Month: July 2015

Are Hyperlinks a Bad Idea?

entirelyuseless Science

Nicholas Carr suggests in this article that hyperlinks such as the one in this sentence are a bad idea. He compares links with footnotes, saying that they are similar but more distracting:

The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It’s also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What’s good about a link – its propulsive force – is also what’s bad about it.

While agreeing that we should evaluate links by comparing them with footnotes, I think that the comparison is overall favorable toward links. For example, consider the difference between footnotes and endnotes. Endnotes are certainly less distracting as long as you don’t look at them, since they aren’t there on the page. But if you actually go and read the endnote, they are more distracting than footnotes, since you have to flip to the back of the book or chapter and seek out the note. In fact, there does not appear to be any real reason to use endnotes unless you simply don’t want people to read them, in which case perhaps they should not be included in the first place.

One could make a similar argument against using footnotes, and in fact Stephen Breyer has made this argument.

Sometimes it’s awkward to use none at all, but if in fact you even use one, then you cannot make the point. And it is an important point to make if you believe, as I do, that the major function of an opinion is to explain to the audience of readers why it is that the Court has reached that decision.

It’s not to prove that you’re right: you can’t prove you’re right, there is no such proof. And it’s not to create an authoritative law review on the subject. Others are better doing that than I.

It is to explain as clearly as possible and as simply as possible what the reasons are for reaching this decision. Others can then say those are good reasons or those are bad reasons. If you see the opinion in this way, either a point is sufficiently significant to make, in which case it should be in the text, or it is not, in which case, don’t make it.

This of course relates to court opinions in particular, and we can support footnotes in general by saying that they are intended to give supporting or additional information without forcing the reader to consider it. If this is worth doing, it will be worth paying the price of causing some distraction. Links are perhaps more like this. But they have an advantage over endnotes insofar as they don’t require flipping to the end, and they have an advantage over footnotes insofar as they don’t require looking to the bottom of the page. This assumes of course that the reader is intelligent enough to open his links in separate tabs rather than jumping to another page as soon as he comes upon a link.

Conspiracy Theories

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Two conspiracy theories that I accept:

1. Vincent Foster was murdered.

2. The Church did not reveal the entirety of the third secret of Fatima. See also the book by Antonio Socci.

Elliot Sober begins his article Coincidences and How to Think about Them:

The naïve see causal connections everywhere. Consider the fact that Evelyn Marie Adams won the New Jersey lottery twice. The naïve find it irresistible to think that this cannot be a coincidence. Maybe the lottery was rigged or some uncanny higher power placed its hand upon her brow. Sophisticates respond with an indulgent smile and ask the naïve to view Adams’ double win within a larger perspective. Given all the lotteries there have been, it isn’t at all surprising that someone would win one of them twice. No need to invent conspiracy theories or invoke the paranormal – the double win was a mere coincidence.

Throughout the article, he recognizes that the “sophisticate” has a problem justifying his account by probability theory, at least in the sense that by any reasonable analysis, the naive account remains fairly probable. Nonetheless he betrays a strong desire to find a way to justify the position of the sophisticates, as for example when he says:

As noted before, it may be possible to provide an objective Bayesian treatment of Adams’ double win. Even though the FIX hypothesis has a higher likelihood than the FAIR hypothesis, perhaps there is a way to justify an assignment of prior probabilities that has the consequence that the FAIR hypothesis has the higher posterior probability.

This of course implies that a treatment that suggests that the lotteries were likely fixed is automatically not objective.

It may be easy to argue that many conspiracy theories are more a result of flawed mental tendencies than of rational thinking. But insofar as virtue consists in a mean, it is necessary to avoid the opposite error as well.

The Null Hypothesis

entirelyuseless Probability

Yesterday I linked to this article by Gwern Branwen. However, since the article is fairly long and concerns other matters as well, I quote from a paper by Paul Meehl (cited by Gwern in his article.)

