Links - 4th January 2020 (2)

If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Turns out it’s just chance. - MIT Technology Review - "while wealth distribution follows a power law, the distribution of human skills generally follows a normal distribution that is symmetric about an average value. For example, intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, follows this pattern. Average IQ is 100, but nobody has an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000.The same is true of effort, as measured by hours worked. Some people work more hours than average and some work less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.And yet when it comes to the rewards for this work, some people do have billions of times more wealth than other people. What’s more, numerous studies have shown that the wealthiest people are generally not the most talented by other measures."

Facebook Said It Wasn't Listening to Your Conversations. It Was. - "Following an investigation by Bloomberg, the company admitted that it had been employing third-party contractors to transcribe the audio messages that users exchanged on its Messenger app... what was Facebook’s excuse for listening to users' audio? Everyone else was doing it.A Facebook spokesperson told VICE News that the practice was “very common in tech” ⁠— at least until a week ago, when media reports revealed that Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft were all capturing and listening to audio from users’ devices."

Women Outraged That Spray-Tan Provider Charges $20 Extra for Fat Girls - "The spray-tanner then explained that she would have to charge her extra for the additional supplies and time.“My regular clients are a max size 8. It’ll be $20 extra as there’s more surface area if you know what I mean”... The entire exchange was subsequently posted Tuesday to the All Things Tanning Facebook page, where it earned thousands of outraged comments from defenders of women’s rights, some of whom demanded that the company be “named and shamed.”“It’s blatant discrimination”"

Kelsey Bressler Solicits Men's Nude Pics for Research Purposes - "A developer solicited photos of men’s penises for a project that would allow users to filter out unwanted “dick pics.”Kelsey Bressler, former chief technology officer for revenge porn activist group Badass Army, solicited the photos from her 7,000 Twitter followers... Earlier this year, Bressler announced she was selling nude photos of herself to raise money to attend DEF CON, a hacking conference... A recent study that will be published in The Journal of Sex Research found that men who send unsolicited dick pics might be narcissists."

Facebook Said It Wasn't Listening to Your Conversations. It Was. - "Following an investigation by Bloomberg, the company admitted that it had been employing third-party contractors to transcribe the audio messages that users exchanged on its Messenger app... what was Facebook’s excuse for listening to users' audio? Everyone else was doing it.A Facebook spokesperson told VICE News that the practice was “very common in tech” ⁠— at least until a week ago, when media reports revealed that Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft were all capturing and listening to audio from users’ devices."

Women Outraged That Spray-Tan Provider Charges $20 Extra for Fat Girls - "The spray-tanner then explained that she would have to charge her extra for the additional supplies and time.“My regular clients are a max size 8. It’ll be $20 extra as there’s more surface area if you know what I mean”... The entire exchange was subsequently posted Tuesday to the All Things Tanning Facebook page, where it earned thousands of outraged comments from defenders of women’s rights, some of whom demanded that the company be “named and shamed.”“It’s blatant discrimination”"

Kelsey Bressler Solicits Men's Nude Pics for Research Purposes - "A developer solicited photos of men’s penises for a project that would allow users to filter out unwanted “dick pics.”Kelsey Bressler, former chief technology officer for revenge porn activist group Badass Army, solicited the photos from her 7,000 Twitter followers... Earlier this year, Bressler announced she was selling nude photos of herself to raise money to attend DEF CON, a hacking conference... A recent study that will be published in The Journal of Sex Research found that men who send unsolicited dick pics might be narcissists."

Oddly Sexual Yearbook Quotes - "My A's turned to B's and so did my grades, God bless."

