I'm not sure what to call this but... problematic? It is not too much to ask from your government but that they give everyone equal rights and privileges under the law. I don't necessarily mean that as an absolute, but it should at least be the default assumption. Cases where we want to provide preferential treatment to certain groups should at least meet the bar of that desire being explicitly spelled out in the relevant legislation.
One of the main benefits of good governance is that their decisions are predictable and reliable. If we are to enshrine identity politics into routine administrative matters, which is exactly what this columnist is obliquely supporting, that leaves us with decisions which are even more capricious / arbitrary / subjective than we currently have. You don't want to go to your lawyer if you are a band and hear "Well, maybe we could get that name, but I am not sure you guys have enough Asian bona fides. Maybe you could replace the singer with someone from China rather than a half-Filipino?"
The best case scenario is that it will merely have a chilling effect, where any name even moderately edgy is avoided by people who don't think they will be able to match with present moment social justice criteria. But there is something very morally wrong with the government saying "We reject your [trademark / patent / immigration] application on the basis of your skin color." And I like some edgy things and names, including NWA, so I wouldn't want that to go away.
Is this entire thing merely my opinion and hopelessly normative? Yes. Could you find extensive academic discussions of all the relevant factors produced by X Studies departments that perfectly tease apart all the politically correct aspects that should be considered in these decisions? Presumably you could, or you would be able to if this became a hot-button issue. But weighed against simplicity of government, the ability to actually know the rules and follow them, I don't think that social justice wins. Let that debate take place in the market of ideas rather than in the halls of justice.
It's not 10 people. This is data that Facebook gives you and each of those numbers is per user in the selected region. The proper way of reading that first graph is that for all Facebook users in San Francisco, on average they liked 6 pages ever, liked 1 post in the last month, etc.
I think you are significantly overstating the extraordinariness of these claims. People are entitled to their own priors, I suppose, but if someone asked "What is the probability that there is at least one player that has taken money to lose a match in Tennis" if you answered something less than 1% you are probably being far too trusting. It doesn't take that much evidence to turn 1% probability to 80% probability. I also don't understand why you're focusing on the 4.7% player. You have to set the cutoff somewhere, and it's not like they specifically named Michael Russell. The accusations in this case do not have much magnitude. People are accused of cheating all the time, and the evidence in this case is as strong as in other cases.
Edit: On further thought, you are probably saying that the people who published this Medium post are being irresponsible publishing the names. That's a little different than I was thinking, and more reasonable I think. That said, I don't think Michael Russell is in much risk here professionally, unless this statistical analysis is much more iron-clad than I expect it to be.
It seems likely that he would have done the same to a male in the same situation, so I fail to see how that relates to misogyny rather than a general culture of violence.
I do not envy the College Board. We are in a social and political environment where many issues that bear directly on the test are things you can't discuss in polite company (e.g. whether IQ is a real and relevant phenomenon, the 0.8 correlation between IQ tests and the SAT, the correlation between IQ and socioeconomic status). This makes it extremely difficult to both optimize for their goals, and to communicate that to the involved parties. Because of this it's hard to even know what their true goals are and whether they are actually going to achieve them.
> The second paragraph amounts to a sexist version of "I'm not racist! I have black friends!"
It bothers me unduly much that it has become a common meme that saying this amounts to saying "I am a racist!" That may be convenient pattern-matching, but if someone has friends that are black, that is definitely some evidence that they aren't racists.
I think this really comes down to pattern-matching and goalpost shifting. There are many definitions of racism, and conflating them serves the purposes of people on both sides of the argument, which makes it an anti-useful rather than merely useless term. When someone says "I'm not a racist, I have black friends" they are referring to the casual/common definition of racism, which is that they judge individuals as individuals and not based on their membership of a racial group. Under this definition, calling someone a racist is essentially saying that they have views that are sympathetic to the views of extremist groups like the KKK. Under this definition, saying, "I'm not racist, I have black friends" makes perfect sense, because it implies that, even if they have tiny biases against people based on race, they are at least not so strong as to preclude having close personal relationships with them.
