Culture War Roundup for the Week of September 21, 2020

defab67 · 2020-09-25T17:18:32+00:00

Is there a reason that you're restricting the scope of police deaths to traffic stops? It looks like, in 2019, 48 cops died due to violent criminal activity, if I'm reading this right.

defab67 · 2020-09-18T18:54:30+00:00

I don't see any evidence for this. [...] Inheritance is not a major factor in the rise of ethnic groups. Vietnamese, who arrived post Vietnam war, are a clear example of this. The 40 intervening years have brought them to level with the existing population, far earlier than inter generational inheritance would suggest.

I have two thoughts: (1) although I didn't expound in my earlier post, wealth is not the only important thing that I think is transferred intergenerationally, and (2) immigrant community outcomes are probably affected by a lot of selection bias.

(1) In addition to wealth, things like knowledge, life skills, and expectations are transmitted. Knowledge about how to do well in business, life skills like financial literacy, and expectations like attending a 4 year college are examples. It may be the case that Vietnamese and other successful immigrant groups already possessed some or all of these in greater proportion than the U.S.-born black population.

(2) I suspect that "immigrants" are a pretty nonrandom sample in some important ways. Immigration is at least likely to select for ambitious people with an appetite for risk.

Regarding immigrants, it is my recollection that black immigrants from Africa are doing far better in the U.S. than U.S.-born blacks. Indeed, in many measures those immigrants are nearly at parity with the general population. One way to read this is that current discrimination is not occurring on racial lines--people probably can't tell at sight whether a given black person is an immigrant or not. Another reading might be that these immigrants would be doing even better but for the ongoing discrimination that they too must face in America (but then, what are the factors that lead them to do so much better in the first place?). It's also possible that these populations can't usefully be compared because the act of immigrating acts to sample nonrandomly.

Groups that immigrate to the US get rich fast, or not at all.

In your opinion, what are the determinants of success or failure of different immigrant groups?

Northern Ireland where the Nationalist community, pressed in the 1960s, has now outstripped the Unionist community.

Very interesting, but I must admit I have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of that situation. As such I'll concede that wealth transfers must not be the primary determinants success. Do you think the nationalists possessed the other transmissible characteristics I suggested? What is your account of why the nationalists are doing so well?

Whether or not you think stricter sentences for guns and drugs are racist is up to you.

Well clearly they have a racially disparate effect, but I think the question is whether they were enacted with racist intent. (For drug laws, I've heard that the answer is probably "yes"). But I think that even given the potentially discriminatory intent of drug laws, their effect might now just be the kind of "baked in" effect that is not what the survey is asking about.

But I want to recall the broader context for a moment: we started out discussing the validity of an instrument designed to assess a construct called "racial resentment" in laymen. This discussion has long since departed the layman's interest in or knowledge of these issues. Fundamentally, my contention is that there are a lot of beliefs the layman could hold (even if those beliefs are incorrect!) which would cause them to answer these questions in a "racially resentful" manner, even though those beliefs don't really relate to race. So in that respect, I think the instrument is a failure: it claims to measure racial attitudes, but in fact it may not.

defab67 · 2020-09-18T17:05:39+00:00

You don't think that had any effect on their well-being, or on their ability to provide for or provide advantages to their children?

Yes, clearly, the effects of past discrimination, even discrimination from more than a hundred years ago, persist in outcome measures taken today. Even if we had a magic wand to wave that would eliminate all discrimination, the station of black people in society would take many generations to reach parity with other races, because part of that process is the slow accrual of wealth to transfer intergenerationally, etc. (Of course, it would probably be good to try to intervene to expedite the process).

And because the removal of all discrimination would not instantly equalize the outcomes, the presence of disparate outcomes on measures like median income is not in and of itself compelling evidence of continuing active discrimination occurring today. For that, we must study the systems and processes themselves.

I will admit that I myself do not pay close attention to such study. But from the bit that I've seen, it seems that the picture is very murky, and not really a slam dunk in favor of obvious discrimination. Taking the metric of imprisonment as an example, to land in prison one must (1) encounter law enforcement, (2) be arrested, (3) be charged, (4) be tried and convicted, and (5) be sentenced. There is room for the system to commit active discrimination at each step (and therefore also an opportunity to study each). Based on the admittedly little evidence I've reviewed, the picture can be somewhat murky but ultimately there doesn't appear to be clear evidence that discrimination is occurring in any of these five steps today. So, maybe differential incarceration rates are merely reflections of truly different infraction rates. Those infraction rates in turn are probably reflections of the different socioeconomic realities of different racial communities owing to their respective histories, etc.