Science Proves That Men Are Funnier Than Women - "In the meta-analysis, published Tuesday in the Journal of Research in Personality, a team of psychologists reviewed 28 previous studies that looked at sex differences in “humor production” ability... It was the first comprehensive and systematic review of the subject, seeking to include all the relevant research. As one of the authors, Gil Greengross, explained in a writeup for Psychology Today, a typical study included in the analysis asked subjects to write a funny caption for a cartoon. Judges later rated the responses for funniness. To control for bias, studies had to involve third-party evaluation of the subjects by someone who did not know their sex. The researchers also checked possible confounding variables, like the countries where the studies were done, the sex of the authors and evaluators and the age of the subjects.According to Greengross, an evolutionary psychologist at Aberystwyth University in Wales, “none of it made a difference in our analysis.” Overall, the researchers found that men were rated as significantly funnier than women. Fully 63 percent of men were deemed funnier than the average woman... it’s possible that “our society suppresses women from producing and exhibiting humor.” But he said there’s “minimal evidence to support the view.”More plausibly, he said, humor gives men an evolutionary advantage when it comes to mating with women. “[W]omen, who undertake the heavier costs of reproduction (pregnancy, breastfeeding) are choosier than men when selecting a mate,” he explained. “Women tend to look for various signal indicators of mate quality, and a great sense of humor is one of them. Humor is strongly correlated with intelligence, which explains why women value men with a great sense of humor, as intelligence was crucial for survival throughout our evolutionary history when we mostly lived in hunter-gatherer groups.”Meanwhile, men tend to prefer women who appreciate and enjoy their jokes, abilities largely unrelated to humor production... Greengross did not address the fact that the comedians considered to be the very best at their craft — like Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Dave Chappelle — are overwhelmingly men. While that may reflect the male skew of the comedy field in general, the variability hypothesis offers another explanation: Compared to women, men appear more likely to have very high or very low intelligence, as well as other traits... In 2005, then-Harvard University President Larry Summers suggested the variability hypothesis could help explain the predominance of men in the science and engineering professions. Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker recounted the reaction for the New Republic.“Nancy Hopkins, the eminent MIT biologist and advocate for women in science, stormed out of the room to avoid, she said, passing out from shock. An engineering dean called his remarks ‘an intellectual tsunami,’ and, with equal tastelessness, a Boston Globe columnist compared him to people who utter racial epithets or wear swastikas,” Pinker wrote. “Alumnae threatened to withhold donations, and the National Organization of Women called for his resignation. Summers was raked in a letter signed by more than 100 Harvard faculty members and shamed into issuing serial apologies.” Summers later faced a non-confidence vote from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, prompting him to resign as president."

Meme - "I CALLED MY SCHOOL-TIME FRIEND, HE SAID HE WAS WORKING ON a SPECIAL PROJECT 'AQUA-THERMAL TREATMENT OF CERAMICS, ALUMINIUM AND STEEL UNDER a CONSTRAINED ENVIRONMENT
I WAS IMPRESSED. LATER I REALIZED THAT IDIOT WAS WASHING UTENSILS IN WARM WATER, UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF HIS WIFE
English Is a Beautiful Language"

Aimee Terese on Twitter - "A real man is sometimes a creep or a perv or rude, but he'll own it. Propagandising that masculinity is toxic only encourages men to act like passive aggressive teenage schoolgirls. For LOTS of women on the left, not dating leftist men is just a matter of basic self-respect."

Chaos Agent Of Color on Twitter - "I don’t think any of us can wash our legs in the shower without thinking about white ppl anymore. Once again white supremacy has infested our homes and our minds."

China Uncensored - "A modern masterpiece. Featuring Xi Jinping, Starry Lee, Elizabeth Quat, Carrie Lam, Teresa Cheng and Fanny Law (the one with the fan). Law made the ridiculous claim that teenage girls offer themselves to frontline male protesters. Then hen on Law's fan is some kind of reference to her being a political "prostitute." #hongkong #hongkongprotest #carrielam #winniethepooh #winniethepoohmemes #xijinping"

Census Bureau Releases Preliminary Results Of 2019 Test Of Citizenship Question - "If the Trump administration had been allowed to add the now-blocked citizenship question to the 2020 census, it likely would not have had a significant effect on self-response rates... After backing down from efforts to use the 2020 census to ask about citizenship status, the Trump administration is now moving forward with compiling government records to produce detailed citizenship data.In an executive order released in July, President Trump said that he wants the data to be available for state redistricting officials to use when redrawing voting districts after the national head count."

Bettina Arndt - "This is a bloody disgrace. Six research grants from Suicide Prevention Australia, all given to female researchers, not one addressing male suicide. Please write to Greg Hunt Health Minister Greg Hunt and the Prime Minister and complain about this shocking misandry and misuse of taxpayers' money. And talk to your local MPs and Senators. Suicide Prevention Australia has a gender neutral policy which includes not a single programme specifically addressing the unique causes of male suicide. This is a shocking organisation which for decades has refused to address the glaring gender imbalance in suicide rates. Please help me spread the word about this latest example of a feminist narrative deliberately denying the truth about the six men who kill themselves every day in Australia. We are letting these men down by allowing our government to ignore their plight."

