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Imagine a child playing in a sandbox, dreaming up elaborate stories about the castles they’ve built with their sandbox toys. Now, imagine a group of eighteen adults, two teams of office co-workers, throwing around a baseball according to very precise rules. Those adults are playing too.
Last week I was on a panel about ‘Democracy and the Digital Commons’ at Suffolk University. At the start of the panel, each of us gave a 5-10 minute talk to help frame the discussion. While there’s no transcript of the panel itself, here are my notes for the intro. (Quick context: each of us tied our talk to the Boston Marathon bombing and in particular Reddit’s response to it.)
Back in high school and college, I had friends who offered to do tarot readings for me. I always turned them down. “What a dumb idea,” I’d think. “How could a deck of cards predict your future!”
We often talk about giving people the benefit of the doubt, but seldom talk about its opposite, to the point that no agreed upon phrase for it exists. The best I could come up with is the “burden of doubt”, which largely applies to courtroom settings. Even with the help of judicial documents, the phrase is not very popular.
This old tweet has recently been making the rounds and sparked up some discussion among my Facebook friends:
Last week I went to a rally to protest a series of raids by ICE in my city. The rally turned into an unplanned march through the streets, and I had to make two quick decisions: first, whether to join the march, and second, whether to remain in the street when the police started to give warnings.
Principles are really important, and by and large you should try hard to stick to them. I have tremendous respect for those who have died or gone to jail for their principles.
This originated as a post to a mailing list on the subject of blockchains and how they might help the cause of open science. The quote below is the claim I was directly responding to.
In an article about Milton Friedman in the Pacific Standard, Rick Paulas quotes from an article of Friedman’s published in 1970:
Warning: Black Panther spoilers.
In an essay at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova sketches out a conception of identity as a collection of fragments which is, paradoxically, being repressed and sanded down by identity politics:
Back in college, I based my Division III (senior thesis) research on a set of empathy studies by Nancy Eisenberg. Eisenberg’s line of research hinges on a distinction between two different kinds of empathy: empathic concern, the ability to recognize and care about the hurt others feel, and personal distress, the experiencing of the other person’s hurt yourself. Counterintuitively, personal distress is not positively associated with helping behavior. In fact, it may even decrease the likelihood of helping, if there’s an easy escape route away from the empathy-provoking situation.
In a previous post, I wrote that asking questions is harder than answering them, although I qualified that in a big way with “answering [questions] involves going back over and over again and updating our hypotheses, which makes answering questions feel hard”. I want to revisit this claim.
Back when I was a research scientist, I straddled the boundary between “hard” and “soft” sciences. I did social psychology, which is a pretty soft science as sciences go, but I paired it with biology and physiology in general and endocrinology in particular, which meant getting a taste for some of the harder stuff.
What shade of gray would you say this is?
It's easy to complain about "purity politics". It's easy to complain about "neoliberals" and "sellouts". But we live in hard times, and the easy route's not going to get us anywhere.
Chalk Corridor by fdecomite 6/25/2013 CC BY 2.0
Mike Montiero recently posted an essay to Medium "One person’s history of Twitter, from beginning to end". It's a good piece, but what really struck me was this referenced Tweet from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone:
Andrew Gelman has a brief post up on his blog comparing the way bug reports in open source software are received to the way many researchers respond to criticisms of their work. The comments there are good, and cover my first reaction, which was, "Developers respond well to bug reports?" But that's a bit tongue in cheek. I do think that, overall, developers are a bit more responsive to bug reports than scientists are to published criticisms of their work. Here are my theories as to why that is: