there  could  be  snakes  in  here

I reviewed an old book about new China . I reviewed Use of Weapons , conceptual art, and Biblical literalism . I wrote a long poem about technical wonder . I poked about Civ V 's ideology . I riffed on scientific and non-scientific knowledge . I listed a range of new and/or rare words . I was impressed by nonfiction about nonreal things . I listed some free web services for developers . I gave an algorithm for working out why your boot drive doesn't work . I talked about songs about music critics and we listened to them . I reviewed British villainy, Accelerando , and an Estonian poet . I reviewed an excellent bedroom synthpop album . I listed more new and/or rare words with no clear theme . I reviewed books on social physics, ' The Hitch ', and Japanese poetry. I reviewed the gentlest introduction to Bayesianism . I got very maternal about the former Bishop of Edinburgh . I listed more new and/or rare words, on maths and wrestling . I applauded preppers with o...

Based on comments in O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction . Full review here. Opacity Is the subject aware they are being modelled? Is the subject aware of the model's outputs? Is the subject aware of the model's predictors and weights? Is the data the model uses open? Is it dynamic - does it update on its failed predictions? Scale Does the model make decisions about many thousands of people? Is the model famous enough to change incentives in its domain? Does the model cause vicious feedback loops? Does the model assign high-variance population estimates to individuals? Damage Does the model work against the subject's interests? If yes, does the model do so in the social interest? Is the model fully automated, i.e. does it make decisions as well as predictions? Does the model take into account things it shouldn't? Do its false positives do harm? Do its true positives? Is the harm of false positives symmetric with the good of true po...

dragon-king (n.): An extreme event among extreme events: roughly, an outlier of a Pareto distribution, even. An elaboration on Taleb's black swan metaphor for unforeseeable extreme events. Not sure if it adds much, since the black swan is distribution-independent and Taleb doesn't fixate on power laws iirc. chef's arse (n.): Painful chafing of the buttocks against each other; attends exercise in hot environments. groufie ( n.): group selfie, obvs. No less contemptible for the awkward swerve around "groupie". detaliate (mangled v.): To explain. Seen in this Quora answer by a non-native English speaker (possibly Romanian ). I want to appropriate it: to detaliate is to respond to casual comments with a fisking . consing: (n.): To save on memory allocation by comparing new values to existing allocations and just storing a hash to the existing one if it's a hit. From Lisp's cons cells, a basic key-value data structure. sadcore: ( n.)...

(c) Tom Gauld (2014) When physicists do mathematics, they don’t say they’re doing “number science”. They’re doing math. If you’re analyzing data, you’re doing statistics. You can call it data science or informatics or analytics or whatever, but it’s still statistics... You may not like what some statisticians do. You may feel they don’t share your values. They may embarrass you. But that shouldn’t lead us to abandon the term “statistics”. – Karl Broman what makes data science special and distinct from statistics is that this data product gets incorporated back into the real world, and users interact with that product, and that generates more data: a feedback loop. This is very different from predicting the weather... – Cathy O'Neil / Rachel Schutt "Data science" is the latest name for an old pursuit: the attempt to make computers give us new knowledge. * In computing's short history, there have already been about 10 words for this activity (and god kn...

Strine (Oz proper n.): that thick Australian accent. Onomatopoeic: just say "Striiine" - "(Au)stralian" - with a long ɒ sound. curioso (C17th It. n.): Brilliant enthusiast of unusual things. Originally synonymous with virtuoso ; a word for a proto-scientist / Renaissance man. sockdolager (American n.): A finisher; an exceptional thing. Probably from "sock" (punch) and "doxology" (final hymn). Was the last word heard in the theatre before Lincoln was shot amidst laughter. gunsel (originally Yiddish n.): 1) hoodlum; Player. 2) catamite - from the Yiddish גענדזל, gosling. <3. The derived term "gunselism" has exactly 1 hit and how often do you see that? green ink letter (n.): A lunatic rant sent in to the Letters page. cromulent (adj.): blameless; fine. Made up by a Simpsons writer to demonstrate Frege's Context Principle (or Springfield's inbreeding). Taco Bell Programming (n.): the discipline of so...

"This isn't right . Imagine: we give them a loss function, without a utility function. They can't feel good; only less bad." "It's the same with us, tho. What we call utility is just the absence of loss." "I'm not sure that's true. Pride feels to be more than the absence of shame; love is more than absence of loneliness." "There's a fairly big gap between your two examples. And it's hard to think clearly when strong pleasure or pain is implicated." "Nevertheless, yours is the view requiring a mass redefinition of natural language to make two entities become one." "I don't mind. Even if they're not identical, we can still capture most of all value by reducing harm." "I don't see how you can know that." "Obvs I don't know it infallibly, but anyway it can't hurt ." "You might be more ambitious than such moral hedging." "Yes, as so...

