(Okay, it doesn't say "white" anywhere.)
The study was on 15-year-olds so migrant workers and mothers were excluded.
The entire study was done on mice.
The study was on 15-year-olds so migrant workers and mothers were excluded.
LOL
Rich white American and Canadian guys, to be precise. I notice with delight that Scottish teenagers were by far the least likely to bullshit, possibly because they don't care what you think.
Haha no, it was rich white guys of course
Whiteness was not tested; the study did not break down the results by race.
I was reading about this on another site this weekend. Apparently the BSing gap between men and women is smaller in North America than elsewhere. Progress!
If anything the extrapolation goes the other way; US teenagers far less likely to be white than Scots, also far more likely to bullshit.
Something I was worried about--and which the paper seems to address--is that "proper number" sounds too close to some real concepts that the participants might just confuse it with them. For example, I know about proper fractions, which must be a possibly non-strict subset of proper numbers. The paper also says that in some countries (looks like Australia, US, England--also, they had data for Wales but decided it was FUBAR for some reason and excluded it), it seemed more confusable with the concept of real numbers. This issue drove an increase in "bullshit" in higher performing students that did not hold for the other two indicators.
Arguably, this corresponds to a lesser sort of bullshit that is useful for test-takers: this concept I don't know looks like another concept I know well, so I'm going to make the logical leap that it works in a predictable fashion and see where that gets me. But it might have just been confusion.
13: In the resulting discussion thread at the site I was reading, the "proper numbers" thing came up as well.
13: I had that kind of thought -- I looked at 'proper numbers' and it seemed like something I might say I understood, because it's so close to proper fractions or real numbers that I would tend to assume that I just needed a tiny bit of context to place it completely. (Like, I know the difference between whole numbers and natural numbers is that one is the positive integers with zero and one without, but I can never remember which is which, but I'd still say I understand what they are.) I guess that's bullshitting, but it doesn't feel that way.
Gawd, you're all total proper numbers.
As a spherical white man myself, I find it interesting me that the results are expressed in terms of standard deviations. It feels like a test of my willingness to bullshit about numbers.
I think I used to have an idea, in a broad sense, what a standard deviation is, but I don't any more. Isn't .4 of a standard deviation a pretty big effect?
OTSO Dunning-Kruger, yesterday I watched the documentary Beyond the Curve on flat-earthers. It actively avoided mocking them, but tried to examine what drove them with a measure of compassion, letting their errancy's depth speak for itself. Which it did starkly: multiple scenes of non-grifting enthusiasts spending real money on equipment, using gyroscopes and then lasers to test curvature, finding the same curvature the standard science predicts, and immediately finding reasons to reject the finding.
It made me think these test would be good as standard school science projects.
You can't tell unless the standard deviation is based on a standardized measure.
multiple scenes of non-grifting enthusiasts spending real money on equipment, using gyroscopes and then lasers to test curvature, finding the same curvature the standard science predicts, and immediately finding reasons to reject the finding.
Hoo boy.
Possibly the Earth is flat in some places and round in others. A cylinder, maybe.
19: The podcast "Oh No, Ross and Carrie", which investigates fringe science and unusual belief systems, did a couple episodes on them, including one where they tried doing a curvature measuring experiment on the Salton Sea. They tried very hard to be sympathetic to the flat-earthers, but it's difficult--some of the top-level ones are clearly grifters, while for the regular believers there's no consistent worldview beyond "The Man is lying to us." They seem to be more gullible and lacking in critical thinking skills than the average believer in weird stuff. Flat-earth is where people go when Pizzagate is too mainstream for them. It seems like at least half of the flat-earthers would believe you even if your story contradicts other things they've professed.
That being said, one of them did have a t-shirt with the NASA logo but with the word "NOPE" instead, which is pretty good.
20: Am I allowed to earnestly not bullshit in this thread? My statistics are very weak. I thought standard deviation was approximately the root-mean-squared average of a distribution's distance from the mean (that is, not the actual mean distance, but a related quantity that's easier to calculate). Is there a common distribution type where 0.4 of that isn't significant?
22: My favorite flat-earth theory is that the earth is both flat and round: the earth is a sphere, but it's a really, really big sphere, whose surface is mostly ice. What we think of the earth is a small circular portion of the surface, small enough that relative to the curvature of the super-earth it's essentially flat. The sun and other astronomical features are small spheres hovering over our section of the earth as is common among flat-earthers. It's possible that there might exist other "flat-earths" elsewhere on the sphere--a kind of multiverse--but our explorers have not been able to surmount the ice wall of Antarctica.
