “Dunning-Kruger Effect” Is NOTHING Like I Thought It Was - "For years, I’ve been teaching a fake graph. In pretty much every course I teach, on some day when students seem discouraged or distracted, I’ll draw an X axis labeled “Experience” and a Y-axis labeled “Confidence,” and sketch out the “Dunning-Kruger Effect” curve, as preparation for an informal pep talk... this one I’ve called “Figure 2” adds labels such as “Mount Stupid” and “Valley of Despair,” which struck me not only as a poor fit for the kind of pep talk I wanted to give, but also too informal for legitimate scholarship. So I wondered, for the first time in my teaching career, what exactly were Dunning and Kruger measuring when they plotted “Confidence” on the Y graph? Did they come up with the terms “Mt. Stupid” and “Valley of Despair”? How did they measure the acquisition of knowledge? I then wondered about the scale on the Y axis. What exactly were Dunning and Kruger measuring when they labeled a point on the Y axis as measuring “100% Confidence”? The graph plots the curve through the (0,0). But who begins any course having exactly *zero* confidence and knowing exactly “nothing”? Certainly SOME students will rate above zero in both categories, which should push the average at least slightly above zero... the narrative I’ve been giving in the name of Dunning and Kruger is totally wrong. Dunning and Kruger did not measure the confidence of students at the start of a class (at X = 0), and then track them through the course by measuring their confidence after the first, second, third, and final quarters. No evidence from their study supports the narrative that the confidence of learners starts out at zero, spikes, nose-dives, and then climbs again — even though the Internet is full of graphics purported to illustrate that very narrative... I can understand why an educator might want to take Dunning and Kruger’s negatively phrased finding — that students who lack knowledge of a domain also lack the ability to recognize the errors they make in that domain — and rephrase it more positively: “As students learn more, they are better able to recognize their errors.” That positive version nicely supports the observation that students were better able to predict their test scores as they learned more. However, Dunning and Kruger’s study did not actually measure student “confidence” on the Y axis, and the X axis does not measure how much experience students gain over time. We are not looking at what happens to students over time as they learn; instead, we are looking at how accurately students are able to predict their scores on a single test, and those students are sorted into four groups (graphed at X=1 through X=4) according to their test scores... I just don’t see any support for the distinctive peak and valley curve that so many online sources associate with the Dunning-Kruger effect."
The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real - "The most important mistake people make about the Dunning-Kruger effect, according to Dr. Dunning, has to do with who falls victim to it. “The effect is about us, not them,” he wrote to me. “The lesson of the effect was always about how we should be humble and cautious about ourselves.” The Dunning-Kruger effect is not about dumb people. It’s mostly about all of us when it comes to things we are not very competent at. In a nutshell, the Dunning-Kruger effect was originally defined as a bias in our thinking... Dr. Dunning tells me he believes the effect “has more to do with being misinformed rather than uninformed.”... Because the effect can be seen in random, computer-generated data, it may not be a real flaw in our thinking and thus may not really exist"
Meme - Jeff Bezos:
Libertarian Left: Lobbied in favor of a $15 minimum wage
Libertarian Right: Straight white male
Authoritarian Left: Endorsed the BLM movement
Authoritarian Right: Refuses to pay taxes"
James Lindsay, called him Joe Malarkey on TV on Twitter - ""Universities are hives of right-wing activity" is the dumbest lie the Woke Left has tried to force on the public yet."
Effects of physical attractiveness on political beliefs - "Physical attractiveness is an important social factor in our daily interactions. Scholars in social psychology provide evidence that attractiveness stereotypes and the “halo effect” are prominent in affecting the traits we attribute to others. However, the interest in attractiveness has not directly filtered down to questions of political behavior beyond candidates and elites. Utilizing measures of attractiveness across multiple surveys, we examine the relationship between attractiveness and political beliefs. Controlling for socioeconomic status, we find that more attractive individuals are more likely to report higher levels of political efficacy, identify as conservative, and identify as Republican. These findings suggest an additional mechanism for political socialization that has further implications for understanding how the body intertwines with the social nature of politics."
i.e. Conservatives/Republicans look better than Liberals/Democrats
Brittani Nichols on Twitter - "My girlfriend said, “Is there basketball on?” then put on the game and walked away. Two hours later, I’m like what is she doing? She’s napping. She turned it on to keep me occupied like a toddler."
