Frequently to both.
For fiction that I re-read and find it not as good the second time, I suspect the newness of it was the driving force in my initial assessment. Permutation City was life-changing for me, but going back after having more transhumanism in my diet, I don’t know that it is even my favorite Greg Egan book.
There are other times where I have that feeling without even needing to re-read. “Upon reflection, I enjoyed that a lot at the time, but there is not a lot of there there.”
You should be very surprised if you think you have found a new counterexample to a centuries-old discipline that comes from a millennia-old example. Odds are there is an existing literature addressing exactly that question.
I concur on “do what I want” as the distinction. Magic is teleological: it produces a certain effect, whereas science is about the cause. Magic “just works.” You do not need to know how the magic words produce light or fire, they just do. The great usual magical dream is about having massive power under your control, not whether you are the direct cause. Wishes are the archetypal example. You wish for something and it happens. Done. A genie is neither you nor a tool you control, just a massive source of power bound to your wishes.
Magical horror stories are about wishing for effects and either not liking the cause or not specifying the effect properly, like the evil genie or the monkey’s paw. Science horror stories are about starting a cause without realizing its effects.
There are plenty of science-like magical stories, where they delve into the rules of magic and effects from causes. And don’t those read a lot more like science fiction, whereas a space opera like Star Wars has the trappings of science fiction but Jedi are just space wizards that produce effects by willing them.
And the direction of the error was known and stated in advance by informed interpreters (538). A fair number of Trump voters would not have been considered “likely” voters based on past non-voting, and that was a systematic bias in the polling estimate rather than something that would affect a few states independently. Pollsters tended to stick with their “likely” filter rather than change it on the assumption that these voters would turn out and vote. They turned out and voted.
I seem to recall seeing Trump doing better in polls of registered voters versus likely voters, but I cannot say I have strong evidence for that and it might have just been comparing a few surveys. Most polls seem to have been of likely voters.
Between Halls B and E, nearish giant Pikachu
Setting up at the blue Fantasy Flight tables, by the X-Wing Miniatures banner, in front of the HQ table, just before the banner showing the switch to Asmodee.
If you have spotted a good/better location at the con, suggestions are still open. Otherwise, I will be updating on-site when I arrive on Saturday.
Default location is in the card game area, specific location to be found at the time (and then posted here). There are always open tables. I would plan on near-ish the exhibit hall exit, but I have not seen how the layout may have changed this year.
There is also the official open gaming space, but that is $4/person.
We could also take discussion to a restaurant, or start at the Convention Center and wander off for food if we run that long.
There is some small number of people whom I trust when they say they very confident. They can explain the reasons why they came to a belief and the counterarguments. Most other highly confident statements I look upon with suspicion, and I might even take the confidence as evidence against the claim. Many very confident people seem unaware of counterarguments, are entirely dismissive of them, or wear as a badge of pride that they have explicitly refused to consider them.
There are others whose intuition I will trust with high confidence on certain topics, significantly because they are aware that they are exercising intuition. They may not know how they know something, but at least they know they don’t know how they know it, which tends to get them to the right confidence level.
“You can’t just decide to be happy.”
“No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable.”
-- Quentin and Alice in The Magicians by Lev Grossman
I only know of 1 at AADL. Folks found it somewhat uncomfortable and wanted to be able to have food and drink. Several were held at Pizza House, just a bit off south campus.
Good point, thank you. I was focusing on the top half of the distribution, when there is also a cutoff in the bottom half.
Granted. The top hires from the top. This leads to two questions:
Do we see corruption in those grades? If that is where it matters, that is where we would expect to see it. Say, does admittance into and top grades at Harvard Law depend mostly on academics or is class rank better predicted by other factors, from social class to blatant bribery you mention above?
Once you are below the tournament economy, do we see any corruption? I work for a state government. “Do you have a relevant degree?” is the question, not how good your university was or what your class rank was. Barring extremes (obvious diploma mill, top tier graduate from top tier university), grading just isn’t that important.
Moreover, universities have a strong incentive to not be corrupt in their grading—if they let people slip through without learning the work, employers will start to notice and discount qualifications from that institution This assumes that employers are using a college degree primarily as a signal for education, outweighing conformity, conscientiousness, class, deference to authority, low time preferences, habitual credentialism, or anything else a degree might signal. We note that most employers want to know that you have a degree but not, say, “must have at least a B+ in Intermediate Microeconomics,” so the entire degree might as well be pass/fail apart from the few hiring at the top of the graduating class. And no employer is going to detect or care whether you legitimately passed something not relevant to work. I had an undergraduate course in Magical and Occult Philosophy, and I have yet to be quizzed on Plotinus and Hermes Trismegistus during a job interview.
The fact that few employers request transcripts and fewer distinguish between “barely passing” and “summa cum laude” (maybe apart from recent graduates?) seems like pretty strong evidence about caring about grading corruption. You really need to corrupt your school’s degree award process (like a diploma mill) before anyone will care about it.
Also, as Old_Gold suggests, if you count grade inflation as corruption of grading, empirically this incentive wasn’t strong enough. We also note that across-the-board corruption of this type undermines incentives. If someone comes up with a better signal, the entire institution of universities would collapse, but most people have seemed to accept rampant grade inflation with a shrug rather than mostly ignoring degrees. It may eventually collapse, but on a time scale where it seems difficult to believe “this was due to grade inflation starting 50 years ago.”
Social desirability bias remains even in randomized, anonymous polls. But the result would be less wrong than self-selected, public polls.
The writing style is … potentially appealing to a certain sort of nerd. But I’m the sort of person who reads here and I stopped after the first paragraph, which has a geology joke, followed by a too-self-aware pun, then ends on the explicit statement that no one really understands handshakes. The typical mind does not know what the Mohs scale is and intuitively grasps social interactions, or at least it thinks it does.
“those pesky social interactions no one seems to get the hang of” comes across (to me) as signaling a lack of social competence and fluency then typical-minding it onto your readers, which signals low status and low awareness of self and others. Or, dropping our local jargon: “I am autistic and I have not noticed that most people aren’t.” You cannot hold yourself out as an expert to be listened to after undercutting yourself that much.
That feels a bit harsh but I’m going with it. As you say, you are assuming some frames of mind that are not typical. It is not just that you are not properly modeling normal people well—it sounds as though you believe you have a great model of normal people while the presentation demonstrates the opposite.
What you’re saying here in this reply suggests you think the problem is one of communicating with typical people, not understanding them. The problem is not (misunderstanding people) → (communicating badly). Okay, it may also be that, but more so (misunderstanding people) → (what you’re telling them is wrong) because you are trying to “fix” a mind that you don’t appear to understand.
That seems like really sloppy sockpuppetry. Wouldn’t that just tell admins which other accounts are likely also the same person, so ban the lot of them?
My experience is mostly with formula grants, where the grant is mostly a formality like the EFT reimbursement. Many grants have expected recipients. Others are desperately seeking new applicants and ideas. From the outside, it is difficult to tell which is which, and from the inside grantor agencies often have trouble telling why random outsiders are applying to their intentionally exclusive grants but they have trouble finding good applicants for the ones where they want new folks.
And then I scroll down and find this, the perfect example of your question about books that can be initially amazing but not great upon re-read or reflection. If you are not familiar with the ideas in GEB, it can be an amazing introduction that opens new horizons. Or it can be too clever for its own good, getting in the way of delivering its own content.