I just can't imagine the face. Is it like, you look at the photo and can't tell it's really a dog? Or like an "if this was abstract art I would say they buried a face in there"?
When I first glanced at the photo never having seen it before, the face was so ghastly and jarring, it was like a demon baby's face grimacing on a dog's body. Then my eyes drifted up to the caption, back down, and the face was never seen again.
I may be missing something important, but it seems to me that some people in this debate are making a "base rate fallacy".
Specifically, the article "Why Brahmins lead Western firms but rarely Indian ones" complains that few Brahmins lead Indian companies. Out of 20 wealthiest Indian companies, not even one is led by a Brahmin!
Okay, so how many Brahmins are there in India? According to Wikipedia, they make 5% of the population, in other words, one in 20. So, under perfect equality, you would statistically expect 1 out of the 20 wealthiest Indian companies on average to be led by a Brahmin. And it is not one, it is zero. Perhaps my math is wrong, but I think that even under perfect equality, where would be about 30% chance that a randomly selected group of 20 people would contain zero members of a 5% minority. (Someone please check my math.)
So the actual question is why Brahmins are *overrepresented* in American companies (compared to other Indians), not why they are underrepresented in Indian ones (because most likely, they are not). I think it could simply be a selection effect of Brahmins being more rich and being traditionally the educated ones -- this is why they are more likely to pay to study at an American university, and then some of them get a great job opportunity and stay here.
I can't imagine much for most books. Probably because of the economics of publishing, most books are barely touched by editors. If you write a non-fiction book and want to have it fact checked you have to pay for that yourself.
She may be an usual case, given this was an already published and successful book, that had become controversial and was being reviewed for changes before publishing a new edition. Maybe they pushed harder because of the (apparent) controversy, but also, she had much more leverage.
"Had to" seems a bit strong for the written fact. I thought it was interesting that the author wrote "Before we could discuss this, Picador and I agreed to split." Clearly authors don't always think/know they have power in these situations but it isn't clear to me that they wouldn't have actually published the book.
Having said that, those suggestions did seem pretty nuts.
The book was already published by Picador, but because of heavy criticism they stopped selling it and planned a new version – "to be revised in consultation with sensitivity readers". This article was about this new version.
I can't speak to the general case, but Naomi Novik, one of my favorite authors, wrote a cringing apology for using the word "dreadlocks" in a context having nothing to do with race after being informed, I conjecture by a sensitivity reader working for her publisher but might be wrong, that the term was not politically correct. Judging by her writing she is not herself particularly woke, so I interpreted that as a response to incentives.
Sure, but the point is precisely that they're using them all at the first place. They may not be literally doing the censoring, but publishers using them means they intend to censor their works for woke reasons.
It's kind of silly to suggest that they would pay for this work to be done but not actually care about what the readers say, unless you want to argue it's some kind of weird act of signalling or something.
But you can ask a dozen women about their experiences with pregnancy and get a dozen different responses. It is the same problem as with 'sensitivity readers'. Given the near infinite number of identity politics subcategories that people claim to belong to these days, how could a few such people even begin to pretend to represent them all fairly?
Don't compare it to a gun editor - compare it to a traditional editor who says things like "the story would flow a lot better if Chapter 18 was before Chapter 17, and Chapter 19 seems like a waste so you should cut it".
This matches my understanding. Authors may choose to self-censor based on the reader's recommendation, but the ones I've been aware of were advisors with no power to actually censor the work. Even in the linked description it's not clear to me that "censor" is an appropriate term for what happened. Same for the "context" warning from Facebook.
I think it may also be conflating "normal" low intelligence with what were considered genetic defects. Down Syndrome and whatever we call Mental Retardation (apparently "intellectual development disorder" in the new DSM) or similar issues.
My experience was that I started by seeing the face (on the bottom of the dog's head), switched after a few seconds to seeing the dog, and now I can't see the face at all no matter how hard I try. I think dog is stickier than face, if you've already seen the dog it's probably hopeless.
I think I was able to see the face after first seeing the dog, but I had to cheat by using the back of my hand to cover up my view of the dogs eyes and top part of the picture. Once the image was no longer obviously a dog, I think my brain was a bit more free to interpret shadows as spooky face-like. The face I ended up seeing had the dogs collar as an eye, the dogs nose as the spooky face nose, a shadow to the left of the dogs nose as the other eye, and the underside of the dogs muzzle as a creepy gaping mouth with visible teeth. It sort of reminds me of the redead from Zelda Ocarina of Time.
Also, I've been a longtime reader, and just recently a subscriber and now first-time commenter. Thanks for all your great writing over the years Scott, and congrats on the marriage!
Similar experience here. I saw the face, then read the caption and could only see the dog. I was eventually able to recover the face by covering the dog's eyes and top part of the image.
The light patch to the left of the dog's nose is the profile of the face's nose (the face is looking somewhat down and to the viewer's left), and the dog's nose is one of the face's eyes. The reddish patch of the dog's collar is the face's left ear.
This was my experience too I think the brain is really well trained on eyes, such that if it "latches" on to a pair of eyes the rest of the face takes shape almost immediately
After reading the comments I scrolled back up to see the face and found that I can catch a glimpse of the face as I quickly scroll up, but the moment it stops it turns back into a dog.
Interesting, I just scrolled back up quickly, and I thought I caught a glimpse of a face. Scrolling down quickly, I didn't get the impression of a face. I gave it a break for a minute, and scrolled up again quickly. Thought I saw a face. Gave it a break. Scrolled down quickly, didn't see the face.
Has it got to do with what part of the pic (bottom vs top) that we see first?
I can switch back and forth with relative ease but notice that when I do there is a change in muscular tension in my upper right back accompanying the switch.
wait... so you saw the face first? I am having trouble seeing the face, but based on (https://imgur.com/SRDcnOr) the face still only takes up a small portion of the picture. And the face is floating on a dogs body? Why would this be seen before a dog when the rest of the picture has all the context of a dog??
..and i wonder how this correlates with dog ownership..
I think if you scroll down the dog is more obvious and if you scroll up you'll be more likely to see the face. Start with the image off screen in both cases.
I’m in the “completely hopeless” camp. I wonder if it might be because I’ve owned dogs, similar to that one (mostly Labs) my entire life. Even if I cover up the dog’s eyes, there is just way too much else in the picture that immediately pattern matches to “black dog laying on the floor” for me.
Wait, really? I didn't see the face at all at first, but after looking at the image that highlights the facial feature locations, I can freely "see" it by focusing on those for a bit
...same as you, I started by seeing the face, from second look on I could only see the dog and was not able to see the face again. But then I accidentally looked at the picture in small (thumbnail) and there I can only see the face, not the dog (even if I have both the large picture and the small one next to each other, I see a different thing in either of them) :) pretty weird :)
If you're having trouble seeing the face: squint so hard your eyes are almost closed and focus on the white parts of the dog's face, which are the highlights of a face mostly in shadow.
Does it resemble jar-jar binks? Like, with 2 eye stalks on top of a head with a mouth on the front of a head sticking out? That's the closest I saw when squinting at the lighter area
I saw the dog first, and was only able to see the face once I concentrated on seeing the dog's nose as an eye. The small white triangle to its right as a nose was also a feature that helped transform the image
Don't know if this helps, but: the dog is looking straight at us with a chill expression. The human face is looking down between the dog's legs and looks horrified / hopeless. Edit: the whitest part of the photo is the human's left cheek and the dog's left upper lip.
It took me a non-trivial amount of seconds to see the dog, but now I can see whichever I want to see.
This is still a dog's nose for me. I'm not able to see any faces anywhere (including the ones illustrated into the photo in other links).
Maybe it has to do with some individual priming? I had a dog with a vaguely similarly shaped face, maybe that's the reason it's instantly recognizable as dog-and-nothing-but-dog for me.
This rings potentially true to me. I can't really see the face either, even after reading some descriptions and looking at a cropped image or two. (I usually experience these optical illusions in a more typical way.)
I'm a big fan of dogs, and I think they're a more salient feature of any dog-containing image for me than they are for the average person. It's hard for me to see the nose as anything other than part of a dog, even when it's cropped out of context.
I never saw the face. I spent two or three minutes staring at that damn dog, and I began to think it was a joke. I'm wondering it isn't due to being told that you'll see a face before you focus on the dog, that you see a face. Anyway, it's interesting that so many people did see a face when all I see is a dog. Of course, I have abundant personal experience that I don't perceive patterns the way other people seem to. I suspect I'm quite neurodivergent in that I don't perceive things the way other people claim to perceive them.
Unlike what most comments describe here, I could not see the dog! I stared for at least a literal minute at the photo in the post (here, above), and I just could not find the dog’s head. I thought it was some kind of creepy AI-generated photo or something.
(I couldn’t really see a face, either, it just looked like a headless dog, and the place where the head should be kind of sort of had some shadows that might suggest a face in a creepy-enough nightmare.)
But I literally spent a minute looking for the dog’s head and couldn’t find it. Then I opened a link from one of the comments here and the dog was obvious. Now I can’t turn it back into nightmare fuel.
Of the many purported benefits of extracurricular activities, I don't ever recall hearing that they were supposed to improve your academic performance. I don't know how it could; it sucks time and resources away from classes, with the goal of giving a broader range of experience and skills beyond book learnin'.
Yes, here in Brooklyn there's this whole layer of the local economy where art and music etc lessons are sold to bourgie parents, usually expressly under the theory that they will help them become STEM geniuses.
For a good, complete summary, look up “Spearman’s G” on wikipedia. For a brief, bad summary, it’s how “generally intelligent” you are, measured by success on various tests in different domains. Doing well on one of them predicts doing well on others, which is why G is interesting; it also seems to track to what we usually mean by “smart”.
I find it amazing that you're continually in the comments crticizing this stuff when you lack even the most rudimentary, 'two minutes on wikipedia' level of understanding of the topics you're criticizing.
Literally how can you possibly express any kind of judgement about IQ and IQ testing (or intelligence research generally) when you don't even know what g is and why it matters.?
g is the general factor of cognitive ability. When a large group of people takes a large number of cognitive tasks, they ALL will correlate positively.
You can extract a single factor using a technique called factor analysis or a principle component using a technique called principle component analysis. The number one factor or first principle component is referred to as g. It is not an average of the scores of the cognitive tasks but a distillation of what they have in common. It is theoretically possible that we wouldn't have this g factor and that cognitive tasks would not correlate like this but they do. And all cognitive tasks positively correlate with g to varying degrees. A very interesting observation.
Some tasks have higher g loadings than others, meaning they correlate more with g. We use a relative scale of IQ to express the scores on tests that accurately measure g. IQ correlates with what people traditionally call "smart" things.
The claim that it doesn't correlate as well with g is not-even-wrong, in that it depends on how you measure *g*. There's no God-given concept of g that is not subject to arbitrary choice-of-test issues. If your IQ battery includes a lot of music tests, then the g of that battery WILL correlate with the ability to read sheet music. That the normal g does not do so is a prescriptivist claim that the standard choice of IQ tests is "better", one which is not supported by any literature I could find.
(I do agree that intuitively, music tests don't measure what we want IQ to measure. But you don't get to use *g* as a get-out-of-arbitrary-test-choices-free card, it doesn't work that way. You must instead argue on the object level that nobody cares about music.)
Just because you can't measure something perfectly doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Take "aggressiveness." There is no God-given concept of it; any measure of it will involve choosing a test. But some of those tests will be better than others, and an "aggressiveness test" which focused mainly on irrelevant physiological characteristics would be a bad test.
So the question then becomes: what makes a test for intelligence better or worse? What grounds the "prescriptivist claim that the standard choice of IQ tests is better"?
Spearman's g is one compelling answer to that question. When we test people's aptitudes across various domains, we find that there are some domains, like visual-spatial reasoning and logical inference, where if someone does well in them, they are likely to also do well in lots of other domains. We call those domains "g-loaded". To measure g, we can generate a score from a particular person's aptitudes - critically, placing a higher weight on those domains which seem more "g-loaded". No test will perfectly measure g, but some will come closer than others, by prioritizing heavily g-loaded tests.
A battery with lots of music tests would be a poor measure of g, since music ability correlates only mildly well with skill in other domains - it's not heavily "g-loaded". In fact, Spearman included a music test in his original analysis, and found it to be the least g-loaded out of all the domains he investigated! Interestingly, math was second-worst; the strongest predictor out of his list was "classics". Selection effects may be involved here, but there's reason to believe linguistic skill is actually very g-loaded.
