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Inegalitarian.
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Jul 29 5 tweets 2 min read
The same companies responsible for enabling motion smoothing on your parents' TV by default are polluting the historical record with "AI enhanced" pictures that phone users don't know about.

This picture isn't fake; it's just been tampered with without the user's understanding. It's not just that the quality is poor and the faces got messed up. Even if the company "fixes" their camera to not output jumbled faces, the photo won't be a record of a real human. It will be an AI invention of what it thinks a plausible looking human face is for that context.
Jun 2 4 tweets 1 min read
The immigration issue has flipped the liberal stance on regulations like child labor, wage minimums, and health codes, because their ideal American is now a poor migrant doing petty hustles on the margins of the formal economy, who must never be interfered with by government. It's still a common lib refrain that if your business can't afford to operate within laws of safety and living wages then it shouldn't exist at all. But that comes into conflict with the new mindset that the more chaotic and poor an activity is the more it must be protected.
Feb 1 4 tweets 1 min read
The education control is a cheat to make immigrants look better vs. natives.

Mexican-born less-than-high-school is not comparable to a US high school dropout, because until recently, it was normal for Mexicans to not finish HS, while American dropouts are a smaller underclass. Such a model is in effect saying the average Mexican compares relatively favorably to the bottom <10% of natives; A much less impressive statement.
Jan 29 4 tweets 2 min read
A fascinating recurring Reddit phenomenon is someone seeking advice from a technical forum on an unusual situation, then a commenter correctly diagnoses OP as experiencing hallucinations or delusions which they are trying to make sense of. Image The most famous instance of this was the guy seeking legal advice about his landlord repeatedly entering his apartment, who was correctly diagnosed as having carbon monoxide poisoning.
Jan 28 4 tweets 1 min read
The race gap is an example of the @wanyeburkett observation that liberals treat explaining a problem the same as solving it.

You can say low black scores are from lead pollution etc, but I still don't want people with brain damage from lead exposure fast-tracked into med school. @wanyeburkett A common liberal view on race and representation is "don't call it a pipeline problem", which is their way of saying that a lack of qualified applicants is no excuse for not practicing affirmative action; basically "I reject your reality and substitute my own."
Dec 1, 2023 6 tweets 3 min read
Pedestrian deaths are another situation where the liberal policy crowd tries to take a problem of acute American lawlessness and reframe it as some abstract system design problem caused by not adopting their pet regulations on urbanism or banning cars they don't like. Pedestrian fatalities are dishonestly framed. Glossy reports represent "pedestrians" as wheelchairs and strollers at crosswalks.

But data show the pedestrians dying are extremely disproportionately drunk or in the middle of the road at night, with driver speeding a minor cause.


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Nov 21, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
LLMs thinking "off the top of their head" are unlikely to generate novel discoveries for the same reason a person wouldn't. Those discoveries that can be inferred by mulling over existing literature without external data manipulation have already been found. The medical breakthroughs you could accomplish without needing carefully collected data and a statistician were already found fifty years ago.

Using existing datasets to make a novel statement about whether X food additive increases cancer requires many iterations of modeling.
Nov 15, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
In the DC schools attendance report, a student being black is more than twice as strong a risk factor for chronic absenteeism than "experiencing homelessness".
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As with the 2020 surge in traffic fatalities, the recent collapse in school attendance is a breakdown of social norms that require applying discipline to blacks. There is no longer a shared expectation blacks should be compelled to do anything, so kids simply stop showing up.
May 22, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
DoJ press release says two men planned to attack power grid with an "AR-47" rifle. Image The actual Information describes an Armalite rifle with no SN, which I'm guessing means it was sold to them by a fed. Image
May 20, 2023 5 tweets 3 min read
Even the NYT can't source things right.

The glossy Deloitte "report" just cites a VentureBeat post, which is in turn a reblog of a report from an AI-HR company called Eightfold AI.

The actual report link is 404 now, so the NYT couldn't have even read it for their article. Image The Eightfold AI report, which is from 2021, is actually just an advertisement for their obnoxious "AI" software which scans resumes for keywords and does what looks like a word embedding search for related keywords. ImageImage
May 9, 2023 12 tweets 4 min read
The "far right" overwhelmingly defended Penny's decision to restrain the threatening Neely. Image Legum's "debunk" isn't really a debunk, just a reframing that most crimes aren't interracial. But so what?

