[Non-political] News that makes you Laugh/Cry/Both...

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Mon May 26, 2014 10:41 pm

Occluded Sun wrote: And, of course, there are more important things in life than not pissing people off. If you disagree, feel free to stop talking in order not to piss us off. The rest of us will be trying to have intelligent (or at least witty) discussions.

I don't like to pull out the grammar stick, but the "you" there actually is an accusative. You're referring to someone else and telling them to stop pissing you off.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Mon May 26, 2014 11:21 pm

1) The grammatical accusative, and accusation, have very little to do with each other. The link between them is pretty much free association, frankly. That is not a worthy argument for you to make.

2) I am not, in fact, telling anyone to do anything. Read the statement more carefully. I am inviting one person in particular (and, in practice, anyone who holds the position that person is advocating) to feel free to apply that principle to themselves and their own actions.

There is an inherent danger in perambulating through the marketplace of ideas: sooner or later, we're likely to encounter positions and arguments that we find personally offensive. The responsible thing that mature and sane people do is acknowledge this and pass by. As long as the ideas are expressed courteously, we don't have a justification in preventing them from being made.

People like to use "I'm offended" as a weapon. It is particularly useful for their purposes because it doesn't require them to conduct any analysis or find any flaw in the position itself.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Mon May 26, 2014 11:39 pm

Occluded Sun wrote:1) The grammatical accusative, and accusation, have very little to do with each other. The link between them is pretty much free association, frankly. That is not a worthy argument for you to make.

2) I am not, in fact, telling anyone to do anything. Read the statement more carefully. I am inviting one person in particular (and, in practice, anyone who holds the position that person is advocating) to feel free to apply that principle to themselves and their own actions.

You did actually make an accusation, which is the point. Moreover, it's an accusation which applies equally to you but which you refuse to acknowledge. Case in point:

There is an inherent danger in perambulating through the marketplace of ideas: sooner or later, we're likely to encounter positions and arguments that we find personally offensive. The responsible thing that mature and sane people do is acknowledge this and pass by. As long as the ideas are expressed courteously, we don't have a justification in preventing them from being made.

People like to use "I'm offended" as a weapon. It is particularly useful for their purposes because it doesn't require them to conduct any analysis or find any flaw in the position itself.

So the real question is: why don't you shut the fuck up?

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Tue May 27, 2014 12:37 am

Since you asked so nicely: no.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue May 27, 2014 12:47 am

Wait wait wait. Did fucking Occluded Sun actually talking about "the rest of us" trying to have intelligent/witty conversations? He sure as hell is not contributing towards intelligence or wit in conversations. The best he can manage is to attract barbs of criticism.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Tue May 27, 2014 7:51 pm

Pirated version of game about hacking has bitcoin malware.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue May 27, 2014 8:00 pm

tussock wrote:Silva is a thing. There are a bunch of people who believe what they're saying and also know that the only thing they're going to achieve is to piss people off by saying it. When that reaction amuses them, or arouses them, or makes them angry, or gets any sort of "rush" feedback, folk get hooked on it.

That's what makes them trolls. Silva loves when people tell him his pet game is shit, because of the blood pressure and pulse rate increase, and associated feeling of moral superiority. He's a troll. It's a thing. Even though he really does like the game.

I don't know if I'd call Silva a troll. "Your favourite game is dumb and you should feel dumb" is usually not the reaction trolls are trying to get out of people. Now, maybe he's a masochist, sure, but I think it's more that he's just stubborn and loyal to a bad game because he really like the setting (which is bad and he should feel bad) but I don't think he's a troll.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Tue May 27, 2014 11:35 pm

I always thought he was just a moron.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed May 28, 2014 12:08 am

Also possible. Permissible, even.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Fri May 30, 2014 12:15 am

I may have mentioned this before, but you don't fuck with Big Bird, and you don't bet against Reading Rainbow.

...You Lost Me · Post by **...You Lost Me** » Tue Jun 03, 2014 5:01 am

Hurricanes with female names have greater death tolls than those with male names, because people don't respect them.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Jun 03, 2014 5:57 am

...You Lost Me wrote:Hurricanes with female names have greater death tolls than those with male names, because people don't respect them.

On the one hand, I guess we should name them all male names then to save the death toll.

On the other hand, the people who die in both types are victims, but do we really care about the extra people that die from female named hurricanes?

Fwib · Post by **Fwib** » Tue Jun 03, 2014 8:14 pm

Re: Gender-named Hurricanes.

I heard that the difference was an artefact of the change in naming systems. Apparently, when you do the test (excluding the massive outlier, Katrina) on just the ones before or after the point that they changed the naming system, the correlation goes away.

[edit]Source for my hearing... (has its own sources and references, which I cba to replicate here)

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Tue Jun 03, 2014 11:59 pm

Fwib wrote:Re: Gender-named Hurricanes.

I heard that the difference was an artefact of the change in naming systems. Apparently, when you do the test (excluding the massive outlier, Katrina) on just the ones before or after the point that they changed the naming system, the correlation goes away.