Another definition of racism, used by people arguing against them, amounts to "everyone is racist in some ways, so it's basically always wrong to say you aren't a racist." (Obviously this is a caricature of another end of the spectrum, there are intermediate definitions) Under this definition, you can have black friends, a black husband/wife, black adoptive parents, black children, and saying any of those things simply pattern-matches to a denial of the obvious conclusion that if you aren't black, you can't know black struggles and so are inherently racist no matter what. If this is the definition of racism you are using, there is literally no evidence you can provide other than to be black yourself to avoid claims of racism against black people. People who subscribe to this definition have had arguments with people who they believe to be self-evidently racist, yet who used "I have black friends," so many times, that it pattern-matches in their brain to "this person is a racist." This is an uncharitable view.
Having black friends or black family members is Bayesian evidence that someone isn't racist as it is defined in casual discourse, and I think it's time that people stop pretending it's the opposite. Similarly, having a female co-founder is valid evidence that you view females as having the capability of equal business acumen to men, no matter how much people dislike the way the argument pattern-matches.
Unfortunately, there is literally no way to be so careful with your language use to avoid this argument, because the issue has long, long since diverged from the norms of reasonable discourse. There will always be people on the side of "everyone is racist" who will just say, "He's just hiding his racist views by trying to use alternate terminology."
If you think there is no victim I think you may not have a very firm grasp of economics. In particular, small negative consequences borne by many economic actors adds up to legitimate negative economic consequences, even if there is a collective action problem in addressing them. In order to make the argument that there is no victim, you will have to describe how this fraud is wealth creating, without appealing to any broken window fallacies. I guarantee this is impossible.
In reality, the costs of fraud are shared widely, and there are definitely victims in aggregate. First, the merchants are clearly victims. In a counterfactual universe that contains no credit card fraud, merchants pay lower fees to accept credit cards, and make more money for selling the same amount of goods at the same prices. Second, consumers are definitely victims. In the same counterfactual universe, consumers pay less for goods by a tiny margin, and thus are able to consume more and achieve higher levels of utility. Additionally, in this counterfactual universe, nobody has to deal with credit card fraud, which is an inconvenience which has both a direct dollar cost, in cases where people aren't satisfied with their legal protection or incur legal costs in exercising their protection, and in non-dollar costs like having to call their bank, stress, broken relationships etc. Note that these are real costs and lower standards of living and utility even if they aren't dollar costs.
From a macro perspective, it's obvious that fraud has a negative impact on the economy. All of the effort that is spent by every fraud researcher, fraud company, credit card company fraud agent etc. is fundamentally unproductive effort which is nonetheless included in GDP. If these people didn't have to deal with credit card fraud, because it simply didn't exist, they could be gainfully employed in other productive fields that work to meet the hedonic goals of other humans.
I just want you to be aware of the tough row you have to hoe if you are really planning on going down this path, and if you ignore the above arguments, well, you aren't making a very compelling case.
You are referring to a "randomized response" survey[1]. There are also list experiments and endorsement experiments for eliciting responses to sensitive questions[2].
First, let me say that in general I hate the negativity that has come to infect Hacker News, so it is only with much self-consciousness that I provide the following negative reaction. The mixergy post says "If you’ve heard me say that entrepreneurs should start by finding the pain, wait till you hear the first thing today’s guest did." (And the submission headline supports this lede.) The advice within the recording is that the founders of Submittable got together and made a list of their personal problems, and Submittable was like third on their list. I don't think that's particularly novel helpful advice given that it's basically the entirety of Paul Graham's famous essay "How to Get Startup Ideas" which I hope everyone here has read. If there were more detail on other ideas and ways to find startup ideas, it would be fine, but this is a one/two sentence explanation of the most obvious and well-known method, being used to justify the entire interview. The real question is what do you do when you don't have any problems and you don't know anyone with business problems.
That said, this isn't a reflection on Submittable as a company or the Submittable founders. I'm sure they are awesome and have an awesome service, and I hope they have the best of luck.
This is pure evil, and morally worse in my opinion than going after Swartz. At least he almost certainly actually violated a law. Trying to fill government coffers by seizing the assets of innocent bystanders is ridiculous.
Wow, that's a lot of vitriol. I didn't mean to upset him so much, but I apologize to him for the offense. I understand that this is his baby so any criticism feels very personal. I could have been nicer.
That said, I must disagree with some of the substantive points he made in this post.
> No, you clueless douche, it doesn’t have that consequence. It has the exact opposite consequence : that in this system you can determine actual current market valuations of risk. This unlike the systems you cite, which are nothing but glorified scams, and which specifically prevent you from gauging the market sentiment precisely because they’re not market priced.