Meme - "Porn movies are the most positive movies... No murder, No war, No fight, No cheating, No racism, No language problem, Good cooperation, Good coordination, Natural acting, Everybody enjoys the climax, Lots of love, Always a very happy ending for all characters! And the best part... No matter which point you start watching, you will understand the story"
Meme - "Pornhub comments are better than the videos"
"Seriously? After 20 minutes of getting to choke this gorgeous girl with his cock, two little poots of cum is all he could manage? Pathelic. I registered an account just so I could leave this comment in hopes he sees it one day. Fronting like you're some alpha male, while Elizabeth is performing her heart out, and what do you give her? Two tiddlywinks of cum? I've never felt so personally offended by porn before. You're a real asshole, pal."
Apparently about "Elizabeth bentley deepthroat tears and smeared mascara [rimming, gagging, slapping, choking, gag, throatfuck]"
Meme - "We live in a strange time where the nerds watch billion dollar Disney movies and the jocks read obscure philosophic texts from ancient and medieval eras."
Meme - Gengar622: "not every Lady Gaga fan is gay... I'm straight and I love her...."
Gengar622: "Ok guys 6 years passed and I eventually came out as gay"
I'll just touch you, fish! : FunnyAnimals
Meme - "EVERYONE STOP ITS A BEAR HOLDING BEAR STUFFIE"
Meme - "My friends have a dog with separation anxiety and someone suggested they get a dummy while they're away to make the dog feel better and they sent them this and I can't stop laughing"
ELI5: If the whole purpose of a fruit/vegetable is to spread seeds by being eaten and what out, why are chilly peppers doing there best to prevent this? : explainlikeimfive - "Chilies have a very good reason to make themselves hot - protection. The leading cause of seed mortality in wild chilli plants is a fungus called Fusarium. The fungus invades the fruits through wounds made by insects and destroys the seeds before they can be eaten and dispersed. Capsaicin, the chemical that makes the peppers hot, drastically slows microbial growth and protects the fruit from Fusarium. And while capsaicin deters local mammals, such as foxes and raccoons, from consuming the chilies, birds don't have the physiological machinery to detect the spicy chemical and continue to eat the peppers and disperse seeds."
In Japan, families share their microbiota in the bath!
Japan urges its young people to drink more to boost economy - "Japan's young adults are a sober bunch - something authorities are hoping to change with a new campaign. The younger generation drinks less alcohol than their parents - a move that has hit taxes from beverages like sake (rice wine). So the national tax agency has stepped in with a national competition to come up with ideas to reverse the trend. The "Sake Viva!" campaign hopes to come up with a plan to make drinking more attractive - and boost the industry. The contest asks 20 to 39-year-olds to share their business ideas to kick-start demand among their peers - whether it's for Japanese sake, shochu, whiskey, beer or wine."
Of course, letting in foreign tourists was too dangerous till recently
Chernobyl radiation damage 'not passed to children' - "There is no "additional DNA damage" in children born to parents who were exposed to radiation from the Chernobyl explosion before they were conceived... "Essentially, we found that there is no difference between thyroid cancers caused by Chernobyl radiation and any other thyroid cancers," Prof Thomas explained. "So there's no 'demon tumour' that comes out of Chernobyl that we won't be able to treat - we can just treat in exactly the same way as we treat other cases.""
