I think of far-centerist as extremely unideological. To me, ideologies are systematically organized collections of ideas, often hierarchically, with core ideas (or assumptions) given a paramount or supreme position. They almost all provide a certain level of insight and huge errors, because no system of ideas describes the world in a complete or fully accurate way. So, a far-centrist in my view is open to using ideas from whatever ideology, or some that associate with no ideology, for what they're worth.
If by far center, you mean unbiased, well, we're all biased to some degree. Actually it's very hard not to be quite biased in some way, whether ideologically or stylistically, or any of the more gross forms of bias most of us have to wrestle with, being human.
A bias scanner can be useful in identifying bias, but you can be ideological and non-biased, in which case, you're just using the bias scanner to reduce your bias. That's a good thing to do, but I'd call it, a kind of self-moderation, which might attenuate partisanship but for sure isn't necessarily centrist at all.
> It's a completely generic algorithm. If the school had a uniquely high percentage of any "group" of people, whether based on race, region, hobbies, interests, literally anything, ads for that school would be more likely sent to people in those groups.
Um, oops. There are laws against discriminating on the basis of race, like, steering Black people to different schools on that basis. That's the difference.
When you say, it's a neutral algorithm because it steers people on the basis of other factors as well, you miss the whole point of having anti-discrimination laws. There's no law prohibiting steering on the bases of "hobbies, interests, literally anything". So when you say the algorithm is okay for that reason, you're saying discrimination based on race is okay if you also discriminate on other, lawful grounds. That seems to me like saying, race discrimination ought not be unlawful. If that's your opinion so be it, but an algorithm that steers people based on race is racially discriminatory.
For example, as Meta previously recognized, steering people seeking apartments based on their race was racially discriminatory, even though steering people seeking apartments based on hobbies or interests isn't that kind of discrimination. The argument you're making would apply equally to steering based on race in connection with jobs, housing, education, and all other areas of society, permitting racial steering because there's an algorithm involved that doesn't just include racial discrimination.
Meta hopefully will recognize this was a mistake, and hopefully will do the right thing by adjusting their algorithm to refrain from steering people in this way based on race.
Understandable in this context that comments would be very negative about looking at statistics relating to race, gender, national origin, etc. of how investors place money. After all, the start-up world is economics at its most meritocratic (is that a word? well it should be). And any constraints of this kind on how investors place their money is gonna have some downsides, many of which are discussed here, if at times in a somewhat overwrought way. Plus, yes, we've seen pretty nasty issues with affirmative action in other contexts, which we wouldn't want to replicate here.
But, alas! the cat is out of the bag as it were. Because there's more than one side to an issue like this. So, when leading VCs and investors determined, companies run by Black women weren't getting very much startup funding at all, they lined up to support The Fearless Fund, a significant, though not exactly huge, capital pool for early funding of ventures started by women of color, which they describe as "bridging the gap" by which they mean, the extremely small number of women of color who ever get funding. Yes, probably it's for what they conceive to be PR reasons, but whatever, I would have thought that the goal being equality of opportunity, and there being no law specifically covering it, that would leave it to the realm of politics and bloviating. But not so!
Encourged by the current antipathy of our Supreme Court for anything resembling affirmative action, a conservative legal group has sued, claiming that racial preference of this kind is prohibited. As a former lawyer I would have asked, just what law prohibits discrimination in investing? Because most lawyers up to recently thought, it wasn't covered. But the clever conservative lawyers point to 42 USC 1981, a Reconstruction alway that asserts, all people are entitled to the same right to contract as White people have. (How they talked back then)
Now, say, this lawsuit against The Fearless Fund succeeds. Well, hmm, that would mean every VC investment decision is subject to section 1981, and yes, it would give non-white people the right to sue if they had evidence of bias in the funding decision. In other words, if it actually succeeds, this lawsuit charging discrimination against The Fearless fund, a rather extreme effort to prohibit totally voluntary efforts by some big time investors to remediate a pretty obvious problem of a minority group's lack of access to capital, wow! suddenly,a pretty major new legal issue for VCs and other private capital enterprises to deal with, in every investment decision they make. And if ever there was a deep pocket for lawyers to pursue...I drop a veil over the scene.
So, just to add this to the discussion, this conservative attack on The Fearless Fund seems to me a far more dangerous to VCs than this California law. Because, yes, folks, there are issues with discrimination in how investment firms hand out capital. I've observed some nasty instances first hand. Please don't live in a dream world where you think it doesn't happen. (I personally think, due to the extreme polarization of most people's beliefs on this subject, it's rather less than most liberals think and rather more than most conservatives do.) Nevertheless from my perspective, another set of legal rights is pretty clearly not the best way to address it.
Because, if The Fearless Fund can be challenged as discriminatory, so can any other fund, that's how it works (well more or less, anyway - nobody who knows anything about it would accuse our legal system of being excessively consistent.) And that's a far greater threat to investors than a somewhat voluntary reporting requirement for VCs.