[edit]Source for my hearing... (has its own sources and references, which I cba to replicate here)

So, the article you're linking to summarizes Jeff Lazo's criticisms of the study, and they aren't really what you think they were. They are also really weak and bullshitty. His complaints are as follows:

1) The data set includes the period from 1950-1979, when all hurricanes had female names. This is true, but the study doesn't actually use a simple binary male/female classification. It rates names on a scale of 1 to 11 based on their perceived femininity/masculinity (consider Diane vs Fern), and then finds a correlation between that value and the hurricane's death toll. There are potential problems with this, but Lazo doesn't point them out.

2) Hurricanes have been getting less fatal over time, so the 29 years of all female names from 1950-1979 biases the sample. This is actually not true at all. You can just go grab the dataset they used (it's not behind a paywall/academic wall/whatever) and calculate the correlation yourself - it's just not there.

3) The study includes indirect deaths. Of course it fucking does! Deaths caused by fatal car accidents are classified as indirect. Deaths caused by the loss of access to emergency services are classified as indirect. Deaths caused by sitting in a room next to a generator slowly killing you with carbon monoxide are classified as indirect. All kinds of deaths which are totally and completely the hurricane's fault are classified as indirect.

4) Lazo complains "sure, in the portion of your experiment where you had people evaluate the potential danger of hypothetical hurricanes while changing their names around, participants reliably assessed male-named hurricanes as more dangerous than female-named hurricanes... but what if college students and psych study volunteers are really sexist, and the people who live on the coast (you know, in places like Texas and Florida) totally aren't?" No, really. That was one of his arguments.

The study does have problems. The biggest is that hurricane death tolls are a dataset driven by outliers, and depending on how you handle them you can get completely different results. You can argue at length that they handled outliers inappropriately and are essentially just picking up random noise, or that the way they handled outliers biased the study towards their conclusion, or blah blah blah.

Also: you can totally attack both the notion and specifics of how they classified the feminity/masculinity of the names. It's a semi-sketchy way to bridge the pre-1979 and post-1979 dataset, and you can make a compelling case that it does not actually let them combine the datasets in a way that gives them the statistical significane they claim.

But Lazo's complaints were really bad.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Jun 04, 2014 4:08 pm

Actually, the entire body of work about the femininity of names is bullshit and should be treated as such. If you ask a bunch of people how feminine a list of names sound to them, that tells you - at best - about the gender assignments of names today. But the all-female name list was before 1979. For fuck's sake, until the early sixties Kim was a boy's name.

How masculine or feminine a name is changes every decade. How feminine people in 2014 think a name sounds obviously cannot possibly have had any relevance to how people prepared or failed to prepare for a hurricane with that name in 1955.

All the data previous to 1979 is bullshit. None of those data points mean shit and none of them can possibly mean shit. No one asked people in the 1950s to rank those hurricane names in order of perceived masculinity, and people from different generations with different name admixtures in their cohort cannot meaningfully fill in that data.

If you drop all the pre-1979 data, the p values aren't good enough to refute the null hypothesis. You have to drop all the pre-1979 data because it is bullshit. Therefore they don't have enough data points to make a compelling argument that they aren't just looking at purely random noisy data.

-Username17

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Thu Jun 05, 2014 10:36 am

I thought this post was quite good.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Jun 05, 2014 4:13 pm

http://globalnews.ca/news/1370512/12-ye ... an-attack/
how much do we want to bet that they are going to lay all of the blame on video games again?

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Thu Jun 05, 2014 4:33 pm

the girls had been planning to kill their friend for months

The other girl said she sees Slender Man in her dreams. She said he watches her and can read her mind and teleport.

Well, friendship is magic.

darkmaster · Post by **darkmaster** » Thu Jun 05, 2014 6:31 pm

Isn't it much more likely that the combined belief of the people of the internet caused slenderman to spontaneously pop into existence?

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Thu Jun 05, 2014 7:09 pm

Not nearly enough narrativum

zugschef · Post by **zugschef** » Sun Jun 08, 2014 9:29 am

Chimpanzee choice rates in competitive games match equilibrium game theory predictions

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sun Jun 08, 2014 3:29 pm

Stahlseele wrote:Not nearly enough narrativum

I watch a few of the Slender series on YouTube.

Not only is this a hideous crime, it's an idiotic one. These girls--who would have seen and read the same stuff as me--somehow missed the fact that you don't pick the Slender Man, the Slender Man picks you. Coupla the series even have a cult that worships him, and he usually attacks 'em when he runs into them. SO EVEN IF YOU THINK THE SERIES ARE REAL, trying to deliberately seek him out doesn't work.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Mon Jun 09, 2014 1:23 pm

One more step towards our glorious robot overlords.[/url]

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Jun 09, 2014 2:56 pm

Reading the chat logs, it's sadly not as impressive as it sounds. It's choppy, makes strange conversational jumps, and responds to confusion by changing the subject. It likely only passed the test because it was pretending to be a foreign teenager.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jun 09, 2014 2:59 pm

Reading the chat logs, it's sadly not as impressive as it sounds. It's choppy, makes strange conversational jumps, and responds to confusion by changing the subject. It likely only passed the test because it was pretending to be a foreign teenager.

All of that, plus only one third of the people were fooled. You can do better than that with a Chinese Room.

-Username17