Labor Day: “Lunch atop a Skyscraper,” was a staged photo of New York iron workers during the Depression - The Washington Post - "Other photos taken that day show the workers playing football, holding up American flags or pretending to sleep on the steel beam"
Hard work used to get you into university – today that couldn't be further from the truth - "If your child isn’t being discriminated against because you were stupid enough to have a successful career and go to a private school or buy a family home in a leafy postcode (NB: remember to purchase flat on sink estate next time), then the few remaining stellar university places they might have had a shot at will be snaffled by a Chinese or Indian student... Simon, a senior lecturer who taught the Master of Science (M.Sc.) course at one of those Russell Group universities, told me, “Of the 1,200 enrolled students, 900 were from People’s Republic of China. Tutors were told not to discuss Hong Kong or Taiwan in class or refer to them on maps. I criticised the leadership for this censorship and was cancelled as a result. My ex-colleagues kept their mouths shut for fear of being disciplined.” According to Simon, who won a prestigious post overseas after he was driven out, universities like the one he worked for “have become drunk on Chinese money”."
Affluent A-level pupils least likely to have offers of university place - "Clare Marchant, the chief executive of Ucas, the UK universities admissions service, said that disadvantaged pupils have been “put first” by universities making offers this year... For applications for university courses starting in 2023, students will be asked to identify whether they fit into new categories which could define disadvantage, including whether students are estranged from their parents, have caring responsibilities, or are from Armed Forces families."
When you demonise success
Why Iceland banned beer - "A century ago, Iceland banned all alcoholic drinks. Within a decade, red wine had been legalised, followed by spirits in the 1930s. But full-strength beer remained off-limits until 1 March 1989... A generation on, beer accounts for 62% of the 7.1 litres of pure alcohol consumed each year by the average Icelander. That's higher than in traditional brewing countries such as Germany and the Czech Republic (54% each) and the UK (37%), according to the most recent World Health Organization figures. But for much of the 20th Century it was unpatriotic - and illegal - to drink beer. When full prohibition became law 100 years ago, alcohol in general was frowned upon, and beer was especially out of favour - for political reasons. Iceland was engaged in a struggle for independence from Denmark at the time, and Icelanders strongly associated beer with Danish lifestyles. "The Danes were drinking eight times as much alcohol per person on a yearly basis at the time," says historian Stefan Palsson, author of Beer: Around the World in 120 Pints... The independence and temperance movements reinforced each other, and in 1908, four years after gaining home rule, Iceland held a referendum on a proposal to outlaw all alcohol from 1915. About 60% voted in favour. Women, who still didn't have the vote, were vocal in their support. "Prohibition was seen as progressive, like smoking [bans] today"... "Doctors started prescribed alcohol as medicine and they did so in huge quantities, for more or less everything. Wine if you had bad nerves, and for the heart, cognac," says Palsson. But beer was never "what the doctor ordered", despite the argument some put forward that it was a good treatment for malnourishment. "The head doctor put his foot down and said beer did not qualify as a medicine under any circumstances"... the Spanish threatened to stop importing salted cod - Iceland's most profitable export at the time - if Iceland did not buy its wine. Politicians bowed to the pressure and legalised red and rose wines from Spain and Portugal in 1921. Over time, support for prohibition dwindled. It had already been repealed by all the other European nations that had experimented with it (apart from the Faroe Islands) when in 1933 Icelanders voted to reverse course. But even then the ban remained in force for beer containing more than 2.25% alcohol (about half the strength of an average-strength beer). As beer was cheaper than wines or spirits, the fear was that legalising it would lead to a big rise in alcohol abuse... It wasn't until the 1970s with the rise of city break holidays, that attitudes really began to shift, Palsson suggests. "You'd go to London to shop, to watch football and go to the British pubs, and this started to seem like something you would like to have over here," he says. Another crack in the edifice of prohibition came in 1979, when businessman David Scheving Thorsteinsson challenged the rule that only pilots, cabin crew and foreign tourists could bring in duty-free beer. When his six bottles were confiscated, he refused to pay the fine. His cause was taken up by the MP Sighvatur Bjorgvinsson, whose bill to allow Icelanders the same rights was passed in 1980. It became practically a civic duty for Icelanders to buy a duty-free crate at the airport: six litres of imported beer or eight litres of local beer (brewed in Iceland even though it was not legally available outside the airport). If they didn't like beer themselves, they'd pass it on to family, friends or colleagues... Today Icelanders drink less than many of their European counterparts. The 7.1 litres of pure alcohol drunk annually by over-15s in Iceland, on average, compares with 11.4 litres in Denmark, 11.6 in the UK, 12.2 in France and 15.1 in Russia, according to the World Health Organization's Global Status Report on Alcohol and Health 2014. Iceland also has a relatively high proportion of abstainers, according to the WHO report - lifetime abstinence for 14.1% of the drinking age population, and 32.1% in the past 12 months. In Denmark, these figures are 4.5% and 11.4%, with 15.1% and 16.1% in the UK. But when it comes to binge drinking, Iceland's stats are on a par with the UK, and Palsson puts this down to drinking habits laid down in the beer prohibition years."
