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What has happened down here is the winds have changed

andrewgelman.com

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Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#161

Post by nickpsecurity »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #96
wyager wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are falling for a classic argumentative attack. Everyone agrees "abuse" (e.g. beating your wife) is bad, so Fisk just redefines "abuse" to mean "earnest, blunt, non-sugar-coated feedback" but you keep on using the connotations of the real definition.

Where can I find the redefinition?

Like wyager said, she takes a term that usually applies to real, undeniable harm then applies it without evidence of equivalence to something controversial. She uses the same word, though. This is so reducing (controversial thing here) is equivalent to reducing "abuse." This is to setup the passive-aggressive (aka SJW) defense where anyone arguing against the controversial claim must also be arguing for "abuse." They can then side-track the discussion by accusing those that disagree of not caring about stopping "abuse" or being an abuse "apologist." You can insert any negative claim related to social justice into that construct and the setup still works on many readers regardless of logical claims of their opponent.

It's a rhetorical device that relies on readers being fooled into the equivalence of what practice the sophist wants to go away and some form of harm. There's no equivalence, though. It's just rhetoric to obscure their actual argument that's probably indefensible or just weaker to rational people. The author of the counterpoint shows that nicely by illustrating what the actual critiques were with evidence, showing the author that was griping had a personal stake in that evidence not coming out, and was just using sophistry to preserve preferred status quo and her career.

Do you understand the technique now? I can provide more links to disinformation tactics in general or the ones preferred by manufactured-harm subset commonly called SJW's if you need.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#162

Post by nickpsecurity »

Animats wrote: post #116

Psychology as a science has far fewer reliable results than it claimed it did. It's not that the winds have changed. It's that the field was broken. Realizing this is a good thing. It's going to set back careers and reduce funding, though. Next, economics? "Science is prediction, not explanation." - Fred Hoyle

"Next, economics?"

I vote for that field's BS to be thoroughly dismantled next. Like psychology, they often stray too far from the real world almost as if the goal is just citations, funding, and academic prestige. Common in general in academia but the connection to reality is thinner with a lot of economics. The amount that try to understand what's going on in U.S. economy without factoring in bribes to politicians and self-forming cartels in oligopolies might be a starting point for the filter. The first thing anyone should think of about a government subsidy, law, or regulation is, "Did someone pay for it? And how would that affect things in local and global sense?"

Same with media reporting. "In todays news, this chemical company and these specific drug companies paid this amount of bribe money to the following Congressmen for the following law to be passed drastically reducing what they have to pay you if they maim you for life, pay your family if they kill you, or pay your town if they mess a whole town up."

A little reality check might change both purchasing and voting behaviors. It's gotta be presented in the model people are reading or hearing. If the effect exists & is not in model, then that's just politically or scientifically dishonest. Often for a reason. ;)

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#163

Post by nickpsecurity »

internaut wrote: post #140
beevai142 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For too long we've assumed the bodies of accumulated knowledge in the sciences to be fact without dispute Who is this "we" who has assumed such a thing? Certainly no working scientist I know would agree that a result being published means it is necessarily correct. Nevertheless, some knowledge of the world scientists have accumulated has very strong support, and those who challenge it have invariably turned out to…

The 'we' could be a bunch of people who are no longer even alive. No longer alive in body but alive in spirit through the application of the law. I was listening to a building science podcast the other day. In it they were talking about how they used to use, and still use, a 100 year old assumption about 'make-up air' in houses which is part of setting up an air conditioning system. Turns out the original scientific…

I know some H&A guys who would probably find that interesting.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#164

Post by internaut »

internaut wrote: post #140
beevai142 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For too long we've assumed the bodies of accumulated knowledge in the sciences to be fact without dispute Who is this "we" who has assumed such a thing? Certainly no working scientist I know would agree that a result being published means it is necessarily correct. Nevertheless, some knowledge of the world scientists have accumulated has very strong support, and those who challenge it have invariably turned out to…

The 'we' could be a bunch of people who are no longer even alive. No longer alive in body but alive in spirit through the application of the law. I was listening to a building science podcast the other day. In it they were talking about how they used to use, and still use, a 100 year old assumption about 'make-up air' in houses which is part of setting up an air conditioning system. Turns out the original scientific…

http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/c/7/c/c7c82959d816327d/BuildingPer...