Something of real consequence was happening. We were at the start of a great renaissance of public shaming. After a lull of almost 180 years (public punishments were phased out in 1837 in the United Kingdom and in 1839 in the United States), it was back in a big way. When we deployed shame, we were utilizing an immensely powerful tool. It was coercive, borderless, and increasing in speed and influence. Hierarchies were being leveled out. The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratization of justice. And so I made a decision. The next time a great modern shaming unfolded against some significant wrongdoer—the next time citizen justice prevailed in a dramatic and righteous way—I would leap into the middle of it. I’d investigate it close up and chronicle how efficient it was in righting wrongs. After the interview was over, I staggered out into the London afternoon. I dreaded uploading the footage onto YouTube because I’d been so screechy. I steeled myself for commen...

Technical books often use seemingly nontechnical, apparently normative terms: you're marching through your dense and spidery notation, and suddenly you tread in a gob of ordinary language. Some of the most important concepts in the formal sciences are of this sort, in fact: well-behaved . "not weird; having all properties suitable for the present study; not in violation of any of the assumptions we just made". One of the big offenders, used everywhere and never defined truly, only by context. Usually "well-behaved compared to an unrestricted superset we don't want to handle right now". well-defined . "unambiguous; blessed with just one interpretation". One of the core differences between the formal sciences and other enquiry. Terminology in other fields is nowhere near as clear as this (not even ones which seem highly formalised, like Spinoza's Ethics or Wittgenstein's Tractatus or half of Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form * ). ...

Some people try to help one person at a time, and other people try to change the whole world. There's a seductive intimacy in the first kind of work, but it can also be messy and unpredictable. People may resent help that is so intimate, and if it goes badly, the blunder is personal. Even when the help succeeds, the victories are small and don't really change anything. The second kind of work is more ambitious, and also cleaner, more abstract. But success is distant and unlikely, so it’s helpful to have a taste for noble failure, and for the camaraderie of the angry few... [ Dorothy ]: "They were people you did not want to be around. They were so sharp. Everything was a matter of life and death: we've got to do this action because the world depends on it." In 1967, a long-term study of living, unrelated kidney donors was initiated, with the aim of helping transplant centers form policies on these confounding individuals. The study subjected the donors to ...

to curry (equestrian v.): to groom, firmly brush all over. (Don't freak out if someone tells you they're off to curry a horse.) See also "to decompose into univariate functions" and " shout at ". People really like this word. GLEE (adj.): "Gay, Lesbian, and Everyone Else". I like this; the current bien-pensant name has grown to "LGBTQIA"; not pronounceable, nor even anagrammable. But GLEE probably can't catch on, since people will see abstraction as erasure, and also won't like it tacitly including majority people. septentrional (poncey adj.): Northern. Used in the clumsy retroactive Latin for the US, "Civitatibus Foederatis Americae septentrionalis". boodles (adj.): Butternut squash noodles. avi (n.): Profile picture ("avatar"). Annoying; optimised for tweeting, not speaking. OC (adj.): Original character; in fanfiction, a new protagonist added to the existing cast. Pejorative? procursiv...

If your software only uses 8-bit characters, if it does not set an explicit charset , then it cannot handle non-English languages. This excludes 80% of the world - mostly nonwhite people. So developers who don't handle different character encodings are racist. And we do not associate with racists. So we need our own, non-racist versions of all ASCII software; yes, this may take all our lives, but the cause is just, and when it comes to justice there is no calculus, no compromise possible. Are you with me? Or If your software only uses 8-bit characters, if it does not set an explicit charset , then it cannot handle non-English languages. It's silly and extremely inefficient to limit your software's reach so much for the sake of two missing functions. The cost is an hour or two of development; the payoff is increasing your potential userbase by a factor of 6 . This will also expand the pool of potential contributors to your project enormously. And besides, glyph encodi...

succession planning (Corp n.): Lining up replacements for senior managers in case of medical or PR disaster. (Think: Cardinal Wolsey in a pantsuit.) to write (Corp v.): to underwrite; to take on the risks of. retrocessionary (n.): Reinsurer of a reinsurer, who is "ceded" part of the first reinsurer's written reinsurance. to productionalise (Corp v.): to produce (test, polish and deploy). halfly (Corp adj.): twice a year (compare quarterly ). Delightful! to downselect (Corp v.): to choose (!) backpocket (n.): Crib notes for the CEO so they don't look totally stupid in interviews. Refers both to the briefing and the people who produce it "My backpocket tell me...". to clopen (worker v.): to shut the shop for the night, then go home to sleep inadequately, then come back and open the shop in the morning. acting up (Corp n.): performing work above one's position to socialise (Corp v.): to spread around; to make accepted. infor...