Why Icelanders are wary of elves living beneath the rocks - "Surveys suggest that more than half of Icelanders believe in, or at least entertain the possibility of the existence of, the Huldufolk - the hidden people. Just to be clear, Icelandic elves are not the small, green, pointy-eared variety that help Santa pack the toys at Christmas - they're the same size as you and I, they're just invisible to most of us."
The best thief I've ever seen😳 : FunnyAnimals
Ditch the 'Experts' - February 06, 2006 - "The book is Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? by Philip E. Tetlock, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. It summarizes the results of a truly amazing research project: Over seven years Tetlock got a wide range of experts and nonexperts to answer carefully constructed questions about the likelihood of specific future events. He ended up with a staggering 82,361 forecasts, expressed in quantifiable form and thus able to be analyzed deeply. His definition of "political judgment" included plenty of topics that you and I would call economic, such as government spending and national economic performance. Tetlock then cranked all those numbers through every kind of statistical thresher, flail, and grinder you can imagine, and the result was clear: Experts don't actually exist. Specifically, experts were no better than nonexperts at predicting the future. They weren't even as good as computer programs that merely extrapolate the past. The best experts could not explain more than 20% of the variability in outcomes, but crude algorithms could explain 25% to 30%, and sophisticated algorithms could explain 47%. Consider what this means. On all sorts of questions you care about--Where will the Dow be in two years? Will the federal deficit balloon as baby-boomers retire?--your judgment is as good as the experts'. Not almost as good. Every bit as good. Which is not to say that experts are no different from you and me. They're very different. For example, they're much more confident in their predictions than nonexperts are, though they obviously have no reason to be. For example, the members of the American Political Science Association predicted in August 2000 that a Gore victory was a slam dunk. Experts can also give far more reasons for their predictions than nonexperts can. Their vast erudition lets them explain at daunting length why something will or won't happen. Not that all those reasons make the forecasts one bit better. The question that screams out from the data is why the world keeps believing that "experts" exist at all. In large part, the answer is human nature. We desperately want to believe the world is not just a big game of dice, that things happen for good reasons and wise people can figure it all out... The awfulness of Tetlock's experts was almost uniform whether they had doctorates or bachelor's degrees, lots of experience or little, access to classified data or none. He found but one consistent differentiator: fame. The more famous the experts, the worse they performed... Tetlock's conclusion: "The three principals--authoritative-sounding experts, the ratings-conscious media, and the attentive public--may thus be locked in a symbiotic triangle.""