I hope this goes part of the way to explaining why the concept of g actually does help justify a choice of tests to measure IQ. It's not about what we *care* about; it's about what talents tend to predict being multitalented, and music just so happens to be a poor predictor of that.
"If your IQ battery includes a lot of music tests, then the g of that battery WILL correlate with the ability to read sheet music"
I don't think you understand 'g'. But the whole point of g is that its a GENERAL intelligence factor.
IQ tests predict performance on most cognitively demanding tasks i.e. stuff completely outside of IQ test questions. That's the whole point of g. It's not simply 'correlates with other IQ questions'.
Reading sheet music almost assuredly does NOT correlate very well in this way, and it probably does not correlate nearly as well with life outcomes as IQ does.
IQ tests are not constructed arbitrarily, and I find it bizarre that you could have possibly 'checked the literature' on this subject and then say something like this.
It's not that 'nobody cares about music', it's that music simply does not have the predictive validity of IQ tests. If you have no predictive validity, then there's zero point of psychometrics. Being good at identifying the next pattern in a series tells us that you'll probably be good at most things that require abstract reasoning. Being good at reading sheet music does not. That's it. That's all there is to it.
Your appeal to 'god given' concepts is totally bizarre. Nothing is god given, everything is ultimately a social construct. But nobody ever takes this as a refutation of anything else. There's no god given definition of species, it's just an arbitrary category we made up on the basis of arbitrary criteria. But it's extremely useful, so we use it.
All tests of cognitive ability correlate positively. A test which consists of literally all cognitive tasks would take too long, so psychologists create intelligence tests like Wechsler with various tasks on it that are more g loaded. This is a better and more efficient way of measuring g and measures it more accurately.
The g factor is not dependent on the contents of a test. See chapter 1 of In The Know by Russel T Warne. If you arbitrarily cut out a bunch of tasks, then you have lowered the g loading of your test but you have NOT changed the g factor. It is not an average or a sum of tests, it is a distillation.
Why not? No, why SHOULD it include that? Do you actually know that the purpose and rationale behind intelligence testing is?
You're acting like it's some arbitrary thing that includes anything and everything for no good reason. Which means you don't know the first thing about the subject.
Minor warning - I more or less agree with your points, but I think "you don't know the first thing about the subject" is neither kind nor necessary here.
Okay, and how do you feel about repeated criticisms of a topic that this person is ignorant of? Would you feel the same if it were a person declaring climate change is BS and then asking what the greenhouse effect is?
That doesn't make sense because the people in the comments here do not construct intelligence tests. I think you're trying to accuse the pro-IQ crowd in the comments of motivated reasoning in a clever way, but it doesn't make sense.
The powerful predictive ability of the g factor and heritability of it is a good argument for the welfare state depending on your moral foundations. People do not choose to have lower average cognitive ability and are in need of more assistance. It's not their fault generally. Here is a coherent pro-welfare argument which recognized IQ and heritability of IQ.
Freddie DeBoer's "The Cult of Smart" is about how much kids already bring their general intelligence with them to school without it being affected that much by school, and I suppose it could be said he wants to "dismantle" the status quo in order to replace it with communism.
Where I went to school it was both; "Music" in the curriculum covered things like music theory and the occasional bit of singing or playing the goddamn recorder, but if you wanted to actually learn a musical instrument properly you'd be paying for private lessons. Pretty sure it's the same way in most parts of the world.
that seems to be far-fetched. However, many people think that music training improves fine motorics in young children and ability to concentrate and persistence in older children. I find these things plausible, as many skills can be improved by intensive training and I do not see why fine motorics or concentration would not.
Then you aren't paying attention. The trope that chess, or music, or art, or Latin, will not just improve your chess class grades but your general grades is older than most of the people here. Literally when I was in middle school and joined the school chess club, one of the justifications we were given for it was that it'd improve our grades by helping us learn to think. (I don't remember if the teacher in charge actually intoned "Studies show..." but I'm sure someone along the way did.)
yep! "It's good for your brain" I've heard this justification given.
This is studied under the name "transfer of learning" and I think the result is that learning doesn't really transfer. I see these things - provided the kid isn't having fun - as very unfair. If you're going to force a kid into doing something, I think there should be a good reason and I think that without the general effect, it's really not fair to make kids learn chess or Latin.
I think it's probably true in the sense of "you train your brain on something" but not true in the sense of "general brain function improvement." I think chess can actually improve your ability to think about chess and areas of similar types of thinking, such as strategy games, spatial location, etc. I don't see any reason at all to think that playing chess would increase your verbal score on the SAT, and probably not your math either.
I think it would be even more narrow. I think chess makes you good at chess. It probably doesn't make you good very good at Go. But that's just an impression from what I've read and I don't have a solid opinion on that.
We probably agree more than disagree. I'm thinking in terms of pretty narrow skills that transfer between games, and maybe other areas. Thinking about the interactions of pieces and planning out chess moves can extend beyond the literal game of chess (obviously in terms of something like 3D chess, but also in other games at least). Less narrowly, you can learn to read your opponent's goals and playstyle, and identify if someone is being aggressive verses reactive as one example.
I am not sure what the cut off is for how similar a task has to be, but a lot of top ranked auto battler players (Hearthstone Battlegrounds, TFT, Autochess) seem to be able to quickly reach top rank when they try other auto battlers.
Do you think there's a meaningful difference between phonics vs. whole language? For that matter, are there any such teaching-technique differences that convincingly beat the null?
Most of the hostility towards phonics I've seen has come from teachers who are all in on whole word. Also, I actually remember being taught phonics, and it was fun, so this take is very confusing.
Motivation was certainly crucial for me, so I'm trying to find that with my own kids.
I had very little interest in reading until my parents subscribed us to Nintendo Power magazine. I probably spent 30 minutes studying and re-studying every page over the course of a month, trying to discern everything it was telling me.
That said, working through those pages at first required a lot of phonics, sounding words out. I was taught the alphabet and the sounds each letter makes (which really doesn't require that much teaching), and I went from there. I haven't encountered the "whole word" thing but it seems like it would be more teacher-intensive, not less.
From educators I have talked to, phonics is more robust in that it can teach a larger fraction of the population to achieve basic literacy than other techniques. More efficient/faster for the average or median student is less certain.
I think it's reasonable to _not_ bet on the null when it comes to the question of "which of these two rather different methods for teaching X is better for teaching X?"
I can imagine how hard this is to measure too, but also how high the stakes are. If phonics means that 3% of the adult population has substantially higher reading proficiency, that's really important.
I'm pretty sure it made a significant difference to me. I couldn't read at all before a remedial reading tutor started me on phonics in third grade. But phonics didn't teach me to read "better;" it's a trick for getting over the first hump of being able to read at all - which, for some reason comes naturally to some people but definitely did not for me.
I went straight from completely illiterate to reading at twelfth grade level in about two months of systematic phonics - but obviously I already had a lot of other foundational skills in place.
Whole language is underspecified. If, as suggested in that article, it means trying the whole task, combining multiple cues, then there is a theoretical argument that it is a mistake. Instead you should strengthen the cues separately, called "deliberate practice." Phonics is only about isolating one cue, which might be a mistake, but the others already exist in speech, so may not really need practice.
I mean, why should it improve skills in other subjects? Why would piano lessons be of any help in my later career as a, say, social scientist that earns his or her money by correlating things with other things? The causal path from exposure to outcome is not obvious at all. And the elephant in the room is selection bias, because these poor children of these rich parents do not just get piano lessons, but all kinds of extra training, including academic training, and they have access to better colleges and universities just because they can afford it.
PS. The time spent with piano lessons and exercises must also be taken into account; if you use that for, say, matrix calculus, you'll be even better at math or whatever areas in which matrices are used.
Some learnings clearly cross over and affect other subjects. Learning any one programming language spills to others and possibly into general communication ability. Learning(or at least understanding) calculus helps you to model physical phenomena in your mind. Statistics applies to many scenarios throughout life in an automatic even intuitive way(academic and not). Presumably, philosophy provides a basis for understanding and evaluating aspects of history and social science both of which can still be learned without it.
A lot of the very smart people I know in grad school play a musical instrument, and probably learned it early in life. Of course this proves that correlation is not causation. However, this tells us why the belief that learning music earlier in life probably leads to better fluid intelligence or something is quite intuitive, and almost common sense; at least based on the ample evidence around me. Perhaps research in education is important because it can help disabuse us of our "intuitive" notions.
I got the impression that the government changed their mind about the funding and Snopes correctly changed their rating to reflect that, but that my description correctly matches the original state of affairs.
The snopes article was directly responding to claims like "The Biden administration is sending crack pipes to minority groups to further racial equality". That statement could... kinda sorta be true if you view the world from a Faerie-like dedication to maximally misinterpreting everything without technically lying.
Crack pipes were one example component of one part of the program that has an overall goal of promoting racial equality, but there's a huge qualitative gap between (Safe drug use kits reduce the lethality of drugs) + (minority groups suffer from poor treatment of addiction and drug use, leading to higher deaths per capita) = (Send safe smoking kits - which may include crack pipes - to minority areas as part of a large scale effort to treat and reduce drug addiction) and (Biden is sending crack pipes to minority groups to further equality).
Even if the second statement is technically kind of true, it's such a gross abuse of the facts and context that I'd feel comfortable calling it a lie. This specific case doesn't feel like a woke outrage overreaction, so doesn't really fit with the list
OK, but this is part of the problem with Snopes' current operating procedure: when a fact that's embarrassing to Democrats start to spread, they go out of their way to find some version of that fact with some not-so-true frills attached and then debunk _that_.
Another particularly horrible example is the Biden/KKK thing. Faced with the (entirely true) rumour that Biden eulogised former KKK member Robert Byrd at his funeral, Snopes managed to find someone on facebook claiming that Byrd was the Grand Wizard of the KKK (in fact he was "only" an Exalted Cyclops, because KKK titles are fucking ridiculous).
The administration's plan to send safe smoking kits is a sound one. There is no version of the claim "Biden is sending crack pipes to minority groups" that does not either
A) Distort the context to manufacture outrage or
B) Retain the context, and therefore has nothing worth getting upset over
The only version of the story even worth addressing is the mostly-false manufactured outrage version spinning this into some sort of drug pushing program
Even the "particularly horrible" example you're pointing out isn't that bad. It's labeled as "miscaptioned" and even the summary points out that Byrd was in fact a former KKK member. And that seems like a very fair assessment of something that takes "Biden eulogized someone who used to be a member of the KKK before leaving and becoming a high profile opponent of the KKK" and twists it into "Biden eulogized a former KKK member". Both statements are strictly true, but context and connotation matters.
Are there any cases where you think snopes has failed to apply that level of nuance to a right wing issue to cast them in a bad light? I don't spend much time on snopes, so I can't speak to any systemic issues they may have. But these two evaluations seem fair
Then again, I am on the left so these are all evaluations that support my team. If you have any cases that are similar on a meta level but go against my biases I'd like to see them to see if I'd feel the same way
Snopes shouldn't be trying to provide an evaluation of whether the plan (sending safe crack kits to minority communities) is sound. It exists to check the facts. The facts were, that was the plan; they fact-checked reporting of that plan as "mostly false". That's a failure. If they had fact-checked it as "missing context", I could be persuaded they were somewhat in the right. But there was a true thing, and they fact-checked it as false.
Don't trust liars just because they're on your team; don't underestimate the harm they do to you in the name of a cause.
Evaluating "Missing so much context that the conclusion is dramatically wrong" to "basically a lie" is not itself a lie. A simplification, sure. But not a lie
> The administration's plan to send safe smoking kits is a sound one.
That's... well, it's an opinion that Democrats might share, but I don't. I find out outrageous to send "safe smoking kits" to anyone under any circumstances, and I think at least a very large fraction of the population would agree with me.
I value the rule of law, and the rule of law is not well served by having the government send people kits to help them break the law. Furthermore, I don't think people should smoke crack/meth, and it doesn't seem necessarily true that having the government send people apparatus for smoking crack/meth is going to serve the interests of not having people smoke crack or meth.
I can definitely sympathize with this sentiment: I don't think merely making drug use more comfortable should be the core of a government response to an addiction epidemic. With that said, there are versions of this program that I can get behind - for example, tying the benefits to strict requirements to join and stay in a cessation program.
