Let me start this link roundup with a couple of plugs.  First, I was interviewed by Asexual Artists, an awesome website that has lots of interviews of ace artists.  Second, in case you missed it, I published a two-part article talking about the history of asexuality in early radical feminism.

In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You – This is an old essay explaining how we might create a planned economy using math, and all the reasons why it would be so difficult.  This post was brought to my attention by Larry, who has a reply.  Larry says that to the extent this problem is intractable for socialism, it is also intractable for capitalism.  The difference between the two isn’t necessarily how the economy is computed, it’s the goal that they’re trying to achieve.

It seems like the best way to approach the problem is to break the economy down into more manageable pieces–each of which could be centrally planned–and have just a few inputs/outputs being passed between the different pieces.  This is basically what capitalism does, with individual firms being centrally planned, and inputs/outputs being passed between firms in the form of prices.  But in principle there could be other solutions, perhaps solutions that are computationally similar, but different in execution.  For example, Russian economists came up with the idea of “shadow prices” which help calculate resource allocation, but which don’t involve money actually being passed around–I have no idea if this particular idea works, but it’s a thought.

I think of myself as a socialist who lacks imagination, so I mostly complain about the current system while advocating for a familiar market-based economy with lots of redistribution.  YMMV on whether that counts as socialism.

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In Bob We Trust – On “Nannette” and the state of comedy (video) – Hannah Gadsby has a comedy special available on Netflix, which I saw recommended several times by different people.  But this video is the one that finally persuaded me to watch it, because Bob described it as an anti-comedy.  Well, I hate stand-up comedy, and I like deconstruction, so if there was ever a comedy special that I’d want to watch, this sounded like the one.

I thought it was good, but calling it an anti-comedy might be a bit of an exaggeration.  I thought there were plenty of jokes and laughs.  Perhaps someone who actually likes stand-up comedy might feel the number of laughs per minute is a bit low, but I just can’t see it that way myself.

On Laziness – Ozy talks about the concept of laziness, and why it’s a terrible idea.  When people lack motivation, there must be a reason for that, and calling it laziness is a way of halting any inquiry into the causes, and unhelpfully turning it into a moral issue.  Nonetheless, laziness is still a compelling concept that I probably use with some frequency myself.  I think some parallels could be drawn with the way that “stupid” is used as an insult.  We know that there’s nothing morally wrong with having less cognitive ability, and yet “stupid” is still a compelling insult that people have difficulty avoiding even when they understand it’s wrong.

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The Lifespan of a Lie – Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment is one of the most famous experiments in psychology.  I knew it was questionable in methodology and ethics, but this exposé gathers all the details in a more shocking picture than I had imagined.  Zimbardo is a crook.  He repeatedly lied about key aspects of his experiment, persuaded subjects to also lie after the fact.  And when other researchers failed to replicate, he accused them of being frauds.  It is a disgrace that people in psychology still respect him.

I know that people still like to cite the Stanford Prison Experiment, because it “proves” something they already know to be true, but have you tried instead just… making assertions without proof, because at least then we’re honest?

The World’s Highest Paid Musicians vs Average Salaries – This is an infographic showing how long it takes for popular music artists to earn as much as people with other jobs make in a year.  It’s based on a Forbes list.  That just makes me think of when I asked my brother how much money he made being a rock star (although “star” is rather overstating it), and the answer was basically nothing.  So, this is your reminder that capitalism doesn’t produce anything remotely resembling “fair”.

What’s interesting to me, is that this is easily explainable.  I honestly don’t understand why CEOs get paid so much–it kinda seems like companies just overvalue CEOs, or there are principal-agent problems–but it’s easy to see why top artists get paid so much.  The popularity of music follows a power law distribution, so artist’s salaries follow that too.  I think it would be an interesting exercise to think up a more utopian system of art monetization.

