Charles R. Twardy

Good essay by Peter Norton Why we need Strong Towns critiquing a Current Affairs piece by Allison Dean.

I side with Norton here: Dean falls into the trap of demanding ideological purity. If you have to read only one, pick Norton. But after donning your Norton spectacles, read Dean for a solid discussion of points of overlap, reinterpreting critiques as debate about the best way to reach shared goals.

This other response to Dean attempts to add some middle ground to Dean’s Savannah and Flint examples, hinting what a reframed critique might look like. Unfortunately it’s long and meanders, and grinds its own axen.

I suspect Dean is allergic to economic justifications like “wealth” and “prosperity”. But we want our communities to thrive, and valuing prosperity is no more yearning for Dickensian hellscapes than loving community is pining for totalitarian ones.

The wonderful, walkable, wish-I-lived-there communities on Not Just Bikes are thriving, apparently in large part by sensible people-oriented design. More of that please.

(And watch Not Just Bikes for a more approachable take on Strong Towns, and examples of success.)

In a recent newsletter, Jesse Singal notes that recent MAGA gains among Democratic constituencies should prompt progressives to pause and question their own political assumptions & theories:

It is quite a string of anomalies. A scientist would be prompted to look for alternate theories.

Singal suggests part of the problem is essentialism:

…activists and others like to talk and write about race in the deeply essentialist and condescending and tokenizing way… It’s everywhere, and it has absolutely exploded during the Trump years.

…both right-wing racists and left-of-center social justice types, [tend] to flatten groups of hundreds of millions of people into borderline useless categories, and to then pretend they share some sort of essence…

