Showing posts with label Colour Me Unconvinced. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Colour Me Unconvinced. Show all posts

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Snappy responses you weren't hoping for that nonetheless answer the question quite well

In the last few years, unable to hold a list of just four grocery items in my head, I’d begun to fret a bit over my literal state of mind. So to reassure myself that nothing was amiss, just before tackling French I took a cognitive assessment called CNS Vital Signs, recommended by a psychologist friend. The results were anything but reassuring: I scored below average for my age group in nearly all of the categories, notably landing in the bottom 10th percentile on the composite memory test and in the lowest 5 percent on the visual memory test.
All this means that we adults have to work our brains hard to learn a second language. But that may be all the more reason to try, for my failed French quest yielded an unexpected benefit. After a year of struggling with the language, I retook the cognitive assessment, and the results shocked me. My scores had skyrocketed, placing me above average in seven of 10 categories, and average in the other three. My verbal memory score leapt from the bottom half to the 88th — the 88th! — percentile and my visual memory test shot from the bottom 5th percentile to the 50th. Studying a language had been like drinking from a mental fountain of youth.
What might explain such an improvement?
Regression toward the mean.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Fun run participants - stop being so god damn smug

Suppose I were to present you with the following proposition:

"Next Sunday morning, I'm going to take a dump on your front lawn.  When I'm done, I'm then going to donate $15 to charity. You'll have no say in the matter - this is going to happen regardless of what you want.  When I'm done, I'm going to walk away and feel proud of how I helped out a good cause, and you should be honoured to be part of the charity process - in your case, the cleanup."

How persuaded would you be by this logic? Would the phrase 'not very' about sum it up?

I imagine the modal answer would be something like:

"Look, I'm glad you want to give to charity, but what the hell has that got to do with crapping on my lawn? It seems that taking a dump on someone's property is the actual point of the exercise, and the charity bit is mainly a fig leaf. The whole thing seems bizarre and contrived. Donate to charity if you want to, but leave my lawn out of it."

And that's exactly how I feel about fun runs.

A bunch of yuppie, SWPL women (and their herb boyfriends) decide to go for some charity run or other. The neighbourhood gets shut down. Local residents get the joy of having their house made inaccessible, and their streets closed down.

So if you happen to be (to pick an entirely hypothetical example) dropping someone at the airport as the run is being set up, and you had the misfortune to arrive back while it was in full swing, you might find yourself unable to get back to the street that your house is on. You might also, to extend our hypothetical, be unable to even park anywhere remotely close to your house, due to the bays all being taken by everyone trying to do the same thing, resulting in swarms of angry drivers doing police-enforced U-turns looking for parking and/or an open street. Hypothetically.

So why do these damn things keep happening? Simple - a sizable fraction of the participants find it fun to get to run in a big crowd along the road that's normally reserved for cars. Not all, of course - some are just giddy with the ability to ostentatiously give to charity, and the fun run gives them an excuse to tell their friends about their generosity in a way that writing a cheque doesn't.

But a large percentage just like the idea of doing an organised run along the streets, and don't think or care if they're inconveniencing a lot of people.

You know who else does that? A**holes like Critical Mass. Fun runs are basically just Critical Mass, but with a better PR department. At least the cyclists are honest enough to admit that they're going to piss you off, and don't care. Fun run participants convince themselves that they're actually doing you, and the world, a huge service.

In order to launder the guilt properly, there has to be the maddening two-step of blame-dodging. It's the charity that organises the run. The participants just say 'look, the run was already going ahead! It's not me blocking off your streets, I just happen to like taking part.' The charity either doesn't care (more likely), or explains it as 'look, these charity fun runs raise a lot of money because SWPLs like running on city streets. If we don't do it, someone else will.'

And so they go on.

I know exactly what response this kind of claim produces from the standard whiners - "They're doing so much for charity! Why don't you just put up with a small inconvenience for a good cause?"

This is totally bogus, and just muddies the two parts.