...unless they have, and The Man isn't telling us.
Something I was worried about--and which the paper seems to address--is that "proper number" sounds too close to some real concepts that the participants might just confuse it with them.
Yes - I tried the questionnaire on some colleagues, having told them in advance that some concepts were made up, and they confidently said that they knew about "proper numbers". They picked up on the other two dummies, though.
18: whether a difference of 0.4 sigma is a significant effect depends very much on sample size. 68% of the data points in a normally distributed sample are within one standard deviation of the mean. To pick an understandable example: American adult male height has a mean of 5 foot 9 inches and a standard deviation of 3 inches. So someone 0.4sigma away from the mean is 5 foot 10.2 inches.
23.3: I suppose it could be that, but for proper numbers, it usually means the square root of the variance, which is how much numbers in a distribution differ from the mean of that distribution.
Also it depicted even the community internally suffering from the same fantasizing and conspiracizing tendencies - the main featured people, two prominent YouTubers, decried by others as CIA plants. One of them, frustrated, said to the documentarians something like, "Look, I can show them my birth certificate or whatever physical proof they want until I'm blue in the face, but as long as they're determined to believe something, they can always say of course the CIA would have fabricated that."
24 is beautiful and I might steal it for a role-playing game scenario. That would make polar explorers the exact equivalent of astronauts!
24: I don't think that should be counted as a flat-earth theory. If you believe the earth is a giant sphere, you can't be in the club.
29: It still requires legions of shadowy government officials lying and mounting massive wheels-within-wheels cover-ups, and (unless you posit lots of other spheres or other discs on the sphere) a cosmology in which God put humanity at center stage. I think those two components are among those vital to flat-earthery.
I looked at the article. They're using Standard Deviation the way 23.3 in talking about. Nevermind.
26: Well yes, but this study is about improper numbers.
I've proven that the earth is flat, but to understand my proof you need to have mastered declarative fractions.
25: Thanks, that's helpful! I should probably just memorize that fact about SD for bell curves. Although I'm not sure how sample size matters there--it seems like it's more a question of the parameters of your curve. But I guess if I had taken a sampling of only a dozen men, there's a higher chance that I'd pick a Mutombo who would greatly inflate the SD.
28: So many of the flat-earth theories are so cool* even if they don't make any sense. It vaguely reminds me of a cosmology in a fantasy series I read as a child. There were four elemental worlds/universes; in the water world, space is filled with ice. The sun and other stars roam through this ice matrix, warming up their neighborhood to create water and allowing water elves or whatever to live nearby. For whatever reason that always struck me as more lonely and isolating than our void.
* Admittedly, our real cosmology is so cool, but it doesn't have any novelty.
Mutombo who would greatly inflate the SD
Among other things.
Meh. Flat earth theories are for losers. The cool kids these days are into hollow earth theories.
We really need to make declarative fractions a thing.
36: Hollow earth theories strike as way too plausible and intuitive to be interesting. The only hollow earth theory I can respect is the theory that the earth is hollow,and that we are within it.
38: "strike me". I write so many hollow sentences.
Inside the hollow earth is where the Proper Numbers are stored for safe keeping.
41: Basically the plot of Neal Stephenson's Anathem.
I could never figure out exactly what the shape of the earth is supposed to be in Ted Chiang's "Tower of Babylon".
OP & 7: Oh, I'm so glad someone posted this! I was going to send it in with a wry comment about ttaM and the relative non-baloneyness of Scots youth.
We are the hollow earthers
We are the flat earthers
Learning together
Research filled with straw. Alas!
Our urgent voices, when
We youtube together
Are tweeted and amplified
Like fire in dry grass
Or measles over anti-vaxers
In our posh suburbs
I use impartial fractions to create unbiased algorithms.
Calvin & Hobbes taught me about imaginary numbers, like eleventeen and thirty-twelve.
47: Then you'll defintely want to buy my self-published manifesto, The Secret Truth about Calvin and Hobbes.
Spoiler!
The tiger is the only one that's real!!!!
Just like how professional wrestling is real, and everything else is fake.
Real numbers are fake in every meaningful sense.
