I mostly agree with Hacker, contra Ed.

It’s not that math is useless. Obviously the opposite is true. However, most of the claimed broad-based intellectual uplift from teaching higher-level math is completely false. Most skills in any field do not transfer — this is well-supported by research. So the supposed improvements in rigor and critical thinking that “naturally” follow from math instruction actually do not exist. (In fact, learning to think more logically just serves to reinforce existing prejudices most of the time.)

I’m terrible at operational math and always will be. Something in my brain is completely and irreparably broken in that respect.

But my partner is actually good at math, but hated her math instruction with a passion. She has a minor in math and quickly understands how to do things that I literally will never be able to do. (Having tried some things for thousands of hours that she can do in minutes, yep, ’tis true.)

However, back to that hatred. Yes, some things need to be learned by rote. This is the way of many things in life. However, none of her math instruction taught her anything at all about the world, about how to learn, how or why any part of it was useful, or how to even in principle to apply any of it to the actual world. Ever.

And she didn’t go to some second-rate university, either. This is typical and defended by those who have also suffered such a torturous matriculation as any large investment often is. A former friend of mine argued (after suffering through a similar program) that it was basically impossible to teach math in any way less punishing than that until the PhD level or beyond.

Which is obvious bullshit but sunk costs, etc.

I’m ambulating all over here, but my point is that math for most people is actually completely useless and as taught is actively harmful.

So, mostly, I support Hacker’s ideas. If math were not taught like some sort of death camp, I might have a different opinion.

And of course math is used as a proxy IQ test — I’d support just giving IQ tests as it’s more honest. And that would also benefit me because I absolutely kill non-math-based IQ tests and that would open more fields to me and to people like me.

But anything beyond long division is completely worthless to 98% of people. Always will be.

I saw some people complaining about a huge deus ex machina in the first portion of Season 6, episode 9 (start of the half-season) for the Walking Dead.

But it was a deus ex machina that rather than coming out of nowhere was an entire mini-plot point a few episodes back. So not deus ex machina at all!

The show has exceeded the IQs and memories of those who watch it is the main problem. It was so sloppy and mediocre to bad at first, and now it’s so careful and consistent. A joy to watch, even if it has exceeded the intelligence of many of its viewers and reviewers.

“A black man with the same IQ, education, experience, and so on as a white man is predicted to earn about 14.3% less, and the difference is very statistically significant.”

–Introductory Econometrics, 2nd Edition by Jeffrey M. Wooldridge (textbook I’m currently reading)

I’ve seen more and more of this denial of the reality of diabetes on fat acceptance blogs:

There ain’t even a word for that kind of dumb-ass.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, that is poorly covered by science as it is cross-discipline and that is frowned upon these days.

And I have no credentials so even if my ideas are 100% right, no one will care. So that leaves me free to do what the hell I want, just as I like it.

But what I’ve been pondering is the complexity gap, as I’ve been calling it. There is an idea pervasive in science that more information leads to better predictive ability. This seems obviously true, right? Yes? Well, but is it? (And there is follow-on that everything can be measured and has a mathematical solution, even if just in principle.)

Just because something seems true means nothing; it actually has to be true.

But there are and always will be enormous complexity gaps in reality. Computer science majors will probably know what I am getting at right away without me having to spell it out, but that’s one of the problems: many scientists I’ve met (save a few like a friend of mine) know almost nothing about any other field!

For problems of certain n complexity, adding even a billion or a trillion, etc., times the information will not change your predictive ability at all. (Computer scientists are probably laughing now; others might be puzzled.)

For certain phenomena, more information might actually lead to worse results.

More information is better than not having it, but it doesn’t magically lead to the truth falling out.

This post resonates with me.

Some of it, though, was different for me. I’ve always had absurd amounts of confidence, nearly unflappable no matter what depredations others subjected me to do. This is both bad and good. But when I was young it helped me to survive. No one ever could and never did convince that I wasn’t just as good as they were, try as they might. (And so, so many people did try where I grew up.)

But still, once you’ve been the unlovable nerd whipping boy for a protracted and miserable time, that never really completely goes away no matter your extreme stubbornness or self-confidence.

When we were leaving for a restaurant over the weekend, my partner said to me, “You look really nice.”

Then when we got there, there was a cute librarian-ish woman sitting at a table catercorner to us. I noticed that when I wasn’t looking in her general direction, she kept glancing and then staring at me. (I have just ridiculous peripheral and unusual vision in other ways, so it was easy for me to see her even when she thought I couldn’t. She was being furtive and not at all rude, but just not furtive enough for me.)

