We need paper ballots because people can understand them. Election conspiracy theories are becoming a problem. Having a counting process that people can understand and trust is a feature.
Paper ballots that we almost never bother manually checking against the insecure digital tallies unless there’s a very close race or explicit challenge to the count.
Nearly every state routinely does statistical audits of voting machines compared with paper records.
People hate to hear this but: statistics work. You can randomly sample a portion (say, 2% to 5%) of ballots and have effective certainty about how much fraud or error there is in your voting system.
Conspiratorial thinking can't be fixed with additional facts. There is no set of facts that conclusively establish any claim to someone who is already committed not to believing the claim.
A common property of conspiracies is that any evidence is evidence of the conspiracy. Not enough data produces "what are they hiding" stuff. More data produces deliberate misunderstandings of the data to justify the conspiracy. We saw this very clearly with covid. When public health agencies were less transparant it was evidence of an evil coverup. When public agencies were more transparant about limitations or things they didn't fully understand it was evidence that public health efforts didn't work.
Why, Imperial Command Enforcement of course. They're a a bit like Hitler's SA (in fact one of them even dressed the part), the Great Leader sends them wherever he wants something stamped on.
I don't know if I'd phrase it like that. It does show they see ICE as a fix all police they can deploy for a wide variety of purposes though. ICE is better funded than some branches of the military, and they are demonstrating they are willing to use ICE for whatever they think needs to be done.
Somehow they will eliminate anonymity for real people, but bots will still be pushing Russian or... some other country's interests with massive bot farms.
I haven't read the article, but my understanding is that a normal curve results from summing several samples from most common probability distributions, and also a normal curve results from summing many normal curves.
All summation roads lead to normal curves. (There might be an exception for weird probability distributions that do not have a mean; I was surprised when I learned these exist.)
Life is full of sums. Height? That's a sum of genetics and nutrition, and both of those can be broken down into other sums. How long the treads last on a tire? That's a sum of all the times the tire has been driven, and all of those times driving are just sums of every turn and acceleration.
I'm not a data scientist. I'm just a programmer that works with piles of poorly designed business logic.
How did I do in my interview? (I am looking for a job.)
Say I have N independent and identically distributed random variables with finite mean. Assuming the sum converges to a distribution, what is the distribution they converge to?
If I had made the extra condition that the random variables had finite variance, you'd be correct. Without the finite variance condition, the distribution is Levy stable.
Levy stable distributions can have finite mean but infinite variance. They can also have infinite mean and infinite variance. Only in the finite mean and finite variance case does it imply a Gaussian.
Levy stable distributions are also called "fat-tailed", "heavy-tailed" or "power law" distributions. In some sense, Levy stable distributions are more normal than the normal distribution. It might be tempting to dismiss the infinite variance condition but, practically, this just means you get larger and larger numbers as you draw from the distribution.
This was one of Mandelbrot's main positions, that power laws were much more common than previously thought and should be adopted much more readily.
As an aside, if you do ever get asked this in an interview, don't expect to get the job if you answer correctly.
But if you haven't had exposure to this either through work experience or through course work it would be unfair to ask this question and use your answer to judge competence.
For a potential coworker role I would certainly be curious about your curiosity but a sharp ended question is not a way to explore that.
The free market solution to this seems to be making it easy / easier for competitors to arise. Then, when private equity does this, the customers, and workers, just hop ship to a competitor that's better managed and the original clinic goes under.
I don't expect this happens in reality though. In general the things that happen in a healthy free market are NOT happening in our society.
This completely discounts the work involved to find service providers you trust. I spent a long time finding a Doctor I trust, finding a Vet I trust, etc. I don't want a "free market" solution where I need to switch providers every 6 months because some rich dude is being a dick.
This is the problem with so many market focused solutions. They discount the burden put on the consumer.
Participating in a market is work, the only way a market (or life in general) works is if you hold your counterparties accountable.
> I don't want a "free market" solution where I need to switch providers every 6 months because some rich dude is being a dick.
Nature does not have a mandate that good quality services and products be available at low prices at all times. The rich dude being a “dick” was a tired vet owner who wanted to sell their equity, just like anyone else who sells their SP500 shares or their house.
The only thing that can be done is encourage government policies to ensure more sellers exist.
If the market is healthy, there will already be two or three providers in town instead of one that has any sort of monopoly, and the LBO won't be lucrative to begin with.
In a perfect world we'd have antitrust enforcement all the way from the top of government down to the municipality, so that this kind of behavior could be curbed. But I bet few cities bother to try at all.
You’re confused because you are treating free-market and capitalism as the same thing.
Capitalism is about who owns the assets, free markets are about how they are transferred. They don’t require each other. State owned enterprises can participate in the free market, an example are municipal utility companies. Private enterprises can operate without a free market, an example would be Lockheed Martin, whose defense business is mostly cost plus contracts.
The US hobbled the free market with deregulation since the 1980s. We encourage monopolies with strange reactionary legal precedent, use tax and other policy to establish price floors on residential units and health procedures.
The behavior that these firms are able to carry on with in veterinary, dental, dermatology, hvac and plumbing is anti-competitive and predatory.
Fewer businesses. But that aside when people say regulations are costly without providing specifics typically they are upset they can't rip off the public, pollute the environment or perform other acts to the disadvantage of the population.
I've noticed I write a lot different because of combative online arguments. I have a problem.
So much of my communication is directed to people who don't want to hear me or understand me. So I've become very punchy and repetitive, trying to hammer home ideas that people are either unable or unwilling to understand.
I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me.
It's hard to find other people who actually want to hear and understand though. People have different interests, and even when people appear to be working towards the same goal, they often aren't; like a boss who just won't understand the bad news, because it's easier to ignore the problem.
