Ok I put up the personal me me me me give it all to me PayPal buttons. They’re over there. On the left. Not as far down. Easy to spot.

This is the perfect way to spite the harassers. They will be so disgusted their nostrils will ache, and I will treat myself to a package of Pepperidge Farm orange Milano cookies on sale this week at Safeway for ONLY TWO DOLLARS.… Read the rest

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Well now really, the pope seems to have his theology all in a tangle. He says he’s resigning the pope job because he’s too old for it. How can that be possible? He’s god’s deputy! Why doesn’t god just make him not too old for it? Why doesn’t god just fix whatever age-related problems he has so that he can go on being god’s deputy until his “natural” death (“natural” apart from whatever secular medical interventions take place, of course)?

Pope Benedict XVI is to resign at the end of this month after nearly eight years as the head of the Catholic Church, saying he is too old to continue at the age of 85.

The unexpected development – the

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Hey have you noticed that button way down in the left hand margin?

Feel free to use it. Don’t feel obliged, but do feel free. It’s like PBS and NPR, or like museums with those boxes for cash in the hall. If you feel like supporting FTB, there’s the button.

We got a big donation the day before yesterday. From what it said in the line for “purpose” and from the timing, I strongly suspect it was motivated by the upsurge in harassment in the past few days. It would be a beautiful, a moving way to cause regret and disappointment to the harassers, if every time they ratcheted it upward, we got a surge in donations. They’ll be feeling … Read the rest

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Lyanna pointed out that I was unclear about the boundaries of when expert judgment is better or worse than an algorithm. Kahneman gets into that in the next chapter. He collaborated with his main opponent to try to figure that out. The takeaway -

At the end of our journey, Gary Klein and I agreed on a general answer to our initial question: When can you trust an experienced professional who claims to have an intuition? Our conclusion was that for the most part it is possible to distinguish intuitions that are likely to be valid from those that are likely to be bogus…If the environment is sufficiently regular and if the judge has had a chance to learn its

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One terrific chapter in Thinking Fast and Slow is 21, Intuitions vs Formulas. There Kahneman tells us a brutal unsettling truth, which is that for certain purposes in certain situations, algorithms do better than expert judgement. Thick detailed rich experiential knowledge does worse than a boring quick little formula. A psychologist called Paul Meehl made this claim more than 50 years ago and the research he inspired is still pouring out. Clinical psychologists don’t like the claim! (You can see the insurance people licking their chops, although Kahneman hasn’t mentioned that as far as I’ve read.)

This is about prediction, and for a moment I consoled myself with “oh well just for prediction…” but really, that won’t do. Prediction is … Read the rest

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I’m just going to keep quoting from Thinking Fast and Slow a lot, because it’s that good. So expect it as a regular thing.

It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task. Claims for correct intuitions in an unpredictable situation are self-delusional at best, sometimes worse. In the absence of valid cues, intuitive “hits” are due either to luck or to lies. If you find this conclusion surprising, you still have a lingering belief that intuition is magic. Remember this rule: intuitions cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment. [p 241]

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Update: They’re choosing another date.

Brilliant. Someone has scheduled a “Secular Leaders Summit” in Los Angeles for…May 17th.

The secular movement made tremendous advances in 2012 as atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and skeptics came “Out” and identified against the traditional religious majority.  With the influx of prospective members, secular communities need to communicate and collaborate to manage the new opportunities and growing challenges.

We need to make 2013 the year of “Organize.” Together we can establish linkages, share best practices and expand the universe of available opportunities. The focus is on communication and collaboration to expand the movement.

Due to available space we ask you limit your representatives to two per group.

Please save the date, bring your best practices

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Seen #INeedMasculismBecause? I saw it on Twitter an hour or two ago and clicked on the hashtag and laughed and laughed, because it’s all full of hilarious jokes by Elyse Anders and Sarah Moglia and Jamie Kilstein and other funny people.

David Futrelle fills us in.

 a bunch of Men’s Rights Redditors and other MRAs, inspired by a post on 4Chan, decided to swarm Twitter with #INeedMasculismBecause tweets in response to the #INeedFeminismBecause hashtag. Feminists responded by outswarming the MRAs, flooding their new hashtag with often quite hilarious parodies of MRAspeak, as well as some just plain ridiculousness.

Here are a few I collected from the top ones.

 There are a lot more.

Update: Well I need to add … Read the rest

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A comment that was just posted on a 2005 post about Irish industrial schools. The commenter is looking for infomation, so I want her comment to get more eyes.

Catherine Mitrenas writes:

My Mother was incarcerated in this establishment from two years old until sixteen years old. Her brother went to a separate orphanage and they did not see each other again until they were sixteen years old. He was only one when they separated. Their Father was a sailor and their Mother died when they were infants. From what I have read recently I now wonder if my Mother’s mother did die as they do not know where her grave is, how she died or even a photograph.

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John Scalzi has been studying our friend Bjarte Foshaug – he’s adopted Bjarte’s excellent wheeze of donating to rights groups by way of reply to haters.

John Scalzi is the author of several books, including the Old Man’s War series and Redshirts, published in the States by Tor and the UK by Gollancz. He’s also the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Fed up of being constantly targeted on his website by one particular individual and his followers, Scalzi decided to take action, pledging US$5 every time “the Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit in question posts an entry on his site in which he uses my name (or one of his adorable nicknames for me)”.

Scalzi put

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I’m reading a wicked review of Alain de Botton’s new book in The New Republic, by Victoria Beale. She explains about “The School of Life”…

The self-declared mission of the School is to provide an enterprise that will “direct you toward a variety of useful ideas … guaranteed to stimulate, provoke, nourish and console.” The School’s shop has a few lightly stocked book-shelves (Oliver James, Paul Theroux, Italo Calvino, and, of course, the complete de Botton bibliography), while in its downstairs classroom, the School hosts talks that are a mixture of book-promos (“Steven Pinker on Violence and Humanity” to sell copies of The Better Angels of Our Nature), schedule fillers (an eight-week course on “Mindfulness,”), and champagne tastings…

At

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I didn’t know that South Korea has the highest per capita rate of plastic surgery in the world. Somebody has to have that, naturally, but I’m slightly surprised that’s who does. I might have guessed the US does, if anyone had asked – I suppose because of lots of rich people and lots of advertising, lots of emulation and envy of movie stars and fashion models, lots of consumerism and the values that go with it, lots of reactionary bullshit about women floating around – reasons like that. But no, it’s South Korea.

One in five women in Seoul have undergone some kind of procedure. Most popular: Eyelid surgery, to make the eyes “more Western,” and getting your jawbone

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Nine women shot to death in Kano for attempting to prevent children from getting polio. Nine.

In the first attack in Kano the polio vaccinators were shot dead by gunmen who drove up on a motor tricycle.

Thirty minutes later gunmen targeted a clinic outside Kano city as the vaccinators prepared to start work.

Some Nigerian Muslim leaders have previously opposed polio vaccinations, claiming they could cause infertility.

On Thursday, a controversial Islamic cleric spoke out against the polio vaccination campaign, telling people that new cases of polio were caused by contaminated medicine.

Such opposition is a major reason why Nigeria is one of just three countries where polio is still endemic.

Nine women murdered, and who knows how many … Read the rest

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