So much for trusting the experts and only ignorant people refusing to trust the experts
Why Someone Isn't Automatically Right Just Because He's An 'Expert' - "After I published this analysis and J.D. Vance shared it on Twitter, Tom Nichols admonished him on the ground that I wasn’t an expert. It’s ironic that Nichols, a self-appointed expert on expertise who constantly opines on topics he knows nothing about (which I’m afraid is most of them), should criticize someone for talking about something outside his area of expertise. On the other hand, Nichols’ own area of expertise is supposed to be international affairs, yet he famously supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, among other calamitous decisions. So perhaps it’s not such a bad thing if he sticks to other issues. By dismissing my article on the grounds that I’m not an epidemiologist, Nichols was suggesting that someone may not have anything interesting to say about a topic unless he is a professor in that subject or has similar credentials. This form of credentialism is very common, particularly among the educated class. Of course, it’s true that many and probably most non-specialists who talk about something outside their area of expertise say a lot of nonsense, but non-specialists can also make interesting contributions... Ultimately, however, the validity of scientific claims depends on the arguments and evidence in their favor. Thus, if someone makes a claim he can’t substantiate with good arguments and evidence, his credentials should not matter. Conversely, even if someone has no credentials, without evidence of substantive incompetence, this is not a reason to reject his claims... experts can be and often are wrong. Everyone makes mistakes, so this should obviously not be disqualifying — otherwise, nobody would be qualified to talk about anything. This is why it’s stupid to dismiss experts just because they have sometimes been wrong, as many people unfortunately do. But it’s just as stupid to continue to trust experts with a track record of being systematically wrong. On some topics, such as foreign policy, many experts whose input is still taken into account by decision-makers and the media have precisely that kind of track record, so unfortunately this is not theoretical. People like Nichols want you to ignore their track record and continue to take them seriously just because they have the right credentials. You shouldn’t... The fact that many experts even today are still wrong about what is going to happen should also be clear from the fact that, as a recent survey of experts showed, they disagree with each other a lot about that. Since it’s not possible that, for example, the epidemic is going to kill both 5,000 people and 2 million people in the United States, some of them have to be wrong. Only three out of 18 were able to correctly predict the number of cases in the United States at the end of March, and one of them only did because he chose an absurdly wide confidence interval. A few have already been proved wrong about how many people will die in the United States by the end of the year... nobody really knows what is going to happen because the data we have is difficult to interpret, generally of poor quality, and difficult to reconcile within itself."
The Limits of Expertise - "high expertise, whilst generally beneficial, also has the capacity in certain circumstances to be pathological as well... ‘Experts’ as a group (if such a thing can be held to exist) have not exactly covered themselves in glory in the last few years, so the cynicism they now face is to some degree justifiable... the complex manoeuvring of some extremely bright and learned people unwittingly triggered the financial crisis. Apocalyptic deadlines for climate change devastation came and went without fireworks. Election predictions on both sides of the Atlantic have been appalling, as have the predictions on the immediate consequences of those elections. Silicon Valley ‘geniuses’ plunge from one self- inflicted crisis to another. And, meanwhile, we have watched as what many people consider lunacy leaks out of the credentialed halls of academia and into the world at large. In other words, smart people keep getting it wrong and scepticism about their competence has grown as a result... people value expertise in closed systems, but are distrustful of expertise in open systems... Open systems, on the other hand, are those that are ‘exposed to the elements,’ so to speak. They have no walls and are therefore essentially chaotic, with far more variables than any person could ever hope to grasp. The economy is an open system. So is climate. So are politics. No matter how much you know about these things, there is not only always more to know, but there is also an utterly unpredictable slide towards chaos as these things interact. The erosion of trust in expertise has arisen exclusively from experts in open systems mistakenly believing that they know enough to either predict those systems or—worse—control them. This is an almost perfect definition of hubris, an idea as old as consciousness itself. Man cannot control nature, and open systems are by definition natural systems. No master of open systems has ever succeeded—they have only failed less catastrophically than their counterparts... Knowing this, it’s a wonder that humility in the face of open systems is still such a rare commodity amongst those who know them. Perhaps it’s because the Enlightenment granted us so much mastery over closed systems that we forgot the distinction existed... we must continually encourage the interplay of diverse expert voices to help ease us into the future gradually, without any one of them gaining absolute authority. This variety is important, since all open systems, being fundamentally unknowable, are governed by competing theories as to how they work. There are no competing theories for being an auto-mechanic, or for flying an aeroplane. There is just one way to do those things... Herein lies the beauty of democracy, and indeed all bipolar, yin-and-yang systems. Democracy doesn’t work because it gives people what they want—it works because it gives nobody what they want. And, as a result, nobody is ever able to fall victim to their belief that they control open systems. The troubles of experts in recent times can be interpreted as a continuation of this balancing act—provided that they are not usurped altogether.
