Mad Science News

madscience @ 2012-06-15T11:44:00

2012-06-15T18:44:17Z

A year late, I thought of the perfect analogy to describe Occupy's impotence:

Occupy is the cargo cult of social movements. They're a functionless imitation built without any understanding of how the real thing works, like an airplane made of bamboo and palm fronds tied together with vines.

The good news is that they may have finally gotten their act together this year, in the few cities where they haven't given up completely. The bad news is that the public no longer cares.

Meritocracy

2012-05-19T16:43:49Z

Do we live in a meritocracy? I used to say not, but it just occurred to me recently that I was thinking about it the wrong way. Just like biological selection, social meritocracy is value-neutral. The only "value" it selects for is success. So it's not that we don't live in a meritocracy; it's that we live in a meritocracy that doesn't necessarily reward the merits we would like it to reward.

There are two lessons to be learned from this. First, a lesson for progressives: if we want to change our society, we shouldn't deny that it's a meritocracy; instead, we should try to identify the merits it does reward and think of ways to change them. And second, a lesson for conservatives: we shouldn't mistake those value-neutral merits for virtues.

Riddle me this.

2011-10-27T07:59:37Z

How come the same people who insist that government can't possibly compete with private enterprise are the first to whine that it shouldn't when it does?

madscience @ 2011-08-27T15:57:00

2011-08-27T22:57:24Z

It's always seemed strange to me that so many Evangelical Christians support Israel, when so many of them are also so rabidly anti-Semitic. (Martin Luther called Jewry "an incorrigible whore and an evil slut" and advocated sending Jews to forced labor camps.)

But I was thinking today about how certain orthodox Jews are anti-Zionist because Jews aren't supposed to have a homeland until the Messiah comes, and using worldly means to establish one is an affront to God. (Especially if you do it with the help of followers of that one impostor Messiah...) It occurred to me that there might be a connection there. Perhaps American Christians view themselves as the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. Perhaps they hope that by establishing a Jewish homeland, they will convince Jews that they are agents of the true Messiah. (And the ones that don't convert can still burn in Hell.)

madscience @ 2011-08-22T22:09:00

2011-08-23T05:09:28Z

Real-world markets quickly cease to function unless the government regulates market failures and externalities. One of the market failures the government is responsible for regulating is the exploitation of weaknesses in consumer knowledge. Note that this does not mean the government is responsible for educating consumers!

However, educating consumers is frequently the most cost-effective means of preventing market failure. When that is the case, then education is the government's obligation.

Hope

2011-07-31T22:01:40Z

Hope without reason isn't hope; it's foolishness. Hope can be calculated and measured. Anything less is self-deception. I'm not interested in tricking myself into being happy; I'm interested in finding reasons to be happy.

madscience @ 2011-07-18T22:13:00

2011-07-19T05:13:32Z

A point eloquently made by Slashdot user causality:

When some kid at school is acting like a total dipshit to everyone else and the authorities don't care, the solution is not to ask him politely to stop. The solution is to give him a black eye, then ask, then give him another if he refuses.

While I would place emphasis on the "authorities don't care" part, you're absolutely right. There are people with whom you cannot reason. In fact, they hate reason because reason would tell them to change their ways and they're addicted to the gratification and feeling of superiority they obtain from being that way. That kind of egomania is the only sort of (pathetic) life they have.

It is not your fault if someone will not cherish reason. That is their decision; let them reap what they sow. It does not make you a bad person to do what is necessary (but no more) to handle someone like that. It is in accordance with how they have chosen to live. In the case of a bully like in your example, it may in fact be a turning point in life that will end up being the best thing that ever happened to them. It would amount to giving him, albeit a harder way, the correction and guidance that his parents (or more likely, parent) so thoroughly failed to deliver.

After doing what needs to be done, then there is opportunity to take the high road and have an attitude of "sorry it came to this, but you had it coming." Gloating and being glad it happened would just make you a bigger bully who will eventually run into one who is bigger still. That path won't reform anyone. So yes, you're absolutely right but it has to come from a certain level of understanding. The real mistake is to coddle a person like that out of some misguided sympathy (what the unwise think is compassion) because they interpret it as weakness, as submission, and they'd be right.

Denying Their Roots

2011-07-10T18:08:28Z

There can certainly be more than one valid paradigm for describing the history of feminism. But I recently encountered a new phenomenon among Fourth Wavers: not content to use a new paradigm of their own device, they've decided to completely reject the Waves paradigm.

This smacks of historic revisionism — an attempt to brush the shortcomings of the Third Wave under the carpet. Perhaps they forget that "Second Wave" and "Third Wave" are not just dry historic descriptions; they were, and are, living self-descriptions. Basically, the Fourth Wave wants to tell people who identify as Second Wave or Third Wave that their self-identification is invalid.

Add this to their rejection of good science and their vehement denial of their own patent bigotry, and you come to an inescapable conclusion: the Fourth Wave is the liberal counterpart of Teabaggers.

Is this the "change" Obama promised?

2011-06-24T00:31:41Z

Like the magnetic poles of our planet which reverse their polarities on million-year time scales, our nation's two dominant political parties — and there have almost always been two — have at times flip-flopped the voter ideologies they court. Perhaps best remembered is the reversal that accompanied the Civil Rights Movement, when the Democratic Party — traditionally the party of slavery — reinvented itself as the champion of racial minorities. Another shift occurred in the Republican party after the Eisenhower administration; by Nixon's time, the party of small government, progressive taxation, and market-oriented fiscal conservatism had become the party of government excess and crony capitalism. And way back in Jefferson's day, the Federalists represented the moneyed interests the Republicans represent now, and the Republicans were the liberal progressives.

Call me crazy, but I sense another change in the wind.

The Obama administration has dragged the Democratic party to the right of center with its subtle undermining of gay rights and its Bushier-than-Bush policies on the economy, the environment, and the wars. Meanwhile, I'm picking up murmurs from a few Republicans that suggest they consider their embrace of the far-right in the last election cycle to be a losing strategy. Could it be that the GOP is preparing to extend a hand to social progressives? It would be quite a shakeup, but it wouldn't be unprecedented.

Cultural Feedback

2011-06-16T06:57:06Z

Facts are not culturally bound, but the importance of knowing them is. If you asked members of a hunter-gatherer society what six times eight is, they might not know the answer. They might not even understand the question. But you would be wrong to conclude from this that they are stupid. Multiplication simply isn't important to their culture.

The same effect occurs within our culture, but it's much more subtle.

After controlling for every socioeconomic factor they can think of, scientists are left with this controversial graph of different races' performance on IQ tests. (Missing from this graph: Jews, who score above everyone else.) But the controversy stems from a lack of understanding — even among many scientists — of what an IQ test actually represents.

An IQ test does not measure the universal scale or scope of a person's knowledge. Nor does it measure their ability to learn, or any other theoretical definition of "intelligence". An IQ test is a measure of the scale and scope of a person's knowledge within the subset of universal knowledge that is deemed important by the culture that wrote the test.

So... who writes the tests?

The subculture of academics who write IQ tests is not a racial monoculture. But relative to our culture as a whole, some races are overrepresented, and others are underrepresented. (This shouldn't be news to anyone; I'm just setting up my argument.) Races that are overrepresented in academia have more influence over the content of IQ tests. Naturally, then, members of those races will have an advantage on the tests. This results in positive feedback, because an individual's performance on IQ tests (and other standardized tests) influences their opportunity to enter academia. Conversely, members of races that are underrepresented in academia suffer negative feedback.

There are many other feedback loops in our culture, and it's no coincidence that races turn up in the same order in most of them. Influence in one subculture is often locked in a cycle with influence in another. A graph of wealth and income, for example, looks exactly like the graph of IQ test scores, and the relationship between the two doesn't require much explanation. But other cycles are more convoluted.

