The Political & Philosophy Thread

[Dak]

One thing I think is interesting relating to either politics or economics (in the micro vs macro sense) is the reversal paradox from statistics.

 

[Einherjar86]

Reading about it now, really interesting.

 

[EternalMetal]

I've since been accused multiple times of harboring some kind of secret liberal agenda of promoting censorship. This hasn't once been the case.

I love how disconnected you like to feel from your own arguments. You posit an argument, make a few statements that absolve you from criticism, and wait to crush anyone who responds. I blame myself for taking the bait.

I'll be the first to, once again, say I apologize for contributing to how this blew out of proportion. I still contend, fervently, that social media is as prone to market pressures as it is to the whims of its liberal overlords, and that censorship on social media answers (at least in part) to market demands. The demographics of social media speak for themselves. I'll agree that political opinion in this country is profoundly shaped by social media, but that doesn't preclude social media from responding to these effects in terms of how to best generate more traffic. If more Facebook users are liberal, for example, then they're probably more prone to visit the site if right-wing stories aren't popping up in their feed, or at least spend more time.

The idea that media censorship (social media and otherwise) can be in accordance with market demands has been the entire point of my posts, and I'm sorry if I drew us off-message. But there, that's what I really think.

Algorithms are designed to correct for this, censorship is unnecessary unless ulterior motives are involved. Otherwise yes, your analysis is correct, Data.

 

[Dak]

Reading about it now, really interesting.

Some of the technical explanations aren't super clear on how it looks practically, the "Wage Gap" is a good example, and here are some others:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/3q3/simpsons_paradox/

In Real Life
I'll finish with a famous real life example. In 1975, there was a study published [2] which demonstrated that 44% of male graduate applicants for graduate programmes at Berkeley were being accepted, whereas only 35% or female applicants were. This was obviously a pretty serious problem, so the authors decided to have a closer look, to try and see which departments in particular were most guilty of discrimination.

As you'll be expecting by now, what they found was that not only were most of the departments not biased at all, in fact, there were more which were biased in favour of women than there were in favour of men! The confounding variable that was found was that women were applying for more competitive departments than men... of course, as we've seen, it's just possible that something else was hiding in the data.

There are several other real-life examples. You can find a few in the wikipedia article on Simpson's Paradox. Batting averages are a common toy example. It's possible for one player to have a better average than another every season for his entire career, and a worse average overall. Similar phenomena are not particularly unusual in medical data - treatments which are given to patients with more serious ilnesses are always going to look worse in aggregate data. One of my personal favourite examples is that countries which put fluoride in the water have significantly more people who require false teeth than those which don't. As usual, there's a hidden variable lurking.

 

[Baroque]

I teach that exact example (Berkeley) in my baby statistics class. I know not every stats teacher does, but they should. It's important to know the flaws.

 

[rms]

One thing I think is interesting relating to either politics or economics (in the micro vs macro sense) is the reversal paradox from statistics.

where are you reading about this?

 

[Talos of Atmora]

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=donald+trump

Well...that was quite the upset.

 

[RedStorm]

Trump is president. Hell yes.

Anyways, question for the politically educated, I would call myself a Libertarian and I feel it holds the best of the two parties (dem and rep) the social side of the left wing and financial side of the right. I would not say Gary was the best example of a Lib, more of a left wingest honestly. What is wrong with the Libertarian party? Is it the lack of money and promotion?

 

[SentinelSlain]

I hope this election signifies a major long term cultural and political shift in the Western world. The self loathing people need to just fuck off.

 

[RedStorm]

Most people hate trump because of what he says, literally no other reason with about 90 percent of the people ive talked with about him. My mom says hes a bully

 

[Talos of Atmora]

I hope this election signifies a major long term cultural and political shift in the Western world. The self loathing people need to just fuck off.

Yup.

 

[RedStorm]

Donald trump will start abolishing our safe spaces !!

 

[Elric of Melniboné]

He's most likely not going to be the agent of great America that he's portrayed himself as so far. I figure that he'll be a pretty average conservative.

I expect him to deliver on very little of his promises aside from the obvious ones like appointing judges and removing Obamacare.

 

[Talos of Atmora]

He's most likely not going to be the agent of great America that he's portrayed himself as so far. I figure that he'll be a pretty average conservative.

I expect him to deliver on very little of his promises aside from the obvious ones like appointing judges and removing Obamacare.

