Links - 25th November 2019 (1)

BBC Radio 4 - The Public Philosopher, Will AI make thinking obsolete? - "‘Who would welcome algorithmic marking [of schoolwork]? Yes’
‘Ariana, I think I would welcome it. Because unlike humans, I would assume that an algorithm wouldn't be subject to the whims of the mood of the breakfast that the professor had, I think it would be more consistent. And it would be more fair, in that sense… What if they had oatmeal instead of eggs? And they hate oatmeal? And now they're going to take out on me? I don't know… especially in the liberal arts, what one professor might give a paper like a 95, another would give a 75 for, especially in the liberal arts, it's, there's so many seemingly subjective reasons that you can mark something, whereas I think an algorithm could have a more nuanced way that's more consistent.’
‘So an algorithm could rise above subjective judgments, and be more objective, and therefore more fair’"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Protests as UK parliament is suspended - "Johnson and Johnson is appealing the [opiod fine] decision, but it is less likely that they will end up having a lesser fine, because this was a trial that was done by judge. So there was no jury. And oftentimes you see that juries will award really big penalties, because this is the public and they generally are a little bit more emotional in terms of the way that they think about these kinds of cases. But this was done by a judge, and he is someone who is following the letter of the law...
Women have so many different issues in Iran, they don't have the right to divorce, they don't have the right to custody of their children... ‘A lot of people inside Iran argue that even if the ban is lifted, not that many women will attend football matches, because still, this is a traditional society where you know, women are supposed to be in their traditional places. And a lot of people also argue and criticize women that okay, if you're so into sports and football, why don't you just go to the stadium and support women's sports, which they don't. So nobody really knows’
‘Are men allowed to watch the women's matches?’
‘Oh, no! No, women sports, it gets absolutely no support in Iran... men cannot go to stadiums and watch women playing anything’"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Thursday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "‘If you borrow money, you normally expect to pay interest don’t you? But not if you’re Germany, which yesterday borrowed money for 30 years and will pay no interest. And the people borrowing paid for the privilege’…
‘Actually, every government in the world is now borrowing below inflation, even in the UK... They're worried about world recession, therefore, they're looking for a safe haven, and they don't mind losing a bit'
'Because it's a guaranteed loss rather than uncertain loss.'"

Newark Airport Chaos After Racial Profiling Of Two Men - "When an Alaska Airlines employee yelled "evacuate" at a major New York–area airport on Labor Day, one of the busiest travel days of the year, it sent 200 panicked people fleeing amid fears of a mass shooting attack... Initial reports said she believed two male passengers were acting suspiciously, and when she approached them they started running... CBS 2 reported that a source told them the woman has bipolar disorder and had missed her medication."
It's sexier to blame racism than someone who didn't take her medication

Sources: Monday Night’s Incident At Newark Airport Touched Off By Bipolar Airline Employee - "Sources told CBS2’s Tony Aiello on Tuesday the flight attendant is bipolar and had an issue with her medication. Prosecutors said for that reason she would not be charged."
Unlike Buzzfeed CBSNewYork isn't stoking racial tensions for profit

Helen Pluckrose - "I have just been uninvited from the "Decolonise STEM" symposium in London next month. I applied to join their panel and said quite honestly that I intended to problematise their idea that STEM belongs to white, western people by citing materialist postcolonial scholars and pointing out that the UK is reliant on attracting doctors, scientists & engineers from India, Pakistan & Nigeria. They declined but invited me to attend. Then they realised who I was and told me that I couldn't come because they needed to safeguard all the other attendees from me. Clearly, I am an extremely dangerous person and could at any moment point out that assigning science & reason to white westerners & spiritual & traditional "ways of knowing" to everyone else is actually a bit racist."

Lucas Lynch - "Internet leftists: "Steven Pinker needs to stop writing about things outside of his narrow realm of expertise."
Also internet leftists: "OMG Noam Chomsky writing about anything but linguistics ""

Fujian cops use drone to tell motorcycle driver to put his helmet on - "After hearing voices from the sky, he does so sheepishly."

French company liable after employee dies during sex on business trip - "A French company has been found liable for the death of an employee who had a cardiac arrest while having sex with a stranger on a business trip.A Paris court ruled that his death was an industrial accident and that the family was entitled to compensation.The firm had argued the man was not carrying out professional duties when he joined a guest in her hotel room.But under French law an employer is responsible for any accident occurring during a business trip, judges said."