Consider the beauty of the human form. This beauty is culturally defined; it's heavily influenced by repeated exposure to images that are presented as beautiful. So, who has the most influence over the content of those images? The complete cycle goes like this: IQ scores affect access to education, access to education affects wealth, wealth affects social exposure, social exposure affects perceptions of beauty, perceptions of beauty influence perceptions of intelligence, perceptions of intelligence affect who gets to write the IQ tests, and who writes the IQ tests affects how people score on them. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Sometimes this cycle takes a shortcut. In the media, perceptions of beauty are locked in a very tight cycle with wealth. Beauty sells. This explains Satoshi Kanazawa's wildly controversial but scientifically sound observation that black women are widely perceived as unattractive. Black women are significantly underrepresented in the media; black women who don't look and speak like white women, even more so. (Compare black men, who have a distinct presence in the media, however unrealistic.) And at the other end of the spectrum, again, are Jews, who make up 2% of the US population, but are dramatically overrepresented among Hollywood's top actors and producers. Jews aren't the richest, smartest, and sexiest people on the planet because of anything innate; it's all just cultural feedback.

Falling smack in the middle on every measure of cultural feedback, whites are in a unique position to arbitrate this cultural discourse and lead the search for a fair way to break the cycles. Collectively, we stand neither to gain nor lose except as society gains or loses as a whole. In particular, whites should not feel threatened by affirmative action; indeed, we should champion it. If not for the fact that Jews are demographically conflated with whites, a carefully-tuned affirmative action program would be a perfectly fair and effective solution to cultural feedback.

We should also fight back against the myth of white privilege. Among racial minorities, there's a pervasive idea that we live in a white-dominated society. It's true that whites collectively dominate our culture, simply by numerical majority. And whites do enjoy certain dubious privileges for being the numerical majority, like being advertised to the most. But Asians and Jews enjoy greater individual opportunity and influence. And it's individual opportunity and influence that drive cultural feedback.

Equally important, we need to aggressively police our own against statistics becoming an excuse for racism. Pink liberals are in the habit of preemptively dismissing science that could be used to justify bigotry, so it would only take a few examples of anti-Semitism arising from the fact of Jewish cultural dominance to sabotage our effort to draw attention to cultural feedback. We must keep the focus on the fact that wealth, not race, is the defining class in our society, and strive to unite the impoverished majority of every race against the privileged minority.

Fun tiemz on teh internetz

2011-06-03T21:38:19Z

I talked a particularly slippery conservative troll into a corner today. Always fun.

(Actually, I probably shouldn't call him a troll. I think he sincerely believes the nonsense he spews.)

I should be coding. Or writing about coding. Lazy Friday...

Coining a word

2011-05-19T17:10:09Z

pro'·so·peme : A fundamental element of facial structure recognized by the human brain's facial recognition system, analogous to a phoneme. From Greek πρόσωπο (prosopo), "face".

More Pink Liberal Wank

2011-05-18T22:57:46Z

My response to this wank:

It's doubtful there was anything racist about Kanazawa's methodology or conclusions. I've read his blog before, and it's usually pretty legit. Unfortunately, we can't see for ourselves because Psychology Today was cowed by the wank mob and pulled the article.

I've often thought that there's some element of facial recognition that's analogous to a phoneme. Just as people who are unfamiliar with a language may not be able to perceive or imitate that language's phonemes, people who are unfamiliar with a race may not be able to perceive or accurately describe the characteristic facial features of members of that race. It recalls the old trope that all Asians look alike. They do, if you're not adequately familiar with Asians... and there's nothing racist about that.

I think that's what Kanazawa was trying to investigate. In the process, he encountered the related phenomenon of people who are unfamiliar with the features of certain races perceiving them as being a different gender than they are. I myself have always thought that black women look masculine, so I'm not surprised that Kanazawa found that perception to be pretty common. It would explain why black women, unlike black men, rarely partner with people of other races. (Likewise, I perceive Asian men as feminine; this could be a factor in the success and popularity of Asian drag shows.)

