256
2yr ago
In addition, there's no actual way to determine whose the best qualified person to be a Supreme Court Justice, outside of personal political beliefs
I find this to be a pretty dubious claim. There are particular skills required of a SC justice. They need a deep knowledge of constitutional law, they need to be able to understand and elucidate complex logical arguments, etc. It's certainly possible to evaluate these skills in a candidate (even if not with perfect precision or inter-annotator agreement). You might say that of the many candidates with the appropriate baseline level of experience, their respective competencies are just too close to distinguish, but that doesn't seem right to me.
Listening to SCOTUS oral arguments and reading decisions, I get the distinct sense that some justices are just a lot better at their jobs than others. Some consistently come up with incisive hypotheticals and clear, eloquent lines of reasoning, and some waste the court's time with meandering, muddled questions. Occasionally, some make even egregiously elementary errors. In one of the recent affirmative action cases, Sotomayor confused de jure and de facto segregation. (I'd ordinarily be happy to give the benefit of the doubt and say this was just a slip of the tongue, but if you look at the full context, it doesn't seem possible that this was the case. She repeats it a few times, and even when sort of given an opportunity to correct herself by Alito, she seems to double down on her misunderstanding.)
256
2yr ago
Surface Detail, one of the books in the Culture series by Iain Banks, features an elephant-like alien race called the Pavuleans who, most memorably, have a horrific computer simulated hell to punish criminals.
256
2yr ago
I notice that a lot of people on this site seem to be both utilitarian and right wing. This makes me confused, as the utilitarian case for a strong welfare state seems extremely strong on its face.
Is it really a given that you can't be right wing and support a strong welfare state? Because I would say I fall into that category. Though my right-wing predilection for small government leads me to prefer something like a universal basic income, rather than a complex constellation of wealth transfers mediated by a bunch of different government agencies and NGOs.
256
2yr ago
I think critic scores have also become a less accurate predictor of my enjoyment over the years. I would attribute this to my taste being in a sort of inchoate state until my mid-20s or so. I was still trying to figure out what I enjoyed, and was a lot more susceptible to suggestion. There were cases where I forced myself to 'enjoy', say, Bjork, or Henry James, or The Night of the Hunter, because I felt like they were things I ought to like, for reasons of tribal identification. Liking works that were critically acclaimed was a way to signal my erudition. As I've gotten older, I've become less insecure. I like what I like. Some of what I like is "trash", and that's fine. I'm not trying to impress anyone with my Letterboxd.
But the whole idea of giving cultural artefacts numerical scores (and aggregating them into a single Metacritic/RT average) sort of hinges on the simplifying assumption that these works vary along a single axis of "goodness", and that your enjoyment of a work is a function of where they fall on this scale. This has always been a laughably crude simplification. Consider the category of the cult classic, a work which turned off most audiences but which has a small group of ardent admirers. How do we account for why I love the critically panned Mommie Dearest? Maybe we just need to add a noise term to our linear model to account for these sorts of random fluctuations? Except these deviations don't occur uniformly at random. If you know that I love Mommie Dearest, you should greatly increase your predicted probability that I love Showgirls, and Valley of the Dolls, for example.
The qualities that affect your enjoyment of a work of art are many-dimensional, and different people differ widely in terms of which regions of that high-dimensional space they enjoy.
The role of reviewer is becoming outmoded now that we have technology to move past the simplifying assumption of a universal, one-dimensional scale of quality. For example, we have collaborative filtering algorithms driving the ubiquitous "Users who liked X also liked..." feature, and other, more complex recommendation algorithms. Social media has also made word-of-mouth transmission a lot more efficient. No matter how niche your tastes, you can always find people who share them somewhere on the internet.
256
2yr ago
Where we're going, we don't need janitors.
It already feels like we're getting within sight of a technological singularity, and this kind of transhuman intelligence-enhancing technology would get us there even faster.
And in this alternate world where everyone's intelligence has been elevated, whatever menial jobs that (briefly?) remain will probably be very well compensated (since the pool of people qualified to scrub toilets is now no larger than the pool of people qualified to design microchips). So rather than thinking in terms of a "145 IQ janitor", it might make more sense to imagine someone who puts in a year as a janitor to make a huge pile of money so he can buy a big house and be financially secure to spend the rest of his life pursuing his passion of writing papers about statistical mechanics.
