Friday Ephemera
Giant wearable woollen cat heads. (h/t, Darleen) || Feeding goldfinches. || Pigeon movie database. || Packaging of note. || Now there’s an empowered lady. || Snowfall in Rome. || The council at work. || A caption seems in order. || Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain. || Today’s word is optics. || True. || “Let me check your feet.” || “I check our numbers at the end of every week.” || Don’t give them the secret of fire. || Today’s other word is metaphor. || When your offices are mistaken for something else. (h/t, Julia) || Meanwhile, in academia. || The museum of obsolete media. (h/t, Things) || She does this better than you do. || And finally, in specialist news, “For a small number of individuals, farting isn’t just a taboo by-product of human digestion—it’s the primary focus of their sex lives.”
Ten, once again, demonstrating that feels outweighs evidence for xim.
In most fields it is pretty easy to spot the charlatans and hucksters. They’re the ones who say evidence, and particularly double blind evidence, doesn’t apply in their field. Their field is, somehow,deeper.
I have a simple and deadly effective heuristic. If people won’t accept blind testing, they have something that doesn’t measure up.
This is not to say that subjective experience is unimportant, but the whole point of good trials is to even out the subjective part. An objectively better sound will also be a subjectively better sound provided the person is listening with their ears and not their wallets.
After all, acupuncture “works” in that people feel better for it. It just doesn’t actually work in the way the proponents claim it does.
Happy St Pat’s Day! 🍀
Ten, once again, demonstrating that feels outweighs evidence for xim.
Now it’s evidence, the last refuge of the putative. I haven’t had this much fun since our recent hysterics about the inherent goodness of the public servant over in the vaunted education sector. Or had we extensively AB’d to prove such a thing because all I seem to remember was the anecdotal evidence.
In most fields it is pretty easy to spot the charlatans and hucksters. They’re the ones who say evidence, and particularly double blind evidence, doesn’t apply in their field. Their field is, somehow,deeper.
Or anecdotal.
I have a simple and deadly effective heuristic. If people won’t accept blind testing, they have something that doesn’t measure up.
Is that like the deadly effectiveness of ignoring the question about what inherently comes to public education’s defense vis a vis liberty, choice, and outcome so convincingly that instead the personal anecdote must carry its day? Because that didn’t quite measure up, if you don’t mind me saying.
This is not to say that subjective experience is unimportant…
Sadly, if associations are a clue in this our proof-by-anecdote realm, it’s exactly to say that the pleasure of subjective experience erecting a believable facsimile of an historic auditory event is unimportant, at least relative to arguing subjectively and quite wrongly about it – because the arguing Objectivist has no evident or even claimed sensitivity to such finely tuned arts – or as it invariably turns out, using his own strict scientific rigor to vigorously produce relative mediocrity.
Why, now that you mention it, it’s exactly like miring the world in bad academy because because.
…but the whole point of good trials is to even out the subjective part.
You’d think, except that that premise simply remains as logically flawed as its real outcomes. The reasons are myriad but the logic of real, end-of-the-day evidence refutes the theorizings of folks who take a dime store level view of what they think blind testing is and does. Either way, real results rarely appeal to the hidebound assertion nearly as strongly as its agenda shall. To wit:
An objectively better sound will also be a subjectively better sound provided the person is listening with their ears and not their wallets.
But there can be no objectively better sound because sensory input is, by the Objectivist’s own miserable metric, so uniquely fleeting and defective among the senses that we need equipment to witness it for us, not unlike how we need their social expertise to determine our ethics and moralities out in the messy world of race and gender.
Secondly, of course to any reasonably experienced audiophile there is no such one-bucket term as “best” that applies to so wide a set of aural stimuli as great hifi delivers. As noted, witnessing the reproduction of an original event involves a number of apparent senses plus the imagination at some added degree of stimulation. You’d think the hair shirt, Objectivist, signal justice warrior would realize from his experience that this broad, dimensional sphere of experience wouldn’t ever condense into a number or a chart or a nomenclature like “best” or even “objective” – the point of the thing is to engage the subjective. But then the signal justice warrior’s never allowed such an event so as to actually witness it or he’d not carry on like an unenlightened boor about what he only assumes constitutes the experiences of others.
