The Best Comment on the Supreme Court's Reasoning in the Gay-Marriage Decision
… came from Dave Munger years before the decision. One of the possible replies to “Should Congress have intervened in -mumble mumble-?” at the top is:
No, that is specifically proscribed by Amendment Pi of the Constitution, in magic invisible ink that only special people can see.
Two Annoying Reactions on the Right to the Gay-Marriage Decision
Soon they will be forcing religious organizations to perform gay marriages!
The question of whether the fact that something is legal means someone can be compelled to get involved with it against his/her religion has already been brought up. Remember the Hobby Lobby case of last year? The same court responsible for the gay-marriage decision ruled in favor of the rights of people called bigots. Please note that contraception has even wider and deeper backing from the Left than gay marriage.
We will never be able to get rid of this!
Just a few days before the gay-marriage decision, the court overturned raisin-control. This was part of the left-wing agenda of a couple of decades ago, defended with the same amount of condescension we see today in the gay-marriage debate. Not every left-wing victory is permanent.
ObSF: “In a good cause, there are no failures, only delayed successes.”—Isaac Asimov
Don't Let This Crisis Go to Waste!
I'm talking about the OPM breach. Remember that?
There's a common libertarian argument: Government is usually incompetent. There's a common response to that argument on the left: Right-wing governments are incompetent because of deliberate sabotage. For example, according to a commenter on Facebook:
Republicans start with the premise that government doesn't work and has no solutions, then they fight tooth and nail to get in office and prove it.
In the case of the OPM breach we see a clear instance of government incompetence that cannot be blamed on right-wing sabotage.
I also heard that there were a few newsworthy Supreme-Court decisions. At least raisins are finally free!
Inceptionism and “Dog Whistles”
A theory about political idiots
The typical political idiot on the Internet takes his cues about what a controversy is Really About from other idiots on the other side of the controversy. This explains why lots of left-wing idiots are convinced that any discussion of academic excellence is a “dog whistle” to racists and, for that matter, why right-wing idiots frequently assume that open border libertarians are Cultural Marxists.
The inceptionism connection
I recently posted a mention of inceptionism. If a neural network is trained on one set of data and then interprets a different set, that different set will still resemble the training set to the network. For example, a cloud will look like an animal or a tree will look like a building or an intellectual snob will look like a racist or a libertarian will look like a Communist agent or …
In possibly-related news, inceptionist images are frequently described using Lovecraftian terminology.
A Brief Note on Dixiecrats
It's common for conservatives to point out that the Republicans were the party that abolished slavery and that the Democrats defended it. The standard response from Democrats is to claim the parties have switched places.
Maybe the conservatives should criticize “the identity-politics party” or “the party opposed to the 1%” or “the party that shouts down dissent” or the “party that regards disagreement as offensive” or …
In the other direction, I doubt if the Republicans have changed much.
The Conclusion Sounds Plausible …
… but I'm still skeptical of the research that purports to show that conservatives have more self control than liberals (original paper here).
In part of the research, the experimenters gave the experimental subjects fabricated data on the effects of a belief in free will. (I have criticized this style of research before.) If the researchers were willing to lie to at least one set of experimental subjects, why should we believe them now?
On the other hand, this appears to back up my theory that conservatives might do better at the Stroop test. I'd like to see this replicated by other researchers … followed by a study of the Asch test. On the gripping hand, by the reasoning in the preceding paragraph, all studies using the Asch test are dubious.
If Leftists Are Refusing to Have Children …
What Happens When Random Data Is Decompressed?
Are Some Teachers AIs?
News that a computer program did better than most humans at questions on IQ tests has been going around the blogosphere. As far as I could tell, the program worked by examining published texts to see which words usually went with which. Let's consider what happens when humans use such an algorithm.
If we search high and low for examples of antonyms in published texts, we frequently see that pairs of words identified as antonyms occur in the form of “Word_A and Word_B.” That's as plain as black and white. If we generalize from that we might decide, for example, that “cat” is the opposite of “dog” or “tadpole” is the opposite of “frog.” I think the algorithm has limitations.
ObSF: “Camels and Dromedaries, Clem” by R. A. Lafferty
When Is Skepticism Justified?
Consider the following scenario: There is a school of thought that makes a theoretical prediction based on what appear to be good reasons. For some reason, the evidence to back up said prediction does not seem to be forthcoming, which is cited by people disagreeing with it. Time passes … and something resembling evidence at long last shows up. On the other hand, it's much less than the people who originally issued the prediction had in mind.