Everything not a number is unreal
And who the fuck are you, then, Jimmie? 007?
To clarify my sample size point: say you've got a sample of men from Maine and they average 5 foot 10.2 in height. That's within a standard deviation of the national mean - it's the mean plus 0.4sigma. So is that significant? Depends on the sample size. If you'd just got a sample of three then not. If the sample was 20,000 Maine men, then that is significant; you can conclude that something is happening to make Maine men taller than average.
Since this is sort of a math thread, it's already gone off topic, and there's been a poem posted, it seems appropriate to comment here that today I discovered that there's a Grothendieck song:
When I was a young boy doing maths in class
I thought I knew it all.
Every test that I took, I was sure to pass.
I felt pride, and there never came a fall.
Up at university, I found what life is for:
A world of mathematics, and all mine to explore.
Learning geometry and logic, I was having a ball.
Until I hit a wall...
For I adore Euler and Erdős,
Élie Cartan and Ramanujan
Newton and Noether. But not to sound churlish
There's one man I cannot understand.
No, I can't get to grips with Grothendieck,
My palms feel sweaty and my knees go weak.
I'm terrified that never will I master the technique
Of Les Éments de Géométrie Algébrique.
He's a thoughtful and a thorough theory-builder, sans pareil.
But can anybody help me find the secret, s'il vous plaît
Of this awe-inspiring generality and abstraction?
I have to say it's driving me to total distraction.
For instance... A Euclidean point is a location in space, and that we can all comprehend.
René Descartes added coordinates for the power and the rigour they lend.
Later came Zariski topology, where a point's a type of algebraic set
Of dimension nought. Well, that's not what I thought. But it's ok. There's hope for me yet!
But now and contra all prior belief
We hear a point's a prime ideal
In a locally ringed space, overlaid with a sheaf.
Professor G, is truly this for real?
No, I can't make head nor tail of Grothendieck
Or Deligne, or Serre, or any of that clique.
I'll have to learn not to care whenever people speak
Of Les Fondements de la Géométrie Algébrique.
But don't take me for a geometrical fool.
I can do much more than merely prove the cosine rule.
I'll calculate exotic spheres in dimension 29
And a variety of varieties, projective and affine.
I'm comfortable with categories (though not if they're derived)
I'll tile hyperbolic space in dimension 25
I can compute curvature with the Gauss-Bonnet law
And just love the Leech Lattice in dimension 24.
But algebro-geometric scheming
Leaves me spluttering and screaming.
And in logic too, you may call me absurd
But I wouldn't know a topos, if trampled by a herd.
I've tried Pursuing Stacks but they vanished out of sight,
I've fought with étale cohomology with all my might.
And Les Dérivateurs. It's 2000 pages long.
I reach halfway through line 3, before it all goes badly wrong.
No, I'll never get to grips with Grothendieck
And I'm frightened that I'm failing as a mathematics geek.
All the same, I can't deny the lure and the mystique
Of Le Séminaire de Géométrie Algébrique.
Wow. Someone a lot cleverer than me with the academic satire songs musta wrote that one.
||
What are people giving HS graduates these days? My favorite anarkid is graduating in a month, and I am invited to her party. I was thinking $50, given that I'm not actually a relative. But if everyone else gives $100, I obviously don't want to seem cheap. I've already spent a couple hours debating this question with myself.
||>
Twenty dollars and a lie about how America is the land of opportunity.
$40 is fine. $50 is fine. Anything in the middle is going to make people talk.
Then you can ask for $3.59 back if you want to give $46.41.
People give things to HS graduates besides a duffel bag to stuff their clothes into?
You can use duffle bags for lots of things besides clothes.
You could give them a quarter ounce of weed. That always goes over well.
We do fentanyl these days. Granpa.
cool then you just need to give him like 1000 mcg. share with friends though so you don't die!
I picture the temple facade falling as its anarkids all wander off in different directions.
|| Coup under way in Venezuela. https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2019/apr/30/venezuela-opposition-leader-juan-guaido-claims-coup-underway-live-news |>
I mean, assuming it works and doesn't result in something worse.
||
Scott Pilgrim: watch/no-watch?
|>
73: don't bother.
On the subject: "Us" is pretty good but with occasional lapses of tone which detract from the general effect; "Lying for Money" is a fun superficial read but doesn't have much substance to it.