BitBet, for the bet of Houston Texans to win the Super Bowl, has .07 against and .08 for (an implied probability of approximately 50%). The reality is that if I place a bet today, I won't know the odds that I'm betting against until the last day of the betting. It's true that there are economic results showing that the pricing in parimutuel betting will settle to the market expected value in equilibrium, but this example shows that these markets require much greater liquidity to provide anything resembling real-life probability estimates. You simply can't open a contract on a prediction market for 50:50 that the Texans will win the Super Bowl and have anyone take the other side of your trade.
> This idiocy is based on the presumption that you can import the “real odds” from somewhere. This is not what BitBet is doing, importing the “real odds” from somewhere else. BitBet establishes the actual odds.
In a priced market, informed market participants look at the probability represented by market prices and make their bets taking into account the information that they have. This action causes all of the information to be revealed in aggregate. His statement above implies that the "real odds" are being set by the market, not by reality, which is an inversion of cause and effect. The real odds are always imported from elsewhere, namely reality itself, as estimated through private and public information and analysis.
In order to profit in parimutuel games, you have to have both an accurate understanding of the reality, and an accurate estimate of public sentiment (and knowledge of the actual payout algorithm, of course). For priced markets to converge upon truthful values only requires that informed market participants bet based on their private information and best estimates, which is a much lower bar.
Not all parimutuel markets are created equally of course. Dynamic parimutuel markets[1] have some advantages over traditional markets (they don't suffer from a lack of buy liquidity, for example, but still don't allow traders to know their payouts at the time of the bet), but this doesn't seem to be one.
All that said, I intend no offense to the creators of this project, and wish them all the best in all of their journeys. Three cheers! I wish the world had more prediction markets.
This betting site has a really stupid betting system. It appears that the amount of money you receive isn't based on a pricing of the bet, as is done on all real prediction markets, but based on a simple payout of all the bets received on the other side of the bet by the end of the bet date. This system has two practical consequences: 1. You can't determine the markets current probability estimates from the current state of the market, as you can with priced markets. 2. You should never bet until the last second so you can know the odds for the bet. In fact, it would make sense to create a sniping bot that would programmatically calculate the odds, compare them to your probability estimate, and only make the bet if it is favorable. There is another site called Bets of Bitcoin (http://betsofbitco.in/) that has similarly dumb rules.
Edit: It appears that they actually tilt the payouts of bets based on an arbitrary weighting factor towards earlier bettors (arbitrary in that it doesn't at all take into account changing risk circumstances or likely levels of risk decay as a real market would), in some undisclosed fashion. I recommend that no one bet on this highly flawed system.
This game reminded me of Sword and Sorcery EP[1]. It had a similar aesthetic and used music in the same way that this piece did, although it was music from Jim Guthrie who sounds completely different from Skrillex. The main character even looks like the character from that game. The gameplay is very different (SS is a two dimensional, puzzle based point-and-click sort of thing), but there is definitely a similarity.
Under U.S. federal law, age discrimination not only protects exclusively the old against the young, it also protects only those over 40.[1] Discrimination in the workplace and in public policy against the young is a big problem (in the moral sense, perhaps not an economic sense) that really has, as far as I can tell, political recognition among essentially no one.
One of the main benefits of good governance is that their decisions are predictable and reliable. If we are to enshrine identity politics into routine administrative matters, which is exactly what this columnist is obliquely supporting, that leaves us with decisions which are even more capricious / arbitrary / subjective than we currently have. You don't want to go to your lawyer if you are a band and hear "Well, maybe we could get that name, but I am not sure you guys have enough Asian bona fides. Maybe you could replace the singer with someone from China rather than a half-Filipino?"
The best case scenario is that it will merely have a chilling effect, where any name even moderately edgy is avoided by people who don't think they will be able to match with present moment social justice criteria. But there is something very morally wrong with the government saying "We reject your [trademark / patent / immigration] application on the basis of your skin color." And I like some edgy things and names, including NWA, so I wouldn't want that to go away.
Is this entire thing merely my opinion and hopelessly normative? Yes. Could you find extensive academic discussions of all the relevant factors produced by X Studies departments that perfectly tease apart all the politically correct aspects that should be considered in these decisions? Presumably you could, or you would be able to if this became a hot-button issue. But weighed against simplicity of government, the ability to actually know the rules and follow them, I don't think that social justice wins. Let that debate take place in the market of ideas rather than in the halls of justice.