MikeUt

More notable than how they use tangential evidence to debunk a claim (e.g. citing a drop in rape as evidence it's not the rape capital, and comparing the rate of rape in absolute terms, not per-capita), is which part of a claim they choose to debunk.

According to the Swedish state TV, 58% of all convicted rapists were foreign-born [1], despite being only 19% of the population [2]. They could cite that as supporting "accepting refugees from war-torn regions like Syria would make the United States less safe", and rate the whole statement as a mixture. Instead they meticulously dance around the core of the statement [3], using all sorts of indirect statistics.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45269764

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden

[3] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/crime-sweden-rape-capital-...

You mean the time they bought the company that solved protein folding.

I pointed out (exaggerating only modestly) the absurd amount of benefit of the doubt you're giving the NY Times. If you believe that's an insult, I really can't help you.

This level of skepticism would find even the Daily Mail as free of bias and agenda.

And if their ToS are themselves political?

Even if the algorithm was correct, the remaining staff will now focus on gaming the perceived productivity metrics. We all know what that means for actual productivity.

Looking at only the college age 20-24 year age group [1], the numbers change as follows:

           Ivy League  US     Ratio
  Jewish*  17.2%        2.1%  8.21
  Asian    19.6%        7.1%  2.75
  White    33.1%       51.6%  0.64
  Hispanic 11.4%       19.4%  0.59
  Black**   7.8%       16.5%  0.47

The relative placement of the bottom 3 groups changes, but their individual representation ratios remain approximately the same. Any conclusions about discrimination that you could draw from the first set of numbers, you can draw from this one - the differences are negligible.

As for there being many people in Asia, that is irrelevant - I excluded international students when calculating Ivy League demographics, so only the US population is relevant.

*I assumed the same age structure for non-Jewish and Jewish whites.

**The census data table gives the total Black population as 47 million for 2017, while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... gives only 40 million, despite citing census.gov as its source. I don't know where the disparity comes from, and that's the only place I've seen such a high estimate of the US Black population.

[1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/tables/2010-... 2019 estimate

Any advice on how I could present this data without it becoming a dogwhistle? The edit window is over, but I'll gladly make those changes next time.

> They're the only small group being considered. Of course they're gonna be "by far" something. Many other small groups have above-average representation in academics.

Maybe small in the US as a whole, but in the Ivy League they are 17.2% - the 3rd largest ethnicity, almost as large as Hispanics and Blacks combined.

But lets suppose they are being discriminated against. That would require some other group, that makes up a significant % of the Ivy League, to be unfairly privileged (otherwise it would have a negligible effect on the % of Jewish students).

So which group do you think that is? You said Asians are discriminated against, so they're out. Maybe you think there's too many Hispanic or Black students, despite being 11x less likely to be accepted into the Ivy League? Or is it non-Jewish whites, the most under-represented group, that are also the most privileged?

It's just a trivial excel table. The Hillel sources are a bit tricky to get to - their URLs are:

https://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/brown-universit...

http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/columbia-univers...

http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/cornell-universi...

http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/dartmouth-colleg...

http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/harvard-universi...

http://www.hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/university-o...

http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/princeton-univer...

http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/record/yale-university

https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges has a decent summary of other demographic data.

For the US, I used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...

Unfortunately I could not find many numbers from eJP, except those in the https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat... article. Perhaps you will have better luck searching.

The presidents of Yale, Pennsylvania, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and Brown are Peter Salovey, Amy Gutmann, Lawrence Bacow, Lee C. Bollinger, Christopher Eisgruber, and Christina Paxson. They are all Jewish (don't take my word for it - check their wikipedia pages).

If you contend they are discriminated against despite holding at least 6 of the 8 presidencies, and despite being by far the most over-represented group, I assume you have some fantastically strong supporting evidence.

Maybe they don't believe the data? And it's very tedious to check. If that's the case, I suggest to check the data for a few individual universities. Cornell and Princeton are slight outliers, but otherwise individual universities don't deviate much from the average. That should give some credence to the numbers.