Given that what's "pretty" is subjective and socially conditioned, that what's socially conditioned reflects cultural influence, and that blacks have the least influence in our culture, it should come as no surprise to anyone that black women are widely perceived as unattractive. And there is absolutely nothing racist about making that observation.

But Ms. Shepherd can't be troubled to consider, much less admit, any of this. Neither could she be bothered to substantiate her claim that Kanazawa's methodology was flawed. Her eagerness to brand Kanazawa a racist has contributed precisely nothing to the conversation. She's succeeded only in demonstrating that she is, to use her own words, "a bad scientist... and probably stupid."

madscience @ 2011-05-09T10:07:00

2011-05-09T17:07:34Z

"Women whose career is to be a 'mother' and nothing else SHOULD BE second class citizens, because they choose to be unemployed." – Frances Martel

Frances Martel differs from most other fourth-wave feminists in that her scattered beliefs seem to include a fair number of right-wing talking points. But otherwise, she fits the profile: a twentynothing blogger who doesn't realize that feminism left its high water mark a decade before she was born.

Food Stamps

2011-05-06T04:18:57Z

I hate bureaucracy.

When I was just a tiny bit better off than I am now, I was getting $16 a month in food stamps. That's right: $16 a month. It probably cost them more than that to file the paperwork.

Now I'm getting $200 a month. About twice as much as I normally spend on food.

I don't know what their formula is, but it's fucking stupid.

The Anticonsumer

2011-05-04T21:30:24Z

I've been thinking a lot lately about labor and wealth. I think America's working poor have them in about the right ratio. Perhaps we're even better off than we deserve to be. So it's not for our own sakes that we oppose the greedy machinations of the super-wealthy. It's not from us that they steal. It's not our own share that we fight to have them stripped of. It's the share that we, as a society, steal from the developing world.

My laptop cost $300. There's no way I could build a laptop for a $300 investment of my own labor. Nor could I create a bicycle, a pair of pants, or indeed, anything but the simplest of tools for less than their going price.

There's an efficiency advantage to mass production, of course. By specializing, we increase our collective wealth at the price of becoming dependent on one another. But even that does not fully account for the low prices of imported goods.

No – this is the true cost of the kind of lifestyle the working poor dream of and the wealthy take for granted.

Let me no longer dream...

Another Feminist Delusion

2011-04-29T20:39:50Z

For every genuine male privilege that is eradicated from our society (and good riddance!), fourth-wave feminists invent three more in a vain attempt to secure their own relevance. This is the most laughably delusional one I've seen yet: our society doesn't discriminate against fat people... if they're male!

Happenings

2011-04-29T08:29:22Z

I found some dude's wallet a couple weeks ago. Someone who knows dude's cousin saw my ad on CL, and I finally got in touch with dude tonight. I'm going to try to meet him this weekend.

I called the chick who abruptly stopped seeing me after I conditionally gifted her my Settlers of Catan set because I didn't have a place to keep it. (I told her if she didn't love it, I wanted it back.) Turns out she doesn't love it, and she's mailing it to me. So she's not a psycho after all... just perplexing.

I still don't believe in karma.

I scored one of these things at a thrift store for $3 today. Can't wait to try it.

Pool party/BBQ tomorrow with the lady's co-workers. Going to rock my new board shorts and leave them all in awe that she's dating such a stud... haha. /nerdpower

ding ding FIGHT!

2011-04-28T21:25:09Z

I almost beat the shit out of a cabbie on 4th Avenue yesterday.

As I was walking down the sidewalk, a couple was headed toward me on a tandem bike. The woman on the back lost her footing on the pedals, and the man was pedaling slow while she got situated. A cab ran up behind them, yelled at them, gunned his engine, and laid on the horn as he passed them. Then he did the same to another cyclist a block ahead, and veered into the parking lot of a bar.