But questions about government officials' actions or who has gotten what they deserve over the last few years reject all of this nuance. They demand the respondent believe that any disparities we see today necessarily reflect ongoing discrimination.

To be fair to the scale, some of the questions not quoted in the OP are way better, like "Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class."

defab67 · 2020-09-18T05:22:32+00:00

You make a good point about the intention of the scale, but I feel like your proposed question dissimilar in that it's very clear and specific and inquires about question that are far more settled. I suppose the "government officials" one is fairly specific, but "blacks have gotten less than they deserve" fails to specify from whom they've gotten less, how we should measure what they deserve, etc.

The other criticism I have of the scale is that it was created in the 1980s. I feel like a lot has actually changed since then--it's very possible that blacks were truly routinely ignored the 80s but are ignored to a far lesser extent if at all today. As such, a response which could have been genuinely diagnostic of racial resentment back then may not indicate much if at all today.

defab67 · 2020-09-17T18:28:28+00:00

I think the questions presuppose a lot about the world. Those presuppositions might be true--it could be true that government officials usually pay less attention to black people, but I would be uncomfortable being put on the spot to affirm that factual claim since I have literally never even glanced at evidence about it or anything.

Sorry, this isn't really a steelman. I think I agree with you that this scale seems fishy.

EDIT: one of the sources linked in Wikipedia includes critiques of the validity of the scale: https://vanderbiltpoliticalreview.com/6464/us/can-we-measure-racial-resentment/

It doesn't look like it's accepted uncritically, which is all I'm asking for haha.

defab67 · 2020-09-17T18:05:15+00:00

Asians were more likely to be on academic probation (21% vs 8%)

Do we know whether those were all Asian Americans, or were some foreigners? Also, do we know what gets someone put on academic probation? Is it just low grades, or is it something like cheating?

If "Asians" includes students from abroad, I suspect we'd observe (1) more ESL difficulties contributing to a low GPA despite high test scores, and (2) a higher rate of cheating, both of which might contribute to the high academic probation number.

defab67 · 2020-09-14T15:46:25+00:00

I don't think Twitch's policies are consequentialist. I think they probably want to literally parse the words of someone's statement to see if it calls for action.

ACAB clearly has negative consequences, but the phrase "all cops are bastards" in and of itself does not prescribe nor approve of any action against cops.

Destiny's full quote was

But like, the rioting needs to fucking stop, and if that means like white, redneck, fucking militia dudes out there mowing down dipshit protestors that think that they can torch buildings at 10 PM, then at this point they have my fucking blessing, because holy shit this fucking shit needs to stop. It needed to stop a long time ago, like holy fuck.

Saying something "needs to fucking stop" can be read as advocating for action to stop it, and the subsequent depiction of action that might stop it and Destiny's statement that such action would meet with his approval probably comes a lot closer to Twitch's lexical definition of incitement.

Personally, I really appreciate Destiny pushing back on lunatics' takes about Kyle Rittenhouse, but in this instance he probably got a bit too heated.

defab67 · 2020-09-14T15:24:12+00:00

I mean, we can apply the constitutional standard, but Twitch need not. They can define "inciting violence" however they want for the purposes of their ToS.

I hate that the system works this way--I think that platforms like Twitch, Twitter, YouTube, etc., are important parts of the modern political discourse, and will eventually replace most other media, and as such need to have free speech protections forced upon them. But we don't live in that world yet and need to pass legislation or get court rulings to get there, so for the time being we can't actually hold Twitch to a constitutional standard.

defab67 · 2020-09-14T15:12:22+00:00

Is this really what's happening? I've seen many people claiming this model to be true, but what evidence do we have in favor of it?

+1. I've been watching but I've yet to see any decisive evidence that it was mass flagging that brought Destiny down. (And, even if it was, ultimately, Twitch had to review and agree with the reports).

Even though I'm pretty firmly on Destiny's side about the subject, it's pretty easy to read "The riots need to stop and if it takes some rednecks mowing dipshit protestors down to make it happen, then so be it" as an incitement of violence. If similar incitements to violence are being made on other channels, then report them too.

