Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

You are still saying that? Christ, you are so full of shit.

You are an interesting and intelligent person. Why do you need to play this troll? If you can't give up this act, then please go away and never come back. Honestly, I'd rather see this board die than read this sort of shit anymore.

Grow up or leave.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

If I start pm'ing you my proposed PB posts maybe you could give me feedback before I post them?

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

How about just looking back to see what I said the last 50 times you posted the same damn thing?

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

I don't think I actually did that, but I'm glad that things I wrote so many years ago made such an impression on you, even if not an entirely accurate impression. Either way, I think conservatives nowadays are a lot angrier, if what my cousins post on Facebook is a good indication. Also, what Sidd said.

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

:-/ likers gonna like

Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
 

FWIW, I was in a job for a while there where I couldn't talk about politics with my co-workers. Not an issue now.

For Sebby
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/up...?smid=fb-share

TM

Also for Sebby
 

Re: For Sebby
 

That is really disturbing and upsetting.


Of course, most of those studies happened before we had a black president. it's all better now, right?

Re: For Sebby
 

I don't see this improving a whole hell of a lot anytime soon. The shift toward hiring/renting/giving credit based on surface information is only increasing. Big data is going to bifurcate us unfairly and arbitrarily more than we were ever able to on our own in the past.

I think lawsuits over discrimination-by-algorithm are going to become more frequent and much larger in the next few decades.

Jumping off a bit, management and governance from the "helicopter view" are going to make a shit show of society, and I don't see any hope of us stopping it. There's a delusion being bought by almost all people with power that huge organizations, markets, and even countries can be fully understood and managed by viewing mere data about how they operate in aggregate.*

This thinking isn't irrational, of course, but we don't have to look far to see its Achilles Heel - the 2008 Crash. The aggregate data never provide a complete picture of what's going on at the street level. God only knows how much damage and unknown risk we'll cause by applying such know-it-all-ism and total reliance on necessarily blunt data in realms beyond finance and insurance.

______
*Wall Street would tell us otherwise, but their broad analyses only appear accurate because its all the same self-reinforcing data passed back and forth between and among the same limited actors, upon which those actors engage in herd investing, the timing of which creates profits. You don't have to have accurate data to win at musical chairs.

Re: For Sebby
 

Huh? The whole point of the studies discussed in the article was that there were no differences attributable to "big data" or "algorithm," but only differences in race (based on skin color or names).

Re: For Sebby
 

Very interesting piece. It's also what I was talking about a couple weeks back when I copped to being racist. It's almost impossible not to be. We are programmed from birth. Every single day, I am faced with a situation where I have to ask myself, "why am I making this choice?" And those are just the times I catch myself.

Re: For Sebby
 

"We like to talk about being a post-racial society. That shit don't fly in Mississippi."

- Tom Edge, director, Southern Foodways Alliance

Re: For Sebby
 

For college admissions patterns, its been found that interviewers generally prefer people like them - not just by race but also by economic background. To some extent big data is a solution to that problem, because you should be able to program to eliminate that personal bias.

But, the downside is, programmed admissions tend to be less diverse and not as prone to pick out the intellectual. Your quota of white suburbanites don't tend to be the ones who are interesting and quirky, but instead ones who know how to game the system to deliver numbers without having real intrinsic interest. They all play a varsity sport, but one without as much competition from the real jocks (e.g., sailing team or fencing club), they have great grades in easy classes, they have enough extracurriculars but not too many...

I think the only real solution is to carefully hire weirdos as admissions officers, but I'm not anticipating that any time soon. The Dangerfields don't want to have their little snookums go back to their alma mater and discover that its being represented by Zeebo and Wiploc.

Re: For Sebby
 

Hm. Theoretically big data will actually be able to replace the prejudices of the past with things that are actually predictive.

Certainly some things that are predictive will correlate with race (or other historically disadvantaged classes) but others will not, leaving the black people who do not have those characteristics at least arguably better off.

"We won't lend do you because we have a lot of data showing you're a bad credit risk" is a different problem than "we won't lend to you because you're black" and, if the data's really there, substantially less unfair and arbitrary.