Any dependent variable of interest, such as I.Q., or academic achievement, or perceptual speed, or emotional reactivity as measured by skin resistance, or whatever, depends mainly upon a finite number of “strong” variables characteristic of the organisms studied (embodying the accumulated results of their genetic makeup and their learning histories) plus the influences manipulated by the experimenter. Upon some complicated, unknown mathematical function of this finite list of “important” determiners is then superimposed an indefinitely large number of essentially “random” factors which contribute to the intragroup variation and therefore boost the error term of the statistical significance test. In order for two groups which differ in some identified properties (such as social class, intelligence, diagnosis, racial or religious background) to differ not at all in the “output” variable of interest, it would be necessary that all determiners of the output variable have precisely the same average values in both groups, or else that their values should differ by a pattern of amounts of difference which precisely counterbalance one another to yield a net difference of zero. Now our general background knowledge in the social sciences, or, for that matter, even “common sense” considerations, makes such an exact equality of all determining variables, or a precise “accidental” counterbalanceing of them, so extremely unlikely that no psychologist or statistician would assign more than a negligibly small probability to such a state of affairs. Example: Suppose we are studying a simple perceptual-verbal task like rate of color-naming in school children, and the independent variable is father’s religious preference. Superficial consideration might suggest that these two variables would not be related, but a little thought leads one to conclude that they will almost certainly be related by some amount, however small. Consider, for instance, that a child’s reaction to any sort of school-context task will be to some extent dependent upon his social class, since the desire to please academic personnel and the desire to achieve at a performance (just because it is a task, regardless of its intrinsic interest) are both related to the kinds of sub-cultural and personality traits in the parents that lead to upward mobility, economic success, the gaining of further education, and the like. Again, since there is known to be a sex difference in colornaming, it is likely that fathers who have entered occupations more attractive to “feminine” males will (on the average) provide a somewhat more feminine fatherfigure for identification on the part of their male offspring, and that a more refined color vocabulary, making closer discriminations between similar hues, will be characteristic of the ordinary language of such a household. Further, it is known that there is a correlation between a child’s general intelligence and its father’s occupation, and of course there will be some relation, even though it may be small, between a child’s general intelligence and his color vocabulary, arising from the fact that vocabulary in general is heavily saturated with the general intelligence factor. Since religious preference is a correlate of social class, all of these social class factors, as well as the intelligence variable, would tend to influence color-naming performance. Or consider a more extreme and faint kind of relationship. It is quite conceivable that a child who belongs to a more liturgical religious denomination would be somewhat more color-oriented than a child for whom bright colors were not associated with the religious life. Everyone familiar with psychological research knows that numerous “puzzling, unexpected” correlations pop up all the time, and that it requires only a moderate amount of motivation-plus-ingenuity to construct very plausible alternative theoretical explanations for them. These armchair considerations are borne out by the finding that in psychological and sociological investigations involving very large numbers of subjects, it is regularly found that almost all correlations or differences between means are statistically significant.

In other words, for similar sorts of reasons we can expect in advance that men and women are not equally good at writing comic books, that Lutherans and Episcopalians are not equally likely to become judges, and that when they do, they are not likely to do equally well, and so on. It will be similar with any such random associations.

Politically Incorrect Algorithms

entirelyuseless Politics

More and more often one sees complaints such as this one from the Washington Post:

Fresh off the revelation that Google image searches for “CEO” only turn up pictures of white men, there’s new evidence that algorithmic bias is, alas, at it again. In a paper published in April, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University claim Google displays far fewer ads for high-paying executive jobs…

… if you’re a woman.

“I think our findings suggest that there are parts of the ad ecosystem where kinds of discrimination are beginning to emerge and there is a lack of transparency,” Carnegie Mellon professor Annupam Datta told Technology Review. “This is concerning from a societal standpoint.”

The Washington Post attempts to explain:

The interesting thing about the fake users in the Ad Fisher study, however, is that they had entirely fresh search histories: In fact, the accounts used were more or less identical, except for their listed gender identity. That would seem to indicate either that advertisers are requesting that high-paying job ads only display to men (and that Google is honoring that request) or that some type of bias has been programmed, if inadvertently, into Google’s ad-personalization system.

