georgefox

This is a fascinating discussion, to which I have little to add, except this. Quoting the article (including the footnote):

> [I]f you carefully craft random data so that it does not contain a Dunning-Kruger effect, you will still find the effect. The reason turns out to be embarrassingly simple: the Dunning-Kruger effect has nothing to do with human psychology[1].

> [1]: The Dunning-Kruger effect tells us nothing about the people it purports to measure. But it does tell us about the psychology of social scientists, who apparently struggle with statistics.

It seems to me that despite rudely criticizing a broad swath of academics for their lack of statistical prowess, the author here is himself guilty of a cardinal statistical sin: accepting the null hypothesis.

The fact that data resemble a random simulation in which no effect exists does not disprove the existence of such an effect. In traditional statistical language, we might say such an effect is not statistically significant, but that is different from saying that the effect is absolutely and completely the result of a statistical artifact.

The nuance of statistics is never-ending.

Releasing any data or statistic based on sensitive data--even once--bears a privacy risk. The primary purpose of differential privacy is to quantify that risk, both for a single release of data and over many releases of data.

As for the number of analyses you can run, that depends on what you mean. You're right that differential privacy won't allow you to set up a database of _confidential data_ that can be arbitrarily queried infinitely many times with any meaningful privacy guarantee, but this is in no way unique to differential privacy.

What you can do with differential privacy is release noisy statistics once and let researchers use those statistics for arbitrarily many analyses. This is what the 2020 US Census is doing, for example.

One of the interesting insights in differential privacy is that to provide privacy protections that can't be reverse-engineered, the process has to be random rather than deterministic. The sort of algorithm that OP describes is really neat, but in addition to what dp_throw says, deterministic algorithms like this that choose how to anonymize things based on private data can reveal information about that private data in the very way that they format the final data. (This may be less relevant in the case at hand, but consider a setting where it would be sensitive to know if someone is in the database at all, e.g., a medical study.)

16 in 10 is a startling overrepresentation.

Hmm, yeah. The linked video from the Globe and Mail says to avoid surfing the web during the procedure, but avoiding explicitly going to Facebook and Twitter (their examples, IIRC) won't stop all identifiable network traffic from your device. I suppose that's where the suggestion of using a boot-from-USB OS might come in.

A few of these articles are suggesting that uploads be performed from public places (e.g., Starbucks) for the sake of anonymity/deniability. But it would seem that performing these actions in public would potentially reveal your identity, actions, and secret codename to any eyes or cameras around. As a question of general curiosity about anonymity, how does one weigh the benefits of using an open internet access point with the more literal visibility that using a public access point might entail?

Just to be clear, I didn't mean my comment as a broad defense of zoning laws. Rather, I think it's only fair to consider that there's a very large difference between the relevance of zoning laws when the city is in its infancy and zoning laws when the city is pretty much entirely built up. When the city is, say, 97% built up, any zoning laws should reflect how its residents want the last 3% developed—if at all. I do realize it's more complicated than that (what about redevelopment, for example?), and I realize zoning is fraught with issues and controversy, but I don't think it logically follows that if present zoning laws in an older built-up area don't reflect the existing building stock, that the laws are illegitimate or corrupt. You may not like the zoning laws or the general concept of zoning (I'm not sure I do either, frankly), but that's not the same argument.

This comment likely also misses the point, but the zoning laws are not really intended to cover situations where the entire city is destroyed and rebuilt. Realistically, if the city were rebuilt from scratch today, much of what people love about it now would be gone regardless of zoning laws.

It seems like it's theoretically possible for residents and visitors in a given city to enjoy its current building stock while simultaneously desiring different standards for new construction. Whether or not that is the case in Somerville, I don't really know, but a statement that the city couldn't legally be built from scratch the same way today doesn't necessarily imply (in my mind) that the zoning laws are illegitimate.

I get that there are other issues here too, of course.

I wouldn't mind a pause button.

I don't want to disagree with you, but I suspect there's more to this than just idle time. For example, there are plenty of retirement communities where idle time is the norm, and the social problems of poor urban American neighborhoods aren't really found there.

Are there any government services you see as valuable?