55. In a locally ringed space, overlaid with a sheaf.
Nice! I remember a grad-level math course (something like "Advanced Topics in Algebra") that was all about that scary stuff. People used to post the course description on bulletin boards* as an example of something totally incomprehensible. "The co-homology of sheaves" was one item on the list of topics. (A friend of mine later took the course and loved it.)
* There was another course called "Lubrication and Friction" that was often posted, because if you read the course description in the right frame of mind, it was pornographic.
73: Watch, especially if you have a big or above-average screen opportunity. It's ultimately less than the sum of its parts, Cera is miscast, but its parts are extremely fun, a visual extravaganza where they were trying to make something genuinely new, even if they didn't succeed.
We need a tiebreaker! Don't let me down, reprobates!
In my experience, movies are usually not worth it.
If you want to listen to a fish, go ahead.
A bit more than seven years ago, I posted a comment here about a pet-related dilemma. Many people told me I was insane to choose the puppy. Today the puppy officially became a full-fledged dog. I haven't been around here as much in recent years, but thanks to all of you for serving as an occasional sounding board as well as a source of entertainment.
For the life of me, I didn't understand that thread at all.
I didn't know dogs lived that long.
Chris Evans is in this movie?
(For the record, I liked Chris Evans before he was famous.)
Endorse 76 though I kind of liked Cera in the role.
"Us" is great. I think I mentioned it here before. See it in the theater if you can and don't read anything about it before.
Do I need to have played video games in the 90s to appreciate this? Because I didn't do that.
Read books? I like Michael Cera, in theory. It's feeling very Aaron Sorkin at his point, Anna Kendrick notwithstanding.
Would this make more sense if I were sober?
Barry: I haven't seen "Get Out" yet. Better than "Us", or worse?
This feels like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but without the talent or pathos.
Note the comic's final volume was not available as of the film's production, so the filmmakers winged it.
Like Game of Thrones without the incest?
What are the racial politics of a Canadian film having an Indian man wear eye shadow and break into song?
Canadians measure speed in kph? Schizos.
94 It's great. Maybe better? But "Us" is pretty great. "Get Out" takes up the issue of white supremacy quite explicitly whereas Us...is not about that.
But if you're asking then definitely see it. Jordan Peele is great.
70 John Singleton, RIP. 51 is way too young.
106, 107: thanks. "Us" was good enough that I didn't regret seeing it, though not good enough for me to spontaneously recommend to other people; if "Get Out" is better than that then it's worth watching too.
Is this sexist? It feels sexist.
Also, Chris Evans is dead already.
I'm on fight number 3. Apparently there're 7? I'm really tired.
Get Out is way better than Us. I enjoyed Us, though I don't think it really holds together. I love, love, love Get Out.
That said, if one of your issues with Us is "lapses in tone", then you might have the same complaint about Get Out. I didn't find that objectionable at all, but I know it's a common issue.
Whiskey is finished. CG dragons.
Flaming katana in the heart? Really?
If I had photosensitive epilepsy I would literally be dead by now.
I liked it at the time for Minivet reasons plus narcotics but my reaction on a recent rewatch was more Mossy.
I don't know if 81 deserves to be front-paged, but it certainly deserves to be unburied. Congratulations!! Although it sounds like you've wanted to take the puppy to the not-necessarily-no-kill shelter a few times over the years, I hope it mellows in its maturity. Also, if seven dog years is one people year, extra congratulations on your insane productivity!
28: So many of the flat-earth theories are so cool* even if they don't make any sense. "
I think this is a big reason I like reading SFF; it is a way to read geology, politics, physics, etc. but with extra newness of being in another world and so I feel like i'm reading science for the first time again.
Seems like Guaidó started the coup without getting the military on board first. Bob Denard is rolling in his grave.
You go to coup with the military someone else has.
Anyway, John Bolton-style planning always involves assuming unlikely things are necessary.
I might have seen Jordan Peele on Sunday evening on the D train. I was trying to decide once and for whether it was him but he started giving me mildly anxious looks back and I figured I should stop creeping. If that guy wasn't Jordan Peele he looked a ton like him.
Congratulations congratulations congratulations 81!
Congratulations Unserious! The puppy became a real dog. (And that old thread was a hoot to reread.)
55: Luckily, there's mLab to clear everything up for us.
My puppy was drowned in a sack.
You come at the caudillo, you best not miss.