Most crimes aren't media sensations. It's interracial violence that's used to craft a racial victimization narrative, and coverage of this is obviously one-sided. Image
May 8, 2023 9 tweets 3 min read
The context of the original meme, which Carr accepted, was the media's particular focus on interracial violence, which is uniquely politically salient, not a conversation about how to best reduce all crime everywhere. Kareem thinks the mode of a distribution is also the most representative value? My friend you have a PhD from Harvard; this is embarrassing. Image
May 8, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
You can't oppose systematic change with individual responsibility. An individual does not sustain a religion or build a community. People make decisions within a cultural and institutional environment that shapes expectations and behavior. Marriage has never been a private act. Marriage is a vow taken before god and your community. It is not a contractual arrangement on file with the county clerk. It's a problem that urban young people are filtered into a homogeneous residential setting in which families are something those distant "other people" have.
Mar 20, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
Balko is significantly mischaracterizing firearm forensics. This high claimed error rate comes from classifying "inconclusive" comparisons - of which there are many - as "errors".

But that's just the examiners being conservative. The rate of *false* positives/negatives is ~1%. Here's one of the studies Balko is speaking of, in which the same examiner unknowingly is tested with the same bullets twice.

The rate of false positive matches for non-matching bullets is under 1%.

Rate of false negatives for matching bullets is 3%.
Mar 20, 2023 7 tweets 2 min read
I think something like this has happened:

Attached to every big brand, business, bureaucracy, whatever, are secondary administrative and media functions, which are less economically sensitized, and draw from a more homogeneous culture than the industries they're attached to. There can be dozens of sports teams in different markets, but the population of "sports team social media managers" is this tiny sliver of society that cuts across all of them. You can capture all of them and get every brand echoing your message without commercial feedback.
Mar 17, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
In 1941 American army procurement averaged 722,000 rounds of artillery ammunition a month.

In 2023 the US struggles to produce 20,000. Historical production for one of about two dozen ammunition plans.
Mar 16, 2023 5 tweets 3 min read
Another maternal mortality story conspicuously not addressing causes. It's not presented as a problem we can fix, but a blight to attribute to racism.

But systemic racism didn't double in three years among every racial group. Something changed that they don't want to talk about. A growing cause of material mortality for all groups is America's drug epidemic. Maternal deaths attributed to opioids have increased dramatically.

I have never seen this mentioned in any article about the subject because they're only interested in talking about racist doctors.
Mar 15, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
American children aren't lacking food and parents are not lacking in food assistance. Most child "hunger" stats are inflated.

The main value of cafeterias is removing the responsibility for feeding from parents who are disinterested in economical or nutritious food preparation. Discussions of "poverty" in America inevitably involve people making excuses for why those with low incomes shouldn't be expected to share living spaces, or know how to cook rice. These are not people who behave like they are starving and poor.
Mar 15, 2023 8 tweets 3 min read
A black man experiencing a psychotic episode wandered for days before expiring in the woods.

After his case is closed with no evidence of foul play, mainstream media is trying to revive the story - with the mental health context omitted - to suggest a lynching occurred. Image As a result of constant racialized media propaganda, countless online liberals have their minds stuck in a Qanon-tier alternate reality in which the police covering up lynchings of black men is a routine occurrence. Image
Mar 15, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
Pew's latest iteration of this chart now removed the self-ratings of religious groups, possibly because it was embarrassing Jews were consistently rating themselves most highly of any group, by a large margin. Image Contrast with 2017 version of this graphic. Image
Mar 4, 2023 6 tweets 3 min read
"being strong is always advantageous, therefore all groups are equally strong"

Immediately disqualifying logic which reveals speaker's fundamental lack of intuition for evolution, or incredible dishonesty. Sadly an extremely common argument by egalitarians. Evolution is about trade-offs under pressure, not a monotonic ascent up the gradient of universal trait-goodness.

If being smarter doesn't pay off, an organism is wasting resources. Human brain is extremely expensive to maintain - a prime target for evolutionary budget cuts! Image