Do algorithms reveal sexual orientation or just expose our stereotypes? – I’ve always found “gaydar” research to be disappointing, because it’s fixated on what you can determine from facial features alone.  In reality, when I can guess someone is queer, that’s based entirely on cultural markers.  So I would say “gaydar” research isn’t really about gaydars at all, and is about some loosely related concept that really ought to be given a different name.

This article I’m linking is a detailed critique of a “gaydar” study that built an AI that can purportedly guess people’s orientation from their faces.  The critique is that the AI is clearly basing its guesses on cultural markers and grooming habits.  And to me, the cultural differences are the more interesting ones.  I would not have guessed that same-sex attracted men in the US are more likely to wear glasses, or that they take selfies from higher angles.

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This is my monthly link roundup, where I link to some stuff I found interesting, and offer brief comments.

The US Puzzle Championship is this weekend, on June 16.  This is an online competition featuring pencil-and-paper puzzles (think Nikoli).  I have been a participant since my teen years.  If that sounds like it might be interesting, you should register and try the practice test.

Ace survey infographics and interactives – Somebody from my team working on the Ace Community Survey put these together.  If you’ve never seen or heard of our survey, these may be the most accessible way for you to learn a bit about it.

Where are all the mothers in video games? … and why are there so many dads? (video) – I appreciate the approach of this video, which is to list lots of examples.  Wow, there are a lot of dads in video games!

Have you ever noticed how often the origin of breasts is explained as “for men”? (video and transcript) – PZ discusses several attempted evolutionary explanations for human breasts.  As with many evolutionary riddles, it’s fun to come up with adaptive explanations, and it satisfies our desire to view the world as full of narratives.  But non-adaptive explanations are usually better.

George Takei’s Accuser Has Changed His Story of Drugging and Assault – A while back, someone accused George Takei of sexually assaulting him in 1981. Now the accuser admits that he doesn’t recall the assault part of the assault. It’s more a case of poor recollection than malicious intent, and it seems that even if he wasn’t assaulted, he was negatively impacted by the experience. I don’t know what to say, except I feel for the guy, and we should aim to reduce the risk of upsetting hookup experiences.

I remember when I first read his story, one thing stuck out to me: Brunton believed that Takei had spiked his alcoholic drink with a date rape drug.  In fact, the most common date rape drug is alcohol by itself, and the use of other kinds of drugs is far less common than people think.  I thought that perhaps Brunton was hit harder by the alcohol than he expected, and he inferred date rape drugs too hastily. The toxicologist in the article agreed. But just because one part of a story is wrong doesn’t mean that the rest of it is wrong too.

Before I get to the link roundup, I’d like to mention an update I’ve made to an old post.  It was about an optical illusion you could make with origami, and now I’ve added nicer diagrams so that you can actually follow along and make it yourself.

IS SONIC 2 ABOUT CAPITALISM??!? (H Bomberguy video) – Ignore the title, this is a retrospective on gaming webcomics, especially the comic Control-Alt-Delete.  Hey, I’ve been into webcomics for a long time, I remember when people loved to hate CAD.  I think part of the reason was that webcomics were a new medium to most people, and we weren’t used to the fact that of course lots of webcomics are bad, and so what?  But the other major reason was that CAD was extremely popular.  I think it was easier to treat the author and his fans as having irrationally bad taste, instead of really examining what CAD said about gamer culture at large.

Sunday Sermon: Buddhism Sucks, Too – The treatment of Buddhism by anglophone atheist communities has always been problematic.  Buddhism is incredibly diverse, and has had a very long history across a very large part of the world, but atheists tend to flatten it into nothing but a philosophical and peace-loving counterpoint to western religions.  Marcus Ranum has the right idea by not even attempting to summarize Buddhism as a whole; instead he discusses how Tibetan Buddhists don’t live up to the image.

I’ve often thought that atheist attitudes towards Buddhism are the consequence of a movement that has systematically left out Asian Americans.  Or maybe it’s the other way around?

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