>The snopes article was directly responding to claims like "The Biden administration is sending crack pipes to minority groups to further racial equality".
...
>Crack pipes were one example component of one part of the program
"Crack pipes" is metonymy. The proper thing to measure is not literally crack pipes and nothing else, but the entire category of "things that make it easier for people to get or take drugs".
I don't see how you got that at all. Snopes originally assumed that "safe smoking kits" referred in part to crack pipes, but the administration later clarified that the kits wouldn't include pipes, hence the update.
Also, part of what they were debunking was the claim that the pipes were being distributed "to advance racial equity". That's nakedly false. I'm fine saying that a false claim plus a misleading claim qualifies as "mostly false".
In what way is that "distributing crack pipes to advance racial equity"? That statement is just saying they intend to implement their program equitably. But the purpose of the program isn't to advance racial equity, it's to combat drug addiction.
I'm not sure what you mean. By definition, "historically underserved communities" are ones who have been prioritized lower by previous programs. Saying you'll prioritize them higher is just saying "This time around, we won't forget about the guys everyone always forgets about." I don't see how that's controversial or even really notable.
The purpose is not to combat drug addiction, it's to combat harms from drug addiction. Hence "harm reduction" - combating addiction is a separate program.
Either way: that being its purpose doesn't make it not *also* intended to advance racial equity, and the text of the order makes it clear that HHS wants implementation to happen in a way that targets minority and marginalized communities in the name of advancing racial equity.
As I said in another comment - the section of the program labeled "purpose" makes it clear that advancing racial equity is part of the program's purpose.
If I bring a box of donuts to work and give one to everybody in the office, am I intending to "advance fairness"? Or am I just being fair while pursuing the goal of group donut consumption?
I'm confused how you managed to convince yourself of this. The program also intended to fund "syringes to prevent and control the spread of infectious diseases." What do you think those syringes were meant to help safely inject? Insulin? Give me a break.
"Safe smoking kits" meant providing the means to use crack. You don't need a "safe smoking kit", or a "kit" of any kind, for a cigarette, blunt, or vape. For the record, I don't think that providing such kits is necessarily a bad idea, like needle exchanges aren't necessarily a bad idea! But transparently, "safe smoking kits" meant crack pipes. And Snopes initially fact-checked that as "false" when it was clearly true, using exactly the justification Scott provided ("it also funded other things").
Then, after the "Biden is giving out crack pipes, lol" meme got trending, the administration "clarified" by claiming that the term "safe smoking kits" didn't include crack pipes. But I don't think their assertion is at all credible; rather, it was a transparent half-assed attempt to walk it back, and Snopes is carrying their water.
Clean syringes are a very common harm reduction measure. The article said about a dozen times that the spending is aimed at harm reduction.
Safe smoking kits can include stuff like sturdier pipes and screens that make the act of smoking safer, but they don't have to -- typically they're things like alcohol swabs, Vaseline, and plastic mouthpieces, the point being to keep people from spreading bloodborne diseases when sharing. It wasn't crazy to expect the kits to include pipes, but it was misleading to claim it with certainty and flat-out wrong to say the purpose was to advance racial equity.
Upon gaining power, Chairman Mao instigated a harm reduction programme against opium use. His policy was to threaten to execute 'addicts'. It was remarkable how quickly 'addicts' suddenly found themselves able to cope without their drug.
It sounds like you're advocating for some sort of large, concerted push to crack down on drug users. A war on drugs, even. If only someone had thought of that before
Uh, I'm not a drug dove, but I don't think any sane person's solution should be "killing all the addicts". Nor is Mao a great policy role model, for all kinds of reasons.
Part 1, section 1, the second-to-last paragraph characterizing the "PURPOSE": "The priority populations for this program are underserved communities that are greatly impacted by SUD. Underserved communities are defined under section 2 of Executive Order 13985." EO 13985 characterizes "underserved community" by referencing (in order) race, sexuality, disability, and poverty, and its text repeatedly invokes the need for "an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda".
So in defining its purpose and target population, the program explicitly and implicitly invoked advancing racial equity. Other kinds of equity too - but it's fair to describe it as prioritizing minority communities. Calling that "flat-out wrong" is ignorant of the facts.
That's a very tunnel-visiony reading. Like I said in the other thread, committing to prioritize underserved communities (which, as you noticed, is not exclusively a racial designation) is not the purpose of the program, it's just a fact about the implementation. Applicants don't have to be from underserved communities, they're just more likely have their applications approved if they are.
They state the purpose of the program in their own words multiple times. From the executive summary and the first paragraph of the section you posted: "The purpose of the program is to support community-based overdose prevention programs, syringe services programs, and other harm reduction services. Funding will be used to enhance overdose and other types of prevention activities to help control the spread of infectious diseases and the consequences of such diseases for individuals with, or at risk of developing substance use disorders (SUD), support distribution of FDA-approved overdose reversal medication to individuals at risk of overdose, build connections for individuals at risk for, or with, a SUD to overdose education, counseling, and health education, refer individuals to treatment for infectious diseases such as HIV, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and viral hepatitis, and encourage such individuals to take steps to reduce the negative personal and public health impacts of substance use or misuse. This will include supporting capacity development to strengthen harm reduction programs as part of the continuum of care. Recipients will also establish processes, protocols, and mechanisms for referral to appropriate treatment and recovery support services. Grantees will also provide overdose prevention education to their target populations regarding the consumption of substances including but not limited to opioids and their synthetic analogs. Funds may also be used to help address the stigma often associated with substance use and participation in harm reduction activities." There's nothing in there about advancing racial equity, because that is plainly not what their goal was. It's something they took into consideration, not their objective in any way.
Thanks. I didn't think the "to advance racial equity" was a relevant part of the claim or the reason it was supposed to be outrageous, but it sounds like some people thought it was and that makes Snopes' decision more reasonable.
That is to say, I have come across the "Biden administration sends out crack pipes" meme quite a few times over the last week in the right wing memeopshere, but this is the first time I've heard it with the "to advance racial equity" bit attached.
First time I heard about it was a meme with Forrest Gump saying "And just like that, crack was safer than Ivermectin". This was followed by several references to Hunter Biden's own crack-smoking proclivities. Then a picture of Joe Biden kindly offering a crack pipe to a black man sitting on a bench, who replies "Sir, I'm waiting for a bus". In each case, the "Biden administration handing out crack pipes" part was the core of the joke.
fwiw, i disagree with the decision to remove this. Snoops objectively reported that a claim that was true, albeit misleading, was false. Unless we're redefining false to mean something else, snoop's original claim of this being false was a lie. They have updated it to be more nuanced now, but i think the original post is worthy of being noted as something related to excessive wokeness.
Update: ah, i see the more clear reasoning you gave on the mistakes page, and i understand better. It's specifically that snoops said that "true statement AND potentially false statement" could reasonable be called a false statement due to the AND. That's...a bit of a reach but defensible.
> Unless we're redefining false to mean something else, snoop's original claim of this being false was a lie.
A key point in Bounded Distrust was that quite a bit of journalism consists of a series of individually narrowly true statements woven together to give a strongly misleading impression, often with the rhetorical punchline being a qualitative statement that can't be strictly evaluated on its own metric. Lots of people would nonetheless round an egregious example off to "that article is lying to me". Would that claim itself be a lie, assuming the journalist was scrupulous in never quite overstepping on any individual point?
I would say yeah, that claiming that such an article is lying is incorrect. You can say many other things about it (misleading narrative, cherrypicked facts, etc) but lying wouldn't be right.
Adding "to racial equality" seemed to me to be a case of making a general claim that you don't like more specific, refuting the more specific claim, and then insinuating that the general claim is also refuted.
Maybe Biden didn't include crack pipes in the bill to advance racial equality (maybe he was just pro crack), but if I knock down that more complicated claim, it would seem to unsuspecting eyes that maybe Biden didn't include crack pipes in the bill at all.
It would... except that advancing racial equity was very much a part of the program's purpose. You can tell because it says so, specifically, under "PURPOSE": "the priority populations for this program are..." and then invokes an EO (#13985) which is focused entirely on a woke conceptualization of "equity", centering race.
Snopes is still the bad guy here, for the reasons you initially provided and more besides. Even if you've revised your opinion, I would appreciate that section of the post being caveat'ed rather than removed, for future readers' sake.
> I got the impression that the government changed their mind about the funding and Snopes correctly changed their rating to reflect that
My brain first interpreted this as "the government changed their mind about funding Snopes, and Snopes got scared and quickly changed their rating to make the government happy". :D
They've updated to "Outdated" which is a rating I don't really understand the purpose of. It seems to obfuscate "did X really happen" by putting it behind a layer of "maybe it happened, maybe it didn't happen, but for some reason we no longer consider it 'relevant'".
Like to pick a fairly straight-forward example "Did Facebook Censor a Picture of Santa Kneeling to Jesus" (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-santa-jesus-image/) - it's a pretty straightforward factual statement: I would rate that "Mostly true" - Facebook did indeed put a "mature content" warning on top of such an image. Yes, it was almost certainly just an algorithmic glitch or human error, but factually it did happen.
They nitpick over the wording "censor" (... despite that they have control over the exact wording of their claims), and Facebook fixed it so that it no longer has the content warning... but I'm not sure why that makes it "Outdated". The claim is in the past tense, and, yes, that really happened.
It kind of feels like a "True, but inconvenient if people were to screenshot this" rating. (Incidentally the "Aztec Chanting in Public Schools" that Scott mentioned in a previous article also got an "Outdated" rating)
Like, yeah, if some controversial law gets repealed that's an important part of the story, but I still care about whether or not it really existed at all. "Outdated" could be a modifier, but shouldn't 'mask' the actual truth rating.
What's cool is how much thought the isochronic map put into human travel time. Apparently I can ride a horse east from Perm much faster than I can try to cross the Greenland icepack.
I'm not sure whether they'd figured out rope teams by that point so crossing Greenland probably had a far higher attrition rate too, what with all the crevasses covered by thin layers of snow.
Nansen first crossed the Greenland ice pack in 1888, before then there was no recorded crossing. So indeed it would have been quite hard and probably deadly.
Apparently Nansen's big advantage was that he knew how to ski, which at the time was a peculiar skill possessed by a handful of Norwegians.
I’m not sure. I see a hall as a corridor. In Bill Bryson’s At Home he says the Hall came first and sometimes was all there was, for instance a Viking great hall, then rooms were added around the side, and the rooms took up more space, and the hall got smaller? Is a hall a corridor? I tend to use either interchangeably but maybe a hall/hallway has to get to the front door.
The distinction is that a hall in that sense of the word *is* a room, where things are meant to occur, instead of being primarily a space for getting between rooms.
I don't understand what you're claiming. A "hall" in the sense of a "great hall" is a distinctly different thing from a "hall" in the sense of "it's just down the hall", and it's the latter that's being discussed. Stand in the two and the difference is obvious. Are you trying to make some sort of argument based on a dictionary, that no distinction can be drawn because the particular dictionary you checked doesn't draw such a distinction??
I also don’t know what you are arguing about. The link said that corridors were invented in the 16C. I said that halls existed long before that, starting out as great halls with small rooms (if any) attached, and then getting smaller - in most houses - to the present day size. So I’m doubting that corridors were invented in the 16C.
I mean, if that's your claim, then you should make that explicit by saying something like "Halls in the modern sense evolved from halls in the older sense, as the latter gradually shrank; there was no hard line where corridors were suddently 'invented'.", not go on about looking up meanings of words!
A hall in the sense of "great hall" is not a corridor but a large multifunction space, generally a singularly large room of a castle or manor. In modern people's houses, rooms such as dining rooms, living rooms, and TV rooms tend to be the spiritual successors of a great hall, while event spaces and multifunction spaces fill the same role in convention centers and hotels.
Before corridors there were just doorways from one room with a purpose to another; corridors as "rooms" whose only purpose is to connect other rooms are less materially efficient, and are less likely to appear as organic extensions to an existing building.
I just did a couple quick google image searches for "Roman Villa Floor Plan" and "Roman Palace Floor Plan". Something like 10% of the results have features that look an awful lot like corridors to me. When they're labelled, it's usually either "corridor" (which seems like a vote in favor of counting as a corridor) or "atrium" (which I think in Classical Roman architecture denotes a sort of semi-enclosed courtyard that opened out onto proper rooms).
I also searched for floor plans for Charlemenge's palace at Aachen, which also had long, narrow features that were often labeled "corridor", but these were walkways connecting otherwise-separated wings or sub-buildings of the palace complex, not direct analogues of a modern hallway with rows of rooms opening onto either side.