Looks like it becomes a bigger problem as buildings become more airtight. Something to do with peak dewpoint in makeup air being all wrong, not sure because I'm not a HVAC expert.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#165

Post by jsprogrammer »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #161
jsprogrammer wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where can I find the redefinition?

Like wyager said, she takes a term that usually applies to real, undeniable harm then applies it without evidence of equivalence to something controversial. She uses the same word, though. This is so reducing (controversial thing here) is equivalent to reducing "abuse." This is to setup the passive-aggressive (aka SJW) defense where anyone arguing against the controversial claim must also be arguing for "abuse." They…

Funny, I don't even see the word "abuse" in Fiske's article.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#166

Post by bjterry »

vitno wrote: post #99
wgyn wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not quite true. E.g. Google's email spam models are trained without access to the raw text. In general the field of differential privacy is developing rather quickly.

I'm somewhat confused about how they would be doing that. Do you have any references to blogs/papers on this technique?

One typical strategy for spam detection is to convert text to a "bag of words" representation[0]. If you take this bag of words representation and hash all the values, then rather than training words like ED, you are training on word number 19213123. The number of these hashed values is smaller than the number of words, just like a hash table, and this generally doesn't harm the accuracy of the machine learning. When you receive feedback on the classification (from people reporting spam or people marking things as not spam), you just turn the reported email into a bag of hashed words and feed that change into your model.

Because the order of the entries in the bag of words is arbitrary, and the words have been hashed, it is impossible to go back from a bag of words representation to the original email. I don't know if this is what google does, but it is pretty normal to do so.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag-of-words_model

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#167

Post by nickpsecurity »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #165
nickpsecurity wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like wyager said, she takes a term that usually applies to real, undeniable harm then applies it without evidence of equivalence to something controversial. She uses the same word, though. This is so reducing (controversial thing here) is equivalent to reducing "abuse." This is to setup the passive-aggressive (aka SJW) defense where anyone arguing against the controversial claim must also be arguing for "abuse." They…

Funny, I don't even see the word "abuse" in Fiske's article.

I was generalizing it into one word that's a superset of all the others. Probably should've put it in parentheses or something. My bad. Here's her words that she uses to describe any critiques people have been doing:

"unfiltered trash-talk" "unmoderated attacks" "sheer adversarial viciousness" "methodological terrorism" "ad hominem smear tactics" "dangerous minority trend"

That's just first two paragraphs. All of these are verbal equivalence to "abuse" or "harm" that gives the perception that whatever was going on is something bad with no rhyme or reason and needs to stop. Because who could possibly argue with her if they were supporting "smear tactics," "trash-talk," and some kind of "terrorism?"

In reality, a number of scientists applied the principles of fact-checking and replication to a lot of work, including hers. The work failed these. They reported failures to use scientific method. Her side is resisting. Instead of addressing methodological failures, she instead calls it all trash-talk or terrorism while saying she can't or won't give examples of either the [methodological] terrorist attacks or "victims" of that abuse. Everyone should instead just keep doing things the broken way that made her career and only question things in the channels that proliferated these problems and that people like her control. Arguing against that is supporting "trash-talk," "attacks," "smear tactics," and "terrorism" coming from a "dangerous minority." Typical, SJW sophistry.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#168

Post by jsprogrammer »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #167
jsprogrammer wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I don't even see the word "abuse" in Fiske's article.