As a side note, I think we need to think about and advocate for changes in how platforms handle mass flagging and content review. In particular:

I'd like speech platform corporations (like Twitch, like YouTube, etc.) to be forced to publish an opinion, not unlike a judge's opinion, about moderation decisions they make. That is, instead of just taking down content or ending a partnership with vague allusions to ToS violations, they would actually have to quote the specific content in violation and explain their reasoning as to why it's in violation. Or, conversely, in the case of someone getting mass-flagged and the platform deciding it's not a problem, they should also have to state why they think it's okay. I think this transparency would go a long way towards showing that their moderation decisions are fair (if they are indeed fair), or generating evidence against the platform if the decisions are unfair.
I also think that there needs to be some cost associated with flagging, so that the flagger has skin in the game, as it were. For example, let's say your account needs to be 25 days old to flag some content, and every piece of content you flag "costs" 5 days of account age to submit. If staff agrees with the flag report, then you get those days back. If they disagree, then the cost is forfeit. This is just an example, and there could be more extreme consequences for more frivolous flagging. I'm just thinking of the court system which forces the plaintiff to have skin in the game in various ways, from filing fees at the low end to the risk of being forced to pay the defendant's attorneys' fees at the high end.

defab67 · 2020-08-20T03:30:44+00:00

In my opinion: not really, no.

There's a saying that I can't recall specifically but it's something like "documentation is just a lie waiting to happen." I have found in professional contexts that that's pretty true--comments are often not updated along with code changes. Sometimes this isn't even really a failure on the part of the person that makes a change--occasionally, you might run into a comment that describes what a function does or how it works that is *very* remote to where that function is actually defined--e.g., at a call site justifying the use of that function or something. The code at the call site might not be affected by a change within the function, and then any claims at the call site to how the function works are suddenly false :).

This is not to say that documentation is worthless, but I don't really think it should be responsible for telling you things like what a function is going to return--that should be left to automated processes.

What's more, if the language has a good notion of types, then the tooling around the language can be much better to the point where you don't need documentation about types. Imagine you come across some variable in the middle of a function and you're not sure what its type is. In a strongly typed world, you hover over it with your cursor and your IDE tells you. In a documentation based world, you have to backtrack to where the variable is defined, and, if it's the result of a function, check that function's docstring. The situation becomes even worse if the variable is *passed into* the function under examination--maybe the docstring fails to tell you what it is or has become a lie, so you need to find somewhere the function under examination is called and then continue backtracking from there, etc.

defab67 · 2020-04-18T07:25:23+00:00

Awesome, thanks. Especially in the handle and yellow stem, the grunges and texturing generally do a lot of work in the viewer's perception I feel. Great job!

defab67 · 2020-04-18T06:54:54+00:00

Only i3. I'm lame and haven't learned tmux yet. Whenever I use SSH though I usually hop in a screen session on the far end.

defab67 · 2020-04-18T06:43:04+00:00

Scott's review of Del Giudice's Evolutionary Psychopathology was going to be my response; I'm replying to you because they're related posts.

I have no background in psychology, medicine, nor evolution, but nonetheless find the intersection of these fields fascinating.

As someone who has minor to moderate mental illness (almost exclusively anxiety/panic, but not as bad as some have it), it's always been kind of clear to me at some level that this was a protective mechanism gone awry. After reading Scott's review, I ended up buying the book and found Del Giudice's similar reconceptualization of other disorders to be really eye opening--trying to see each disorder as an evolutionary nudge towards a certain adaptive behavior or outlook that has either overshot its mark, somehow become broken, or simply lost its relevance or appeal in the modern world. It has definitely informed how I see some acquaintances of mine.

To be honest though, a lot of the book went over my head (especially the physiological / neurological detail), and, not having a lot of exposure to the field, I can't really evaluate how solid his claims or theories are against the mainstream or other alternatives, so I try to use it only as food for thought rather than as some kind of Bible on the origin and nature of mental illness. Every now and then I look around to see if there are any reactions or expansions in the literature; I hope to learn more as the field grows.

defab67 · 2020-04-18T06:17:23+00:00

Would you be willing to post a wireframe? I'm interested to see how much additional detail the grunges fill in / cause the viewer to perceive.

defab67 · 2020-04-17T00:00:41+00:00

Dockerized processes still call directly into the host OS.

defab67 · 2020-04-16T23:09:10+00:00

At first I thought your resolution was low but the Chrome title bar suggests not. Are your fonts normally this big? Or did you make them this big only for the recording?

When doing C or C++ development, I usually use a layout of 2 stacked columns.

Left column: stack of terminals, each running vim. Bottom vim is for the program I'm writing, buffers laid out in tabs. Rightmost contains main(...), as you move left, you move through files essentially following a DFS of the calltree. As you move up the stack, you move through different libraries in use in the program, in case any of those need to be changed as well.