Between the Roman atria, Carolingian walkway corridors, and Viking great halls, I'm starting to suspect that the root of the "Corridors were invented in the 16th Century" claim is that before then, internal subdivision of large buildings was limited by concerns about lighting and ventilation. Subdividing a building with internal partitions limits internal air circulation, cuts off natural light and ventilation from exterior windows and doorways, and also cuts off line of sight to artificial lighting (oil lamps, candles, hearth fires, etc).
In this context, a modern-style interior corridor is a subdivided space with little or no exterior facing for natural light and ventilation and is probably more trouble than it's worth. Using courtyard and Roman-style atria to perform the office of corridors is a pretty easy workaround, since that increases surface area for windows and whatnot while the transitional space has most of the advantages of an outdoor area but is still at least marginally protected from wind (and rain, in the case of Roman atria which had partial roofs). Likewise, a Carolingian-style walkway corridor connecting separated wings of a palace complex leaves plenty of surface area for working and living areas of the palace, while the corridors themselves are fully sheltered from the elements but still have ample access to natural light and ventilation. A great hall is not as clear-cut, but doing double-duty as a room in its own right mitigates the problem, and I'd expect a great hall to also be a natural spot to put a hearth fire.
> No. I mean, for a long time, for a very long time, right up at least until - really, until about the age of Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare, most houses, even quite well-to-do houses, were fundamentally a single room, which was called the hall.
And the hall was so important that that became the name of the whole house sometimes. And indeed, hall, in a wider sense, became a word signifying a grand space, which is why we have Carnegie Hall and Baseball Hall of Fame and the Halls of Montezuma, and so on.
So in kind of original sense, it was a really grand room. It was the whole house. But then as time went on, people, they discovered the comforts and attractions, the privacy, and they began to add more rooms onto the home and to spread the house both upwards and outwards.
And the hall became diminished in its importance until now. In most domestic settings, it's really just a kind of entryway in which we - where we hang our coats and take our hats off and that sort of thing.
And also I found an article on ancient Roman apartment buildings that mentions at least one of them as having a "narrow corridor": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insula_(building). I looked for this because I knew they had apartment buildings, which I think almost require hallways.
Some halls are corridors. Halls which are corridors are frequently called "hallways", but that can be abbreviated to "hall" in contexts where there aren't going to be non-corridor halls, e.g. a middle-class house.
Some halls are *not* corridors, but rooms in their own right and in which people spend a significant amount of time. The innovation (which may have occurred more than once) is the development of a long skinny room-like thing that is only or primarily used to travel between other rooms.
Corridors are a very inefficient use of space, so I'm not sure the inventor should be proud of themselves.
In fact, there is something distinctly modern about corridors - it's a place for untrusted strangers to move between places that are better guarded. There is nothing of value in corridors. I assume ancients didn't need corridors because their buildings were either more oriented towards common unrestricted use, or were strictly invite-only for one reason or another.
It's a lot like the difference between a street (a public space between buildings) and a road (a means of transportation from one place to another). Much of 20th century urban design has been focused on turning streets into roads.
“ would answer ‘yes’ to this because she [the queen] visited Ireland when I lived there, I watched the parade in her honor, and I could vaguely glimpse her on the inside of her car).”
You and a few thousand Corkonians waving their plastic union jacks. Rebel county, my arse.
> I have checked Wordle to see if this is true, and can confirm that it now tells me that “slave” is not a real word
This is of course not true. It tells you that "slave" is not in the word list. I also think removing slave from the word list is stupid but misrepresenting what Wordle says in a way that anyone can double check in two seconds is sloppy in a way that seems motivated.
Scrabble bans classes of words that are already extant, including not only expletives but proper nouns, for various reasons but all ultimately related to making the gaming experience better. It does not create a new class of words to ban with no linguistic justification, which is what is happening here. Whilst the reason for the decision may be to avoid offence, this seems basically to be a political policing of language by people who don't know how language works.
How is 'Slavery' offensive ? is it an insult or a slur ? What about 'War', 'Hunger', 'Death' or 'Murder', are they banned too ? How many negative words is too many ?
Yes but Wordle is not attempting to tell you it’s not a word, only that it’s not on its list of words. You get the same thing with any computerized word game (like Scrabble) - they have a list of allowed words in that game. One can disagree with their choice of words to include on their list but it’s simply wrong to say that they have declared something as “not a word”
I mean, the word list is...the list of real words? At least that's what it is for every other word on the list? I agree you can claim this is merely a coincidence and there's no necessary connection, but it's a bit weird.
I'll edit the sentence just in case other people have the same objection.
I think it's important to be precise when accusing one's opponents of malfeasance; if you do so inaccurately, you open the door for their defenders to point out your inaccuracy while conveniently ignoring your point, and then you're making no progress (except perhaps in tribal point-scoring, which I do not think is your goal).
For clarity, there are two Wordle word lists: the list of possible answers and the list of possible guesses.
The list of possible answers includes only words that are reasonably well known, because the game isn't fun if the answer turns out to be some hyper-obscure archaic sheep disease that you've never heard of. And it's quite reasonable for this to exclude swear words etc as well.
The list of possible _guesses_, though, previously encompassed pretty much every five letter word that could be found in some large dictionary. But once the NYT bought it, a bunch of words (including some fairly common ones that appear within the New York Times practically every day) disappeared from this list.
It turns out they didn't delete anything from the list of possible guesses. The game doesn't actually have a list of possible guesses. Rather, it has a list of possible answers, and a list of non-answer possible guesses. When they deleted something from the list of possible answers, it accidentally got removed as a possible guess because it is no longer an answer, and had never been a non-answer possible guess.
So, most of the removals I can see the reasoning for, even if I don't agree with removing words like "slave" or "lynch", but what the hell is the objection to "fibre"?!
I can see why they removed "slave" and "lynch," and I suppose "wench" could be seen as problematic. "Fibre" is a British spelling, but why remove "pupal" and "agora"? Just too obscure?
If they had removed it from the list of possible answers, I would agree. But removing it from the list of words you can even guess is a step further than that. There are several other impolite words that are still usable as guesses, like "FUCKS", "SHITS", and "NEGRO". I'd expect the only unguessable strings to be gibberish or words too obscure for the word list.
That is quite surprising! I had assumed this was just about removing it from the list of potential answers. And that would be in total keeping with much NYTimes practice.
They officially apply a "breakfast test" to the crossword - they don't want an entry in the grid to be something that will dismay someone if it comes up while they're working on the crossword over breakfast, so no URINE or ENEMA or HITLER. The big challenge is eliminating IDI and AMIN, because those letter combinations are so good for completing grids, even though the person is one you don't want to think about when you're having fun.
It seems to me that you definitely don't want to pick a word like SLAVE and force people to guess it. But it does seem over the top to prevent people from using it as a guess to find letters.
Exactly. I generally like the NYT, so my thought process was this:
1) Seems like an overstatement, I bet they just removed it from the answer list, which is a good decision. [Falsified by trying to guess SLAVE and failing]
2) Hmm, maybe they just imported the word list from Spelling Bee, which needs to have its guesses sanitized. [Falsified by trying to guess other rude words and succeeding]
Someone in a different thread noted that it was probably an attempt at the first thing, that accidentally went wrong. It turns out that Wordle has an "answers list" and a "guesses that aren't answers list", so that if you remove something from the answers list while forgetting to add it to the other list, it disappears completely. Most people assumed they had an "answers list" and a "guesses list", so that removal from the answers wouldn't interfere with the guesses. Hopefully they fix it soon.
Someone pointed out that the "allowed guesses that aren't answers" list has always had words like JIHAD and NEGRO (and SOARE and other unfamiliar words). They didn't realize that when they deleted something from the "possible answers" list they needed to add it to this other list in order to not break things. Hopefully they will fix it.
#32, on beautiful buildings surviving: there is definitely something to be said about modern architecture, auto-centrism, and technological changes, but I think another important factor that often goes undiscussed is labor efficiency. Construction remains a labor-intensive industry, even as raw materials and equipment grow cheaper. Some of the beauty of old buildings is related to the careful craftsmanship put into designing, building, and decorating even simple features. Today, that kind of time costs more relative to the other costs involved in building (land, permitting, materials, equipment).
The relevant economic law is "shipping the good apples out." If you look at buildings where the price has already been increased by other components besides labor (e.g. homes in an area where zoning limits supply and drives up the cost of lots), it's easier to spend more on construction since that cost is a smaller proportion of the overall cost. As a result, the design is notably better.
I'd highly recommend looking up the Twitter account of the article's author, Samuel Hughes. A lot of his posts highlight the efforts of late 19th and early 20th century architects and builders to combine modern labour-saving technologies and materials with colourful, textured, highly ornamented design in both traditional and novel styles. It leaves one without a shadow of doubt that the deterioration in the design standards of the built environment over the course of the 20th century was above all the result of poor aesthetic choices, not economic necessities.
I just can't imagine the face. Is it like, you look at the photo and can't tell it's really a dog? Or like an "if this was abstract art I would say they buried a face in there"?
When I first glanced at the photo never having seen it before, the face was so ghastly and jarring, it was like a demon baby's face grimacing on a dog's body. Then my eyes drifted up to the caption, back down, and the face was never seen again.
I may be missing something important, but it seems to me that some people in this debate are making a "base rate fallacy".
Specifically, the article "Why Brahmins lead Western firms but rarely Indian ones" complains that few Brahmins lead Indian companies. Out of 20 wealthiest Indian companies, not even one is led by a Brahmin!
Okay, so how many Brahmins are there in India? According to Wikipedia, they make 5% of the population, in other words, one in 20. So, under perfect equality, you would statistically expect 1 out of the 20 wealthiest Indian companies on average to be led by a Brahmin. And it is not one, it is zero. Perhaps my math is wrong, but I think that even under perfect equality, where would be about 30% chance that a randomly selected group of 20 people would contain zero members of a 5% minority. (Someone please check my math.)
So the actual question is why Brahmins are *overrepresented* in American companies (compared to other Indians), not why they are underrepresented in Indian ones (because most likely, they are not). I think it could simply be a selection effect of Brahmins being more rich and being traditionally the educated ones -- this is why they are more likely to pay to study at an American university, and then some of them get a great job opportunity and stay here.
What happens if the sensitivity reader suggests a change and the author says no?
The second paragraph doesn't mesh with what I get from the article; do you think the writer's case is atypical?
Most authors don't have much money to burn, the idea that they're spending money "voluntarily" on this is difficult to believe even for the woke ones.
I can't imagine much for most books. Probably because of the economics of publishing, most books are barely touched by editors. If you write a non-fiction book and want to have it fact checked you have to pay for that yourself.
The author in the article refused all sensitivity reader suggestions, and ended up having to change publisher for her book: https://unherd.com/2022/02/how-sensitivity-readers-corrupted-literature/
She may be an usual case, given this was an already published and successful book, that had become controversial and was being reviewed for changes before publishing a new edition. Maybe they pushed harder because of the (apparent) controversy, but also, she had much more leverage.
"Had to" seems a bit strong for the written fact. I thought it was interesting that the author wrote "Before we could discuss this, Picador and I agreed to split." Clearly authors don't always think/know they have power in these situations but it isn't clear to me that they wouldn't have actually published the book.
Having said that, those suggestions did seem pretty nuts.
The book was already published by Picador, but because of heavy criticism they stopped selling it and planned a new version – "to be revised in consultation with sensitivity readers". This article was about this new version.
I can't speak to the general case, but Naomi Novik, one of my favorite authors, wrote a cringing apology for using the word "dreadlocks" in a context having nothing to do with race after being informed, I conjecture by a sensitivity reader working for her publisher but might be wrong, that the term was not politically correct. Judging by her writing she is not herself particularly woke, so I interpreted that as a response to incentives.
Sure, but the point is precisely that they're using them all at the first place. They may not be literally doing the censoring, but publishers using them means they intend to censor their works for woke reasons.
It's kind of silly to suggest that they would pay for this work to be done but not actually care about what the readers say, unless you want to argue it's some kind of weird act of signalling or something.
Not him, but I'd say maybe 9/10 "sensitivity advisors" of any kind are virtue-signalling.
The difference is that guns are mechanical devices about which one can make objective claims, while 'sensitivity' is entirely subjective.