The Real Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - "until some security genius comes up with a reliable way to read hostile intent, we have to react as if she might have. Which gives bad guys less motivation to enlist grannies—through bribery, trickery, or compulsion—as smugglers... TSA security is far from perfect, but also far better than you’d think from the skewed press coverage claiming that the TSA misses 95 percent of threats. Those numbers are vastly inflated—based on covert testing failures that do not include some key facts. The TSA’s covert testing teams are already “inside our perimeter.” A real bad-guy has to pass through several layers of unseen security that can flag them as a threat and our covert testing teams automatically bypass those, creating the impression of more weakness in the system than there really is. In addition, the testing teams know from the inside every weak point in the TSA’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) and equipment, knowledge that the vast majority of terrorists wouldn’t possess... Any time you create a protected category, and subject people to lesser level of scrutiny, you can count on that protected status immediately being exploited.  There is literally no category of people who haven’t tried to use a perceived protected status to smuggle. Women with sick infants smuggle. Old men smuggle. Old women smuggle. Women faking pregnancy smuggle. People with deliberately disgusting feet smuggle (one can only imagine the smell from the Underwear Bomber, who was rumored to have worn his explosive-laden undies for two weeks straight ahead of his flight to “get used to it.”) In all cases, smuggling techniques can be adapted to smuggle bomb components. And it has been done many times by female suicide bombers... There is a recent trend in press coverage of the TSA that either implies, or outright states, that the TSA is a racist organization out to humiliate black people. Cosmopolitan, for example, asserts that if black women (allegedly) get more hair pat downs after going through the body scanner, it must be a result of racism. At no point is it acknowledged that the physical structure of black hair is, on average, different to Caucasian or Asian hair, notably curlier and kinkier. Or that black passengers’ choices to wear more elaborate and dense hairstyles can come with the cost of more hair pat downs. Fashion choices do have costs when it comes to screening: clothes with sparkle or bling trigger body scanner alarms, and elaborate hairstyles can too... These facts are ignored in place of a narrative of institutional racism, and racism so diabolical that it has somehow been foisted on one of the most racially diverse workforces in the federal government—TSA employees are 25 percent African American and 23 percent Latino (roughly 12.5 percent of the US population is black and 17 percent is Latino)... When a passenger creates a big stink, and then leaves the TSA checkpoint to get on their flight, that’s not the end of it for us, it is just the beginning. The first thing every TSO who witnessed the pat-down has to do is write an official statement ahead of the inevitable investigation. In this case, three TSOs had to write statements about the event, in which nothing happened that doesn’t happen literally hundreds of times a day at every busy checkpoint in the country... When passengers look at a TSA checkpoints and see cameras everywhere they might presume it is to spot potential security breaches. That is their official function. But what they are far more routinely used for is to protect TSOs from exactly the kind of baseless complaint described above. Practically speaking, those cameras are not for the passenger’s protection, but the protection of TSOs from time-wasting complaints.When you have to perform mildly unpleasant procedures on a daily basis, and get accused of sexual assault, or racism, or any of 100 other kinds of bad faith, think of how that might make you feel."
They could learn from Israel's reliable way to read hostile intent, but that'd increase the accusations of racism

James Wong on Twitter - "Reading that Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘clean beauty’ regime means she starts every day with a refreshing glass of alkaline water + a spritz of lemon. (Which makes the alkaline water no longer alkaline & highlights the magnificent level of BS that people will swallow from celebrities)"

NY Times Says 'Airplanes' Took Aim at World Trade Center on 9/11 - "this is what the New York Times published on Wednesday, the 18th anniversary of that terrible day: “Eighteen years have passed since airplanes took aim at the World Trade Center and brought them down.”... Without bothering to retract the extraordinary news nearly 3000 Americans were the victims of airplanes that had suddenly became sentient, the Times deleted the tweet and rewrote the article.Naturally, the article still withholds holds the crucial information about exactly who the terrorists were: “Eighteen years have passed since terrorists commandeered airplanes to take aim at the World Trade Center and bring them down,” it now reads. But nowhere in the piece will you read the words “Islam” or even “al Qaeda.”This is what Orwell called memory-holing, a deliberate act that involves the Powerful rewriting the past by erasing the past, all in the hope of controlling the future.You can bet that had white supremacists brought down the World Trade Center,  “WHITE SUPREMACIST” would appropriately blaze in every headline. To point out just how dishonest the failing New York Times has chosen to be on this somber anniversary, try to imagine similar coverage on the anniversary of the 2015 massacre in that South Carolina church where a white supremacist murdered nine black Americans in cold blood. “Five years have passed since a gun took aim in a Charleston, South Carolina Church, and nine people died,” the Times story and tweet would read.Now let’s apply the Times’ so-called update to the 9/11 article to the Charleston shooting:  “Five years have passed since a man used a gun to murder nine black Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina Church.”We can spend the whole day ridiculing the obscenity that is the New York Times…“Fifty years have passed since a gun took aim at Martin Luther King…”“Fifty years have passed since dynamite blew up four little girls in Alabama…” “Sixty years have passed since Emmett Till was strangled to death by a piece of rope…”... How in the world does the New York Times dare to write a story that claims to commemorate the 18th anniversary of a terrorist attack that murdered nearly 3000 people without reporting the WHY, without reporting the MOTIVE, without telling us WHO?"

