Truthiness: Debiasing the World (Internet) - fcrimins/fcrimins.github.io GitHub Wiki

This one is a real blooper and I cannot let it pass by

  • Stephanie Saul wrote in The New York Times:
    • Nearly 40 percent of colleges are reporting overall declines in applications from international students, according to a survey…
  • Here is what the opening of the survey itself said:
    • 39% of responding institutions reported a decline in international applications, 35% reported an increase, and 26% reported no change in applicant numbers.
  • The NYT article does not reproduce the more positive pieces of information... The headline of the piece?:
    • Amid 'Trump Effect' Fear, 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applicants
  • I look forward to not only a correction but in fact a retraction of the entire article and its headline.

Contrastive divergence to suppress biases (3/19/17)

  • Take 2 people, expose one to bias inducing stimula and another not, and take the difference as truth.

On debiasing (3/19/17)

  • Morey (The Undoing Project) wouldn't watch scrimmage games and didn't allow comparisons based on race.
  • Ads and Twitter messages are geared to incite bias. Can it be undone?
  • Commonsensemedia on zootopia was biased by adult-think. It should have focused more on scary animal scenes (more likely to give kids nightmares) than adult innuendo that kids wouldn't even get.
  • A.k.a.: delouse the web

how do you assess intelligence while filtering out smooth talkers (3/8/17)

  • too much of politics (job searches, etc) seems to select for the "smooth talker"

What I find strange is people who think this has only recently become relevant (2/28/17)

Kws: truthiness (2/1/17)

Kws: truthiness (1/30/17)

Kws: truthiness (1/20/17)

no subject (1/17/17)

News bias (1/13/17)

  • Just heard a reporter report "carries a maximum sentence of life in prison" which is true, but why did they only report the max? Because they are optimizing for viewers, not truth.
  • Kws: truthiness

Truthiness (1/3/17)

  • Even one person can embody different levels of truthiness. In a way Friedman and Krugman (and esp. that CS dude at MIT) both shift back and forth between truthier academic pursuits and advertisingier political (truth lacking) pursuits.
  • CS dude at MIT = Noam Chomsky
  • Let us denote proposition P applied in world w∈W by P(w). The meaning of P is then the mapping v_P:W→{0,1} which assigns 1 or 0 to each w∈W according to whether or not proposition P(w) is true. Equivalently, the meaning of the proposition is the ordered pair consisting of: all worlds, and the subset of worlds where it is true: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.08627.pdf]

Can the truthiness... (1/2/17)

Confirmation bias is the root of all evil (1/2/17)

  • The more news there is, the easier it is for people to participate in confirmation bias. The more CB the bigger the problem. So how does one neutralize wrt CB?
  • Or how does one tailor his life to avoid CB?
  • What is this type of self experimentation, self optimization, called?