256
2yr ago
There's some truth to this, but I don't think the community is as uniformly nasty as you're making it out to be. There are plenty of editors who will patiently try to point you toward relevant policy or help you through a point of misunderstanding. (See, for example, the saintly editors who answer newbie questions at "The Teahouse".)
Also, while I would never admit to holding this opinion in an on-wiki discussion, I secretly think that the relatively high barrier for entry to making non-trivial contributions to Wikipedia is actually a crucial ingredient to its success, in that it filters out would-be editors who are insufficiently smart or diligent. This is why I cringe a little every time Wikimedia developers try to roll out more glossy, simplified, WYSIWYG interfaces. I'm not sure I want more people coming in to the project who aren't smart enough to use wikitext (the markup language that constitutes the "source code" of all articles and discussion pages).
As it is, Wikipedia kind of does feel like a community of scholars. But the more accessible it becomes, the more it's going to come to resemble the YouTube comments section of yore. Case in point, a while back the WMF did an experiment where they actively solicited feedback from readers of Wikipedia articles. Their theory was that Wikipedia needs more voices (and this continues to be an overarching theme of their work), and that a) this user feedback would help existing editors identify areas for improvement for articles, and b) users who are induced to leave feedback can also be induced to go fix the problems they identified, and thus graduate from reader to editor. The experiment was a failure, because the signal to noise ratio of the reader comments was pretty abysmal. You can actually still download a dataset of some of this feedback and it's pretty funny to read. Here's a random sample of comments on the article "Apple Inc.":
This page needs a long, detailed explanation on the type of stone used for the floors of all Apple Stores.
say that apple is not or is better than Microsoft corporation created by Bill Gates
make it a little more easier for children to read as many teens use this site for education..
Crapple is a scam
It was great
More pictures
Seriously, this did not help me at all!!! I need MORE information people!
Steve Jobs said that consumers will finally get the chance to own an iphone, a mobile phone that plays iTunes and surfs the Web. He also disclosed that Apple's iTunes will sell Paramount films. (From CNNMoney, January 9, 2007)
Add colors!
incident is missing
(Reminder that there are a lot of sub-100 IQ people out in the world, but you probably don't have much interaction with them because you exist in a bubble of above-average intelligence friends, family members, and coworkers.)
256
2yr ago
This is really important nuance which I wish Wikipedia editors would be more appreciative of. A lot of editors are addicted to the simplicity of a red light/yellow light/green light system, and will therefore wholesale eradicate any citations to sources marked "generally unreliable", even if they're being used to cite basic pieces of info like the date of a speech or a direct quote, which no-one would seriously consider it plausible for that source to falsify.
Normally you can just find the same information cited in a "green" source, but it becomes a real problem when dealing with topics that are mostly being covered by right-wing outlets.
256
2yr ago
if I tried to make an earnest, good faith effort to fix the inaccuracies and politically slanted representation of the articles that concern me, I would just be banned within short order
Have you actually tried editing Wikipedia before? Because this does not match with my experience. If you're actually operating in good faith and within Wikipedia's policies, you're not going to get banned. Bans are for people who are clearly "not there to build an encyclopedia" (e.g. spammers), or editors who chronically or egregiously disregard Wikipedia's policies. You might get reverted a lot, which can be very annoying, but I think you'd be surprised how much progress you can make in getting changes through if you politely argue your case on the talk page with reference to relevant policies.
the_last_pigeon is right - if you're patient and competent, you could absolutely single-handedly ameliorate some of the bias in an article on a culture-war topic if you sat down and tried. I say this as someone who has actually done this. (Granted, it wasn't fun having to patiently deal with what clearly seemed to me to be ideologically motivated bad faith arguments and isolated demands for rigor, which is why, for my own sanity, I mostly edit non-CW articles.)
A very similar line of argument came up in the recent SCOTUS affirmative action cases. Harvard/UNC really tried to characterize their use of race in a minimal way. I.e. we're not picking students on race alone, it's just one of many factors in a holistic process, there are no quotas, no "points" for being a certain race, not a single specific applicant has been identified who was rejected because of their race, etc. The conservative justices seized on this to say something like "well then you wouldn't have any problem with us issuing a ruling saying you can't discriminate on race, right?"
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