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made up numbers are just pretend

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Another week, another Friday – as in part one, this occasional series describes fixations, hobbyhorses and other bees in my bonnet. The usual warning applies – argue in the comments if you like, but these are not issues on which I’m susceptible to rationality or persuasion, they’re not opinions, they’re bees.

This particular buzzy little fellow was annoying me the other week because once more they awarded a Nobel Prize (in Economics, but still) at least partly for something I consider to be actually embarrassing.  In this case, the practice of carrying out econometrics using an “index” of “institutions” on the left hand side.

Guys, it’s just a number that somebody made up!  I mean, I suppose that as an accounting influencer, I have to say that nearly all statistical data is to some extent invented, that coding systems and collection practices are ideological rather than neutral and the creation of “objective” data is often a crucial tool of rhetoric.

But when you’re using the Freedom House Index Of Effective Property Rights[1], and asking “why is France a 3 and Germany a 4? If America is 2 and Cuba is 8 does that mean America is four times better?  Could somewhere be 3.5 and if not why not?”, then … all those questions are potential showstoppers from a statistical point of view, but more importantly these are just numbers that somebody made up!  At their desk, in the knowledge that they were going to publish them.  They might have had a set of criteria and a weighting scheme, they might even have been surprised at some of the conclusions, but fundamentally they, and their boss, knew how the rankings were going to have to look.

Why do people create these numerical indexes rather than just saying which systems they think are best?  Usually, because you can then do statistical analysis and demonstrate rigorously that certain desirable characteristics are correlated with economic growth and prosperity.  Can you really do that? Of course you bloody can’t.  You put the rabbit in the hat, then you took the rabbit out of the hat; the statistical analysis is just your original argument.

Buzz, buzz, buzz.  At various points in my career, I used to be responsible for creating “Eurocrisis political risk indicators” and the like, basically because research reports look better with a chart on the front.  I was always happy to print them, because it was actually potentially useful to my clients (and to me, comparing back to previous times) to have a time series line that went up and down and roughly summarised my views of the situation.  If I was comparing complicated things like tax systems between countries, I’d much rather have a knowledgeable professional’s score out of ten than a list of marginal rates, for example.  But that’s all these things are; they’re made up numbers.

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[1] It’s not called that, it’s not scaled like that and I don’t care.  Mention of FH rather than any other provider of indices shouldn’t be taken as endorsement or its opposite – it was just the one that sprung to mind.  In many ways, I have more respect for the more nakedly ideological and half-assed versions of these indicators than the ones which try too hard to be scientific.  As my dad used to love to say, “if a job’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing properly”.



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denubis
2 days ago
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‘Scary’: Why US expats are tossing their citizenship – and it’s not just Trump

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Becoming un-American is complicated and expensive – yet in recent times, a rising number have embraced the “ex” in “expatriate”.

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denubis
3 days ago
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Lovecraftian Campaign has no Cosmic Horror, just Racism

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Jean Artio decided to leave the horror game he had joined during the very first session, after realizing that the Game Master and other players were fans of H.P. Lovecraft, not his Cthulhu Mythos. “I was coming in expecting strange and unknowable monstrosities that our mortal minds could barely comprehend,” said Artio. “But instead the GM started to describe monstrously racist beliefs that were too easy to understand.”

“I started to get a little uncomfortable when the players started to describe what they were going to do to the dark hordes invading our shores. Then as they started to get into it, I heard some of the most ugly and vile things I’ve ever heard about other human beings. And that’s just what they were saying about people with Welsh ancestry. I didn’t want to stick around and find out what would happen if they went any farther south.”

Artio said that this wasn’t the first time he had played with the GM, which is why he wasn’t expecting the sudden prominence of early twentieth-century race science. “Now that I look back on our other games, there were definitely signs. I probably should have noticed that the tool he was using to measure out movement was a set of phrenologist’s calipers. I thought it was just an old-timey drafting compass.

When we asked what system the group had been playing, he said he wasn’t sure. “Some game with a long acronym that stood for something stupid. In theory, it sounded interesting, and the GM kept talking about how in-depth the character creation could get with the details of body dimensions. It was only as the bigotry started to build up that I realized why they cared so much about body type, and I decided I had had enough. Which is a shame, because I’m sure if the table hadn’t been so virulently racist, I would have had a chance to fall in love with FATAL.”

The post Lovecraftian Campaign has no Cosmic Horror, just Racism first appeared on The Only Edition.

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denubis
3 days ago
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Simson Garfinkel on Spooky Cryptographic Action at a Distance

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Excellent read. One example:

Consider the case of basic public key cryptography, in which a person’s public and private key are created together in a single operation. These two keys are entangled, not with quantum physics, but with math.

When I create a virtual machine server in the Amazon cloud, I am prompted for an RSA public key that will be used to control access to the machine. Typically, I create the public and private keypair on my laptop and upload the public key to Amazon, which bakes my public key into the server’s administrator account. My laptop and that remove server are thus entangled, in that the only way to log into the server is using the key on my laptop. And because that administrator account can do anything to that server­—read the sensitivity data, hack the web server to install malware on people who visit its web pages, or anything else I might care to do­—the private key on my laptop represents a security risk for that server.

Here’s why it’s impossible to evaluate a server and know if it is secure: as long that private key exists on my laptop, that server has a vulnerability. But if I delete that private key, the vulnerability goes away. By deleting the data, I have removed a security risk from the server and its security has increased. This is true entanglement! And it is spooky: not a single bit has changed on the server, yet it is more secure.

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denubis
3 days ago
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Line Go Up || Crapshots Ep785

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From: loadingreadyrun
Duration: 0:48

Finally, out of the Red and into the Orange!

Support LRR: http://patreon.com/loadingreadyrun
Merch: https://store.loadingreadyrun.com
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Check out our other channels!
Video Games: http://youtube.com/LRRVG
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Streams: http://youtube.com/LoadingReadyLive

#LRR #comedy #crapshot

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denubis
4 days ago
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Found on pinterest

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Found on pinterest

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denubis
5 days ago
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