How skeptical should we be about the prediction? In a related question, what is the track record of earlier predictions that fit the pattern?
I can think of several predictions that fit the above pattern. One of them is believed by the Left. Another is believed by the Right. I am disinclined to take either that seriously. On the other hand, there are other predictions that I am inclined to take seriously that also fit the pattern.
A Consequence of China's One-Child Policy
It's producing a non-trivial number of Chinese citizens with no close relatives. If one of them has access to classified information, he/she might be willing to defect if there's nobody who can be held hostage.
If I were Chinese, I'd be wondering if Malthusian theories are part of a deliberate disinformation plan.
You Cannot Resist This
It's the Wave of the Fuschia!
A Unified Paranoid Theory
It should be completely obvious that GMO foods were developed by H1B-visa holders working for Monsanto (bankrolled by a consortium consisting of the Elders of Zion and renegade Objectivist extraterrestrials from Zeta Reticuli) using a template developed by the Freemasons (you can find it encoded in the Washington DC street plan) in order to produce a vaccine (but only when grown using radioactive fertilizer) that would both prevent circumcisions from being reversed and produce antibodies to medical marijuana.
Kindle Auto-correct
A few months ago, I turned off the auto-correct “feature” of my Kindle Fire. I recently noticed it was back and, when I tried using the settings, I saw nothing that would turn off auto-correct.
Now, when I try typing “glyphosate” on the Kindle (to comment on this thread, it turns it into “toothpaste.”
Did Agriculture Make People Worse Off?
According to Jared Diamond (in the course of a whine about the agricultural revolution):
If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?
Is the choice between existence as a peasant farmer and existence as a hunter-gatherer? Or is it between existence as a peasant farmer and non-existence? There was, after all, a large in population.
As far as I can tell, the upper-class population in agricultural societies was about the same as the hunter-gatherer population. For example, in Medieval England, there were 200 men in the upper aristocracy and 1000 knights. If we assume that a typical aristocratic family included a Lord, a Lady and couple of children, the upper class would be 4800 people. According to Jared Diamond, hunter gatherers had a population density of \(\frac{1}{10}\) person per square mile, which means England's 50,000 square miles could support 5000 of them, about the same number as in the agricultural upper class. The advantages of being a hunter-gatherer also applied to the upper class. People in the upper class did not spend all day shoveling manure and had a diet with adequate protein.
In other words, the agricultural revolution did not take hunter-gatherers and turn them into peasants but added a peasant population.
Applying the above to a hypothetical society consisting largely of “ems” will be left as an exercise for the reader.
Jigsaw Politician?
From “The Jigsaw Man” by Larry Niven:
The state will prove that the said Warren Lewis Knowles did, in the space of two years,
willfully drive through a total of six red traffic lights. During that same period the same Warren Knowles exceeded local speed limits no less than ten times, once by as much as fifteen miles an hour. …
From The New York Times:
According to a search of the Miami-Dade and Duval County court dockets, the Rubios have been cited for numerous infractions over the years for incidents that included speeding, driving through red lights and careless driving. A review of records dating back to 1997 shows that the couple had a combined 17 citations: Mr. Rubio with four and his wife with 13. On four separate occasions they agreed to attend remedial driving school after a violation.
Mr. Rubio’s troubles behind the wheel predate his days in politics. In 1997, when he was cited for careless driving by a Florida Highway Patrol officer, he was fined and took voluntary driving classes. A dozen years later, in 2009, he was ticketed for speeding on a highway in Duval County and found himself back in driver improvement school.
Things got more complicated in 2011 when Mr. Rubio was alerted to the fact that his license was facing suspension after a traffic camera caught him failing to stop at a red light in his beige Buick. His lawyer, Alex Hanna, paid a $16 fee to delay the suspension and eventually it was dismissed.
I was reminded somehow.
Another Note to My Fellow Mathematicians
Try not to use too many typefaces in the same article. You're writing math articles, not ransom notes. Also please remember that MathJax can't handle really weird typefaces.
To My Fellow Mathematicians…
Please note that the {subequations} environment in \(\rm\LaTeX\) will increment the main equation counter even when there are no equation numbers displayed. If you forget that, you might write an article in which the equation numbers skip from (17) to (20), causing the copy editors to wonder if you've discovered a new method of counting.
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