After all, acupuncture “works” in that people feel better for it. It just doesn’t actually work in the way the proponents claim it does.
After all, so do outright fallacies, to take your meaning. Good thing Objectivist fallacists never permeate education or anything…
@Spiny Norman
Inspired by Killer Marmot’s Alexa ranking of HuffPost:
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/spectator.co.uk
I cannot explain the recent uptick as I do not subscribe, but the overall numbers look grim. At one time they were more generous with their articles-per-month allowance, and even earlier one could get round the paywall by using a private window.
Newspapers and magazines these days are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The Spectator (est. 1828) is doomed, like its stablemate, the equally anodyne and often ridiculous Telegraph.
the equivalent of the art’s unhappy social justice warriors…You’d think the hair shirt, Objectivist, signal justice warrior…
Step away from the crack pipe, Ten. Your use of such hysterical, insulting, and politically charged terminology merely calls attention to your irrationality and dishonest crackpottery.
Ten, once again, demonstrating that feels outweighs evidence for xim.
Chester Draws, I fully agree.
That was quite a large bowl of word salad that Ten aimed at us. But of course it was mere blather, an extended emission of bullshit whose purpose was to obscure the issue at hand: Are there perceptible differences between, say, a a thousand-dollar receive and fifty thousand dollars worth of separate components? Between a speaker priced at one thousand dollars and one priced at ten or twenty thousand dollars? Audiophiles tell us that the differences are real and important, and that if we care about good sound we should shell out the big bucks. Maybe we won’t be sure today, but we will thank them in the end. There is a lot of money involved in this, and a lot of ego.
Another example of audiophile fraud: Salesmen have told me that I must have power cables which are made with extremely heavy gauge pure copper and which have gold-plated connectors. This is laughable but few people know anything at all about electrical engineering and will accept whatever the salesmen tell them.
An entertaining parallel exercise in bullshit: Racists who are absolutely certain that blacks are all intellectually inferior to whites. They can tell, soon after starting a conversation with a black, that the black is not really smart. But if they are not allowed to speak only by phone, or to exchange letters, they cannot detect that ineffable inferiority.
Another: psychics who can connect your astrological sign to your personality, but only after they know when you were born. If given an incorrect birthdate, or no birthdate, they make fools of themselves.
WWII Historians here might find this guy interesting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Beyrle?wprov=sfti1
Afraid you’ve gone off the deep end over there pstdramaticeffectsyndrome314.
Reversing your string of fallacies, actually when you think about it the whole world is defective when it comes to your own personal “issue at hand”; if they’re honest EEs will always tell you all transmission lines possess reactance – whether they or you care to hear the effects in audio electronics is another matter; your irrelevant, spontaneous ejaculation about blacks is evidently just that – a word salad if we will; and your astrology is Daws’s acupuncture is Clinton’s election paranoia is somebody’s UFO abduction-logy.
And this applies to tuning the Ferrari or seasoning the sauce how?
Those incessant appeals to self-evidence are amusing, if also obviously self-defeating. The use of such hysterical, insulting, and politically charged terminology, if I may, merely calls attention to, say, arrogant hysteria and fallaciously palpable dimwittery, since we’re trading compliments. You don’t mind me borrowing some of that, do you old boy?
I aim to obscure? No, that’s the transparent intentionalism talking. I intend to do just what I have: protest the myths that uniquely spring up around a pursuit the most ignorant and least accomplished in the field feel compelled to ruin, thus saving countless innocent lives from their built-in biases and prejudices. All that framing and projection doesn’t suit the deeply objective, scientific image Objerktivists try to cloak themselves in. Accept it: Good hifi is at its core a subjective experience that as such doesn’t much care when presumptions like theirs are thrown at it. The pursuit is simply too serial and linear and faceted to take well to their mindless interruptions. It no more responds to their left field demands than a diner does to their shrieking through the glass from the curb that he simply must be overpaying, the insufferable fool, when Chef Boeuf around the corner makes what absolutely everyone has scientifically proved is the more accurate Wellington for four dollars less.
