Why a pro/con list is 75% as good as your fancy machine learning algorithm | Hacker News Reader

Why a pro/con list is 75% as good as your fancy machine learning algorithm

chrisstucchio.com

18 pointsjpdus26 comments

Aren't we, like, not supposed to do this kind of thing anymore?

I agree with you. This introduces race and sex into a topic that requires neither, benefits from neither, and doesn't explore either in a useful way.

Do you mean the checklists or the stereotyping / judging on superficial attributes?

Author here. I know that treating the L^2 ball as somehow equivalent to binary vectors is invalid - I even say so in the post. If it helps, I explicitly point out the place where the real work for the binary vector would have to go.

The basic idea is I think is to use the central limit theorem on dot(u,d) and dot(p,d) - but unfortunately the CLT does not show that these two dot products are independent.

Just remember: Your name is on this and you're intentionally pouring gasoline onto an issue that didn't need it.

Author expresses confusion about why people are offended in 3, 2, 1...

Is there an obvious reason for drawing vectors from the Dirichlet distribution?

The Dirichlet distribution I chose is merely the uniform distribution over the unit simplex. I.e., it means that all possible h-vectors get equal weight.

It's an attempt to choose as uninformative a prior on h as possible.

This post was killed by user flags.

Is there some particular reason why the LateX stuff is untransformed?

What browser do you use? Are the files from cdn.mathjax.org not loading?

I refreshed and it healed. I'm going to assume something got overloaded.

75% as good... 100% not good enough

I'm somewhat amused that both women get +1 for great legs and both get 0 for "not letting me work", heh.

It's also interesting that white Svetlana gets +1 for being smart, while black Elise gets +1 for being black but isn't smart. Interesting little Freudian slip (is that the right term?) there, I guess.

I also agree with other commenters that introducing sex/race into this discussion seems completely unnecessary. A better example might be cars, comparing a minivan vs a convertible or something less... politically charged.

Law of small numbers - with only 2 examples, you have to cram lots of possibilities in there. The author envisions two people he might date, and a variety of possible attributes. So he would date someone if they were smart or not, exciting or not, black or not. But probably not someone fat. The whole exercise is an exploration of what the author thinks of himself and has nothing to do with actual women.

Yep. Totally get that. We've got a long way to go...

Oh yeah, poor judgment for sure. But I don't think "smart" was taken off to balance "black", but more likely "exciting".

So the author thought, "I'll make an article about pro/con lists", but he thought he'd make it sexist and racist while he's at it. That's hilarious.

Couldn't you pick something less controversial, like say, comparing religions, political parties or sports teams?

Those are strange examples of "less controversial."

A "less controversial" topic of comparison would be boxers vs. briefs.

EDIT: I'm bad at sarcasm detection.

I am pretty sure the GP was being sarcastic with that list of alternatives (if it just mentioned one of those things, the GP might have just made a mistake, but by naming three controversial things and nothing else, it was likely said sarcastically.

There is nothing sexist or racist about this article, unless you believe that stating a black person is black is somehow offensive towards black people.

Actually, he marks black as a "pro" which is an almost hilariously mathematical form of racism.

Like many people, I hold certain aesthetic preferences. You can call me racist while continuing to prefer blondes to brunettes if it makes you feel good about yourself.

The line between 'aesthetic preference' and 'fetish object' is a fine one.

Well, the black person also got 0 points for "smart"...

The persona in the article is a parody of a man who judges women, and not an actual judgment of women.

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