Apparently men can be pregnant too, don't you know? Please re-write your comment to reflect that. "Voluntarily," I might add.
But you can ask a dozen women about their experiences with pregnancy and get a dozen different responses. It is the same problem as with 'sensitivity readers'. Given the near infinite number of identity politics subcategories that people claim to belong to these days, how could a few such people even begin to pretend to represent them all fairly?
The whole thing is an absurdity.
Don't compare it to a gun editor - compare it to a traditional editor who says things like "the story would flow a lot better if Chapter 18 was before Chapter 17, and Chapter 19 seems like a waste so you should cut it".
This matches my understanding. Authors may choose to self-censor based on the reader's recommendation, but the ones I've been aware of were advisors with no power to actually censor the work. Even in the linked description it's not clear to me that "censor" is an appropriate term for what happened. Same for the "context" warning from Facebook.
I think it may also be conflating "normal" low intelligence with what were considered genetic defects. Down Syndrome and whatever we call Mental Retardation (apparently "intellectual development disorder" in the new DSM) or similar issues.
Low IQ is not the same thing as genetic disorder.
Note that there’s also a AI Governance curriculum for a track running parallel to the Alignment course! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F4lq6yB9SCINuo190MeTSHXGfF5PnPk693JToszRttY/edit#
Thanks, I've added it in.
Great links, really appreciate the AGI stuff. Thank you.
#13 can someone help me out here?
My experience was that I started by seeing the face (on the bottom of the dog's head), switched after a few seconds to seeing the dog, and now I can't see the face at all no matter how hard I try. I think dog is stickier than face, if you've already seen the dog it's probably hopeless.
I think I was able to see the face after first seeing the dog, but I had to cheat by using the back of my hand to cover up my view of the dogs eyes and top part of the picture. Once the image was no longer obviously a dog, I think my brain was a bit more free to interpret shadows as spooky face-like. The face I ended up seeing had the dogs collar as an eye, the dogs nose as the spooky face nose, a shadow to the left of the dogs nose as the other eye, and the underside of the dogs muzzle as a creepy gaping mouth with visible teeth. It sort of reminds me of the redead from Zelda Ocarina of Time.
Also, I've been a longtime reader, and just recently a subscriber and now first-time commenter. Thanks for all your great writing over the years Scott, and congrats on the marriage!
Similar experience here. I saw the face, then read the caption and could only see the dog. I was eventually able to recover the face by covering the dog's eyes and top part of the image.
The light patch to the left of the dog's nose is the profile of the face's nose (the face is looking somewhat down and to the viewer's left), and the dog's nose is one of the face's eyes. The reddish patch of the dog's collar is the face's left ear.
This was my experience too I think the brain is really well trained on eyes, such that if it "latches" on to a pair of eyes the rest of the face takes shape almost immediately
thank you for explaining where the face is! Until reading this, I did not see any face at all.
After reading the comments I scrolled back up to see the face and found that I can catch a glimpse of the face as I quickly scroll up, but the moment it stops it turns back into a dog.
Interesting, I just scrolled back up quickly, and I thought I caught a glimpse of a face. Scrolling down quickly, I didn't get the impression of a face. I gave it a break for a minute, and scrolled up again quickly. Thought I saw a face. Gave it a break. Scrolled down quickly, didn't see the face.
Has it got to do with what part of the pic (bottom vs top) that we see first?
I can switch back and forth with relative ease but notice that when I do there is a change in muscular tension in my upper right back accompanying the switch.
wait... so you saw the face first? I am having trouble seeing the face, but based on (https://imgur.com/SRDcnOr) the face still only takes up a small portion of the picture. And the face is floating on a dogs body? Why would this be seen before a dog when the rest of the picture has all the context of a dog??
..and i wonder how this correlates with dog ownership..
I think if you scroll down the dog is more obvious and if you scroll up you'll be more likely to see the face. Start with the image off screen in both cases.
Yep.
For me it the exact opposite. It took time to flip from dog to face and now it won’t flip back
Not hopeless - I was in the same situation as you, but switched back to face after turning the image sideways and upside down on my phone.
I’m in the “completely hopeless” camp. I wonder if it might be because I’ve owned dogs, similar to that one (mostly Labs) my entire life. Even if I cover up the dog’s eyes, there is just way too much else in the picture that immediately pattern matches to “black dog laying on the floor” for me.
Wait, really? I didn't see the face at all at first, but after looking at the image that highlights the facial feature locations, I can freely "see" it by focusing on those for a bit
I can see the face again by rotating my head 90 degrees.
...same as you, I started by seeing the face, from second look on I could only see the dog and was not able to see the face again. But then I accidentally looked at the picture in small (thumbnail) and there I can only see the face, not the dog (even if I have both the large picture and the small one next to each other, I see a different thing in either of them) :) pretty weird :)
If you're having trouble seeing the face: squint so hard your eyes are almost closed and focus on the white parts of the dog's face, which are the highlights of a face mostly in shadow.
Does it resemble jar-jar binks? Like, with 2 eye stalks on top of a head with a mouth on the front of a head sticking out? That's the closest I saw when squinting at the lighter area
No. It's white-face clown, with sloppily-applied black makeup around the mouth.
I saw the dog first, and was only able to see the face once I concentrated on seeing the dog's nose as an eye. The small white triangle to its right as a nose was also a feature that helped transform the image
I think this worked, but unfortunately also caused me to forget everything I knew about Georgism.
Don't know if this helps, but: the dog is looking straight at us with a chill expression. The human face is looking down between the dog's legs and looks horrified / hopeless. Edit: the whitest part of the photo is the human's left cheek and the dog's left upper lip.
It took me a non-trivial amount of seconds to see the dog, but now I can see whichever I want to see.
I could only see the dog at first. Squinted. Now whenever I squint I can see a face. I don't think it's what others are seeing though. Illustration overlaid on the image may prime you to see what I'm seeing: https://drive.google.com/file/d/142RY870sOU4frFFnU8G0dqOk-hUaBcn1/view?usp=drivesdk
Can confirm that is not what I was seeing. It's weird / nice how easy it is to see faces everywhere.
This is the face I see, which was explained to me from Measure's comment above. https://i.imgur.com/g9rzRLd.jpg
This is the face I am seeing https://imgur.com/SRDcnOr
Yes this is the face
This is still a dog's nose for me. I'm not able to see any faces anywhere (including the ones illustrated into the photo in other links).
Maybe it has to do with some individual priming? I had a dog with a vaguely similarly shaped face, maybe that's the reason it's instantly recognizable as dog-and-nothing-but-dog for me.
This rings potentially true to me. I can't really see the face either, even after reading some descriptions and looking at a cropped image or two. (I usually experience these optical illusions in a more typical way.)
I'm a big fan of dogs, and I think they're a more salient feature of any dog-containing image for me than they are for the average person. It's hard for me to see the nose as anything other than part of a dog, even when it's cropped out of context.
It became easier for me to see the face once I switched my screen to grayscale.
I never saw the face. I spent two or three minutes staring at that damn dog, and I began to think it was a joke. I'm wondering it isn't due to being told that you'll see a face before you focus on the dog, that you see a face. Anyway, it's interesting that so many people did see a face when all I see is a dog. Of course, I have abundant personal experience that I don't perceive patterns the way other people seem to. I suspect I'm quite neurodivergent in that I don't perceive things the way other people claim to perceive them.
Unlike what most comments describe here, I could not see the dog! I stared for at least a literal minute at the photo in the post (here, above), and I just could not find the dog’s head. I thought it was some kind of creepy AI-generated photo or something.
(I couldn’t really see a face, either, it just looked like a headless dog, and the place where the head should be kind of sort of had some shadows that might suggest a face in a creepy-enough nightmare.)
But I literally spent a minute looking for the dog’s head and couldn’t find it. Then I opened a link from one of the comments here and the dog was obvious. Now I can’t turn it back into nightmare fuel.
1. In education, always bet on the null.
Of the many purported benefits of extracurricular activities, I don't ever recall hearing that they were supposed to improve your academic performance. I don't know how it could; it sucks time and resources away from classes, with the goal of giving a broader range of experience and skills beyond book learnin'.
I definitely heard that music was supposed to increase your IQ and I think people extended that to academic achievement.
Yes, here in Brooklyn there's this whole layer of the local economy where art and music etc lessons are sold to bourgie parents, usually expressly under the theory that they will help them become STEM geniuses.
It increases your IQ if your IQ test includes reading sheet music and identifying diminished fifth intervals by ear. Which, I mean, why not?
...because it doesn't correlate as well with g as the stuff IQ tests actually test, and it isn't culture-fair which most modern IQ tests strive to be?
What is the value of "g" supposed to be?
For a good, complete summary, look up “Spearman’s G” on wikipedia. For a brief, bad summary, it’s how “generally intelligent” you are, measured by success on various tests in different domains. Doing well on one of them predicts doing well on others, which is why G is interesting; it also seems to track to what we usually mean by “smart”.
I find it amazing that you're continually in the comments crticizing this stuff when you lack even the most rudimentary, 'two minutes on wikipedia' level of understanding of the topics you're criticizing.
Literally how can you possibly express any kind of judgement about IQ and IQ testing (or intelligence research generally) when you don't even know what g is and why it matters.?
g is the general factor of cognitive ability. When a large group of people takes a large number of cognitive tasks, they ALL will correlate positively.
You can extract a single factor using a technique called factor analysis or a principle component using a technique called principle component analysis. The number one factor or first principle component is referred to as g. It is not an average of the scores of the cognitive tasks but a distillation of what they have in common. It is theoretically possible that we wouldn't have this g factor and that cognitive tasks would not correlate like this but they do. And all cognitive tasks positively correlate with g to varying degrees. A very interesting observation.
Some tasks have higher g loadings than others, meaning they correlate more with g. We use a relative scale of IQ to express the scores on tests that accurately measure g. IQ correlates with what people traditionally call "smart" things.
The claim that it doesn't correlate as well with g is not-even-wrong, in that it depends on how you measure *g*. There's no God-given concept of g that is not subject to arbitrary choice-of-test issues. If your IQ battery includes a lot of music tests, then the g of that battery WILL correlate with the ability to read sheet music. That the normal g does not do so is a prescriptivist claim that the standard choice of IQ tests is "better", one which is not supported by any literature I could find.
(I do agree that intuitively, music tests don't measure what we want IQ to measure. But you don't get to use *g* as a get-out-of-arbitrary-test-choices-free card, it doesn't work that way. You must instead argue on the object level that nobody cares about music.)
Just because you can't measure something perfectly doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Take "aggressiveness." There is no God-given concept of it; any measure of it will involve choosing a test. But some of those tests will be better than others, and an "aggressiveness test" which focused mainly on irrelevant physiological characteristics would be a bad test.
So the question then becomes: what makes a test for intelligence better or worse? What grounds the "prescriptivist claim that the standard choice of IQ tests is better"?
Spearman's g is one compelling answer to that question. When we test people's aptitudes across various domains, we find that there are some domains, like visual-spatial reasoning and logical inference, where if someone does well in them, they are likely to also do well in lots of other domains. We call those domains "g-loaded". To measure g, we can generate a score from a particular person's aptitudes - critically, placing a higher weight on those domains which seem more "g-loaded". No test will perfectly measure g, but some will come closer than others, by prioritizing heavily g-loaded tests.
A battery with lots of music tests would be a poor measure of g, since music ability correlates only mildly well with skill in other domains - it's not heavily "g-loaded". In fact, Spearman included a music test in his original analysis, and found it to be the least g-loaded out of all the domains he investigated! Interestingly, math was second-worst; the strongest predictor out of his list was "classics". Selection effects may be involved here, but there's reason to believe linguistic skill is actually very g-loaded.
I hope this goes part of the way to explaining why the concept of g actually does help justify a choice of tests to measure IQ. It's not about what we *care* about; it's about what talents tend to predict being multitalented, and music just so happens to be a poor predictor of that.
"If your IQ battery includes a lot of music tests, then the g of that battery WILL correlate with the ability to read sheet music"
I don't think you understand 'g'. But the whole point of g is that its a GENERAL intelligence factor.
IQ tests predict performance on most cognitively demanding tasks i.e. stuff completely outside of IQ test questions. That's the whole point of g. It's not simply 'correlates with other IQ questions'.
Reading sheet music almost assuredly does NOT correlate very well in this way, and it probably does not correlate nearly as well with life outcomes as IQ does.