Nothing, nothing, is stopping these people just writing a cheque to whatever charity they're supporting. You think the charity won't take your money unless you've signed up to the fun run? Don't make me laugh. Donating directly would also have the added benefit that a) all the money goes to the cause, instead of most of it subsidising the recreation, and b) then it would have to be all made up of their own money, rather than hassling their friends.

And if they won't write the cheque unless they're allowed to do the fun run, what is that telling you? To me, it sounds exactly like the first hypothetical. I'm going to use this act of charity as moral blackmail in order to do something entirely unrelated that I want to do anyway.

The Talmud has a very different idea of charity:
Charity, ideally, should be given in secret so that the two parties, the giver and the receiver, do not know each other.
By this standard, modern charity can't be accomplished without the donors literally organising their own parade run to celebrate their generosity, and then using most of the proceeds to fund the parade itself.

You'll forgive me for not getting all misty-eyed.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Yahoo Employees Know Less About Computers Than You Think

Well, the CEO anyway.

Via Hacker News comes a letter from Third Point LLC claiming that newly appointed Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson may have, er, 'embellished' his academic credentials:
According to the Yahoo! Form 10-K/A, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 27, 2012, newly-hired Chief Executive Officer, Scott Thompson, "holds a Bachelor's degree in accounting and computer science" from Stonehill College. ...
A rudimentary Google search reveals a Stonehill College alumni announcement stating that Mr. Thompson's degree is in accounting only. ...
Furthermore, Stonehill College informed us that it did not begin awarding computer science degrees until 1983 -- four years after Mr. Thompson graduated
Hmm, that's quite a pickle, no? 

I mean, maybe he just forget to correct everybody for all these years when they talked about his computer science degree? He's reading the press release where they're lauding him for this degree that he doesn't have, and he figures 'Hey, why not? I deserved  a computer science degree. It's like an honorary PhD, but granted by the secretary at Yahoo instead of the college itself!' 

Could happen to anybody, really.

Third Point then decides to put the boot in:
We inquired whether Mr. Thompson had taken a large number of computer science courses, perhaps allowing him to justify to himself that he had "earned" such a degree. Instead, we learned that during Mr. Thompson's tenure at Stonehill only one such course was even offered - Intro to Computer Science. Presumably, Mr. Thompson took that course.
Oooh, that's gotta burn.

Third Point are an activist hedge fund, and as such are professional rabble rousers. They own 5.8% of Yahoo, and want their own people appointed. That doesn't make them wrong, of course, but it does tell you their incentives in the whole thing.

So far, Yahoo has admitted the discrepancy, but claims that it was all a clerical error. They also claim (with perhaps more credibility) that it doesn't matter anyway, since the guy has a lot of tech experience, running PayPal and Visa's Innovant division.

Personally, I think they're right. It's hard to imagine that my opinion of the guy's credentials would be much increased by the presence of a computer science degree in 1979. Learn the fundamentals of Fortran! Study the coming microprocessor revolution! And to add to the gravitas, the piece of paper certifying all this comes from a college I'm not sure I've even heard of.

This makes Third Point's claim that this "undermines [Thompson's] credibility as a technology expert" laughable. On the other hand, they do have a point that this bodes poorly as a sign of the guy's character if he's been lying about his credentials. That kind of thing is hard to come back from.

Still, Yahoo shareholders can take solace in the fact that in the bigger picture, the provenance of Scott Thompson's degree is the least of their problems:


Whether the same can be said for Mr Thompson himself remains to be seen.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Great News

Apparently the War on Drugs has ended! I know this because I read as much from Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Obama administration's White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. (i.e. the drug czar). Let's hear it from the man himself:
My first act upon being appointed President Obama's drug policy advisor in 2009 was to discard the "war on drugs" approach to formulating drug policy.
That's fantastic! It should could as great news to the families of Wendell Allen, Ramarley Graham, Jonathan Ayers, Eurie Stamps, etc. etc. etc.