Well, the article says, Amazon already charges this wherever Amazon Publishing Services is available. The change is to extend this charge to places where Amazon Publishing Services isn't available. Then the article provides some background info about how Amazon Fire works economically. So, basically, not much new here.
Big news, automobile manufacturer inflates gas mileage! Really!
If anyone here has had a car that actually got the stated mileage in real world conditions, please let me know.
I live on top of a hill and every single car I've ever owned, including, Honda, Toyota, Ford, Nissan, Dodge, Volvo that I recall right now has gotten oh, about 30% lower mileage than advertised. due to that pesky law of gravity that requires energy to be expended going up and down.
But even when I lived in leveller locales, cars never got the EPA rated mileage, except once, when I drove a Honda with a CVCC engine on a road trip through level countryside at about 45 miles per hour all day. I got terrific mileage. I never did it again.
Your comment is just publicly broadcasting your ineptitude at efficient driving. I regularly beat EPA estimates in both the EV I have and the ICE car I had.
> If anyone here has had a car that actually got the stated mileage in real world conditions, please let me know.
Depends on driving style. I drive a manual Ford Fiesta (with worse specced fuel efficiency than the automatic) living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, and it's abnormal for me not to get better fuel economy than the automatic's spec.
So, if this project were to be successful, it would replace news media as the outlet where people would look for news, thereby, reducing audience for the news media it's using as the source for it's information, which will provide less information due to reduced resources, and even more interestingly, get ever more sensationalist in trying to attract readers thereby increasing the bias of other media the AI depends on for information.
Yeah, bankruptcy basically does not let anyone off the hook who owes the bankrupt company or person a debt. But collection is overseen by a court which definitely can mean that efforts to collect debt owed to the bankrupt party can intensify and are unlikely to end until money is collected.
Over a decade ago, when I first left home, I bought a bunch of home appliances on finance. They never collected any payments, and a few years later, they went bankrupt. Nobody ever came after me and nothing ever appeared on my credit report.
So, for all the many things in the world that cannot be defined in "a reasonably concrete and provable way" or where a statement cannot be "falsified", no study is worthwhile.
More or less this position: nothing worthwhile from Wittgenstein beyond the Tractatus and specifically, forget about the Philosophical Investigations.
It's not an indictment of a field that the subject matter is not susceptible to description in terms that are definitely falsifiable. Of course, definite terminology can be very helpful where it does apply, but it can also be used to oversimplify complex questions in a way that obfuscates them. But there's no law that nature must always be subject to description in a "concrete and provable way", especially not by human languages. By not taking seriously anything but disciplines that can be boiled down to true-false propositions, we'd miss huge amounts of knowledge that are useful and helpful.
Especially fields like psychology where so many important observations simply cannot be broken down into concrete statements or provable propositions in the way you seem to mean those words.
On the other hand, it's also very important to be careful of misuse of terms such as "true" and "false", for example, they can have very different meanings when we're talking about logic or observation, answers to examination questions, romance or religion. In this particular exchange, by true do we mean scientifically true or logically true?
Or, how indeed would anyone stand up and say whether something is "definitely not damning" or "definitely not unintentional" actually?
There’s a reason that traditionally in America psychology is taught in a research oriented way. This has the upside of at least ideally causing psychologist and psychiatrist to have a curious attitude toward their patients. In a field that is dealing with something so complicated as people’s brains and their social interactions and their self perceptions and their bodily health, it’s pretty much a necessary condition to begin from a standpoint of assuming that you don’t understand everything. I think it also has the unfortunate downside of producing a lot of questionable research though.
The problem is that in a research paper you do have to have operational definitions, P values, etc. it’s not that these things are bad but they are not particularly well-suited to such an ambiguous problem as attempting to explore the human condition.
To bring the point back to Wittgenstein, we are forcing students to talk about “the unspeakable” in scientific terminology. Bringing in his viewpoint from the investigations, it feels to me like in the mental health field we need to be playing a different game than the scientific research game. Professionals on-the-ground are doing this, but how to bring that back into the academic sphere, I don’t know what the best solution is.
Wait! Contingent was just defined as everything that's not necessary. Not contingent with its normal meaning of dependent on something else. Like, a square has 4 sides, that's necessary for it to be called a square, but it might or might not depend on something else for that quality. Or a square is blue, that's contingent (i.e., what's not necessary in this usage for it to be called a square), and it might or might not depend on something else.
If you are using "contingent" with its normal meaning, the idea is absurd. We can divide everything that exists into "necessary" and "contingent", one or the other? We might as well divide everything into edible and picturesque, for example. Words, but more like word salad than meaningful statements.
If by far center, you mean unbiased, well, we're all biased to some degree. Actually it's very hard not to be quite biased in some way, whether ideologically or stylistically, or any of the more gross forms of bias most of us have to wrestle with, being human.
A bias scanner can be useful in identifying bias, but you can be ideological and non-biased, in which case, you're just using the bias scanner to reduce your bias. That's a good thing to do, but I'd call it, a kind of self-moderation, which might attenuate partisanship but for sure isn't necessarily centrist at all.