Seeing as how the Senate and the House will essentially keep him on a leash through checks and balances, that's a reasonable expectation.

 

[Einherjar86]

I just want to say something about the glee and intentional non-PC environment here, especially in a few threads since Trump won the election.

I'm not a PC dogmatist (despite what some of you may believe). I think there are dangers to non-reflective PC thinking, and I think that some people here - namely Dak, but a few others too - make very good points about the ways that political correctness elides important cultural issues. One area in which I'm particularly concerned has to do with safe spaces and trigger warnings, which - while I make attempts to communicate as fully as possible with my students about the kinds of stories they'll be reading - can sometimes unfortunately lead to the avoidance of serious cultural texts or artifacts (e.g. students who don't want to read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man because of the racial violence, despite the fact that Ellison is a black writer and his story critiques racial inequality).

My problem with anti-PC culture is when it achieves its own dogmatic level, which is something I see frequently - not just on this forum, but all over the internet. I wouldn't even accuse people of being racist, at least not in any intentionalist manner. David Foster Wallace sums up my thoughts on this nicely, and I figured I would leave this here:

This is obviously a high-voltage area to get into, but for what it's worth, John Ziegler does not appear to be a racist as "racist" is generally understood. What he is is more like very, very insensitive—although Mr. Z. himself would despise that description, if only because "insensitive" is now such a PC shibboleth. Actually, though, it is in the very passion of his objection to terms like "insensitive," "racist," and "the N-word" that his real problem lies. Like many other post-Limbaugh hosts, John Ziegler seems unable to differentiate between (1) cowardly, hypocritical acquiescence to the tyranny of Political Correctness and (2) judicious, compassionate caution about using words that cause pain to large groups of human beings, especially when there are several less upsetting words that can be used. Even though there is plenty of stuff for reasonable people to dislike about Political Correctness as a dogma, there is also something creepy about the brutal, self-righteous glee with which Mr. Z. and other conservative hosts defy all PC conventions. If it causes you real pain to hear or see something, and I make it a point to inflict that thing on you merely because I object to your reasons for finding it painful, then there's something wrong with my sense of proportion, or my recognition of your basic humanity, or both.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/04/host/303812/

Obviously, there is the concern over what constitutes "real pain," and how exactly we can legitimize the experiences of those who feel threatened or traumatized. This is a serious question, and I don't think we can reduce pain entirely to a person's claim to feel it, since this is an unconfirmable quality - that's not to say the subjective experience is beside the point, but there needs to be some kind of socio-cultural metric for gauging traumatic situations to complement it.

That said, it's horrific to see people make light of PC culture and explicitly invoke politically incorrect language because they know it upsets people. Racial slurs and sexist language aren't a matter of opinion, they're historically determinate and verifiable phenomena.

 

[CiG]

He's most likely not going to be the agent of great America that he's portrayed himself as so far. I figure that he'll be a pretty average conservative.

I expect him to deliver on very little of his promises aside from the obvious ones like appointing judges and removing Obamacare.

He won't be an average conservative because he isn't one at all. Many of his policies look more like Bernie's than Cruz's for example. The only genuinely GOP-esque position I see him holding is he's very much for the war on terror.

So I'm not really sure what you mean.

 

[Dak]

Obviously, there is the concern over what constitutes "real pain," and how exactly we can legitimize the experiences of those who feel threatened or traumatized. This is a serious question, and I don't think we can reduce pain entirely to a person's claim to feel it, since this is an unconfirmable quality - that's not to say the subjective experience is beside the point, but there needs to be some kind of socio-cultural metric for gauging traumatic situations to complement it.

That said, it's horrific to see people make light of PC culture and explicitly invoke politically incorrect language because they know it upsets people. Racial slurs and sexist language aren't a matter of opinion, they're historically determinate and verifiable phenomena.

I think the degree to which we see the explicit invoking is in proportion to the degree that we see the absurd application of PC ideology. The callousness plays a homeostatic role.

 

[Einherjar86]

That may be true. But the fact that the explicit invoking is done with the intention to harm strikes me as worse than its potential misapplication.

 

[Dak]

That may be true. But the fact that the explicit invoking is done with the intention to harm strikes me as worse than its potential misapplication.

This perspective seems a bit oblivious to the harm of PC culture to the same people reporting the pain of insensitivity - which is understandable because it's less obvious.

 

[Einherjar86]

But that harm isn't intentional. That's the kicker for me.