Lie in Your Exit Interview and Avoid Criticizing Your Boss: Expert - "If you want to leave on good terms, "say only nice things," even if it means you have to "lie like hell," said Robbie Abed, the author of the 2017 book "Fire Me I Beg You: Quit Your Miserable Job (Without Risking it All)." "So many people think that they're going to be the hero on the way out. The reality is that if you wanted to make a change within a company, you would have done it while you were there"... Abed argued that whatever bad things you say about your boss, HR will already know about them. "This is not new information to them," he said. "They keep that person there for other reasons.""
Former CIA director said he agrees with notion that there's no political force more 'dangerous' than Republicans - "Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said he agreed with the notion that there's no political force more "dangerous" than the Republican party. Hayden, who also served as director of the NSA, was reacting to a tweet from journalist Edward Luce that said, "I've covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career. Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today's Republicans. Nothing close." The former CIA chief in response said, "I agree. And I was the CIA Director.""
When you don't even try to hide your bias
Meme - Jesse Kelly @ @JesseKellyDC: "We're gonna lose a major war."
Billy Gribbin @BillyGribbin: "From a friend: "I'm about to fail my workplace violence prevention training because the test was designed by high school girls." @USNavy really striking fear into the hearts of our enemies these days."
"INCORRECT You answered: B. No, because the crumpled picture did not physically hurt anyone and the issue seems more like a personal problem she should not get involved in
A crumpled picture is still workplace violence. Though it may just be a crush to Gwen, the crumpled picture is workplace violence and may lead to more obsessive behavior, a warning I indicator. Gerri should report her observations to her supervisor so that a solution can be sought. While these are not all-inclusive, we hope this has encouraged you to consider complicated situations involving employee relationships."
So much for "white fragility"
Meme - "Recently hired a young woman. Yesterday was her first day. She attended one meeting and submitted her resignation. Said "the vibes are off here.""
Of course there were people praising her
City tells junkies not to be ashamed to get high - "The city Health Department is urging junkies not to feel embarrassed that they get high off fentanyl, and even offering a step-by-step tutorial on how to use one of the deadliest and most addictive drugs on the planet. In its “Let’s Talk Fentanyl” ad campaign the agency tells users they should feel empowered when they safely consume the drug — which became the leading cause of death among Americans ages 18 to 45 in 2020, according to one analysis. “Don’t be ashamed you are using, be empowered that you are using safely,” a woman identified as Florence from Manhattan says in one of the ads that has appeared citywide on trains and buses."... “It’s incredible that our commissioner thinks that putting useless cloth masks on toddlers is mitigating a real danger, but when it comes to heroin it’s all ‘Take turns you guys’ and ‘Use safely, smartly.’ It’s just bizarre"... Legal shooting galleries in East Harlem and Washington Heights opened to an outcry from neighbors, and the city plans to install vending machines that dispense needles and naloxone. The DOH defended the latest initiative — which mirrors the “harm reduction” approach taken by drug-ravaged cities such as San Francisco — saying “every four hours a New Yorker dies of a drug overdose.” “Shame pushes people underground. Shame drives people away from services. Shame puts people at even greater risk. And shame is life-threatening. We want to fight shame and stigma. We want people to live,” said DOH spokesman Patrick Gallahue."