One of the worst habits distinctive to online discussion-board writing (especially the sorts of places with lots and lots of people and where it's fairly hard to get permanently kicked out—like here) is too much hedging and over-specifying to try to head off shitposting by bad or bad-faith readers. It's all over forum posts, and it's poor writing, but without moderation that slaps down responses based on plain mis-reading you have to write that way, or your post will spawn all kinds of really stupid tangent strings of posts (and they still do anyway, sometimes). And, yes, the excessive and too-close-together repetitiveness you mention is part of that.
The result is that a ton of web forum/social-media posting would, in any other context, be fairly poor writing (even if it's otherwise got no problems) simply because of the the extra crap and contortions required to minimize garbage posts by poor readers who are, themselves, allowed to post to the same medium.
This is in addition to, though not wholly separate from, the tendency toward combativeness in online posting.
I totally agree with this. I would add that it's well beyond the discussion boards. It's probably most clear there and it's well possible we learned it there and then took it into our social interactions everywhere, but the majority of my irl interactions—except with my closest friends—are sorta like this. Sometimes I think its ADHD, other times I think it could be any number of things, but I think to say anything that isn't dead simple (or in dead agreement with the other person), you need a few sentences. Often, you need to hear the third sentence before the first will make sense. But if you get distracted by the first one or can't suspend your disagreement enough to get to the third you will think the person is mistaken. You'll think that about both their first point and the larger one, which you didn't really hear or even get to but thought you did. So the speaker does the hedging each sentence in hopes of getting to the third (or whatever) sentence.
To add to this: another sign of posting on online boards is starting your comments with "I agree" because otherwise the other person might default to assuming you are disagreeing (as is the norm for replies), leading to a comment chain of people violently agreeing with each other without realizing it
>too much hedging and over-specifying to try to head off shitposting by bad or bad-faith readers.
yeah but if the OP doesn't do that and you confront their argument they can retreat into definitions and ambiguity without addressing your rebuttal. i think its good manners to be hyper-specific particularly on HN where there tend to be a lot of martian brained people who need it to engage with you. the fuzziness just won't do.
No, this goes beyond that. A well-written article or book doesn’t need to be padded with junk to cater to bad readers, or to preempt trolls, because they can’t scrawl all over it such that it disrupts others’ experience. You have to go to e.g. the Amazon reviews to find people complaining that an author didn’t address something that they very definitely did, or claimed something they certainly did not, that stuff doesn’t show up on the page in footnotes or turn into flame wars on the page where everyone sees it.
One thing that helps: remember that there are many people reading your response, one of them possibly being the person you replied to. Write for the audience, not specifically for the person you're responding to. It's a rare thing for someone to change their mind; it's a much more common thing for others to read your comment and gain something from it.
I just wanted to tell you that I read your comment immediately after writing mine and it's almost eerie how similar they are. There's the proof, if we needed any!
It might not mean much, and it won't lead to an interesting conversation, but here's one that has read your comment, and every single word resonated like a tuning fork.
I find that a little faith goes a long way here: assume that you have a higher audience and speak to them accordingly.
Don't let the loud ones confuse you: normal, reasonable people (with normal, reasonable thoughts, just like yours) might not always reply, but they also read you.
I'm guessing you mean politics, but surely this is topic, person, time, and space dependent.
For example, I abhor talking about modern politics. If it’s election season and I’m being asked to cast a vote or take some other specific civic action, then I understand it’s my civic duty to understand the situation and make a decision accordingly and I do.
But if it’s March and there’s really nothing specific I can do as a result of this particular conversation, I would probably also be in your camp of the “unwilling”. I would much rather chat about something else, or nothing at all.
I'm also assuming you're referring to in-person communication. If it's online communication, all bets are off. It's unlikely you're having a linear conversation and these days you're probably not even talking to a person.
> I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me.
Ask more questions. It takes work when dealing with smart people who think beyond the question you asked, adding their own context, and then replying with a different question. But those are the people who are willing to engage with you. Statements without questions can be ignored, and people who engage with different questions than the ones that you asked can be safely ignored as those who don't want to engage.
The cure to a purely adversarial conversation is educated curiosity. The educated part being being able to differentiate the threads that will lead down a tribalistic path vs those that will lead down an exploratory one.
More important than all of the above, is knowing when to walk away. It's barely a majority, but that barely majority "want" to waste your time. Ignore their DOS attempt, and save your time for people who want to engage, fairly. The fairly part being the most important.
> I need to find ways to talk to people who want to hear and understand me.
I'm told blogging works for some. I don't really know how you build an audience, though, and it's hard to keep going (first-hand experience) without one.
There's a tension (imo) between deciding to only spend time trying to talk to people who immediately agree with you or are open to hearing you out vs those who immediately disagree such that they will fight hard to not hear, not understand, misinterpret, or "not have time for this". The latter is a specific form of disagreement where they've "noise-canceled" the possibility of learning or understanding (even if it would be perfectly reasonable for them to disagree with it afterward).
Is your life easier to not waste time on them? I guess. But obviously you're going to put yourself in a similar bubble, and to whatever extent the issue is important it's now become undiscussed. As you've hinted at, they could be right and you wrong, but the difference is (at least in the premise) that one is willing to talk and listen and so really only one side has the potential to change and it's not based on the merit of the argument—because of course no conversation took place. How hard does one try to encourage someone else to listen? Or rather continuing pursuing a conversation that's being denied? That's the tension. I don't know other than it seems like the side unwilling to listen wins a little bit each time they've successfully evaded it and wins a little more when the other has decided to let it go. I don't just mean they've won a proverbial argument, I mean the issue or decision in question tilts toward their side.
reply