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Suspicious Discontinuities

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Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#231

Post by abvdasker »

tracker1 wrote: post #18
lkbm wrote: post #12

OKCupid has a graph of reported height for men[0]. It's both shifted 2 inches to the right of average, but also slightly flattened at the normal peak of 5'10". It's not nearly as pronounced as the graphs in this post, but it's still notable. [0] https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...

I really miss the more technical blog posts that OKCupid used to do like this... then after selling out to Match Inc, they wen't through that weird woke period... and radio silent for over a year... The technical insights were far more informative in terms of dating trends.

If you liked OkTrends, one of the founders of OkCupid, Christian Rudder, wrote an entire book full of fascinating social phenomena using data from social media and dating sites. It's called Dataclysm and it's great.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#232

Post by apta »

streb-lo wrote: post #218
zeveb wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you might as well call people sexist for preferring to date a particular gender. Just give it a few years. I know that Slate (a mainstream publication) a few years ago published an article which mentioned in an aside that it is bigotry for a heterosexual man to refuse to date a male who identifies as a woman. I will be completely unsurprised if in a decade or two the same argument is applied to gender preference, p…

Currently someone who has transitioned is noticeably different than someone who was born that way. I think it's not far-fetched to imagine that in the future there will no longer be any 'uncanny valley' and the stigma will disappear.

It won't happen. A man who pretends to be a woman still carries XY chromosomes. This is a fundamental reality with no way around it.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#233

Post by thu2111 »

smnrchrds wrote: post #217
kazagistar wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The leftist solutions are to get rid of of the conditions entirely, and find non-means-tested ways to accomplish goals more universally. The advantage here is significantly reduced administrative costs, freeing up time and energy of those in a tough situation on recovery rather then stress over beurocracy and limitations, and of course, people not viewing the people on the programs as morally deficient. Social securi…

I reminds me of that quip that if libraries didn't exist already and did not have a history millennia long, no government would create one today. Instead, they would create a means-tested tax credit for purchasing books.

Intriguing idea :)

I'm not sure if you're speaking approving or not (or neither). It seems like a reasonable thing to do though. Amazon is bigger than any library, it avoids the use of physical space in city centres and the need to manage loan systems/handle stolen books.

I think the difference between then and now is that IT happened, so it's much easier to do things like calculate complex per-item tax rates than it would once have been.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#234

Post by jonnycomputer »

greggyb wrote: post #199
jonnycomputer wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and I have my own stories to tell (like my foodstamps admin telling me to spend my tax return as quickly as possible or I'd lose foodstamps; which is doubly perverse). A for tax brackets, why do they exist. I think our mathematics is advanced enough that things like tax brackets could be replaced by continuous functions. So its either by design or by lack of imagination that these discontinuities exist. I've…

> A for tax brackets, why do they exist. I think our mathematics is advanced enough that things like tax brackets could be replaced by continuous functions. So its either by design or by lack of imagination that these discontinuities exist. Progressive tax brackets do not have discontinuities such that your income net of income tax becomes lower as a result of moving up a bracket.

good point. its actually not as bad as I thought.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#235

Post by banads »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #67
mumblemumble wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you order your hit list right, you can kill a continuous streak of #2s, until there's only one person left.

With only a few 100k casualties in collateral damage.

And twice as many more potential #2s spring up as a result

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#236

Post by habosa »

smoyer wrote: post #2

The youth sports discontinuity was a problem for me when I became old enough to play little league, but was exploited by me when I should have moved on to Teener League. I was born on the cut-off date for Little League, so I was the youngest player on the team my first year (and the youngest for my grade the other years.) Do to ambiguity in how the cut-off date wording was written, I ended up (legally) playing a four…

I had the exact same experience. I was one of the youngest people in my year and one of the worst players on my team. Until my age 13 season, when they wouldn't let me move up into the teenager league because of a one=month difference in age. So I was pitching to kids who had just turned 10 ... I threw a lot of strikeouts that year and hit my only home run ever haha.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#237

Post by Wehrdo »

aeturnum wrote: post #33

This is a lovely post and good general demonstration on this phenomenon. The drug charging graph is particularly stark. I think the most interesting graph is the final one, for marathon finishing times. The idea that people will fudge numbers to meet (or avoid) official definitions is commonly believed (and shown repeatedly here). It's more interesting to observe that it's not just people using motivated reasoning, b…

I think another factor for the marathon finishing time discontinuities is the use of pacers --- people who run carrying signs at a pre-defined speed (usually targeting a specific finishing time, e.g. 3:15). Lots of people who have finishing goals will run in a pack with this person so they know they're going fast enough, then will all finish just under the target time.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#238

Post by kwhitefoot »

jacques_chester wrote: post #108
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert on the system in Australia but how I think it works from what I have heard is there isn't a cut off point where if you make x you are eligible and if you make x+1 you aren't. Instead its a slope where if you make x+1 you lose a certain % of the payments until you eventually make enough to lose them all. But at all times its still better to take the job.

I'm afraid it's not that simple. The key is the Effective Marginal Tax Rate, which is the compounded effect of withdrawal of benefits and moving up to a different tax bracket. Depending on the prevailing settings it's not uncommon to find points at which the EMTR is more than 100%. I ran for the Federal Parliament for a libertarian party in 2007 largely because I supported their policy plan to reform taxation and wel…

Well done for trying.

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#239

Post by jmmcd »

eloff wrote: post #3
smoyer wrote: post #2

The youth sports discontinuity was a problem for me when I became old enough to play little league, but was exploited by me when I should have moved on to Teener League. I was born on the cut-off date for Little League, so I was the youngest player on the team my first year (and the youngest for my grade the other years.) Do to ambiguity in how the cut-off date wording was written, I ended up (legally) playing a four…

I was always small until about age 16, and I always sucked at sports and never really got into them - partly as a result. I wonder if we shouldn't group kids by size for sporting activities instead of by age. There's a famous statistic in Canada that NHL players are much more likely to be born in January and February than September-December. The reason being is they were nearly a year older than other kids they were…

> I wonder if we shouldn't group kids by size for sporting activities instead of by age.

This is how it's done in rugby in New Zealand and maybe a few other countries, but not most. It's much more important in rugby than in baseball!

Re: Suspicious Discontinuities

#240

Post by RHSeeger »

kazagistar wrote: post #214
RHSeeger wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time following this argument. It's not a tax, it's a limit to benefits. If the government comes along and says > You need $30,000 / year to live at a minimum in our society. We will make sure everyone that makes less than that gets enough in benefits to make up the difference. That's not a 100% tax rate for any money earned under $30,000 / year. It's reduced benefits because the definitions of the syste…

It behaves the same way from the perspective of the worker. For every hour I work of a minimum wage job, I see an increase to my spending abilities of 35% of minimum wage or whatever. It's only not a tax technically, but it still cuts into your direct benefit from working exactly like a tax.

> It's only not a tax technically

In the same way that any benefit program being cancelled (eg. movies for kids for free every Friday on the town green, etc) are stealing.

It's a benefit that had some or all of it taken away.

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