Interesting Links for 04-06-2015

[andrewducker]

• No, MPs are not ‘giving themselves a pay rise’
  • (tags: parliament money UK viaJennieRigg )
• The Myers-Briggs Personality Test Is Bunk But I Don't Care
  • (tags: personality myers_briggs psychology )
• Which Unicode character should represent the English apostrophe? (And why the Unicode committee is very wrong.)
  • (tags: punctuation unicode )
• Loads of people

Comments

[gonzo21]

I think the important question about the MP pay rise thing is to ask, 'How independent is IPSA?'.

[drdoug]

And also, crucially, "who set the terms of reference and the parameters whereby IPSA were to make decisions on pay". That'll be the House of Commons, though admittedly last Parliament.

I do think MPs deserve a pay rise - but many people deserve one more. As IPSA themselves point out, there is no shortage of candidates for MPs, but it was outwith their remit to go on to note that there are recruitment problems in health and education where it looks like pay is at least part of the issue. Who said those pay levels must be capped at 1%, yet again? Oh, that'll be MPs.

People saying it is MPs with their snouts in the trough are right. Just because they set someone else up to press the lever torelease the swill doesn't mean it was nothing to do with them.

[gonzo21]

A committee chaired by Bercow it would seem, both set the terms by which IPSA operate and make their decisions, and decided and appointed the people to run it.

And it would seem the people at IPSA are all very cozy in with the establishment people.

So yeah, I agree.

Probably not very independent at all. But it is sufficiently 'independent' looking, heck, it has the word in it's name, that politicians can shrug their shoulders and say 'Nowt to do with us guv'.

[steepholm]

But it is sufficiently 'independent' looking, heck, it has the word in it's name

In other words, as independent as the DDR was democratic. I can't remember who observed that the presence of the word "democratic" in the name of a state is a pretty sure sign that it's not democratic at all, but I suspect something similar could be said about "independent" and quangos. Cf. also the Independent Press Standards Organisation.

[bohemiancoast]

It's how you ask the question, isn't it? If you say 'how would you like to take a once-a-month pill for contraception', loads of women answer yes. If you said 'how would you like a system where you don't use contraception, but just have a super-early pill-based abortion every time you get pregnant, consisting of a single pill?', most women (possibly nearly all women) would answer no. This isn't just about government meddling as BPAS are suggesting. We tend to be pretty upset at cultures who use abortion as a primary birth control method, even where we entirely accept abortion when necessary. Note that we're much more comfortable with birth control systems that operate on preventing implantation of fertilised eggs, perhaps because it's that much earlier in the process, or just because those systems have a very long heritage.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. If it was "Take a pill once every month" then I suspect that would be a lot more palatable than "Take a pill once every month if the egg has implanted", because the former is an automatic action and the latter means you're taking a deliberate action that would make many people squeamish.

[naath]

I'm not uncomfortable with the idea of using abortifacients as my primary birth control, except that that would mean needing to detect reliably that I needed to take it, and also would probably have a new and exciting array of nasty side effects.

[andrewducker]

It's semi-hoodoo. It's clearly not random noise, because otherwise the results wouldn't correlate with things at all. But it's not _accurate_ and it's massively oversold. Handy for sparking discussions, largely.

Of course, being an INTP I would say that.

[andrewducker]

Well there you go - if the results were meaningless then I'd expect you to get a different, random, result each time :->

[momentsmusicaux]

I really hate old text (things like Unix man pages, for instance) where in what I can only imagine is an attempt to emulate smart quotes, the author uses ` (backtick) for open single quote and ' (single quote / apostrophe... after reading your link I'm not sure!) for close single quote. Even on systems where the font shows the apostrophe as slanted, they are NOTHING like mirror images, and it just looks fucking hideous.

[steer]

Ah...no, that habit is not what you think that habit is.

The LaTeX document preparation system is widely used in engineering and science. It uses ` and ' for left and right quotes and when compiled produce appropriate smart quotes. Typing with LaTeX becomes second nature that many science/maths/engineering geek habitually use `dumb quotes' because they forget not to. It's not because we think it looks good or approximates what we're trying to type, it's pure muscle memory.

[steer]

The "respectable" version of Myers-Briggs is the "Big Five" personality indicators. Which as it turns out correlates well with the four degrees of freedom in Myers-Briggs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indicator#Big_Five

Myers briggs is criticised because it doesn't produce repeatable measurements on individuals -- there is considerable variance. You know, that's pretty much what you'd expect though. Myers-Briggs is criticised because people move between types -- but again you'd expect that -- particularly if people are on the border between two types (as many are). In fact it does semi-reliably put people on similar places on the axes. So if you see it as placing people at a place on I/E N/S P/J T/F then it works very well. If you see it as placing people exactly into a class INTJ then it works less well -- but it's not supposed to do that -- those four axes are not supposed to be bimodal.

[andrewducker]

Yup, that matches with my understanding. I get very annoyed with people saying "It's like star signs" when clearly it's a _lot_ better than that, just very oversold by some people.

Someone on my FB friends list was complaining about the whole area of categorising personality, as "Everyone is different". Which made me want to slam my head firmly into my desk. Or write a strongly worded reply. I backed away slowly instead.

[steer]

Yes... we should calibrate what we expect from such a test