IQ tests are not constructed arbitrarily, and I find it bizarre that you could have possibly 'checked the literature' on this subject and then say something like this.
It's not that 'nobody cares about music', it's that music simply does not have the predictive validity of IQ tests. If you have no predictive validity, then there's zero point of psychometrics. Being good at identifying the next pattern in a series tells us that you'll probably be good at most things that require abstract reasoning. Being good at reading sheet music does not. That's it. That's all there is to it.
Your appeal to 'god given' concepts is totally bizarre. Nothing is god given, everything is ultimately a social construct. But nobody ever takes this as a refutation of anything else. There's no god given definition of species, it's just an arbitrary category we made up on the basis of arbitrary criteria. But it's extremely useful, so we use it.
All tests of cognitive ability correlate positively. A test which consists of literally all cognitive tasks would take too long, so psychologists create intelligence tests like Wechsler with various tasks on it that are more g loaded. This is a better and more efficient way of measuring g and measures it more accurately.
The g factor is not dependent on the contents of a test. See chapter 1 of In The Know by Russel T Warne. If you arbitrarily cut out a bunch of tasks, then you have lowered the g loading of your test but you have NOT changed the g factor. It is not an average or a sum of tests, it is a distillation.
Scott, this is correct and a good response. Thank you.
Why not? No, why SHOULD it include that? Do you actually know that the purpose and rationale behind intelligence testing is?
You're acting like it's some arbitrary thing that includes anything and everything for no good reason. Which means you don't know the first thing about the subject.
Minor warning - I more or less agree with your points, but I think "you don't know the first thing about the subject" is neither kind nor necessary here.
Okay, and how do you feel about repeated criticisms of a topic that this person is ignorant of? Would you feel the same if it were a person declaring climate change is BS and then asking what the greenhouse effect is?
Given the tenor of the comments here, the purpose of general intelligence testing is to provide a permission structure to dismantle the welfare state.
That doesn't make sense because the people in the comments here do not construct intelligence tests. I think you're trying to accuse the pro-IQ crowd in the comments of motivated reasoning in a clever way, but it doesn't make sense.
The powerful predictive ability of the g factor and heritability of it is a good argument for the welfare state depending on your moral foundations. People do not choose to have lower average cognitive ability and are in need of more assistance. It's not their fault generally. Here is a coherent pro-welfare argument which recognized IQ and heritability of IQ.
Freddie DeBoer's "The Cult of Smart" is about how much kids already bring their general intelligence with them to school without it being affected that much by school, and I suppose it could be said he wants to "dismantle" the status quo in order to replace it with communism.
where i went to school, music was a during the day class, not extracurricular
Where I went to school it was both; "Music" in the curriculum covered things like music theory and the occasional bit of singing or playing the goddamn recorder, but if you wanted to actually learn a musical instrument properly you'd be paying for private lessons. Pretty sure it's the same way in most parts of the world.
Yeah! At my school too
that seems to be far-fetched. However, many people think that music training improves fine motorics in young children and ability to concentrate and persistence in older children. I find these things plausible, as many skills can be improved by intensive training and I do not see why fine motorics or concentration would not.
Then you aren't paying attention. The trope that chess, or music, or art, or Latin, will not just improve your chess class grades but your general grades is older than most of the people here. Literally when I was in middle school and joined the school chess club, one of the justifications we were given for it was that it'd improve our grades by helping us learn to think. (I don't remember if the teacher in charge actually intoned "Studies show..." but I'm sure someone along the way did.)
yep! "It's good for your brain" I've heard this justification given.
This is studied under the name "transfer of learning" and I think the result is that learning doesn't really transfer. I see these things - provided the kid isn't having fun - as very unfair. If you're going to force a kid into doing something, I think there should be a good reason and I think that without the general effect, it's really not fair to make kids learn chess or Latin.
I think it's probably true in the sense of "you train your brain on something" but not true in the sense of "general brain function improvement." I think chess can actually improve your ability to think about chess and areas of similar types of thinking, such as strategy games, spatial location, etc. I don't see any reason at all to think that playing chess would increase your verbal score on the SAT, and probably not your math either.
I think it would be even more narrow. I think chess makes you good at chess. It probably doesn't make you good very good at Go. But that's just an impression from what I've read and I don't have a solid opinion on that.
We probably agree more than disagree. I'm thinking in terms of pretty narrow skills that transfer between games, and maybe other areas. Thinking about the interactions of pieces and planning out chess moves can extend beyond the literal game of chess (obviously in terms of something like 3D chess, but also in other games at least). Less narrowly, you can learn to read your opponent's goals and playstyle, and identify if someone is being aggressive verses reactive as one example.
I am not sure what the cut off is for how similar a task has to be, but a lot of top ranked auto battler players (Hearthstone Battlegrounds, TFT, Autochess) seem to be able to quickly reach top rank when they try other auto battlers.
Do you think there's a meaningful difference between phonics vs. whole language? For that matter, are there any such teaching-technique differences that convincingly beat the null?
Don't know, but the phonics people I know are really adamant that phonics is more efficient/faster.
Stories are fun to read. Phonics are boring. Do enthusiasm & motivation matter?
Edit: Phonics are well-suited for the prison-guards they call teachers.
Most of the hostility towards phonics I've seen has come from teachers who are all in on whole word. Also, I actually remember being taught phonics, and it was fun, so this take is very confusing.
A healthy skepticism of American pedagogy, among the least successful of human endeavors, is all I need.
Motivation was certainly crucial for me, so I'm trying to find that with my own kids.
I had very little interest in reading until my parents subscribed us to Nintendo Power magazine. I probably spent 30 minutes studying and re-studying every page over the course of a month, trying to discern everything it was telling me.
That said, working through those pages at first required a lot of phonics, sounding words out. I was taught the alphabet and the sounds each letter makes (which really doesn't require that much teaching), and I went from there. I haven't encountered the "whole word" thing but it seems like it would be more teacher-intensive, not less.
From educators I have talked to, phonics is more robust in that it can teach a larger fraction of the population to achieve basic literacy than other techniques. More efficient/faster for the average or median student is less certain.
I think it's reasonable to _not_ bet on the null when it comes to the question of "which of these two rather different methods for teaching X is better for teaching X?"
I mean, even if one technique is faster, that's no guarantee that it matters five years down the line. I've read phonics people claim that this makes a lifelong difference (https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading). I'm genuinely curious if this is true.
I can imagine how hard this is to measure too, but also how high the stakes are. If phonics means that 3% of the adult population has substantially higher reading proficiency, that's really important.
I'm pretty sure it made a significant difference to me. I couldn't read at all before a remedial reading tutor started me on phonics in third grade. But phonics didn't teach me to read "better;" it's a trick for getting over the first hump of being able to read at all - which, for some reason comes naturally to some people but definitely did not for me.
I went straight from completely illiterate to reading at twelfth grade level in about two months of systematic phonics - but obviously I already had a lot of other foundational skills in place.
Whole language is underspecified. If, as suggested in that article, it means trying the whole task, combining multiple cues, then there is a theoretical argument that it is a mistake. Instead you should strengthen the cues separately, called "deliberate practice." Phonics is only about isolating one cue, which might be a mistake, but the others already exist in speech, so may not really need practice.
and parenting
"Sehr gut. Setzen."
I mean, why should it improve skills in other subjects? Why would piano lessons be of any help in my later career as a, say, social scientist that earns his or her money by correlating things with other things? The causal path from exposure to outcome is not obvious at all. And the elephant in the room is selection bias, because these poor children of these rich parents do not just get piano lessons, but all kinds of extra training, including academic training, and they have access to better colleges and universities just because they can afford it.
PS. The time spent with piano lessons and exercises must also be taken into account; if you use that for, say, matrix calculus, you'll be even better at math or whatever areas in which matrices are used.
In case it comes up, the German for the command "Sit" is "Platz".
Only to dogs, not to school children.
Some learnings clearly cross over and affect other subjects. Learning any one programming language spills to others and possibly into general communication ability. Learning(or at least understanding) calculus helps you to model physical phenomena in your mind. Statistics applies to many scenarios throughout life in an automatic even intuitive way(academic and not). Presumably, philosophy provides a basis for understanding and evaluating aspects of history and social science both of which can still be learned without it.
A lot of the very smart people I know in grad school play a musical instrument, and probably learned it early in life. Of course this proves that correlation is not causation. However, this tells us why the belief that learning music earlier in life probably leads to better fluid intelligence or something is quite intuitive, and almost common sense; at least based on the ample evidence around me. Perhaps research in education is important because it can help disabuse us of our "intuitive" notions.
That seems like it would be highly confounded by tiger mom parents who make their children learn musical instruments.
28: The snopes link you posted has been updated, suggest you strike that paragraph
I got the impression that the government changed their mind about the funding and Snopes correctly changed their rating to reflect that, but that my description correctly matches the original state of affairs.
The snopes article was directly responding to claims like "The Biden administration is sending crack pipes to minority groups to further racial equality". That statement could... kinda sorta be true if you view the world from a Faerie-like dedication to maximally misinterpreting everything without technically lying.
Crack pipes were one example component of one part of the program that has an overall goal of promoting racial equality, but there's a huge qualitative gap between (Safe drug use kits reduce the lethality of drugs) + (minority groups suffer from poor treatment of addiction and drug use, leading to higher deaths per capita) = (Send safe smoking kits - which may include crack pipes - to minority areas as part of a large scale effort to treat and reduce drug addiction) and (Biden is sending crack pipes to minority groups to further equality).
Even if the second statement is technically kind of true, it's such a gross abuse of the facts and context that I'd feel comfortable calling it a lie. This specific case doesn't feel like a woke outrage overreaction, so doesn't really fit with the list
OK, but this is part of the problem with Snopes' current operating procedure: when a fact that's embarrassing to Democrats start to spread, they go out of their way to find some version of that fact with some not-so-true frills attached and then debunk _that_.
Another particularly horrible example is the Biden/KKK thing. Faced with the (entirely true) rumour that Biden eulogised former KKK member Robert Byrd at his funeral, Snopes managed to find someone on facebook claiming that Byrd was the Grand Wizard of the KKK (in fact he was "only" an Exalted Cyclops, because KKK titles are fucking ridiculous).
The administration's plan to send safe smoking kits is a sound one. There is no version of the claim "Biden is sending crack pipes to minority groups" that does not either
A) Distort the context to manufacture outrage or
B) Retain the context, and therefore has nothing worth getting upset over
The only version of the story even worth addressing is the mostly-false manufactured outrage version spinning this into some sort of drug pushing program
Even the "particularly horrible" example you're pointing out isn't that bad. It's labeled as "miscaptioned" and even the summary points out that Byrd was in fact a former KKK member. And that seems like a very fair assessment of something that takes "Biden eulogized someone who used to be a member of the KKK before leaving and becoming a high profile opponent of the KKK" and twists it into "Biden eulogized a former KKK member". Both statements are strictly true, but context and connotation matters.
Are there any cases where you think snopes has failed to apply that level of nuance to a right wing issue to cast them in a bad light? I don't spend much time on snopes, so I can't speak to any systemic issues they may have. But these two evaluations seem fair
Then again, I am on the left so these are all evaluations that support my team. If you have any cases that are similar on a meta level but go against my biases I'd like to see them to see if I'd feel the same way
Snopes shouldn't be trying to provide an evaluation of whether the plan (sending safe crack kits to minority communities) is sound. It exists to check the facts. The facts were, that was the plan; they fact-checked reporting of that plan as "mostly false". That's a failure. If they had fact-checked it as "missing context", I could be persuaded they were somewhat in the right. But there was a true thing, and they fact-checked it as false.
Don't trust liars just because they're on your team; don't underestimate the harm they do to you in the name of a cause.
Evaluating "Missing so much context that the conclusion is dramatically wrong" to "basically a lie" is not itself a lie. A simplification, sure. But not a lie
> The administration's plan to send safe smoking kits is a sound one.
That's... well, it's an opinion that Democrats might share, but I don't. I find out outrageous to send "safe smoking kits" to anyone under any circumstances, and I think at least a very large fraction of the population would agree with me.
I value the rule of law, and the rule of law is not well served by having the government send people kits to help them break the law. Furthermore, I don't think people should smoke crack/meth, and it doesn't seem necessarily true that having the government send people apparatus for smoking crack/meth is going to serve the interests of not having people smoke crack or meth.