All the pink libs just stood there and gawked. (One guy yelled. Good for him.) But I'm always looking for a ~~legitimate~~ heroic excuse to beat the fuck out of someone, so I decided to go give the cabbie a good talking to.

As I was walking his way, he came tearing out the back exit of the bar and back up toward 4th, still yelling at random pedestrians in the street. He was looking the other way as he approached the intersection and would have run me down if I wasn't watching him.

I kicked the headlight of his van, which unfortunately didn't break. He jumped out and came at me, swearing – a fat little Mexican, about 5'3". I just stood there, grinning. The little bitch got about five feet from me and turned around. Fuck! I wanted him to swing at me so I could crack his head open on the pavement.

Anyway... I called his dispatcher, who pretended not to speak English as soon as he realized I was complaining. I threatened to call the cops, but I didn't, 'cause fuck the police. But somebody did, because the place was swarming a few minutes later. The cabby was smart and got the hell off 4th Ave.

I'll be looking out for him, though... green van with a tag ending in 799.

One idea shot down

2011-04-27T22:44:07Z

I was thinking about starting a FreeGeek in Tucson. Then I discovered that something similar already exists here – only they're a Microsoft Registered Refurbisher, and they load their refurbished machines with Windows XP.

I hoped that they simply hadn't considered Linux, or considered it but lacked the expertise to promote it. But they have. In fact, they have a regular volunteer who installs Linux for the few customers who want it. And that's the problem: nobody wants it. Tucson isn't geeks; Tucson is blue collar.

So even though I think they're doing their customers a huge disservice by not pushing Linux, I feel that changing their minds would be an extremely hard sell. Not only that, but the marginal gain would be minimal compared to the marginal gain of starting a recycling center where none existed before. It just isn't worth it.

So, on to my next idea.

The real bummer is that I wouldn't even feel right about volunteering in their recycling center, because it's also a work transition program for COPE Community Services. So I'd be taking a volunteer opportunity away from someone in a rehab program. :-/

Like I've been saying...

2011-04-27T21:24:00Z

From the Washington Post:

President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican of the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

I'm glad to see the mainstream media finally addressing this. Obama has dragged the Democratic Party to the center (you might even say center-right) and led them in taking up many traditionally Republican policy positions. In response, the GOP has abandoned those positions and moved even further to the right – or in many cases, completely off the left-right spectrum and into the loony bin.

The best part is that Mitt Romney is currently considered the front-runner for the GOP's 2012 presidential bid. In case you're unaware, Romney is the former Republican governor of Massachusetts who implemented the health care system upon which "ObamaCare" is based. So if he wins the nomination, our choices will be a center-right Republican, and another center-right Republican. I predict the lowest voter turnout on record...

Or maybe it'll be the Year of the Third Party.

madscience @ 2011-04-23T21:31:00

2011-04-24T04:31:21Z

I just crashed after work and slept hard for five hours. I vaguely remember my dream.

One of the guys from the chainsaw crew I was on was taunting a bull. It got super pissed and ran into a front-end loader and broke one of its horns. Then it came after me. I don't know what to do if a bull attacks, so I reacted as if it were a bear: played dead. It stood over me, nudged me with its hoof, and then placed its hoof on the back of my neck. I thought for sure I was gonna die. Then it just laid down and I was like, uhhhh... should I move?

Later, I was at this house in the middle of nowhere. There were a bunch of Mexican families there – young, single mothers, mostly – having a meeting about social aid. Someone came with bad news; I forget exactly what. Some woman was crying. I went into the yard and there were cats and chickens.

Returning to LJ

2011-04-22T07:57:12Z

I have to wonder if it wasn't all just a big social experiment to see how much abuse the users of a social networking site would take. With such a long litany of senseless interface changes and cavalier privacy violations, it's hard to say which straw was the last. I think it was the inexplicable and idiotic removal of the "reply" button in favor of posting comments whenever you press "enter" that finally did it for me.

Whatever it was, it's official: Facebook is over.

