Comments on: Links for July

By: St. Rev

St. Rev — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 04:03:18 +0000

Yes, that! The funny thing is, that version is lighter than the one on Slate, and the page margins are different, but they’re clearly from the same original: random black marks on the pages match. Different scans from the same pages, maybe.

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By: gwern

gwern — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 01:00:15 +0000

Until decreased validity has been shown, we still don’t know that the increased measures have managed to hammer those students down to below baseline.

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By: Scott Alexander

Scott Alexander — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 00:17:02 +0000

My understanding from the article is that everyone cheats at a certain baseline, the Zhongxiang students were exceeding this baseline, and the law stepped in to use especially strict measures that put them below this baseline.

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By: Randy M

Randy M — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 19:25:11 +0000

Way to keep us in suspense there.

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By: gwern

gwern — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 18:31:47 +0000

> The attachment used to be at http://rethinkingschools.org/img/archive/17_02/Vote_test.pdf but the link seems to be broken now.

Ah, a chance to apply one of my hidden techniques: IA-jutsu!

/swiftly makes a series of hand mudras

The document you seek can be found at http://web.archive.org/web/20030719190813/http://rethinkingschools.org/img/archive/17_02/Vote_test.pdf

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By: gwern

gwern — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 18:26:17 +0000

> “Thousands of Chinese students riot ont he streets of Zhongxiang, changing ‘We want fairness! There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat!’. The scary part is that under the circumstances the pro-cheating rioters were completely justified. See also the Reddit comment thread for interesting commentary.

No, they weren’t justified. The very first paragraph:

> The relatively small city of Zhongxiang in Hubei province has always performed suspiciously well in China’s notoriously tough “gaokao” exams, each year winning a disproportionate number of places at the country’s elite universities.

They are not ‘compensating for discrimination’ to reach an average score – they are doing better than they should using cheating, and so the cheating is prima facie not simple compensation. If we had the university performances of the students from these schools, we would doubtless find that they underperformed compared to other schools with comparable scores – indicating cheating above and beyond the ‘fair’ baseline.

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By: Max

Max — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 13:29:49 +0000

I think the reinterpretation of the marshmallow test is probably overinterpreting the results of the second experiment; see these comments.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/hw6/a_new_interpretation_of_the_marshmallow_test/9ax0

I would be interested in seeing the marshmallow test replicated with a revision in which the experimenters first make the children several promises, and then follow through on all of them, thereby offering a demonstration of their trustworthiness.

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By: Deiseach

Deiseach — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 09:32:53 +0000

Yeah, I mean, the understanding nowadays (whether it’s completely true or not) is that “rape is about violence, it’s about power over the victim, it’s not about sex”.

Whereas in previous times, “rape is about sex”. So classing rape as a sin of lust (not a sin of anger) means that you stack it up on the column of “worst to best” from ‘unnatural vice’ up to ‘fornication’.

And we certainly have modern “sins against nature” that are considered worse than anything else – some people get very exercised about “Why don’t you recycle? Why do you insist on having children? Why do you eat fish – don’t you know angling is a cruel bloodsport that tortures the poor little sea-kitties? If you don’t eat local, you are responsible for the destruction of the rainforest!”

Note – I’m not saying these are bad things (except for PETA’s “kittens of the sea” stunt which I refused to believe was anything other than a spoof until I saw the evidence of my own eyes that it was legit) but you can be cast into the outer darkness if you don’t hew to a particular orthodoxy for certain philosophies, not just Catholicism alone.

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By: Charlie

Charlie — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 05:15:21 +0000

I dunno, I think you’d need to do something more drastic than replacing one generalization with another.

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By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 04:05:24 +0000

That’s basically true, but your phrasing makes it sound so vague. After Three Mile Island, the US canceled all its plans. After Chernobyl, France stopped building. It’s reasonable to blame these centralized decisions on public perception of risk, but the effect on engineers was pretty direct, not through ugly looks.

But everyone continued making nuclear subs, so the engineers didn’t go away entirely.

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