Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I appreciate the links! It seems more people did refer to Twitter's actions as "shadow-banning" than I was aware of, even if Twitter itself did not.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
Having a brief read of it, I'm inclined to believe it's a fake. Honestly, the grammar in some parts is so odd I don't think it was even written by someone who has English as their first language. Some things that make me suspicious:
1. The page numbering. The pages are numbered using roman numerals rather than the normal arabic characters. This is common for things like the preface to reports but my general experience (admittedly limited) is that executive summaries tend to be part of the main body and numbered appropriately. Additionally there are no page numbers visible on the title page or copyright page but the "Executive Summary" page starts at "iii". It's normal for title pages and copyright pages not to be numbered but they also are generally excluded from the numbering system altogether such that the first page after them ought to be "i", not "iii". Either two numbered pages are missing between the copyright page and the "Executive Summary" titled page or something odd is happening here.
2. Some of the acronyms on the "distribution" line on the title page don't mean anything to me. "Dept. of State", "CIA", "NSA", and "DNC" are all presumably clear enough (although, an odd grouping) but "WHCS" does not seem to be anything I can find with a Google or Wikipedia search and the only ANSA that seems relevant is... an Italian news agency? Of course, just because I can't find any relevant hits doesn't mean they don't exist but I'm not sure what they are supposed to indicate and no likely matches suggest themselves.
3. Grammatical and general formatting problems. For example the final paragraph on page "iii" (which is also a single sentence) reads (emphasis added):
Besides, if the U.S. is for a certain period is engulfed by domestic problems, the Old Europe will be able to more effectively resists the influence of the U.S.-oriented Eastern European countries.
of course, it's possible the repeated "if" is something an editor missed, but it is suggestive. The document uses the "Old Europe" construction in a number of places, apparently intending to mean Western Europe. I've never heard this construction before and would be interested if anyone has examples of other RAND reports that use it. The first paragraph on the last page has the sentence
The scenario under consideration will thus serve to strengthen the national financial condition both indirectly and most directly.
"both indirectly and most directly" is not a construction I have ever read in English and does not read like natural English to me. There are other constructions that seem odd but these were the ones that jumped out the most.
4. The whole thing is written much more... directly... regarding its goal of harming various European countries to the benefit of the US than I would expect. Not that people planning bad things never write them down but this is, like, "notes on a criminal conspiracy" level. I would expect any descriptions of intentions, estimates of results, and desirability, to be written much more circumspectly. With much more room for plausible deniability, especially by an operation like RAND.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I don't understand how the requirement to be undiscoverable to "everyone" is being invented. The word "everyone" is right there in the definition Twitter gave of what it considered shadow banning back in 2018. Now, maybe your own definition has never had "everyone" as a requirement, but Twitter seems to have clearly communicated that their definition included "everyone" and so, on their own understanding of the term "shadow-banning", did not "shadow-ban" anyone.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I would absolutely subscripe to the notion that all outcomes of a procedurally fair process are just by definition.
I am interested in picking at this a little. Would you agree that the application of something like a poll tax or literacy test could be just, then? As long as it was administered the right way? If so, would such outcomes also be good or desirable? Or is it possible for an outcome to be both just and bad?
Yes, that is one of the things I wanted to get at: People have a prior notion of what type of outcome is "just" and a procedure is "fair" if it's instrumental in bringing that about. That view is, frankly, insane to me. It's like saying that an election is only fair if my favourite candidates are elected.
I think this goes a little bit too far. Rather, I think there is often disagreement about whether a given procedure is "fair" in the relevant sense. I think most people would agree that fairness consists in something like "treating similarly situated people similarly" with a lot of disagreement bout what it means to be "similarly situated." Continuing the voter ID example some people A and B may be "similarly situated" in that both are US citizens who are prospective voters. But perhaps they are not "similarly situated" in that B must sacrifice much more time, effort, resources, etc than A to get an ID. Is rule requiring and ID to vote fair to A and B? It depends, even if we don't start at an outcome and work backwards (though I agree this happens as well).
I mean, all sets of procedural rules are substantive solutions to the meta question of which procedural rules should be applied. But then we just shift the debate because we still have to ask by what rules that decision should be produced.
The objections I have in mind are less meta than this. Consider again a literacy test. On the one hand, such a requirement is procedural, it's literally a procedure you have to go through in order to vote. On the other hand, the imposition of such a procedure implies a substantive judgement about who ought to be able to vote (specifically that people who cannot or will not pass such a test ought not be able to). So is the imposition of a literacy test a procedural rule or a substantive one?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
What's your definition of "shadow-ban"?
According to urbandictionary
Banning a user from a web forum in such a way that the banned user is unaware of the ban. Usually takes the form of showing that user's posts/profile/etc. only to that user; other users never see them. Considered underhanded chicken-shit behavior.