Both of these are certainly possible in principle, and only Google can know for sure. But there is a much simpler explanation. It is possible that men simply click on this kind of ad more often than women do. If so, the ads will be shown to men more often. That is what the algorithm does, and what it is meant to do. It shows ads to the people who are most likely to click on them.

Modern liberalism has a dogma: “Men and women are equal.” This is to be understood literally. They are actually equal in every respect. There is no difference between them except that we happen to use different names, for no particular reason.

This dogma of course is evidently false, more obviously so than the dogmas of Scientology. Men and women are different. They have different properties. They differ on average in basically every respect, since the null hypothesis is always false. The more we use unbiased algorithms, the more the real world will come into conflict with the false dogma of liberalism, much as geology and biology constantly come into conflict with Young Earth Creationism.

Beati Mundo Corde

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The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that purity of heart consists in three things: “charity; chastity or sexual rectitude; love of truth and orthodoxy of faith.” The idea is that a power becomes impure by being exercised on the wrong object and pure by being exercised on its proper object. The mind of a human being is purified by knowledge and love of truth, and the will by love of the good. “Chastity or sexual rectitude” refers to the sensitive appetite, but why this area in particular, rather than temperance in general? The reason for this is that the appetite for sexual pleasure is among the strongest in man and therefore among the most likely to lead him against reason. Thus we see that many reject all possible restrictions on sexual desires, saying that everything is licit as long as one does not harm others, even though in any other area this would be obviously absurd: thus no one thinks it is virtuous to give oneself to eating and drinking without any restraint whatsoever, as long as one doesn’t harm others. In relation to the sensitive appetite, therefore, purity of heart most of all requires purity in regard to sexual desires. Nonetheless, one cannot wholly exclude other sensitive desires from purity of heart.

In Forty Days Nineveh Will be Destroyed

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As the prophet Jonah realized, being a prophet of doom is difficult. Frequently the prediction is not fulfilled, and this casts a bad light on the prophet. As Jonah said to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.”

In the encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis seems to engage in this kind of prophecy. He contrasts his own words with “doomsday predictions,” (par. 61) but seems to give credence to them himself: “Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain” (par. 161). He repeats several times that the present system is “unsustainable,” and implies that it will have various catastrophic consequences. As with Nineveh, the only thing that will save us is repentance: “At one extreme, we find those who doggedly uphold the myth of progress and tell us that ecological problems will solve themselves simply with the application of new technology and without any need for ethical considerations or deep change” (par. 60). “Merely technical solutions run the risk of addressing symptoms and not the more serious underlying problems” (par. 144).

But predicting the future is difficult, and prophesying doomsday is no exception. Most such prophecies fail to come true. Events such as the BP oil spill or the Kuwaiti oil fires had less significance for the environment than various people suggested in advance. The Cold War did not result in a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union, despite the expectations of many (although this does not necessarily mean that there will not be a nuclear war sometime in the future.) It is likely enough that in the present case too, there will be no “deep change”, and yet things will prove to be relatively sustainable. Ross Douthat comments on this possibility:

In that case, the deep critique our civilization deserves will have to be advanced without the threat of imminent destruction. The arguments in “Laudato Si’ ” will still resonate, but they will have to be structured around a different peril: Not a fear that the particular evils of our age can’t last, but the fear that actually, they can.

The problem for the encyclical is the same as that for the prophet Jonah: in such a case the prophet loses some of his credibility, and especially if God relents without the repentance of the sinner.

Why Useless?

entirelyuseless Journal Entries

Useless is better than useful since knowledge which is desirable for its own sake is better than knowledge which is desirable for the sake of something else.

This points out the appropriate goal, but in practice the actual content of this blog will be determined by the whim of its author, as is customary in this genre. Of course it is even more customary to start a blog and then stop forever after a post or two. It is perfectly possible that this will be the case here as well.