I can definitely sympathize with this sentiment: I don't think merely making drug use more comfortable should be the core of a government response to an addiction epidemic. With that said, there are versions of this program that I can get behind - for example, tying the benefits to strict requirements to join and stay in a cessation program.
>The snopes article was directly responding to claims like "The Biden administration is sending crack pipes to minority groups to further racial equality".
...
>Crack pipes were one example component of one part of the program
"Crack pipes" is metonymy. The proper thing to measure is not literally crack pipes and nothing else, but the entire category of "things that make it easier for people to get or take drugs".
I don't see how you got that at all. Snopes originally assumed that "safe smoking kits" referred in part to crack pipes, but the administration later clarified that the kits wouldn't include pipes, hence the update.
Also, part of what they were debunking was the claim that the pipes were being distributed "to advance racial equity". That's nakedly false. I'm fine saying that a false claim plus a misleading claim qualifies as "mostly false".
From the Snopes article:
“the grant description did state that priority would be given to applicants who serve communities that are historically underserved. “
That sounds a lot like trying to advance racial equity to me. It certainly doesn’t come across as “nakedly false”
In what way is that "distributing crack pipes to advance racial equity"? That statement is just saying they intend to implement their program equitably. But the purpose of the program isn't to advance racial equity, it's to combat drug addiction.
All crackheads are equal. Some are just more equally prioritized than others.
I'm not sure what you mean. By definition, "historically underserved communities" are ones who have been prioritized lower by previous programs. Saying you'll prioritize them higher is just saying "This time around, we won't forget about the guys everyone always forgets about." I don't see how that's controversial or even really notable.
The purpose is not to combat drug addiction, it's to combat harms from drug addiction. Hence "harm reduction" - combating addiction is a separate program.
Either way: that being its purpose doesn't make it not *also* intended to advance racial equity, and the text of the order makes it clear that HHS wants implementation to happen in a way that targets minority and marginalized communities in the name of advancing racial equity.
As I said in another comment - the section of the program labeled "purpose" makes it clear that advancing racial equity is part of the program's purpose.
If I bring a box of donuts to work and give one to everybody in the office, am I intending to "advance fairness"? Or am I just being fair while pursuing the goal of group donut consumption?
I'm confused how you managed to convince yourself of this. The program also intended to fund "syringes to prevent and control the spread of infectious diseases." What do you think those syringes were meant to help safely inject? Insulin? Give me a break.
"Safe smoking kits" meant providing the means to use crack. You don't need a "safe smoking kit", or a "kit" of any kind, for a cigarette, blunt, or vape. For the record, I don't think that providing such kits is necessarily a bad idea, like needle exchanges aren't necessarily a bad idea! But transparently, "safe smoking kits" meant crack pipes. And Snopes initially fact-checked that as "false" when it was clearly true, using exactly the justification Scott provided ("it also funded other things").
Then, after the "Biden is giving out crack pipes, lol" meme got trending, the administration "clarified" by claiming that the term "safe smoking kits" didn't include crack pipes. But I don't think their assertion is at all credible; rather, it was a transparent half-assed attempt to walk it back, and Snopes is carrying their water.
Clean syringes are a very common harm reduction measure. The article said about a dozen times that the spending is aimed at harm reduction.
Safe smoking kits can include stuff like sturdier pipes and screens that make the act of smoking safer, but they don't have to -- typically they're things like alcohol swabs, Vaseline, and plastic mouthpieces, the point being to keep people from spreading bloodborne diseases when sharing. It wasn't crazy to expect the kits to include pipes, but it was misleading to claim it with certainty and flat-out wrong to say the purpose was to advance racial equity.
Upon gaining power, Chairman Mao instigated a harm reduction programme against opium use. His policy was to threaten to execute 'addicts'. It was remarkable how quickly 'addicts' suddenly found themselves able to cope without their drug.
It sounds like you're advocating for some sort of large, concerted push to crack down on drug users. A war on drugs, even. If only someone had thought of that before
Uh, I'm not a drug dove, but I don't think any sane person's solution should be "killing all the addicts". Nor is Mao a great policy role model, for all kinds of reasons.
The actual text of the order disagrees with you.
Part 1, section 1, the second-to-last paragraph characterizing the "PURPOSE": "The priority populations for this program are underserved communities that are greatly impacted by SUD. Underserved communities are defined under section 2 of Executive Order 13985." EO 13985 characterizes "underserved community" by referencing (in order) race, sexuality, disability, and poverty, and its text repeatedly invokes the need for "an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda".
So in defining its purpose and target population, the program explicitly and implicitly invoked advancing racial equity. Other kinds of equity too - but it's fair to describe it as prioritizing minority communities. Calling that "flat-out wrong" is ignorant of the facts.
https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/grants/pdf/fy22-harm-reduction-nofo.pdf
That's a very tunnel-visiony reading. Like I said in the other thread, committing to prioritize underserved communities (which, as you noticed, is not exclusively a racial designation) is not the purpose of the program, it's just a fact about the implementation. Applicants don't have to be from underserved communities, they're just more likely have their applications approved if they are.
They state the purpose of the program in their own words multiple times. From the executive summary and the first paragraph of the section you posted: "The purpose of the program is to support community-based overdose prevention programs, syringe services programs, and other harm reduction services. Funding will be used to enhance overdose and other types of prevention activities to help control the spread of infectious diseases and the consequences of such diseases for individuals with, or at risk of developing substance use disorders (SUD), support distribution of FDA-approved overdose reversal medication to individuals at risk of overdose, build connections for individuals at risk for, or with, a SUD to overdose education, counseling, and health education, refer individuals to treatment for infectious diseases such as HIV, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and viral hepatitis, and encourage such individuals to take steps to reduce the negative personal and public health impacts of substance use or misuse. This will include supporting capacity development to strengthen harm reduction programs as part of the continuum of care. Recipients will also establish processes, protocols, and mechanisms for referral to appropriate treatment and recovery support services. Grantees will also provide overdose prevention education to their target populations regarding the consumption of substances including but not limited to opioids and their synthetic analogs. Funds may also be used to help address the stigma often associated with substance use and participation in harm reduction activities." There's nothing in there about advancing racial equity, because that is plainly not what their goal was. It's something they took into consideration, not their objective in any way.
Thanks. I didn't think the "to advance racial equity" was a relevant part of the claim or the reason it was supposed to be outrageous, but it sounds like some people thought it was and that makes Snopes' decision more reasonable.
I don't think it ever was.
That is to say, I have come across the "Biden administration sends out crack pipes" meme quite a few times over the last week in the right wing memeopshere, but this is the first time I've heard it with the "to advance racial equity" bit attached.
First time I heard about it was a meme with Forrest Gump saying "And just like that, crack was safer than Ivermectin". This was followed by several references to Hunter Biden's own crack-smoking proclivities. Then a picture of Joe Biden kindly offering a crack pipe to a black man sitting on a bench, who replies "Sir, I'm waiting for a bus". In each case, the "Biden administration handing out crack pipes" part was the core of the joke.
fwiw, i disagree with the decision to remove this. Snoops objectively reported that a claim that was true, albeit misleading, was false. Unless we're redefining false to mean something else, snoop's original claim of this being false was a lie. They have updated it to be more nuanced now, but i think the original post is worthy of being noted as something related to excessive wokeness.
Update: ah, i see the more clear reasoning you gave on the mistakes page, and i understand better. It's specifically that snoops said that "true statement AND potentially false statement" could reasonable be called a false statement due to the AND. That's...a bit of a reach but defensible.
> Unless we're redefining false to mean something else, snoop's original claim of this being false was a lie.
A key point in Bounded Distrust was that quite a bit of journalism consists of a series of individually narrowly true statements woven together to give a strongly misleading impression, often with the rhetorical punchline being a qualitative statement that can't be strictly evaluated on its own metric. Lots of people would nonetheless round an egregious example off to "that article is lying to me". Would that claim itself be a lie, assuming the journalist was scrupulous in never quite overstepping on any individual point?
I would say yeah, that claiming that such an article is lying is incorrect. You can say many other things about it (misleading narrative, cherrypicked facts, etc) but lying wouldn't be right.
Adding "to racial equality" seemed to me to be a case of making a general claim that you don't like more specific, refuting the more specific claim, and then insinuating that the general claim is also refuted.
Maybe Biden didn't include crack pipes in the bill to advance racial equality (maybe he was just pro crack), but if I knock down that more complicated claim, it would seem to unsuspecting eyes that maybe Biden didn't include crack pipes in the bill at all.
that's a good trick actually, do you know if it has a name?
EDIT: wait this is just motte and baily isn't it.
It would... except that advancing racial equity was very much a part of the program's purpose. You can tell because it says so, specifically, under "PURPOSE": "the priority populations for this program are..." and then invokes an EO (#13985) which is focused entirely on a woke conceptualization of "equity", centering race.
https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/grants/pdf/fy22-harm-reduction-nofo.pdf
Snopes is still the bad guy here, for the reasons you initially provided and more besides. Even if you've revised your opinion, I would appreciate that section of the post being caveat'ed rather than removed, for future readers' sake.
Agreed that it shouldn't be memory-holed; I had no idea what this discussion was about at first glance.
> I got the impression that the government changed their mind about the funding and Snopes correctly changed their rating to reflect that
My brain first interpreted this as "the government changed their mind about funding Snopes, and Snopes got scared and quickly changed their rating to make the government happy". :D
They've updated to "Outdated" which is a rating I don't really understand the purpose of. It seems to obfuscate "did X really happen" by putting it behind a layer of "maybe it happened, maybe it didn't happen, but for some reason we no longer consider it 'relevant'".
Like to pick a fairly straight-forward example "Did Facebook Censor a Picture of Santa Kneeling to Jesus" (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facebook-santa-jesus-image/) - it's a pretty straightforward factual statement: I would rate that "Mostly true" - Facebook did indeed put a "mature content" warning on top of such an image. Yes, it was almost certainly just an algorithmic glitch or human error, but factually it did happen.
They nitpick over the wording "censor" (... despite that they have control over the exact wording of their claims), and Facebook fixed it so that it no longer has the content warning... but I'm not sure why that makes it "Outdated". The claim is in the past tense, and, yes, that really happened.
It kind of feels like a "True, but inconvenient if people were to screenshot this" rating. (Incidentally the "Aztec Chanting in Public Schools" that Scott mentioned in a previous article also got an "Outdated" rating)
Like, yeah, if some controversial law gets repealed that's an important part of the story, but I still care about whether or not it really existed at all. "Outdated" could be a modifier, but shouldn't 'mask' the actual truth rating.
>which is a rating I don't really understand the purpose of. It seems to obfuscate "did X really happen"
That's the purpose of it.
What's cool is how much thought the isochronic map put into human travel time. Apparently I can ride a horse east from Perm much faster than I can try to cross the Greenland icepack.
I'm not sure whether they'd figured out rope teams by that point so crossing Greenland probably had a far higher attrition rate too, what with all the crevasses covered by thin layers of snow.
Nansen first crossed the Greenland ice pack in 1888, before then there was no recorded crossing. So indeed it would have been quite hard and probably deadly.
Apparently Nansen's big advantage was that he knew how to ski, which at the time was a peculiar skill possessed by a handful of Norwegians.
#7 corridors invented in the 16C.
I’m not sure. I see a hall as a corridor. In Bill Bryson’s At Home he says the Hall came first and sometimes was all there was, for instance a Viking great hall, then rooms were added around the side, and the rooms took up more space, and the hall got smaller? Is a hall a corridor? I tend to use either interchangeably but maybe a hall/hallway has to get to the front door.
The distinction is that a hall in that sense of the word *is* a room, where things are meant to occur, instead of being primarily a space for getting between rooms.
Not really. I did as it happen subsequently look it up and hall and corridors are synonymous- at least inside buildings.
I don't understand what you're claiming. A "hall" in the sense of a "great hall" is a distinctly different thing from a "hall" in the sense of "it's just down the hall", and it's the latter that's being discussed. Stand in the two and the difference is obvious. Are you trying to make some sort of argument based on a dictionary, that no distinction can be drawn because the particular dictionary you checked doesn't draw such a distinction??
I also don’t know what you are arguing about. The link said that corridors were invented in the 16C. I said that halls existed long before that, starting out as great halls with small rooms (if any) attached, and then getting smaller - in most houses - to the present day size. So I’m doubting that corridors were invented in the 16C.
I mean, if that's your claim, then you should make that explicit by saying something like "Halls in the modern sense evolved from halls in the older sense, as the latter gradually shrank; there was no hard line where corridors were suddently 'invented'.", not go on about looking up meanings of words!