US universities also had a history of trying to exclude Jewish people [1]. I say history, because the practice has by all accounts stopped, and the current situation in the Ivy League [2] is as follows (looking only at non-international students):

                          Ivy League   US      Ratio
  Jewish                  17.2%         2.4%    7.16
  Asian                   19.6%         5.3%    3.71
  White (incl. Jewish)    50.3%        61.5%    0.82
  Hispanic                11.4%        17.6%    0.65
  Black                    7.8%        12.7%    0.61
  White (non-Jewish)      33.1%        59.1%    0.56

The numbers don't sum to 100% because I did not include multi-ethnic students, a few minor ethnicities (American-Indian, Pacific Islander..), and students categorized as "unknown" or "other" by the universities. Data on university undergraduate demographics was taken from the universities own diversity reports. Jewish representation was was gathered from http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat..., taking the lowest estimate when sources conflicted. ejewishphilanthropy.com (eJP) points out flaws in Hillel's data gathering (e.g. showing Harvard as 30% Jewish, when eJP found it only 16%) Hillel seems to have since fixed these flaws, as the estimates they now give are in-line with those of eJP.

No correction has been made to look at only the college-age population of the US, or only at the Northeastern US where all the Ivy League universities are located, so that may be a source of some bias.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_quota#United_States

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League

> It’s possible the truth falls somewhere in the middle here.

Only if you believe Facebook has authority to decide what users do with the data Facebook shows them on their own machines. I find this suggestion repellent, the same as if I bought a copy of the New York Times, and afterwards the newspaper tried to forbid me from sharing which ads I saw on its front-page.

I thought one of the main ideals of free software is the user being in charge.

People can complain about something, without believing it is illegal, and without already having a legislative or other solution for the problem ready.

If nothing else, it informs others about Youtube censorship - even the most radical libertarians are pro-informed consumers.

> What is stopping people from manufacturing a better ice cream machine? Absolutely nothing. I don't understand this ""right""-to-repair movement.

Do you think that's a viable solution? When the market fails to deliver what consumers and voters want, to ignore what caused or allowed that failure, because "nothing's stopping you"*? And when the new competitor abandons their idealism (or gets bought out) and decides they too will increase profit by sabotaging their machines?

*Except network effects, lock-in, sunk-cost, the significant technological and financial edge of existing companies, startup costs,..

From organization. They can rely on the police to arrest you, you cannot rely that your arrest will be what sparks the revolution that overthrows them. Assuming many people even learn about your arrest - they might be able to find out in theory, but it's probably not going to be on the front page of major newspapers.

How much is this promise worth?

In flip-flop, Apple bans app used by Hong Kong protestors - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/apple-approves-t...

Apple deliberately places itself in a position that make their users powerless against them, then cries when governments predictably force them to abuse that position.

> Government can't just do whatever they want if they also being surveilled.

No? Because it seems to me if you're the one with power, you have a lot less to fear from surveillance, than if you're without. Say there's only one political party allowed (officially or unofficially) - that means it is free to organize and act as a political party, while if you were to try and start your own, you'd be jailed.

Does surveillance make it easier, or harder, to change unjust law, or an unjust government? Or even learn there are injustices being carried out in the first place?

Suppose the people of Hong Kong followed your advice, and had allowed surveillance infrastructure to spread through their city, mapping out everyone's social graphs and political affiliations.

Now that a hostile government is in charge of their city, there is no reason to worry the govt. has inherited all the gathered information and knows exactly who to target - if they don't like it, they should fix the root issue and change the law.

I don't like those responses, because they fundamentally don't address the issue. What if the person is okay with a trustworthy government agent/system seeing them naked, or having a copy of their house key? This way they won't be embarrassed in public, or get robbed, while the government still gets what it needs to "keep them safe".

I think a better response is - what if they did have something to hide? What if they were a government or corporate whistleblower, a human rights lawyer, or a journalist? What if the government changes and suddenly their friendship with a Tibetan sympathizer becomes a liability?

What if they're none of those, but due to their carelessness, make whistleblowers stand out because they're the only ones trying to keep some privacy, making them easy to find an retaliate against?

I'm confused. Other than alerting to small sample size, how can this tool measure bias without knowing what the true distribution is?

For example, given a database of violent crime convictions, would it be marked as biased because men make up over 70% of offenders, instead of an "unbiased" 50%?

Isn't it strange? Naively one might expect that as surveillance capabilities grow, laws that mandate cooperation with state surveillance would be relaxed or removed. "We have cameras on every street corner, location data on every phone, metadata on every phone call, fingerprints and cheap DNA analysis, so we can drop the requirement that ID must be shown when renting a hotel room."

But the opposite happens - the more surveillance we are subjected to, the more laws are introduced to reduce our privacy even further.

On the other hand, just recently [1] was posted to HN, that analyzed the frequency of words such as racist, sexist, etc., in major US media, and found:

> It is noteworthy that prejudice-denoting words are markedly increasing in prevalence alongside long-term decreases in overt expression of prejudice [6]-[9] yet recent increases in the perceived prevalence of such prejudice among the general public.