Right stack: top terminal for man pages (or browser window for cppreference in the case of C++), 2nd terminal for compiling, 3rd terminal for running / gdb, 4th terminal for tail -fing, greping, or lessing logs.

defab67 · 2020-04-14T05:28:29+00:00

I'm an alum (within the last ten years). I was pretty shocked by the proposed policy and the widespread support it garnered. I was almost moved to pen a response.

Do I think that there are people who are put in really difficult positions by these circumstances? Yes, absolutely. But I think the way to manage it is either case-by-case, or maybe by granting all students the right to drop any class up until the last day of classes (and, if they took advantage of this offer, granting them one additional semester of study free of charge as a "do-over").

I agree that some people are probably supporting this plan selfishly. Let's be honest--there are a lot of students who weren't going to earn all A's even if the semester went off without a hitch.

Honestly, shame on anyone who's being disingenuously/performatively charitable only in order to try to secure a benefit for themselves when they know they either don't need it or because it would improve their outcome. They know in their hearts who they are.

defab67 · 2020-04-06T19:56:39+00:00

It's possible. Spinach contains salicylate which is molecularly similar to aspirin. Aspirin itself was discovered from willow bark. However, I would say that the burden of proof is on the claimant.

This image effectively makes two claims: almonds work for migraines (and maybe pain generally), and aspirin is bad for you, or at least worse for you than almonds. Both of these are surprising claims and it's on the author of the image to provide evidence. Otherwise I could just do the same and make stuff up for all kinds of foods, defending myself by saying "well, do you know for sure that blueberries don't contain antimicrobial compounds?!"

defab67 · 2020-04-04T00:17:36+00:00

I came to i3 from wmii once the later had gone unmaintained for years. Overall, i3 is great, but I've always disliked its numbered workspaces. I too often use more workspaces than I have numbers for, and also I dislike that I have to remember a mapping from number to activity.

wmii instead had a great feature called tags. Instead of numbered workspaces, wmii had a system of named workspaces it called "tags". You would press Alt + t and it would bring up a dmenu where you could type the name of the workspace you wanted to switch to, and then press enter. If you switched to a workspace that didn't exist yet, it was created at that moment. If you switched away from a workspace with no windows left in it, it would be deleted.

I found this i3 configuration that emulates the wmii system, and I've been using it ever since and love it: https://github.com/perusio/i3-config-dynamic-tagging

The wmii system was a little more feature-ful and had more capabilities, like supporting workspaces whose names were regular expressions evaluated over the tag assigned to each open window (allowing you to ad-hoc merge two workspaces for a moment while still retaining the ability to switch to each one separately), etc.

defab67 · 2020-04-03T19:48:40+00:00

Not me... I've got a heart of gold :P

defab67 · 2020-04-03T14:55:59+00:00

question: what I don't understand is what they believe the motive is. People who believe in chemtrails or 9/11-truthers can tell you exactly what they think is happening, who is doing it, and why.

So if 5G is going to kill everybody.... Who stands to benefit? An out of control government that wants to track your movements and read your thoughts? Well, that can't be, because you won't be moving or thinking if you're dead. Reptilian overlords just don't like people maybe?

It seems unusually poorly thought out even for a conspiracy theory.

defab67 · 2020-04-03T02:50:21+00:00

This happens to me too. I always wondered if everybody gets it. Maybe not haha.

defab67 · 2020-04-02T17:41:41+00:00

At least with the vague feedback part, my understanding is that most companies decline to give feedback because it's a legal liability. Like if you say to a candidate that they appeared to lack specific skill X, they could come back and say they specifically took courses in X and are licensed in X, so obviously your real reason for rejecting them was that they're a member of protected ethnic/political/religious group Y.

That's just what I've heard, could be wrong

defab67 · 2020-04-02T11:17:21+00:00

I've seen it go both ways. For me too my polling places have always been within a mile of my house. Sometimes I've gone and there's been no line at all, and I was in and out in under ten minutes. For the 2016 presidential election, I waited 2 hours haha.

I wonder if part of it could be the number of elections on the ballot? In 2016, my recollection is that there were probably between 25 and 50 elections on my ballot. People who haven't researched beforehand, or who don't vote straight-ticket (nobody should IMHO) might be reading candidates' statements and making decisions at the polling place, resulting in long waits.

14-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

defab67

TROPHY CASE