A toy model of aesthetics with just two binary variables, 'classiness' and 'busyness'*: Minimalism : Simple Classy Baroque : Busy Classy Brutalism : Simple Vulgar Rococo : Busy Vulgar Are these descriptions true ? Well, they are incomplete, and are not definitions (i.e. one-to-one mappings ), but yes. Are they helpful? As a start, absolutely. Now, the labels on the left are vague and intuitive family resemblances ; it is a fool's game to imagine they could ever be nailed down as monothetic definitions (the philosopher's ideal of neat, necessary and sufficient sets of attributes). We can still model usefully and harmlessly, even if the models can never be complete.** But the critics and art academics I know spend far more time muddying the water: deconstructing our use of the problematic term "classy"; and who gets to say what 'simplicity' is anyway? They don't seem to want to explain things, even fuzzily .*** Or, maybe the...

(Turn it up will you?) Histories of figurines so fresh in the mind of Babes who were never witnesses but must relive the Consequences in the fiber of their day-to-day. When I thought of these incidences then, When I thought of all these happenings then I was thinking of now; Gives resonance those hours I spend Contemplating the effects of resonance. Dear resonance, is the distance real? Talk of war and actions that resemble such; And I dance in this club with the guilt Of my apathy shaking this indifference. And then I hear Lennon’s 'Imagine' and the generations Round me waltz in mockery and irony. I want some distance! It hurts to know history’s closeness can blow A hole right through your guile (Without showing its face). The times may be constantly changing, Bob, But what does that mean to resonance? Dear resonance, is the distance real? A giant mad pop ramble on historical consciousness, free will, and path-dependency. A protest song; but,...

Dedekind cut (n.)  A partition of a ordered list into two nonempties, such that everything in the first sublist is less than every member of the second sublist, and such that the first contains no greatest element . Used in the rigorous definition of the reals . As "an infinitely thin thing", also used in the following burn from Wilfrid Sellars: The crux of a philosophical argument often appears to be a Dedekind cut between a series of 'as I will show's and a series of 'as I have shown's. Popperazzi (pej. pl. n.)  Term of contempt for people who use Karl Popper's falsifiability criterion in a simplistic or inaccurate manner. juke (East Coast US v.)   To massage or dredge or miscode data. (As in "juke the stats": police coding robberies as thefts in The Wire .)   Maybe some connection to the Chicago genre of cheap fast dance music, juke (incomparable adj.)   See also cook the books , creative accounting . loggia (Italian n.)  A ...

'Everything is PR' has become the favorite phrase of the new Russia; my Moscow peers are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened. When I ask them about Soviet-era dissidents, like my parents, who fought against communism, they dismiss them as naïve dreamers and my own Western attachment to such vague notions as ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom’ as a blunder. Just as Cherkesov [head of the Russian DEA] was investigating Patrushev [head of the new KGB] , so Patrushev supported those who were fighting Cherkesov. So when the FSB heard about Yana's story, they made sure the police didn't close down the demonstrations [for Yana's freedom] , that the right newspapers and TV channels covered the protests. This was one of the reasons ‘liberal’ papers and TV channels existed, to give one power broker a weapon to hit another power broker with. ...the new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: it will never let TV become dull. T...

poz (Troll v.). 1) To intentionally infect with venereal disease , especially HIV. Mercy. 2) By analogy, to stealthily corrupt a culture. I don't think either has ever been deployed by a decent human being. mortmain (French n.). 'Deadhand'. Common law term for the legally binding decisions of dead people. See also the awesome-sounding area of public policy, dead hand control . Like forex control, pest control. truscum (SJ n. and adj.). Person who holds, along with most of the medical establishment, that gender dysphoria is a necessary condition for someone to be transgender. This gets attacked in the strongest terms for gatekeeping and questioning the lived experience* of nonbinary people who want to call themselves trans. It is all very sad that it is impossible to talk clearly about it. See also "tucute" for the equally unhelpful mirror insult. * Had to force myself not to use scare quotes there. A dreadful pious phrase; what other kind of experience i...

(c) Andrew Wyeth (1957), "Brown Swiss" It's easy to mock preppers - that is, people who buy off-grid rural land, a stock of imperishable food, and guns, while honing skills in expectation of the harsh and pre-modern world soon to come - but it's plausible that they're actually providing a public good: redundancy , for the species, against certain awful tail risks . Let's begin by inventing a distinction: call the ideology "survivalism" and the practice described above "prepping". People often point to creepy far-right tendencies among survivalists (e.g. anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, violent libertarianism, Red Dawn paranoia) and speak as if this were an argument against prepping. No matter how self-interested or politically unsavory the practice supposedly is: competent, geographically spread-out prepping could still help ensure that future generations come to be. "The species", in some sense, and also maybe modern ...