Don’t be a joyless scold, is my motto. You can hook all sorts of telemetry up to your red wagon and hack it into your GameBoy before rocketing around the neighborhood with your stopwatch, telling it loudly that you’re a race car engineer and the only honest one at that, or you can just DIY up a reasonable mix of tech and go enjoy the afternoon on a nice twisty two-lane, stopping here and there to re-dial this or damp that or adjust something else.
How very novel, the idea that you can think and experience for yourself without some nanny pissing all over your day for your own good.
This electronics discussion is so exciting and stimulating that it has tired me out. I will celebrate St Pat’s Day by taking a nap. ☘️😴
We were going to go out to lunch at a restaurant that serves no booze, as is traditional in Ireland, but there was an ice storm and the back roads are still icy. (This place has such good food they can afford to be out in the middle of nowhere.). So we had Tuna Sandwiches a la Pogonip and will hit the restaurant Monday.
David, did you ever find another Chinese restaurant?
@R. Sherman
If I understand correctly, a “walk-on” in American college sports is a player who enrolled as a fee-paying student through conventional academic channels, and then tries out successfully for a sports team. In the parts of the world that haven’t gone insane about college sports, it’s just a student athlete.
The author thinks it’s scandalous that walk-ons are more representative of the student population than the misleadingly-named “scholarship” athletes recruited under lax academic criteria and excused from fees. Of course walk-ons are more representative of students – they are students. There’s a mismatch there alright, and it’s not where the author thinks it is.
This is for you, Ten:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp6LT2MdaPI
@Quincy
Your understanding is correct. The author’s thesis is one of the most absurd things I think I’ve ever read. I keep trying to imagine something similar, except with the thesis that too many scholarship basketball players are black. I wonder how that would go over?
Oh god, what did I start?
Ten, just out of curiosity, how many 96/24 digital remasters on 180g vinyl do you own?
I aim to obscure? No, that’s the transparent intentionalism talking.
I think my irony meter just redlined.
I think my irony meter just redlined.
Dave used to have this on the blog’s masthead:
Is “blow harder” equivalent to Ten, or does it go to eleven?
Meanwhile in the Cultural Studies of Science Education
As a kid my parents had one of those old wood-and brushed aluminum sound systems, the sort with that great, heavy knobfeel.
In my early to mid twenties I worked in the outside broadcasting industry, and so had the opportunity to listen to engineers testing million-plus dollar digital studio setups in the mobile production units.
I like the sound of records played on systems like my parents had better.
I know if you tried to broadcast an event using audio piped through one of those, however, you would be kissing your contract with the client goodbye.
“great, heavy knobfeel”
The weekly allotment for cock jokes was used up in a previous post, so I won’t speculate as to why that word was italicized.
@Darleen
Trofim Lysenko called to say, “Dudes!?! You’ve gone off the deep end!”
http://knobfeel.tumblr.com
PiperPaul
so I won’t speculate
It’s actually an old (but sadly, only briefly popular) DavidThompsonBlog joke (prompted by David posting the link in Squires’ comment, as I recall).
R.Sherman,
Trofim Lysenko called to say, “Dudes!?! You’ve gone off the deep end!”
The best part is that the primary author repeatedly quotes herself in the third person as a source.
Meanwhile in the Cultural Studies of Science Education
It’s extraordinary. Practically every other sentence amounts to an absurdly begged question, or several absurdly begged questions. The thing seems to fold in on itself, curling away from reality or even the pretence of coherence.
A person capable of writing this unhinged poison should not be given car keys or left near children.
A person capable of writing this unhinged poison should not be given car keys or left near children.
Let me see here … [Slips on spectacles onto nose … Googles …. starts reading]
Oh, my God.