The old much-hated (by others) nerd inside of me wondered at first if i looked particularly funny that day, or I had a booger hanging out of my nose or something. Then I realized that she wasn’t looking at me that way. She was looking at me the way people look at you when they like what they see.

Still — still — even after all these years, I was half-convinced at first that she was making fun of me or otherwise trying to taunt me. The old nerd talking. I shut that fucker up right quick.

Before I left, I looked over at her when she was in “stare mode” and gave her a smile and cocked an eyebrow, and she turned a shade of red usually reserved for barns and firetrucks.

Yeah.

Go away, old nerd. Go back to middle school where you belong.

How much of a pay cut would you take to have a private office rather than having to work in an open floor plan?

Hmm, I actually do like my teammates so it’s not as important as it would be at other places I’ve been — but I’d still get vastly more done with my own office and thus be able to work less, effectively.

I’d say I’d take a 20K per annum pay cut to have my own office.

You?

People are really surprised about this?

Of course many white Sanders fans are going to vote for Trump if Sanders isn’t nominated and Trump is.

I’m bad at political analysis, but anyone who didn’t realize this is missing so much that should be utterly obvious. Trump and Sanders have positioned themselves and many see them as voices for the voiceless; they are both candidates that have cross-aisle appeal for this very reason.

And this reason is why Hillary Clinton stands zero chance in the general ceteris paribus if Trump is the nominee since many Bernie supporters — say 15 to 20% — will then swing to Trump.

I think Clinton’s chances of being nominated are nearly 100%, but her chance of defeating Trump if the Repubs don’t find some way to knock him off his perch are 10%. (She’d beat Rubio or Cruz easily, though — and the Repubs would rather lose the election than to allow Trump to gain that power.)

You might have been wondering why you’ve seen so many articles lately about how the $100 bill should be eliminated because it aids terrorists, and also propaganda concerning the magisterial wonders of a cashless society.

There are two reasons for this. One is that cash transactions are one of the last bastions of anonymity and privacy. That alone is enough for corporations and the government to want to trash cash.

But that’s not the main reason. The main reason is of course an even more corporate-focused one and that is compulsion of spending through negative interest rates. If there is still cash then negative interest rates don’t work — anyone with half a brain will just pull all their money out of the bank and avoid that.

But if there is no cash that becomes impossible.

So for the financial industry and corporations in general banning cash will have two benefits: forced negative interest rates on bank balances compelling spending because on balance it is better to buy something now than have less money later.

Second and just as importantly, investments such as stocks, 401ks, IRAs and similar will be immune to these negative interest rates so investment funds and other legal scam purveyors will enjoy trillions of dollars of ill-gotten largesse from negative interest rates combined with possession of cash being made illegal.

So you can see why this is being pushed so hard, and will eventually occur. It’s going to make people like Jamie Dimon billions.

And it is inevitable, even in the US.

A recommendation I made at work — and which others fought vehemently against for ideological reasons — increased performance on an extremely important, critical system by 600% in one part and 900% in another. And also took it I might add from non-functional to working perfectly.

There were no additional costs and resources are better used.

900% and 600% better. Ta-dow, how do you like me now?

Many of the problems that modern humans experience — especially in the richer Western world — are because we are supremely maladapted to our own civilization.

Our autonomic nervous system interprets many issues as life or death that are merely inconveniences. This acute stress response to small slights was once very adaptive indeed as exile from the group meant a near-certain death, but now means not much at all.

This is one of the many reasons I support genetic modification of humans, despite all the risks.

It’s strange that people can complain about the supposed excessive violence in Game of Thrones while in the actual world that we live in, Aleppo exists (sort of, these days).

I don’t understand. But I guess when your life is excessively privileged, there are no consequences for believing all sorts of exceedingly ridiculous bullshit.

The violence in GoT is quite tame compared to many actual wars and events happening right this very second, and not on a TV screen….

One thing that bothers me about the social justice warriors is that almost none of them can recognize when a work is a critique or an endorsement.

Happens over and over again. I think this is deliberate. It’s sort of the Orwellian belief that completely eliminating a syntactic and thematic structure of something can eliminate thoughts about it altogether — and perhaps the reality itself.

But of course the universe doesn’t work this way. It’s a very childish sort of worldview. Part of it is that a lot of the self-styled SJWs are indeed very young, but much of it is just extreme aversion to confronting human nature and tendencies as they truly are, rather than as these people wish them to be.

As successful ideologies go, that won’t even roll down the runway much less ever soar into the air.

Dogs are parasites.

Cats are, too. But at least they are angry about it.