avs733

I would add a corollary to this...when facts are posited in support of this ideology, you should be highly suspicious of them. Because more often then not the guy who built the house is telling you the foundation was irrelevant.

Private industry often has the option to NOT do something. When they leverage that option, if the thing really does need to be done, it is typically left to government. That puts government led initiatives at an inherent disadvantage when private industry also dictates the metrics of success. Government is forced into doing things that private industry doesn't want to or cannot do - and we point to the government like its a failure. See USPS vs. FedEx/UPS - USPS treats its employees well, delivers to everyone, and controls prices to make basic services accessible to all citizens. Private versions do none of those things but we view them as more successful because 'they don't lose money'.

Example from when I used to live in Arizona:

* they introduced a school voucher program

* theoretically, charter schools could not discriminate against students with disabilities

* students with disabilities are more expensive to educate, in a public school the ratio of able bodied to disabled students helps lessen the burden of those costs

* shockingly, Charter schools in practice wildly discriminated against students with serious disabilities. They used the language of 'would not succeed in our rigorous academic environment'

* Students with major disabilities (e.g., Down's Syndrome) became enormously overrepresented in public schools

* For public schools - costs per student went up, relative test scores went down.

Some argued that this was proof that public education was failing and they needed to expand the voucher program and grow the number of Charter schools. I would argue it didn't - the ideology of industry better than government just changed the rules, broke the system, and claimed a victory.

Space-X and Blue Origin and [insert space startup here] exists because of NASA in the 60s and 70s and everyday since. It isn't just that NASA did the early parts and now industry can do now. NASA literally used that time to write the standards that all of these companies now rely on. They generated the knowledge base required to succeed in spaceflight. They literally generated the standards - e.g., 3D printed spaceflight parts https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/msfcstd... that are a starting point for anything they do.

I don't think that is a Spain only problem. As an American, that speaks to me of how most government and corporate systems operate. They are actively detrimental to helping people in need and do a terrible job of preventing fraud.

Here they are more likely to result in punishing the already poor or underprivileged and at times seem to be the way we prop our economy up.

I think the biggest shift I have noticed in watching comparisons is not a particular single change, it is a paradigm shift.

There seems to be actual thought put into how space for moving people is, should be, and will be used. It doesn't begin with an assumption of building a road and then work from there. That change in planning assumption is enormous. I'm hoping the pandemic does something to shift the US culture of infrastructure building but I am not hopeful.

(it was sarcasm, I honestly went back and forth several times about whether to add an indicator and decided it was unbecoming)

My wife and I are a one car household. On a typical day we both alt commute - I run or bike 7 miles to work and she runs/walks 3-4. We walk our daughter to and from daycare - even in the rain. These are choices we are barely able to make because we live in the near burbs of a pedestrian focused US city.

The US built infrastructure isn't just 'cheap' on pedestrian safety it is actively hostile. There are neighrborhoods that resist sidewalks for 'safety' reasons where safety means - only poor people walk and poor people are criminals. When I used to live in Phoenix Arizona, It would take me both hands to count the number of times i was stopped by police while walking because I was 'suspicious'. I would say I have a scary experience at least once a week alt commuting.

My bike lane to work goes from no bike lane to physically separated rails to trail to protected bike path to just suddenly ending and dumping me into traffic. It is ABSURD. I was once physically talked off my bike by a driver because I yelled at them for driving in the bikelane. The police who responded threatened to cite me for disorderly conduct.

I could go on.

I watch the youtube channel Not Just Bikes as a form of catharsis. I thought I had it good until I saw just how good places like the Netherlands have it.

as a pedestrian I've just found that the result of those in Georgia, USA is that drivers ignore pedestrians more slowly.

Sidewalks are an optional extra on road building so...in his defense...you can't build a sidewalk without a road, which makes it significantly more expensive.

"In most places in America walking is not a practical mode of transportation because of distance; it’s miles from your house to the grocery store, for instance. If you live in a city this might not be obvious to you but half the country lives in the burbs or rural areas."

That seems like a problem that could be solved through zoning. Solutions that by your definition inherently put people at risk seem an easy thing to re-evaluate.

this is exactly the roll our judicial branch should play and so rarely does.

Step by step in America, the judicial branch has become more and more deferential to the executive branch when it comes to law enforcement. The reality is that I (and you) should have zero expectation that they will protect you from bad state actors at this point.

It is something everyone involved with the judiciary should be embarrassed about.

and the courts choose to be party to this, and there is no consequence.

which is the (great great?) grand parents point ... laws not being reasonably applied.

He means “lied about”. He may not know it but that’s what he means.

thats part of the goal of this approach to argumentation. Its not a bug it's a feature.

did you really compare saying Marijuana and a word you won't say?

ugh...uniforms for employees

this is helpful.