What the fuck is this that I’m reading?
Whiteness embraces White ideology, and because Whites are at the apex of the racial hierarchy, whiteness becomes normalized and is invisible to those who benefit the most from it (Matias, Viesca, Garrison-Wade, Tandon, and Galindo 2014). This is particularly troubling because the normality of whiteness means that Whites do not believe that they are actively investing in White supremacy or racism, which keeps oppression intact. Ricky Lee Allen (2001) reminds us that with the globalization of White supremacy, we cannot rely solely on issues of classism and must work to decenter White voices and explore possibilities that form radical alliances with White people and people of Color to fight oppression. Thandeka (2009) asserts that the silence of whiteness stems from the expectation that White children adopt a colorblind ideology even though they do recognize racial differences as children. For Whites, whiteness operates in subtle, and yet, at times, not so subtle, ways to maintain White supremacy [ … ]
Take for example the emotionality of whiteness. Matias (2016a) describes how in her urban teacher education program that seeks to train teachers with cultural diversity the emotions of the mainly white female teachers when talking about race always shut down the learning and dialogue. Too often the emotion, themselves, become a strategic tool to silence racial dialogue and progress. As such, whiteness can be the everyday enactments that promote white hegemonic ideology.
In that example of “the emotionality of whiteness”, why is that I seem to be getting a mental image of something like army recruits undergoing a hazing ritual as part of a counter-insurgency interrogation resistance training programme?
Problematizing whiteness in science education allows us to understand the White imagination [ … ] If we are serious about an anti-racist science education, we must be critical of our own conceptions and emotions and how they stem from racist ideology [ … ]
This means that our White science educators must consider the following:
1. Recognize different forms of racism beyond the commonplace of explicit racism. Even though there have been decreases in blatant racist acts, humans carry many unconscious biases that allow racial disparities to exacerbate [ … ]
2. Understand the importance of White heritage by acknowledging what it means to be White. For science educators beginning on this journey, we recommend Peggy McIntosh’s (2001) article on White privilege, which identifies common acts that Whites may take for granted. [ … ]
3. Actively reject dominant racial ideologies such as deficit thinking, essentialism, and colorblindness. [ … ]
4. Reimagine what science education spaces can look like [ … ] Those committed to racial equity need to identify and understand their own whiteness and consider alternative views of science education in the creation of spaces that validate our students of Color. Within this re-imagination, we believe it is also important to consider that students of Color who decide to leave science are just as successful of those who continue. For example, students may be attracted to other disciplines during their studies and decide to pursue interests other than science (Strenta, Elliott, Adair, Matier, and Scott, 1994).
Can anyone explain how point 4 works? What do they mean by the idea that students who do not study science can be as successful at science as those who do? And how does that not undermine what I assumed to be the whole point of the article – namely to improve participation and achievement rates of students of color in public science education?
What the fuck is this that I’m reading?
Indeed. And that “what-the-fuck” quality – i.e., dogmatism and incompetence – is actively encouraged. These are the expected assumptions, mouthed in the expected way, and this is the expected standard of thinking.
In entirely unrelated news, departments of Education and Angry Studies attract students with some of the lowest SAT scores, while offering the most generous grading.
how many 96/24 digital remasters on 180g vinyl do you own?
None, but then I know the subject.
I think my irony meter just redlined.
My mistake addressing ptsd314 impersonally. I should have written, no, that’s your transparent intentionalism talking.
Matias (2016a) describes how in her urban teacher education program that seeks to train teachers with cultural diversity the emotions of the mainly white female teachers when talking about race always shut down the learning and dialogue.
In other words, the participants objected to being labeled as racists by some soi-disant intellectual, and promptly told Matias to bugger off.
“the primary author repeatedly quotes herself in the third person as a source”
“I insist that you remain silent while I lecture you, flatter myself and virtue-signal. I’ll let you know when I’m done and then you can leave.”
In other words, the participants objected to being labeled as racists by some soi-disant intellectual,
But that’s the standard way of doing things. It’s a woke tradition.
