gametheoretic

(I'm more on your side than not.)

What does it even mean for 'society' to 'have a bias'? That individuals in group G fare worse in situation S, all other things being equal, than individuals in other groups? If you have a better reading, please let me know. If not, we have disembarked too far from the cognitive for bias, an inherently cognitive thing, as our explanation.

Look at my name and call me a hammer-nail guy, but here's what I think: it comes down to options - yours, others', your expectation of others', theirs of yours, and most especially the resulting interplay of all of the above. Human beings are the situation you put them in.

You and I (and Max Temkin and Julian Assange) have a grounded reason for a general fear of false rape accusation: that option is available to any woman we've ever spent an hour with. Is any individual, no matter her motivations, terribly likely to exercise that option? No, but that's not the disturbing part. The disturbing part is, there's no recourse once they do - no options.

But why! Why are there no options? Because rape is the exact thing that it is: a grievous crime whose lasting scars are emotional more often than physical. Anything else, it's different: show me the dead body, show me the stolen thing, what have you. If you're a woman, and some dude rapes you but somehow there's no physical scarring and no dna and no webcam recording and no witnesses-- an altogether plausible scenario, we can all agree-- then fuck you, says the legal system. No options. Not that the legal system has an option in the matter either; you can't have a system that sends people to jail for decades on testimony without evidence. No options here, no options there, no options everywhere, for everyone.

We, by which I mean the public, tend to believe the accuser, in my personal opinion, a) because some fraction of the public is women who have been exactly there, with no options, and see themselves in the accuser (regardless of whatever the real truth of the matter may be), and b) because they don't believe their voice matters anyway. Perhaps secretly, but all the same. Your girlfriend's opinion on Ben Roethlisberger's guilt of rape will, she is well aware, have zero legal effect. But it's your potential no-option situation, not hers, on your mind when you challenge her living room accusations for lack of evidence. A challenge which she can't answer because rape is the thing that it is.

Black females don't have the time in the day to get arrested. White women live in a consequence-free environment until they don't. A dozen other things. It depends how frank we all want to be.

>Black males are disproportionately represented among those in poverty or with low income compared to white males.

Who on earth is the intended audience here--

NFLX would prefer we not measure their offerings against AMZN's. That's what I think, anyway. Amazon has more headliners than they know what to do with - they rotate them on and off Prime's frontpage regularly enough to give the impression you'll never watch all of it. Netflix, on the other hand... Netflix and I fought an 18-month staring contest over whether I was going to watch The Lincoln Lawyer.

Amen & Ahoy

Good. Drive them into the ground, Jeff.

What was it, 2003-04 when Blockbuster's engineering team sent Netflix that concession letter? 10 years go by and guess who's stuffing their bra for lack of content.

Yes, they keep asking me to import my Gmail contacts.

Groan.

Owen,

I would submit to you that an analysis of Twitter's, for lack of a better word, design decisions can't be made without putting more thought in re: who they are as a company and what their tendencies are.

What sticks out about Twitter is how deliberate and disciplined their decision-making tends to be. (To me, at least. FWIW, I've worked with a major telecom on their buyflow in both a business and technical capacity. I'm proud to say I'm the reason email/password is the fallback auth and address/pin-number (half of which was already taken care of in the previous step: determining service availability via address) is the default, rather than the other way around as per the original design. Given that the app is in Best Buy kiosks and whatnot, that was a pretty big one.) E.g., these guys track time-to-first-tweet. They're not not looking at what you're looking at. Hell, they're looking at it with a microscope. If they and I arrive at different conclusions, I ask what I'm missing, not what they're missing -- and I don't say that in a platitudinal sense; I'm an arrogant bastard who thinks everyone is wrong about everything. In case you hadn't noticed.

But think about how long, how many years TC, et al. chirped chirped chirped about Twitter's "inability" to monetize. Now those people-- if anyone would bother to look-- look like idiots. Twitter silently told everyone to go fuck themselves, we're going to spend like 4 years throwing away ideas, developing a very strong opinion on this, because a wrong decision could kill our company - not now, but 10 years from now. Compare and contrast: Fb ads, which have been (thoughtfully! and with data!) likened to Ponzi schemes.

11 minutes of panic. With torn ligaments. Empathize with an 'e'?

The feminists say to flip the genders.

Yes, the audience's ability to relate to the protagonist matters.

Intend? In the trivial sense, you can guess; in the broad, unknowable.

Agreed; nowadays anywhere you go, there's some snarky dude saying 'hardly'.

A strict consequentialist wouldn't waste time with politics; he knows the input/output ratio is a billion to one.

Either that and/or people on the internet are more extreme. Specifically the ones who write the things on the links you choose to click.