And according to Twitter
People are asking us if we shadow ban. We do not. But let’s start with, “what is shadow banning?”
The best definition we found is this: deliberately making someone’s content undiscoverable to everyone except the person who posted it, unbeknownst to the original poster.
So, what accounts is it alleged Twitter shadow banned, according to either its own or the pre-Twitter-Files definition? As far as I can tell the actions Twitter is alleged to have taken are:
-
De-boosted some accounts such that their content would not appear in one's timeline, but could still be viewed if they went to the posting account directly (i.e. not shadow banned) and;
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Hid some accounts from auto complete in the search bar, but which could still be viewed if one navigated directly to the posting account (i.e. not shadow banning).
As far as I can tell this new post-Twitter-Files definition of shadow banning as any kind of limit of an accounts reach is entirely invented for the purpose of claiming Twitter lied about not shadow banning people (in the same blog post where they are extremely clear about what they mean by shadow banning).
As you note I think one's beliefs about procedurally fair rules are tied up with their conception of justice. Specifically, people support procedurally fair rules when they believe those rules will lead to just outcomes and oppose them when they think they won't. Unless one is committed to the proposition that procedurally fair rules always entail just outcomes (which I think describes very few people) it's not hard to find examples of cases where the application of procedurally fair rules lead to unjust outcomes. Some common examples in US history include poll taxes and literacy tests. While these rules were generally applied to all voters, they had the effect of disproportionately excluding certain demographics in a way many considered unjust due to those demographics relative poverty and illiteracy. This can also lead to a general skepticism of procedurally fair rules in general, in a way I think we still see today. The belief that the people who want to impose certain procedurally fair rules don't actually think the rule itself is good, but want the rule in effect due to the disproportionate impact it will have on certain groups (ex, debates about voter ID).
Has the appreciation of procedural rules of fairness in fact waned?
My own appreciation for procedurally fair rules as tools to achieve just outcomes has certainly waned. Whether that's my own changing sense of what is just or just an expansion of my knowledge of situations where procedurally fair rules have led to unjust outcomes is hard to say, probably a bit of both.
If so, when?
In my particular case I would say starting five or six years ago. I share the perspective articulated by @drmanhattan16 that there was something different about the 90's compared to today but I am not sure I could identify a sharp breaking point for the culture more generally.
What made the political "left" shift from a celebration of these values to a purely opportunistic application? Was this always purely instrumental, as outlined above?
I suspect a mix of the two. For some people it was always purely instrumental while others followed a similar path I did, becoming disillusioned with procedurally fair rules as a mechanism for producing just outcomes due to a perceived lack of results. I think a big part of the reason the "left" is broadly more skeptical of procedurally fair rules its because the left's political coalition is composed substantially of those groups that have been left in disproportionately worse positions by the application of such rules, and have disproportionately benefited from less procedurally fair rules.
ETA:
This is getting a bit more philosophical but since I have Moore v. Harper on my mind I'll mention I think there is also a population out there that is skeptical about the extent to which we can coherently categorize rules into "procedural" vs "substantive" such that all rules are "substantive" in the relevant sense.
Correct, assuming it's calculated the way you mention in the other comment. Row 13, for example, has all three of the columns used in the calculation populated but has the autofilled value. Rather, none of the three columns used in the calculation contain any auto-filled averages (based on a quick calculation of each columns average). Honestly, the fact that every field is a raw integer (so she didn't use Sheets built in functionality to compute these numbers) makes me wonder if there was some copy paste issue from elsewhere?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
Nice find! Feels like this should be more prominently displayed than just in a box that appears when you hover over column A1 (at least, that's the only way I see it).
Are they survey and response items up anywhere for people to see still? I ask because a lot of the data in the raw data sheet seems, frankly, weird.
For example, column "O" in "Sheet1" is the question "You typically use a condom:" and the results in the column are almost all integers. It is not clear to me where these integers are coming from, or what units they are supposed to have. Are they the number of the result item the respondent selected? Ex "1" represents someone who picked the first item, whatever that frequency was? If this is the case I am not sure running a regression using these numbers as your values will yield any sensible result. Similarly several rows in this column have an identical non-integer value of "2.293838863". No idea where this value is coming from or what it means in the context of the question.
Or take column "BT" in "Sheet1", which is the question "About how many times in a year do you get tested for STIs?" I expect answers to this question to be nice integers (you can't exactly get tested a fractional number of times) but again a bunch of columns have an identical non-integer value of "6.37414966".
Perhaps relevant to the BMI/income buckets a bunch of rows in the "BU" column ("Estimated Monthly") also have identical values of "1428.597195". Aella mentions this is a computed column but I'm having trouble figuring out how. Most of the non-identical values seem like sensible number ("900", "2700", "9900") that I can see being computed from the given figures of hourly rate (column K, all multiples of 50, no repeating weirdness) and duration (column L, values from 0.5 to 8, all multiples of 0.5, no repeating weirdness). Where the heck did the repeating decimal come from?
You can see this pattern across a bunch of columns where integer values don't really make sense as a response (column N, "What services do you offer, primarily?") and there are some bizarre identically repeating values (all with substantial decimal significant digits). It's not even like it's the same rows that have weird values for every column either. There does not seem to me any relation between which columns have these rows across columns.
I'm also interested in the procedures for generating the correlations in "Sheet3". There are listed correlations for categorical variables (like the aforementioned column N) but what procedure was used to generate them? The procedure for calculating the correlation between different kinds of variables (ex, categorical vs continuous) are different. Were the results of column N treated as categorical (how do you do a categorical calculation with the weird decimal values?) or continuous?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
Apologies if this seemed like trolling. It seemed like each of your questions could be answered discreetly, though I believe I understand your larger point with the questions was to denigrate or degrade the WNBA and Griner.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
Because wanting something for its aesthetics is not the same as wanting something for the thrill of stealing it/knowing it belonged to someone else, where the transgression is a part of the appeal.
Why does this line of reasoning apply to the clothes in the bags but not the bags themselves?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
Can you clarify "that sort of thing"? Why isn't "stealing luggage bags is more of a thrill than buying new luggage bags" a similar hypothesis?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I do not think I ever claimed it was a mistake?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
If Brinton wanted the clothes and didn't care about the bags, why keep and re-use the stolen bag?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
Why doesn't this also invalidate the women's clothes theory? Brinton's salary is decent enough to buy the bags... but not the random women's clothes they contained?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
Alternate simpler theory: Brinton thought the bags looked nice and wanted to own them. This also comports with how Brinton re-used the first bag they stole at another airport.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I am not doubting that Brinton stole the luggage, merely the purported justification for Brinton's doing so.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
How did Brinton know the luggage contained women's clothing?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
What is the evidence that this was the case? How does the issuance of a warrant give us any insight into the reason for the theft?
I am confused. How does the issuance of a warrant establish that Brinton stole the bag due to a "continually escalating fetish"? Can you elaborate?
ETA:
Let me propose an alternate theory: Brinton liked the way the bags looked and stole them because they wanted to use the bags themselves. Note how this squares with the fact that Brinton was seen at another airport using the first bag they stole. If Brinton only cared about the contents of the bag and not the bag itself, why keep the bag and use it at another airport?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
Why is she famous?
Because she's a really good basketball player and has won a bunch of awards, including being part of the gold medal winning USA women's basketball team in both the 2016 and 2020 Olympics.
Why is WNBA a 'thing'?
Presumably because there are women who would like to be paid to play basketball and others who would pay to watch them. Why is any sports league 'a thing'?
It wasn't a 'thing' 20 years ago.
This is just false.
It seems kind of short sighted to just assume that the doctrine that has been in charge for a few decades now, that shaped the cultural climate as it is today, is not to do with race and sex when that's the main point it focused on. It would certainly seem odd to me if that weren't the case given the huge emphasis the powers that be place on those things.
I think you're selling it a little short to claim that "the doctrine" whose "main point" is "race and sex" has only been in charge for "a few decades." I'm confident that a doctrine whose main point has been race and sex (especially race) has been in charge in America going all the way back its founding.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
Now, can you answer any of my questions?
Probably!
Do think company owners have the ability to read minds, and control all employees at once?
No, but they do generally have the ability to issue commands to employees and discipline or terminate them if they do not comply. Are you under the impression if Musk went to his moderation team and said "Take down the tweet doxxing LibsofTikTok" they would refuse? Or... did he just not know Weiss was going to mention it?
If not, what is you expectation that the bias should be fixed by now based on?
The part where fired, like, 80% of the company.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
3yr ago
I am not seeing what the evidence in these articles is supposed to be. I see allegations that they do this, but where is the data?
While it would surely be emotionally satisfying to arrest and indict Sam Bankman-Fried the reason the DoJ moves slowly is that after you bring an indictment there are avenues for the defendant to challenge further investigatory actions and there is a constitutional right to a speedy trial so you also face time limits in how long you can defer from the indictment to the trial (unless the Defendant consents). This creates a bias towards making sure you gather all the evidence you reasonably can before bringing an indictment.
Frankly, the investigation(s) into Binance seem good to me. Surely it's better to stop the fraud while it's occurring (and before funds have been lost) than let it continue and steal more from people.
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