The irony.

~~~

Aside: I’m also reminded of a grad school story from Ruth.

Zeno: …Descartes is being an essentialist here…

Ruth: Wait, no, I think you’re being the essentialist….

_____: I’m sorry, what’s an essentialist?

Zeno: [short pause] It is a derogatory term.

(Yes, we had a philosophy teacher named Zeno. I’m not sure if the subject was actually Descartes.)

In The bias we swim in, Linda McIver notes:

Recently I saw a post going around about how ChatGPT assumed that, in the sentence “The paralegal married the attorney because she was pregnant.” “she” had to refer to the paralegal. It went through multiple contortions to justify its assumption…

Her own conversation with ChatGPT was not as bad as the one making the rounds, but still self-contradictory.

Of course it makes the common gender mistake. What amazes me are the contorted justifications. What skin off AIs nose to say, “Yeah, OK, ‘she’ could be the attorney”? But it’s also read responses and learned that humans get embarrassed and move to self defense.

                         ~~~~~

If justifying, it could do better. Surely someone must have written how the framing highlights the power dynamic. And I find this reading less plausible:

The underling married his much better-paid boss BECAUSE she was pregnant.

At least, it’s not the same BECAUSE implied in the original.

Reflection for sheltered people like me:

Laura points out that even in the US, a sizable minority have been living in “actual history”.

Alan Jacobs, The HedgeHog Review, “David Hume’s Guide to Social Media: Emancipation by the cultivation of taste.”

Alan Jacobs reminds us to eschew easy opinions (re: Supreme court here): blog.ayjay.org/reading-s…

…in which minutes are kept and hours are lost. 😉

Geol. Soc. of Wash. 1999

AstralCodex on nerds and hipsters:

Revisited my old post about reconstructing Syrotuck’s (lost) Lost Person Data. Mediocre writing, but I still like the basic data detective work we did.

Analysis in Google Sheets

Bookmark: Haidt on Why the mental health of liberal girls sank first and fastest.

• Reverse CBT hypothesis
• Tumblr - 4Chan dynamic (From Phelps-Roper)
• Other things to re-read

Based on the abstract, it seems Alexander Bird’s Understanding the replication crisis as a base rate fallacy has it backwards. Is there reason to dig into the paper?

He notes a core feature of the crisis:

If most of the hypotheses under test are false, then there will be many false hypotheses that are apparently supported by the outcomes of well conducted experiments and null hypothesis significance tests with a type-I error rate (α) of 5%.

Then he says this solves the problem:

Failure to recognize this is to commit the fallacy of ignoring the base rate.

But it merely states the problem: Why most published research findings are false.

Fascinating discussion of Lord of the Rings:

• Adam Roberts musings on Denethor’s death sees a tension between Roman and Christian views on suicide..
• Alan Jacobs self-sacrifice and despair thinks not, and offers four excellent points.
• Roberts takes this on board at the end of his essay on the (lack of) death penalty in Middle Earth
• Jacobs responds with the sovereignty of mercy.

But whatever it is, it seems to whisper of the sovereignty of mercy above that of legal decree. It shows us a world in which penalties of death are declared, but are then abrogated by the wise and kind.

And on this theme, Laura reminds me of the classic essay, Frodo didn’t fail

I think Jacobs has the right of it where he stakes a claim, but there’s much else in Roberts' pieces. Including this marvelous merger of Eowyn’s speech at Pelennor and the Gettysburg address.

It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. ‘But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Eowyn I am, Eomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. That &c. &c.’

Roberts prefers the punchier movie version, “I am no man”. Fair enough! But in musing on that I found a fantastic 2015 essay by Mary Huening, '“I am no man” doesn’t cut it' that lays out precisely what we lose about Eowyn in the movies.

Alan Jacobs on The sovereignty of mercy in Middle Earth (and beyond).

I understand?

I enjoyed this discussion of the John Snow cholera story, inspired by Christmas cookies. podcasts.apple.com

[To fix peer review, break it into stages], a short Nature opinion by Olava Amaral.

• Separate evaluation of rigor from curation of space.
• Check the data first!
• Statcheck can do a lot of this.
• Reallocate the 100M annual hours of peer review to standardization etc.

Bookmark: Clean Code in Python by Nik Tomazik

Clean Code by Robert Martin is Java-oriented. Tomazik uses Python examples and includes some Python features.

Well that’s cool. Gravitational lensing.

• Supernova at 3 stages of its life, all at once.
• Another one last year with the 4th image predicted to appear ~2037.

HTT the Northern Virginia Astronomy Club mail list. 🌌

Interesting look at speed gains in Python 3.11, by Beshr Kayali. (Who has a microblog! @beshr@m.beshr.com)

Thanks to Ewan McNay for alerting me to this gem:

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days –
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

John M. Ford, October 2003, first comment on a post on Patrick and Teresa Nielsen-Hayden’s blog.

Fascinating and sobering AI reflection by Daniel Miessler.

AI Art is doing what we thought would come from AGI.

It “understands” nouns, verbs, context, emotions, relationships, and can put them together in touching or fantastic near-pixel-perfect pieces, or generate relatable novelties like “a sad ice cream”.

See his post for why he thinks much knowledge work is “ice-cream and sadness”.

In the meantime, look at the collection of images he posted from Midjourney’s V4 engine:

Kevin Driscoll’s Prehistory of social media is a lovely short reminder of the 2400 baud days.

Driscoll, Kevin. “A Prehistory of Social Media.” Issues in Science and Technology 38, no. 4 (Summer 2022): 20–23.

ADSEI’s Linda McIver on swapping toy problems for real ones:

(My emphasis.)

Thoughts

Mainly I wanted to emphasize that this sensible intervention increased boys' participation as well as girls'.

The take-home seems to be “the reason we haven’t seen [more] progress is that we’ve been teaching it badly”. And that this can be fixed by using real, relevant problems.

Also using STEM is somewhat misleading. Without claiming success, of course women have made notable progress in STEM. But far far less in computer/data science. Which, as McIver notes, has repelled many men as well as women.

If McIver is right, teaching real and relevant problems will stop artificially repelling qualified people.

On progress

• Forbes 2017: women were 53% of Bachelor’s degree recipients in science, engineering and math. That’s progress. But women were only 16% (!) of computer science degrees.
• US Census bureau 2021 figure below. Note:
  • “Social science accounted for only 3% of STEM occupations,” so that line not as good as it looks.
  • Women % in computers declined from 1990.