I was generalizing it into one word that's a superset of all the others. Probably should've put it in parentheses or something. My bad. Here's her words that she uses to describe any critiques people have been doing: "unfiltered trash-talk" "unmoderated attacks" "sheer adversarial viciousness" "methodological terrorism" "ad hominem smear tactics" "dangerous minority trend" That's just first two paragraphs. All of the…

wyager actually introduced the word. You then said that Fiske used the term. I don't see the term anywhere in Gelman's article.

In fact, Gelman uses the term in a comment on the linked page:

>Frederic:

>I’m as bothered by anyone by trolls etc., and I’d’ve had no problem if Fiske had written an article about trolls, abuse of communication channels, etc. (ideally with some examples). But this has nothing to do with replication. These are two unrelated topics! What Fiske seems to be doing is conflating the replication movement, which she doesn’t like, with all sorts of “terroristic” behaviors which none of us like. I’d prefer for Fiske to write two articles, then I could say I agree with her article about bad behavior and I disagree with her argument about scientific criticism.

Gelman has lots of valid points. I just didn't see any real discussion on abuse...anywhere...and was wondering what was being discussed in regards to using and redefining the word.

I don't understand what methodological terrorism is, but I do see ad hominem arguments use. The words really should be defined somewhere for use to read, if they are going to be published. Also, examples of exactly what she is talking about would be really useful.

[We are in the thread about people just making shit up and publishing it, right?]

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#169

Post by nickpsecurity »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #168
nickpsecurity wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was generalizing it into one word that's a superset of all the others. Probably should've put it in parentheses or something. My bad. Here's her words that she uses to describe any critiques people have been doing: "unfiltered trash-talk" "unmoderated attacks" "sheer adversarial viciousness" "methodological terrorism" "ad hominem smear tactics" "dangerous minority trend" That's just first two paragraphs. All of the…

wyager actually introduced the word. You then said that Fiske used the term. I don't see the term anywhere in Gelman's article. In fact, Gelman uses the term in a comment on the linked page: >Frederic: >I’m as bothered by anyone by trolls etc., and I’d’ve had no problem if Fiske had written an article about trolls, abuse of communication channels, etc. (ideally with some examples). But this has nothing to do with rep…

"I just didn't see any real discussion on abuse...anywhere...and was wondering what was being discussed in regards to using and redefining the word."

"[We are in the thread about people just making shit up and publishing it, right?]"

I already corrected that and you're still focused on the use of the word instead of the tactics we're saying Fiske (and others) used. The word was a tiny point in that which I already owned up to as a mistake or missing clarification.

What's your position on the characterization by Fiske of anyone that disagrees with her or doesn't use channels people like her control to post criticisms as (all the negative connotations like "smear tactics" or "terrorists" here)? And do you agree that scientists should only be allowed to do what established names in academia say (status quo) and be automatically labeled as supporting the same, negative things for any form of dissent? Or publish dissent however they choose so long as there's evidence like in the counterpoint?

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#170

Post by wyager »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #168
nickpsecurity wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was generalizing it into one word that's a superset of all the others. Probably should've put it in parentheses or something. My bad. Here's her words that she uses to describe any critiques people have been doing: "unfiltered trash-talk" "unmoderated attacks" "sheer adversarial viciousness" "methodological terrorism" "ad hominem smear tactics" "dangerous minority trend" That's just first two paragraphs. All of the…

wyager actually introduced the word. You then said that Fiske used the term. I don't see the term anywhere in Gelman's article. In fact, Gelman uses the term in a comment on the linked page: >Frederic: >I’m as bothered by anyone by trolls etc., and I’d’ve had no problem if Fiske had written an article about trolls, abuse of communication channels, etc. (ideally with some examples). But this has nothing to do with rep…

> wyager actually introduced the word.

No I didn't, the person above me did.

But it's true, Fisk didn't redefine this particular word, just some other ones (like "terrorism"). My mistake, I shouldn't have assumed the guy above me was correct.

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