None of these things are even remotely true, therefore wokeism (by your definition) can be dismissed as nonsense.

the idea that we as individual aren't capable of and responsible for evaluating knowledge claims is silly.

The increasing use of that idea to deny the obvious is troubling and not something that that should be celebrated.

You’re right!

It is used to play the strategic ambiguity game.

Where what one means when they say it is never the same as what it means when they are asked to explain what they mean.

Lord…three comments. Three comments in before “don’t be a jerk to people different than you” is called a cult.

Yeah…this.

How much of the homogenization is due to “broader impacts” and “intellectual merit”. Which became the default lingo of nsf grants in about 1997

Add in “grant writing specialists” with no domain expertise but lots of “test the nsf as an api” expertise and you have even bigger sources of error in these claims.

Words don’t represent JUST represent ideas.

Words transmit ideas. The difference is notable I’m this data set in particular. I posted a longer version elsewhere in the thread but to summarize.

During this time period the nsf became more strict about explicitly addressing their review criteria. Faculty became trained to use the languag explicitly and connect their ideas to the language of the review criteria. I’m effect, you started to get an ‘api’ where, irregardless of what the idea in the grant is, it’s is clearly and explicitly connected to key nsf terminology. That is a de novo narrowing of the language space no matter the underlying ideas. It’s purpose is definitively about improving communication, not narrowing ideas.

From what I can tell the paper didn’t filter anything in the data. Had they filtered “broader impacts” and “intellectual merit” I would be hard money they would get different results.

The telling part for me is the scale of the graphs from the original paper and the blog post

The paper graph shows a decrease from like .1 to .075 over 30 years

The blog post shows a decrease from .35 to .1 over 100 years

However, the crimson had a notable drop around 2000 - on the order of the entire decrease in the research study - and then looks fairly stable.

It’s almost like there are policy and effective communication reasons for narrowing your vocabulary to that appropriate for a target audience.

If you look at the graph from the underlying study, there’s a bit of a “shoulder” around 1997. That is telling. 1997 was when the NSF introduced a new, clear and explicit, set of review criteria - broader impacts and intellectual merit [0]. That change alone is likely a cause of significant (Meaningful?) linguistic narrowing. To get NSF funding, researchers now had to explain why their research matters using explicit language that aligned with specific strategic objectives of the funding agency.

Then you add a layer of Goodharts law. During this time period, two other things were also happening. First, University’s increasingly began to rely on external funding - especially public university’s. Second, the field of “faculty development” was increasingly formalizing and offering training and support on things like grant writing. Those trainings include a lot of focus on using normalized, almost shibboleth like, language in grant applications. Ensuring that there is religion of key words so that it is easy for the reviewers to establish that a particular grant application addresses the required review criteria.

So the data set used here is part of the problem - if they had used submitted rather than funded they would likely see different results. Not because ideas are narrowing but because grant applications are basically a human manifested api, and someone tried to actually standardize it.

[0] https://stem.colostate.edu/a-history-of-the-broader-impacts-...

I can hear the steampunk aesthetic from here.

Just as an observation about this…I’ve increasingly begun to see the term knowledge expand to encompass information as if they are equivalent. That tracks, in my field, with changes in US K-12 education and the problems we now see in college learning behaviors.

I agree with your general ramble, but found this interesting in context.

“ Cannabinoids Promote Progression of HPV-Positive Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma via p38 MAPK Activation”

That is the study name. You are referencing the title of the press release from the university they work at.

While it’s perfectly fair to discuss the historical context of words, it’s important that we also recognize that using commonly used terminology in translating science for public consumption is necessary.

It’s also important to get basic facts right before trying to criticize peoples research.

...that's the point?

they are making an argument for their point of view. They list specific actions and evidence to support their points. They don't claim to be 'unbiased'.

The fetishization of objectivity and being unbiased will honestly be the death of the human species.

sometimes called copy stupid in extreme circumstances

I'm less worried about somebody attacking more radio and more annoyed that radio stations have taken to using an information mechanism designed to tell me what I'm listening to and used it to serve ads.

Unless we are calling serving unwanted ads as an attack.

But in a broader sense, I am absolutely unsurprised that there is terrible security on automotive hardware and software. Things like this are one of my major personal concerns about self driving cars.

> While Amazon is

Not a wrong comparison at all. His point is that Amazon was a place that sold books. They took risks and grew into a marketplace for selling everything. One mismanagement of their AWS development or platformization and things could be very different.

Peloton is a manufacturer of fitness gadgets AND a content provider of fitness classes. What they could grow into if they take risks is an open and interesting discussion.

Well I just laughed so hard I woke my baby up. Thank you for that on a Saturday morning.