Here’s a thing.
Yes, 91 ads. On one page of a phone tech site. Can anyone top that?
We have been here before. My advice remains the same.
We have been here before. My advice remains the same.
Yeah, you’re right; I’d forgotten what Ten was.
I spoke too soon.
Same page. As I type, it’s at… 140…. no, wait. 152.
Wow.
Wow.
I left the page open and it’s still cycling through the repertoire of crap that I’m not interested in. Last time I checked it was at 304. But even allowing for cycling, there were close to 100 ads aimed my way in just over a minute. And that’s with my adblocker set to allow through some of what it considers non-intrusive ads.
David, what site is it?
It’s AndroidPit.com.
Thanks, David. I asked in case it would be helpful to be warned.
I’ve noticed that some tech sites are particularly obnoxious offenders, in number of ads, in bandwidth consumed, and in the intrusiveness of the ads.
Are you sure you’re not accidentally at AdDroidPit?
Another entry into the annals of Stupid Politicians.
Meanwhile in American Lit class . . .
Meanwhile in American Lit class . . .
Remind me again the purpose of education? Perhaps ignorance, relatively speaking, is actually less expensive.
I’ve noticed that some tech sites are particularly obnoxious offenders,
If you’re curious, I tried the same thing with Android Authority and Android Central, which managed 3 and 18 blocked ads respectively. Again, with ‘non-intrusive’ ads allowed.
I’ve previously mentioned following a link to something at the International Business Times, which wouldn’t allow me to read anything but headlines unless I disabled my adblocker. (Just a few seconds scanning headlines resulting in 23 blocked ads.) For once, morbidly curious, I did disable the adblocker, and even with a fast internet connection, the site took almost 30 seconds to load all of the auto-play horseshit, the Facebook extensions, and all the distracting and irrelevant crap that no-one wants to look at. Including, of course, auto-play videos with audio on by default.
Meanwhile in American Lit class . . .
FTA:
People don’t seem to understand how radical Judaism was/is in the ancient world and how the diminishing of Judeo-Christian principles is undercutting the foundations of Western Civilization.
If ritual human sacrifice is merely opinion, then what arguments can be marshaled against Sharia? FGM? Slavery?
This woman actually couldn’t seem to bring herself to say plainly that she was against human sacrifice … a student explained she had been taught not to judge, and if this practice worked for them, who was she to argue differently.
G.K. Chesterton
Basic problem as I see it is that we’ve replaced Religion with Education. Seemed reasonable at the time because Religion was failing miserably at explaining God, falling way behind Science. So we’ve fallen over to use Education to explain Science. With parallel results. IMNSHO because whenever man makes progress, he fools himself into thinking he’s made great progress when really the road is much, much longer than he can imagine. There’s also a “skip ahead” fallacy involved but, eh. I’d be here all day.
Meanwhile in American Lit class
It reminded me of the Guardian’s Madeleine Bunting, allegedly a “leading thinker,” who denounced modernity and Enlightenment values – on which her own livelihood, status and safety depend – as “an ideology of superiority that is profoundly old-fashioned – reminiscent of Victorian liberalism and just as imperialistic.” We must “learn to live in proximity to difference,” said she.
By Ms Bunting’s reckoning, our own values must be “reworked” in ways never specified – and by which she seems to mean surrendered – so as to accommodate newcomers. Specifically, those newcomers who, rather than adjusting to infidel notions such as free speech and gender equality, instead prefer to transform their adoptive country by rendering it more fearful and primitive.
Given Ms Bunting’s infamously flattering Hello-style interview with the Islamist cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi – a man who insists that “disobedient” women should be beaten, albeit “lightly” – perhaps we should assume that she would be prepared to accept similar chastisement, all in the name of the moral relativism that she claims to hold so dear?
Meanwhile in Canadian Lit
Re: The Lottery
As Glenn Reynolds is fond of remarking, “The Return of the Primitive” was not a “how-to” manual.