I've been wanting to start a new blog for a while. Maybe I'll start one here. In spite of the rise and fall of Myspace and Facebook, and its acquisition by SixApart and then SUP, LJ still has the most vital user base around. No other site ever offered anything comparable to communities like selfportraits or politicartoons. The occasional blank page load is a small price to pay for a social networking site that doesn't utterly suck.

The Just-World Fallacy

2011-04-18T20:21:49Z

I found an interesting article about the Just-World Fallacy. Put simply, people have a tendency to convince themselves, for the sake of their egos or their own emotional security, that people deserve the good and bad things that happen to them. It's an extremely common delusion among conservatives, especially Objectivists.

As I've noted before, I'm almost an Objectivist. I say "almost" because, while I accept the fundamental principles of Objectivism as they are commonly stated, I disagree very strongly with the conclusions Objectivists inevitably draw from them. I've attributed this to my having a healthy instinct for the Principle of Reciprocity, which I believe most Objectivists lack.

The aforementioned article brings up another point which distinguishes me from Objectivists: I draw a distinction between being responsible for what happens to you, and deserving it. I seem to have a hard time explaining this distinction to some people... especially miseducated young liberals like the twits I call fourth-wave feminists. It's hard to broach the subject without being accused of victim-blaming. But I think it's an extremely important distinction to make, because not addressing the responsibility of victims does them a terrible disservice.

As the article eloquently explains:

It's obviously false that everything which happens to you, happens because you deserve it. Even in cases where you are at least partially responsible for the events in question, that's a far cry from saying that you deserve what happened to you. Saying "you bear some responsibility for your problem" is a relatively neutral observation; saying "you deserve your problem" is a moral evaluation.

A person who gets drunk and tries to walk home bears some responsibility if they become a victim of a crime. A person who leaves their car unlocked bears some responsibility if their car is stolen. A person who commits a crime bears all the responsibility for being imprisoned with other criminals who might commit crimes against that person (from assault to rape). In none of these cases, however, do these people deserve to be victims of crimes.

I'm glad to learn that the Just-World Fallacy is recognized as a thing. It's good to have a name for it. And not just because it's a common delusion among conservatives. New-agey people who believe in karma also annoy the shit out of me...

Asus EeePC 1015T / Xubuntu 10.10 Review

2011-04-17T00:18:20Z

I've had my 1015T for about three days, and I'm super happy with it. I blew away Windows 7 Starter (and its restore partition) and installed Xubuntu 10.10 AMD64 before I even left the store.

The installation went off without a hitch. The folks at Hi-Tech Computers, where I bought the machine, kindly let me use their USB optical drive. Booting the Xubuntu Live CD was simply a matter of holding the Esc key during boot and selecting the USB boot device.

The wifi, webcam, microphone, multi-touch trackpad, and ATI graphics drivers work flawlessly. I have not yet tested sound playback, for lack of hardware to play it from, but I assume it works since the mic on the same sound device works. (I tested the mic by recording in Audacity and viewing the waveform.) I have also not yet tried to play HD video through the HDMI port. However, the HDMI device is detected, and its mixer is on the list.

My only complaint is that the sensitive area of the touchpad extends too close to the spacebar. I'm constantly brushing against it as I type, causing the cursor to move erratically. I might try putting a narrow piece of black electrical tape over the top portion of it.

Edit: Confirmed that sound playback works. Easiest Linux install ever!

I can't recommend the 1015T enough. Sadly, I've read that its big brother, the 1215T, uses a Broadcom wifi chipset instead of Atheros. It's been a couple years since I tried to get Linux to play nice with Broadcom, so maybe things are different now... but be wary.

Edit 2: This thing has speakers?! I didn't think it did. They're inside the front of the handrest area, and play out of the cooling air intake grilles. Neat.

Edit 3: Since I use a USB mouse most of the time, I simply disable the trackpad with synclient TouchpadOff=1. GNOME apparently has a feature that disables the trackpad when you're typing, but I'm not installing GNOME just for that.