That’s what happens to you. It’s as if you vomit in the gutter and everybody starts saying it’s the greatest new art form, so you go back to see it, and, by God, you have to agree.

Having met his goal of making 100,000 angels, he is now busily working to meet his revised goal of one million. He continues to hope for peace and an end to war.

Buzzfeed is an entertainment website that collects an enormous amount of information about its users. Much of the data comes from traditional Internet tracking, but Buzzfeed also has a lot of fun quizzes, some of which ask very personal questions. One of them – “How Privileged Are You?” – asks about financial details, job stability, recreational activities, and mental health. Over two million people have taken that quiz, not realizing that Buzzfeed saves data from its quizzes.

I read this in Bruce Schneier’s “Data and Goliath” and thought “oh my god, ‘Buzzfeed sells mental health information from privilege quizzes to insurance companies’ would be the most horribly believable 2010s internet thing,” but the source he cited was merely an article (see also here, here) saying that Buzzfeed could conceivably do this (of course they can) but there is no evidence they actually are

Still a weird thing to think about

jadagul:

balioc:

A discourse request, mostly directed at @slatestarscratchpad –

Can we not casually equate “fuzzy / empathy-oriented / non-systematic thinking” with “the humanities?” 

“The humanities” is a field of intellectual inquiry.  Practiced properly, it involves rigor and clear logic – not experiment, not quantification (usually), not empirical data (usually), but definable principles and arguments that proceed cogently from those principles.  The people who are good at it are not that different, in ability or in temperament, from the people who are good at science. 

[…you know that philosophy counts, right?  That High Holy Utilitarianism itself is a product of the humanities?]

If you want to point out that we live in a world in which humanities scholars and humanities departments often seem to prefer feelings to reason, well, I can’t really argue with that.  But making a bad-thinking totem out of “the humanities” in the abstract…cedes a lot of ground, unnecessarily, to people who don’t deserve it.  And insults a lot of people who  do good work.

I staunchly maintain that math belongs with the humanities and not with the sciences.

IMO “the humanities” is an ambiguous term in much the same was as, say, “intellectuals,” or (in a more obvious/straightforward way) “theory” – terms that can semantically cover vast swaths of human mental activity but carry a lot of more specific connotations/implicatures

Consider “intellectuals,” for instance – the word is often casually used to just mean “people who think a lot” or even “smart people,” but because of its history, my prototypical image of an “intellectual” is something like one of the New York Intellectuals, while my imagine of a “person who thinks a lot” or a “smart person” are much vaguely and less tied to specific historical circumstances

Likewise, “the humanities” has a history of use in recent conversations about the American academy, which lends it a whole cloud of associations.

It’s important not to conflate the broad meanings with the narrow ones, but this doesn’t require (say) critics to take the pose of “the current narrow meaning is a corruption of the good, broad concept.”  Perhaps the very idea of the broad concept is a-historical (just a succession of narrow concepts we may not want to lump together), etc.

(via tanadrin)

“Every morning we had to watch propaganda films saying what a great harmonious society the Communist Party had created in China.

"In the afternoons, they screened really terrible films, usually with Nicolas Cage in them. It was weird.”

He then imagined himself as a man with no interest in sex who proposed to seal a romance by committing to play tennis only with his beloved. Breaking that promise, he said, would not be adultery.

Tonight’s misread: “George was threatened with death by pro-death extremist Theodore Shulman” (for “George was threatened with death by pro-choice extremist Theodore Shulman”)

Let’s understand what went wrong and how you can avoid hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. To start out with, each y_i has loss around 1/2±1/sqrt(n).

Once identified, toxic memes can be divested of their attractive and pleasing capsules and adornments and be relegated to the pool of irrational memes that can be a source of amusement rather than threat.