Interesting Links for 14-05-2014

[andrewducker]

• Dan Harmon in the possible un-cancellation of Community
  (tags: DanHarmon community tv )
• Former CIA/NSA director ‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’
  (tags: surveillance usa politics )
• The Crowdfunding Upstart That’s Turning Freelancers Into Superstars
  (tags: money internet creativity )
• No One Ever Told Me About Politics
  (tags: politics education )

Comments

[girl_onthego]

So glad I looked over this.

I'm totally signing up for Patreon.

Also: my roommate babysat the prom girl.

A brief reminder on how ranked voting works (in this case, for The Hugo)

[cartesiandaemon]

Yes! Although I'm leery of calling the link a "a reminder of ranked voting works" because it's very good correction to a misconception which is (apparently) common, but one I'd personally not heard of before, but I feel it's likely to be a lot MORE confusing to anyone who didn't have that particular mistake already.

If someone is stuck in that particular mistake, weasal_king's post is perfect, but as an explanation from scratch I'd say something like "rank all the entries from best to worst" or "don't leave anything out unless it's worse than everything you've voted for" is more likely to get people to understand it easily.

Re: A brief reminder on how ranked voting works (in this case, for The Hugo)

[alitheapipkin]

Yeah, I found it confusing but then I don't think I've ever voted in a ranked thing with 'no award' or equivalent as an option so that misconception had totally passed me by.

[simont]

It does seem like a bit of a misfeature of the voting system, to be honest. Naïvely, one would have reasonably expected that completely omitting one or more candidates from a ranked ballot ought to be considered basically equivalent to ranking them all equal-last, since surely either one is trying to say "I prefer any of the others to these". If I think two candidates are worse than RON, I should be able to switch between listing them after RON or not listing them at all, with the only effect being whether I specified a preference between them in the worst case where they're the only two options in contention. The idea that 'not voting' and 'voting last' are semantically different in a way that's hard to quantify except by doing all the game theory is pretty unpleasant for the voter who's staring at their ballot paper thinking 'OK, I know what my real preference order is, now what do I doOf course, it's well known that voting systems cannot avoid all possible misfeatures, and perhaps this one actually turns out to be less bad than

[cartesiandaemon]

Now I'm confused again. I thought "ranking awful authors last, behind no award" and "not no award last and not ranking awful authors at all" WERE the same, but what he was warning against was, if there was some so-so authors you wanted to vote above no award, you shouldn't leave them out? Which seemed fairly obvious to explain. But you seem to be describing a more voting-theoretic mistake. Am I missing something?

Blasphemy Laws. Even stupider in Pakistan

[cartesiandaemon]

:( Although I think nowadays our equivalent of blasphemy is terrorism, not blasphemy :(

[apostle_of_eris]

I wonder how the budget against terrorism compares to the peak budget for anti-blasphemy. (Come to think of it, this is right beside my suspicion that the Founding Fathers were strongly influenced by the Thirty Years War in separating Church and State.)

[nancylebov]

Lectures may be somewhat less effective than more active learning.

Discussion of possible problems with the study, but admission that 6% improvement is enough to matter.

[gwendysmile]

Uggh, that guy Captain Awkward was discussing made my skin crawl. I have had to have the "Look, you're my ex, I don't really want this much communication any more" talk multiple times - I'm really glad none of them have been as creepy and as that guy.