Looking at this article, I found the following contrast very amusing (though not surprising):

> Interpreting recent polling data is tricky, but my tentative read of the data is that it shows a welcome increase in the number of people who are aware of long-standing racist practices—especially in the criminal justice system—but not an increase in the number of people who think these practices have gotten worse.

> And the American National Election Studies, among other polls, have showed this belief in so-called reverse racism is overwhelmingly driven by white Republicans. This trend starts before 2000, but it’s growing and is an obvious candidate to explain rising white anger—as long as there’s something around to keep it front and center in the minds of white people.

One change in attitude is accepted without question as obviously driven by truth, the other is surrounded by caveats and implications it's misguided.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28109305

> It is noteworthy that prejudice-denoting words are markedly increasing in prevalence alongside long-term decreases in overt expression of prejudice [6]-[9] yet recent increases in the perceived prevalence of such prejudice among the general public.

In other words, media is giving an impression that is directly opposite of reality.

> Gobineau’s hogwash is easily disproven by comparing the health and vitality of endogamic and exogamic communities, that is communities that only breed with their own versus communities that invite outsiders into their genetic pool.

Endogamic communities such as China, Japan, or Judaism [1], and exogamic communities such as the US, Canada, and South Africa? Seems like anything but an "easy" comparison, as those communities have many differences besides endo/exogamy.

Overall the article spends more time worrying about implications than trying to answer the question posed in the title. Ironically, the answer it gives is "yes". Despite the false dichotomy it offers at the start [2], it then goes on to describe exactly what I would call "degeneration" [3]. I.e. brainless entertainment is growing disproportionately to quality art.

It's hard to view this article as anything other than an excuse to dig up and triumphantly defeat some 150 year old racist thought. Once the reader sees that dumb racists worried about degeneration, then surely the idea must be false.

That the author herself admits there is a distinction between quality and mindless art, that giving mindless art disproportionate attention could be termed degeneration, and that that is something that definitely could, and arguably (argued by the author herself [4]!) is happening... well just ignore all that, because racists.

Overall the kind of article I would expect from a humanities professor - a lot of rhetoric, used mostly to distract rather than inform. Comparing that rambling article with dash2's post [5], that definitively answers the question in 3 sentences, reveals what a farce the Princeton professor's work is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogamy#Examples

[2] Do you see a thriving and innovative scene, replete with original forms and vibrant content? Or do you see something simple and stagnant, marked by dead-end ideas that either repeat the patterns of the past or offer only feeble attempts to craft a new aesthetic vision?

[3] Upon deeper reflection, I realise that while media companies reward narcissism, shallowness, empty spectacle, hyperbole and brainlessness by giving disproportionate exposure to things that generate easy attention, there is another coexisting world, one in which thoughtful, intricate and uplifting things are being created at an unprecedented pace.

[4] On days when I feel discouraged by the kinds of cultural objects I encounter

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28110007

Surely "she" should be changed to "they"? It was Hewish who designed the radio telescope that allowed the fine time-resolution needed to detect pulsars, they investigated the signals together, Bell herself uses "we" when talking about the discovery [1], supports the decision of the Nobel committee [2], and the existence and characteristics of pulsars were all proposed before their discovery, by other scientists [3]. The documentary of course omits this, and even includes her false claim that "back then, nobody knew what a pulsar was, until I found the first two". The great journalists at the Times did not bother to give a quick glance at wikipedia to check their story.

Sourced from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsar#Discovery

[1] At this point, Bell said of herself and Hewish that "we did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization"

[2] Bell claims no bitterness upon this point, supporting the decision of the Nobel prize committee.

[3] The existence of neutron stars was first proposed by Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky in 1934, when they argued that a small, dense star consisting primarily of neutrons would result from a supernova. Based on the idea of magnetic flux conservation from magnetic main sequence stars, Lodewijk Woltjer proposed in 1964 that such neutron stars might contain magnetic fields as large as 1014 to 1016 G. In 1967, shortly before the discovery of pulsars, Franco Pacini suggested that a rotating neutron star with a magnetic field would emit radiation, and even noted that such energy could be pumped into a supernova remnant around a neutron star, such as the Crab Nebula.

> the authors plagiarized my definition and explanation almost word for word (from my confidential review).

Is there any way the authors could have kept your definition, and somehow credited you, even anonymously? Because rephrasing definitions is the pinnacle of wasted effort, and leads to confusion - you are asking them to say what you said, but without using your words.