A hall in the sense of "great hall" is not a corridor but a large multifunction space, generally a singularly large room of a castle or manor. In modern people's houses, rooms such as dining rooms, living rooms, and TV rooms tend to be the spiritual successors of a great hall, while event spaces and multifunction spaces fill the same role in convention centers and hotels.
Before corridors there were just doorways from one room with a purpose to another; corridors as "rooms" whose only purpose is to connect other rooms are less materially efficient, and are less likely to appear as organic extensions to an existing building.
I just did a couple quick google image searches for "Roman Villa Floor Plan" and "Roman Palace Floor Plan". Something like 10% of the results have features that look an awful lot like corridors to me. When they're labelled, it's usually either "corridor" (which seems like a vote in favor of counting as a corridor) or "atrium" (which I think in Classical Roman architecture denotes a sort of semi-enclosed courtyard that opened out onto proper rooms).
I also searched for floor plans for Charlemenge's palace at Aachen, which also had long, narrow features that were often labeled "corridor", but these were walkways connecting otherwise-separated wings or sub-buildings of the palace complex, not direct analogues of a modern hallway with rows of rooms opening onto either side.
Between the Roman atria, Carolingian walkway corridors, and Viking great halls, I'm starting to suspect that the root of the "Corridors were invented in the 16th Century" claim is that before then, internal subdivision of large buildings was limited by concerns about lighting and ventilation. Subdividing a building with internal partitions limits internal air circulation, cuts off natural light and ventilation from exterior windows and doorways, and also cuts off line of sight to artificial lighting (oil lamps, candles, hearth fires, etc).
In this context, a modern-style interior corridor is a subdivided space with little or no exterior facing for natural light and ventilation and is probably more trouble than it's worth. Using courtyard and Roman-style atria to perform the office of corridors is a pretty easy workaround, since that increases surface area for windows and whatnot while the transitional space has most of the advantages of an outdoor area but is still at least marginally protected from wind (and rain, in the case of Roman atria which had partial roofs). Likewise, a Carolingian-style walkway corridor connecting separated wings of a palace complex leaves plenty of surface area for working and living areas of the palace, while the corridors themselves are fully sheltered from the elements but still have ample access to natural light and ventilation. A great hall is not as clear-cut, but doing double-duty as a room in its own right mitigates the problem, and I'd expect a great hall to also be a natural spot to put a hearth fire.
I got my idea from bill Bryson’s book on houses.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/130569743?t=1645575717983
> No. I mean, for a long time, for a very long time, right up at least until - really, until about the age of Elizabeth I and William Shakespeare, most houses, even quite well-to-do houses, were fundamentally a single room, which was called the hall.
And the hall was so important that that became the name of the whole house sometimes. And indeed, hall, in a wider sense, became a word signifying a grand space, which is why we have Carnegie Hall and Baseball Hall of Fame and the Halls of Montezuma, and so on.
So in kind of original sense, it was a really grand room. It was the whole house. But then as time went on, people, they discovered the comforts and attractions, the privacy, and they began to add more rooms onto the home and to spread the house both upwards and outwards.
And the hall became diminished in its importance until now. In most domestic settings, it's really just a kind of entryway in which we - where we hang our coats and take our hats off and that sort of thing.
I tried to find the Wikipedia page pictured in the tweet, and failed.
I did find an extremely short article that credits John Thorpe with inventing the hallway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallway
And also I found an article on ancient Roman apartment buildings that mentions at least one of them as having a "narrow corridor": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insula_(building). I looked for this because I knew they had apartment buildings, which I think almost require hallways.
> I tried to find the Wikipedia page pictured in the tweet, and failed.
It is simply the article for 'Hall'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall
While your wording is somewhat confusing your general claim is correct.
Some halls are corridors. Halls which are corridors are frequently called "hallways", but that can be abbreviated to "hall" in contexts where there aren't going to be non-corridor halls, e.g. a middle-class house.
Some halls are *not* corridors, but rooms in their own right and in which people spend a significant amount of time. The innovation (which may have occurred more than once) is the development of a long skinny room-like thing that is only or primarily used to travel between other rooms.
Corridors are a very inefficient use of space, so I'm not sure the inventor should be proud of themselves.
In fact, there is something distinctly modern about corridors - it's a place for untrusted strangers to move between places that are better guarded. There is nothing of value in corridors. I assume ancients didn't need corridors because their buildings were either more oriented towards common unrestricted use, or were strictly invite-only for one reason or another.
It's a lot like the difference between a street (a public space between buildings) and a road (a means of transportation from one place to another). Much of 20th century urban design has been focused on turning streets into roads.
“ would answer ‘yes’ to this because she [the queen] visited Ireland when I lived there, I watched the parade in her honor, and I could vaguely glimpse her on the inside of her car).”
You and a few thousand Corkonians waving their plastic union jacks. Rebel county, my arse.
> I have checked Wordle to see if this is true, and can confirm that it now tells me that “slave” is not a real word
This is of course not true. It tells you that "slave" is not in the word list. I also think removing slave from the word list is stupid but misrepresenting what Wordle says in a way that anyone can double check in two seconds is sloppy in a way that seems motivated.
Scrabble bans classes of words that are already extant, including not only expletives but proper nouns, for various reasons but all ultimately related to making the gaming experience better. It does not create a new class of words to ban with no linguistic justification, which is what is happening here. Whilst the reason for the decision may be to avoid offence, this seems basically to be a political policing of language by people who don't know how language works.
How is 'Slavery' offensive ? is it an insult or a slur ? What about 'War', 'Hunger', 'Death' or 'Murder', are they banned too ? How many negative words is too many ?
War, Hunger and murder are definitely banned: they don't have five letters.
That's the "error code" it has always given for non-words.
It gives that for any input that is not in the wordlist, including but not limited to strings of characters that are "non-words"
Yeh but slave is a word, right. Just tested on WWF and it’s there ( with many derivatives - slaver, slavery etc).
Yes but Wordle is not attempting to tell you it’s not a word, only that it’s not on its list of words. You get the same thing with any computerized word game (like Scrabble) - they have a list of allowed words in that game. One can disagree with their choice of words to include on their list but it’s simply wrong to say that they have declared something as “not a word”
This is all a bit pedantic.
Yes of course! People on the spectrum discussing a word game, not surprising right (smile)
I mean, the word list is...the list of real words? At least that's what it is for every other word on the list? I agree you can claim this is merely a coincidence and there's no necessary connection, but it's a bit weird.
I'll edit the sentence just in case other people have the same objection.
I think it's important to be precise when accusing one's opponents of malfeasance; if you do so inaccurately, you open the door for their defenders to point out your inaccuracy while conveniently ignoring your point, and then you're making no progress (except perhaps in tribal point-scoring, which I do not think is your goal).
There are lots of 5-letter words that are not on the wordle word list. See the 3blue1brown video on YouTube.
For clarity, there are two Wordle word lists: the list of possible answers and the list of possible guesses.
The list of possible answers includes only words that are reasonably well known, because the game isn't fun if the answer turns out to be some hyper-obscure archaic sheep disease that you've never heard of. And it's quite reasonable for this to exclude swear words etc as well.
The list of possible _guesses_, though, previously encompassed pretty much every five letter word that could be found in some large dictionary. But once the NYT bought it, a bunch of words (including some fairly common ones that appear within the New York Times practically every day) disappeared from this list.
It turns out they didn't delete anything from the list of possible guesses. The game doesn't actually have a list of possible guesses. Rather, it has a list of possible answers, and a list of non-answer possible guesses. When they deleted something from the list of possible answers, it accidentally got removed as a possible guess because it is no longer an answer, and had never been a non-answer possible guess.
They did in fact delete multiple words from both lists.
Words that used to be valid answers, and are no longer on either list:
agora
pupal
lynch
fibre
slave
wench
Words that used to be valid non-answer guesses, and are no longer on either list:
bitch
chink
coons
darky
dyked
dykes
dykey
faggy
fagot
gooks
homos
kikes
lesbo
pussy
sluts
spick
spics
spiks
whore
No words have been added to either list.
[I really hope this comment doesn't get auto-moderated]
Source:
Comparing the javascript of the NYT's wordle as of Feb 18, and the waybackmachine's backup of powerlanguage's wordle as of Feb 1.
So, most of the removals I can see the reasoning for, even if I don't agree with removing words like "slave" or "lynch", but what the hell is the objection to "fibre"?!
I can see why they removed "slave" and "lynch," and I suppose "wench" could be seen as problematic. "Fibre" is a British spelling, but why remove "pupal" and "agora"? Just too obscure?
Luckily CUNTS is still fine
If they had removed it from the list of possible answers, I would agree. But removing it from the list of words you can even guess is a step further than that. There are several other impolite words that are still usable as guesses, like "FUCKS", "SHITS", and "NEGRO". I'd expect the only unguessable strings to be gibberish or words too obscure for the word list.
Editing to include a screenshot just because: https://i.imgur.com/JFdV1wW.png
That is quite surprising! I had assumed this was just about removing it from the list of potential answers. And that would be in total keeping with much NYTimes practice.
They officially apply a "breakfast test" to the crossword - they don't want an entry in the grid to be something that will dismay someone if it comes up while they're working on the crossword over breakfast, so no URINE or ENEMA or HITLER. The big challenge is eliminating IDI and AMIN, because those letter combinations are so good for completing grids, even though the person is one you don't want to think about when you're having fun.
It seems to me that you definitely don't want to pick a word like SLAVE and force people to guess it. But it does seem over the top to prevent people from using it as a guess to find letters.
Exactly. I generally like the NYT, so my thought process was this:
1) Seems like an overstatement, I bet they just removed it from the answer list, which is a good decision. [Falsified by trying to guess SLAVE and failing]
2) Hmm, maybe they just imported the word list from Spelling Bee, which needs to have its guesses sanitized. [Falsified by trying to guess other rude words and succeeding]
3) Yeah, this is a bizarre and bad decision.
Someone in a different thread noted that it was probably an attempt at the first thing, that accidentally went wrong. It turns out that Wordle has an "answers list" and a "guesses that aren't answers list", so that if you remove something from the answers list while forgetting to add it to the other list, it disappears completely. Most people assumed they had an "answers list" and a "guesses list", so that removal from the answers wouldn't interfere with the guesses. Hopefully they fix it soon.
Jihad remains an option as well. If negro is as well, they are officially incompetent.
Someone pointed out that the "allowed guesses that aren't answers" list has always had words like JIHAD and NEGRO (and SOARE and other unfamiliar words). They didn't realize that when they deleted something from the "possible answers" list they needed to add it to this other list in order to not break things. Hopefully they will fix it.
That's still incompetent, just a different kind.
#32, on beautiful buildings surviving: there is definitely something to be said about modern architecture, auto-centrism, and technological changes, but I think another important factor that often goes undiscussed is labor efficiency. Construction remains a labor-intensive industry, even as raw materials and equipment grow cheaper. Some of the beauty of old buildings is related to the careful craftsmanship put into designing, building, and decorating even simple features. Today, that kind of time costs more relative to the other costs involved in building (land, permitting, materials, equipment).
The relevant economic law is "shipping the good apples out." If you look at buildings where the price has already been increased by other components besides labor (e.g. homes in an area where zoning limits supply and drives up the cost of lots), it's easier to spend more on construction since that cost is a smaller proportion of the overall cost. As a result, the design is notably better.
I have a hope that 3D printing will lead to some kind of renaissance in ornamentation.
There is at least a new trend towards patterned perforated metal sheets as a form of ornamentation. Even my own state's new white elephant covid quarantine facility has them https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-20/victoria-mickleham-quarantine-facility-open/100845058 and I have to admit that it looks a lot better than it would without them.
I'd highly recommend looking up the Twitter account of the article's author, Samuel Hughes. A lot of his posts highlight the efforts of late 19th and early 20th century architects and builders to combine modern labour-saving technologies and materials with colourful, textured, highly ornamented design in both traditional and novel styles. It leaves one without a shadow of doubt that the deterioration in the design standards of the built environment over the course of the 20th century was above all the result of poor aesthetic choices, not economic necessities.
Interesting - I will!
They made a male beauty pageant and they called it Mr Global instead of the obvious high-karma choice of Mr Worldwide?
then Pitbull would have to host it (and win it) every year
A beauty contest in our culture probably wouldn't want the word "wide" associated with it in any way.