Raheem Kassam on Twitter - "“Airplanes took aim”
“2000 people”
Imagine what it takes, as a newsroom with a huge editorial process, to get 9/11 so offensively incorrect. Scumbags."
Looks like before 2019's attack on "Easter Worshippers", killer AI was around in 2001, causing airplanes to attack people

Olisa Efobi's answer to If Brie Larson is such a good actress, why is her performance as Captain Marvel regarded as bad? - Quora - "most comic fans, like myself, do not care what political leanings a character’s actor supports in real life. It’s the actor’s choice, and he/she has every right to think as he pleases.What fans do hate, is an actor/actress bringing those political beliefs into the studio, and trying to shove them down our throats.And the only thing they hate more than that? Is when you say that this new, un-introduced, politically-fueled character is already better than all the main characters who they’ve come to love at everything they do... I won’t focus too much on the film’s inherent political bias. Because, to be fair, that can be blamed on the film-writers and producers, of which Larson was not one.But aside from Captain Marvel’s script (which, again, the crew could be blamed for), Brie Larson was the author of her own downfall. She quite literally trolled her own fanbase.She claimed her character could move planets.She claimed her character could whoop Thanos. (Which actually may be true, but is not something you want to be proclaiming right after IW just ended.)She claimed her character could lift Mjolnir. She kept making these down-right false comments. Things that only comics fans could be really upset by.It’s as if she purposely tried to stoke fans’ anger. She obviously knew that what she was saying was wrong, and she probably knew that comic fans would be upset by it, too.But she wanted media buzz around her. And trolling the fans was a cheap and easy way to do that.The result was that even before her film came out, a sizable number of fans already disliked her. Not because of her political beliefs, but because she just couldn’t shut up! And, as people in the comments section have pointed out, I understand that Brie Larson was joking with her Thor and Thanos comments.But as I said before, it’s the timing and delivery of her jokes that pissed everyone off. Let’s not forget that what happened took place right after Infinity War. Thanos had just beat every hero we ever knew.In the midst of this, Kevin Feige made a statement about Carol, a person we’d never seen before, being the strongest Avenger in the MCU.This made everyone, regardless of their thoughts on Larson, think that Captain Marvel would swoop in and single-handedly beat Thanos, inadvertently ruining Endgame. Because everyone wanted to see Tony, Thor, Hulk, Wanda and all the people who had actually lost something fighting against him, eventually be the ones to take Thanos down themselves.Not some random stranger beating him all by herself... It’s like cracking a joke about guns at a funeral for victims of a school shooting. It’ll never come off well. No matter how benign your intentions.
And let’s not forget that Carol acts like little more than a power fantasy. There’s very little humanity and flaw in her character.She exudes pride and cockiness, but has no charisma or weakness to endear her to us- something you need when you’re a cocky character.Think about it: Iron Man was a proud character when introduced to the MCU. But he also had a great sense of humor and he wasn’t afraid to be the butt of his own jokes.And we later saw that he also had a whole host of family and personal issues- one of which was a perceived lack of affection from his father... So far, Carol Danvers has only been a cocky character who blasts through everything she sees and gets her way because of that. And even when personal problems arise, she shows very little in the way of emotional fragility... there were ample opportunities for Larson to bring some dramatic emotion to the screen.Moments for her to at least give us a glimpse of character.But she did not.She’s like Thor and Iron Man, but without any of the personality flaws or charisma to back it up. Because she can just punch through every problem. So she has nothing to learn.Factor in the cockiness of the character, with the attitude of the one playing that character, and you’re making a recipe for disaster."

Ryan Quintana's answer to If Brie Larson is such a good actress, why is her performance as Captain Marvel regarded as bad? - Quora - "well personally I thought she added very little emotion to the character. 90% of the movie she either had no expression at all or that small smirk, but that’s it. Out of all the marvel hero’s in their movies she had the least amount of emotion. The green alien (main skrull) and nick fury both had more emotion than her, the green alien was the most emotional one in the movie, as he was focused on trying to save his family and race."