Vijaya Gadde on Twitter - "@WillOremus hi - here's our current definition:
1/ Ads that refer to an election or a candidate, or
2/ Ads that advocate for or against legislative issues of national importance (such as: climate change, healthcare, immigration, national security, taxes)"
I wonder if those cheering Twitter's ban on "political" ads know that ads on climate change are now banned - somehow things are only "political" when one disagrees. Admirably at least Twitter is (trying to be) fair here

'Remodelling the lizard people's lair': Denver airport trolls conspiracy theorists - "Large posters, placed on hoardings around the terminal, cast doubt on what’s really going on. One reads: “Construction? Or cover up?” and features Illuminati insignia on a yellow hard hat. Another shows a reptile head poking out of a suit and asks: “What are we doing?” It offers three potential answers, one of which is: “Remodelling the lizard people’s lair.”... ever since it was opened in its current iteration in 1995, Denver international airport (DIA) has, for some reason, been the subject of conspiracy theories. There is, to give the tinfoil hat crowd their due, lots that is fishy about DIA. The dedication stone, created for the airport’s opening, bears the logo of the Freemasons and was paid for by two Freemason grand lodges in Colorado, as well as something called the “New World Airport Commission”, an organisation about which there is almost no information. It has led conspiracy theorists to argue that their airport is the headquarters for a secretive new world order linked to the masons or the Illuminati.

Study: Conservative YouTube Content Leads To 'De-Radicalization,' Not Radicalization - "A new study out of Penn State’s Political Science Department found that rather than conservative content online leading to radicalization, as the popular “gateway” narrative insists, the reverse appears to be true. The study, titled “A Supply and Demand Framework for YouTube Politics,” published online in October, takes a closer look at the popular narrative that YouTube serves as a “radicalizing agent,” particularly for the right. Conservative content, the narrative goes, supposedly acts as a “gateway” for viewers, potentially leading them to the fringes of the far-right. But, as Birkbeck University of London’s Eric Kaufman puts it in his succinct summary of the study’s key finding, “Contrary to the ‘gateway drug’ narrative,” the new study “shows the Intellectual Dark Web (i.e. [Jordan Peterson], [PragerU], [Joe Rogan], [Ben Shapiro], [Rubin Report]) is de-radicalizing potential Alt-Right viewers.”... with the “skyrocketing” of Conservative content online, despite a similar increase in Alt-Lite and Alt-Right content, the total views of Conservative content continued to climb while far-right traffic steeply declined.

Charlie on Twitter - "Imagine a city less crowed (sic)...
Do your part. Get sterilised! Yay! *all white people in ad*"
"Spotted in London (Holloway Road)... Funny, this sign doesn’t meet the usual ‘diversity’ requirements of all the others around London."
This doesn't help the case that 'white genocide' is a paranoid far right conspiracy theory with no basis in reality

Old Holborn QC ✘ on Twitter - "If I had paid £30K to send my daughter half way across the world in the back of lorry to work in a nail salon in Warrington for £3 an hour, I'd probably not be whinging to the press. Just saying.
So why the UK and not Singapore, Japan or America?Simple.No ID required in the UK. No registration of address. Nothing. Get here and the rest is easy. Claim asylum and get free housing, medical care and education.Stop leaving the lid off the jam."

Segments of Random Thoughts - Posts - "Pakistani Muslims stamping on the head of an effigy of PM Modi in central London. While Prince Williams and his wife Kate are experiencing pakistani culture in Pakistan, real Pakistani culture is itself breeding in the hearts of London."
"Xenophobia? Hate speech? Bigotry? Or do these things come into play only when white people are involved?

Florent Crivello on Twitter - "SAN FRANCISCANS: my studio costs $2700 and I stepped on human feces & 1 used syringe on my morning commute
CITY: we hear you, action must and will be taken. Scooters are now illegal
SF-ANS: what
CITY: no more delivery robots
SF-ANS: but
CITY: workplace cafeterias are forbidden"