Update on the fake story about the river laborers paying people to whip them
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu
One of my pet peeves is the chain of citations that will inevitably spawn from this. No author can be bothered to go find the original source and just cite that, so this inaccurate (and since retracted) quote will end up propagating itself for decades if not centuries, with each author citing the work that they got the story from. Eventually, hundreds of years from now, someone will be crazy enough to try to work their way down the chain to track down the original, only to discover it isn't there.
For an excellent and humorous example, see CGP Grey's search for the original Tiffany: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qEV9qoup2mQ
When a paper contains an “invalid reference”, flag that paper in a database. Expose a service that allows you to share a list of references and receive any flags and the reasons. You can then more carefully scrutinize the papers you’re citing that might have referencing issues.
Bonus: display an entire reference tree and show branches with issues. Not that an issue invalidates a branch, but it might bring into question the integrity of the branch, especially if the reference in question is so key to the claims.
WHAT'S THE JOKE?
> Most of us believe that we do stuff because we want to be good people, and that other people act the same. But the dominant political philosophy for the last half-century, "economism," views us as slaves to "incentives" and nothing more.
> Economism is the philosophy of the neoclassical economists, whose ideology has consumed both the Democrats and Republicans. They dismiss all "non-market" solutions (that is, projects of democratically accountable governments) as failed before they're begun, due to the "incentives" of the individuals in the government.
Most of us believes there's more to be done than people want to do out of their own good will, and that some things nobody will want to do without an incentive. (I bet garbage truck workers don't do it from being good people).
You might have the privilege of enjoying what you work for. So maybe take some time to realize that you're the outlier here.
By the way, your so called "democratic accountability" is up for sale by your media, and their so called projects are incredibly corrupt because they were bought. If you took some time to understand economism, maybe you'll realize why your Congress budget bills look like they do.
Making it impossible - by definition - for anyone to do something without incentive.
Making the term a catch-all term-of-the-art, with a meaning quite different from the general meaning of "incentive".
(Eg, the general term "incentive pay" is meaningless using the economism definition since all pay is incentive.)
> some things nobody will want to do without an incentive
By your definition, "out of their own good will" is an altruistic incentive, so of course it's impossible for someone to do this without incentive - you've defined it to be impossible.
The problem with economism is how this technical definition gets confused with the general definition. I think you just did that.
> I bet garbage truck workers don't do it from being good people
That's .... a really sad view you have there of garbage truck workers. And of people.
Literally no one is saying there are enough people like David Sedaris, who picks up rubbish as a hobby, to meet the garbage hauling needs.
But if "incentive" includes altruism, then we know some garbage truck workers are partially incentivized by the public health role they play as sanitation workers, and the pride they get from helping keep the street clean. (Source: my cousin's husband was a garbage truck worker.)
The problem is when economism reduces everything to strictly financial measures.
> maybe you'll realize why your Congress budget bills look like they do
I don't regard the US as having a healthy democratic system.
> You might have the privilege of enjoying what you work for. So maybe take some time to realize that you're the outlier here.
If every other day I come home from work crying, because I'm stuck in a position I can't change, would that change your opinion?
Or are you just sniping at me for the lulz?
[1]https://news.gallup.com/poll/245255/750-million-worldwide-mi...
https://ia801005.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages....
The full book is available on Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/06AsterixAndCleopatra_201804/pag...
Of course you're right about the global consequences. Many people would rather that the world be destroyed in a nuclear conflagration, than that some politician they don't like had told a joke and they hadn't laughed. A few wise people long ago realized that everything is a joke; they also program in Lisp.
Participants were 65 Cornell University undergraduates from a variety of courses in psychology who earned extra credit for their participation. We created a 30-item questionnaire made up of jokes we felt were of varying comedic value. Jokes were taken from Woody Allen (1975), Al Frankin (1992), and a book of “really silly” pet jokes by Jeff Rovin (1996). To assess joke quality, we contacted several professional comedians via electronic mail and asked them to rate each joke on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all funny) to 11 (very funny). [. . .] Although the ratings provided by the eight comedians were moderately reliable (a = .72), an analysis of interrater correlations found that one (and only one) comedian's ratings failed to correlate positively with the others (mean r = -.09).The truth of either illustration is wholly beyond the point; if you have a problem with the point you might as well limit yourself to that rather then take the view that anecdotes need to be refuted.
But don't take my word for it: https://archive-srel.uga.edu/outreach/ecoviews/ecoview071223...
When I read about the frog I suspend scientific analysis of the frog long enough to get the anecdote. When I read the whipping story I think wow British people are so racist, so disconnected from reality, and so stupid they believe that the people they subjugated in their land are such natural slaves that when not crushed under a British heel they pay to be likewise abused in their own lands.
If you wanted to simultaneously smear the modern Brit and the modern American you could do no better than to let Michael Munger talk.
>the declaration of independence has x pages
>the EU regulations on lettuce have y pages
> y>x!!!
>laughter erupts
except it’s not true and never has been true, but the falsehood is more powerful than reality, so it’s widely “known” as a fact
Ever since I was made aware of Betteridge's law of headlines, and I started noticing it was correct based on my own experiences, I more or less refuse to read anything with a question as the title. I'm sure I'm missing a few good things with this practice, but I'm saving a lot of time missing out on wastes of time. Enough so that I consider it a net benefit.
Similarly, from now on, I'm going to be immediately suspicious of all claims that are served up with a side of folksy anecdotes.
The whole thing seems like a fallacy by appeal to "common sense".
So Betteridge's Law is true based on your own, shall we say, anecdotal experience?
Same here. Most of the content titled in this way is essentially vapid click-bait or a list of obvious facts with no real research, conclusions, or novel ideas.
I don’t like Gelman’s arrogant style, and a number of his posts have struck me as sneering at some idea or method without any good counter argument provided. At this point my prior is that everything he says should be taken with a grain is salt.
> In 1970, Toronto’s John McManus was my guest in Seattle. I chatted to him about what happened when I was a refugee in wartime Guangxi. The journey from Liuzhou to Guiping was by river, and there were men on the banks whose job was to drag the boat with ropes. There was also an overseer armed with a whip. According to my mother, the whipper was hired to do just that by the boatmen! My tale went the rounds, and it was seized by a number of neo-institutional economists. . . . However, this could be a story invented by my mother – the smartest person I have ever known – to entertain a boy of seven!
When the original teller doesn't believe his own story and the story flies in the face of everything we know about human nature and the story can be fully explained as a mom trying to shelter her son (which is very much human nature), I think we can go with "fake story" as the most likely hypothesis.
In college I played in a club rugby team. Everyone who was on the team had to pay dues, and one of the things the dues paid for was our coach. Now I understand the big differences between being whipped by an overseer and having a coach make you run wind sprints, but at the same time there is a similarity to outsourcing this unpleasant activity to an outsider who will do it at arms length.
As another sports example, consider the cox'n in an eights rowing boat.