Quotulatiousness

June 4, 2014

Sarcasm-detecting software wanted

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:02

Charles Stross discusses some of the second-order effects should the US Secret Service actually get the sarcasm-detection software they’re reportedly looking for:

… But then the Internet happened, and it just so happened to coincide with a flowering of highly politicized and canalized news media channels such that at any given time, whoever is POTUS, around 10% of the US population are convinced that they’re a baby-eating lizard-alien in a fleshsuit who is plotting to bring about the downfall of civilization, rather than a middle-aged male politician in a business suit.

Well now, here’s the thing: automating sarcasm detection is easy. It’s so easy they teach it in first year computer science courses; it’s an obvious application of AI. (You just get your Turing-test-passing AI that understands all the shared assumptions and social conventions that human-human conversation rely on to identify those statements that explicitly contradict beliefs that the conversationalist implicitly holds. So if I say “it’s easy to earn a living as a novelist” and the AI knows that most novelists don’t believe this and that I am a member of the set of all novelists, the AI can infer that I am being sarcastic. Or I’m an outlier. Or I’m trying to impress a date. Or I’m secretly plotting to assassinate the POTUS.)

Of course, we in the real world know that shaved apes like us never saw a system we didn’t want to game. So in the event that sarcasm detectors ever get a false positive rate of less than 99% (or a false negative rate of less than 1%) I predict that everybody will start deploying sarcasm as a standard conversational gambit on the internet.

Wait … I thought everyone already did?

Trolling the secret service will become a competitive sport, the goal being to not receive a visit from the SS in response to your totally serious threat to kill the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Al Qaida terrrrst training camps will hold tutorials on metonymy, aggressive irony, cynical detachment, and sarcasm as a camouflage tactic for suicide bombers. Post-modernist pranks will draw down the full might of law enforcement by mistake, while actual death threats go encoded as LOLCat macros. Any attempt to algorithmically detect sarcasm will fail because sarcasm is self-referential and the awareness that a sarcasm detector may be in use will change the intent behind the message.

As the very first commenter points out, a problem with this is that a substantial proportion of software developers (as indicated by their position on the Asperger/Autism spectrum) find it very difficult to detect sarcasm in real life…

Piketty’s book as revealed truth

Filed under: Books, Economics, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:43

Sean Collins says “thou shalt not doubt St. Thomas”:

The Piketty-FT debate should be seen for the arcane technical dispute that it is, but instead many claimed that it was a Big Deal, a decisive political debate for our times. This overblown reaction highlights how Pikettymania has got out of control. Your attitude to Piketty’s Capital – a 700-page tome that many have not read – has become a badge indicating that you are right-on (or not) when it comes to inequality.

Pikettymania took flight when the left hailed him as extraordinary, a hero, and claimed his book would utterly transform the policy discussion towards questioning capitalism. Liberal economist Paul Krugman considers Capital ‘the most important economics book of the year – and maybe the decade’. Even those who disagree with the content feel obliged to claim the book is exceptional; for example, Lawrence Summers, a top economist in the Clinton and Obama administrations, says it is a ‘Nobel Prize-worthy contribution’, even though he finds Piketty’s theory to be wrong.

[…]

When the Great Man himself responded to the FT, his annoyance at having to deal with someone raising questions about his awesome work was clear. ‘Ridiculous’ and ‘dishonest’ was how he initially described the FT’s findings. In his full reply, he says the FT’s points were ‘criticism for the sake of criticism’ — in other words, this wasn’t a genuine search for the truth. In response to a number of the FT’s specific charges, Piketty says that he often had to adjust the data because of their inadequacies, and he applied his best judgment. He admits that in a few cases he could have been more explicit in describing his adjustments.

Such a response may lead to more questions, but not from his loyal supporters, who were busy celebrating Piketty’s ‘victory’ over the FT. ‘Piketty’s devastating point-by-point rebuttal’, says Robert Kuttner, shows that Giles ‘made a fool of himself’. Economist and New York Times contributor Justin Wolfers tweeted, ‘Debate’s over folks’ — providing further evidence for Joel Kotkin’s theory of the spread of a ‘debate is over’ syndrome among the modern left, which seeks to impose a stifling conformity on a variety of issues (from climate change to the causes of poverty and the definition of marriage, among others). Krugman concluded that the FT-Piketty debate showed the persistence of inequality ‘deniers’ — the same term of abuse thrown at today’s heretics who dare to question climate-change orthodoxy.

This anti-intellectual ‘nothing to see here, folks’ approach is wrong; more, not less, debate should be encouraged. Piketty’s data is fair game, but there’s much more to his argument that should be questioned, too. Even if Piketty’s figures are perfect, he still cannot explain why inequality changes over time, nor back up his predictions for the future. Moreover — as I pointed out in my review of his book — we should challenge the elite’s obsession with the lives of the rich and famous, which distracts from a proper discussion about economic growth and increasing living standards for all.

It’s clearly time for The Something Must Be Done Act 2014

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Law, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:23

A post by David Allen Green from last year that prefigures the political landscape of today:

… all this statutory output is subject to the tiresome jurisdiction of the courts — the High Court will quash delegated legislation and use “human rights” jurisprudence to interpret the word of parliament out of recognition. Something must be done.

So this Act is a modest proposal for our legislators and public officials. Once it is passed, no other legislation will ever be necessary and the meddlesome courts will be neutered. This would be a Good Thing.

Let’s start with Section 1:

    “The Crown shall have the power to do anything, and nothing a Minister of the Crown does will be ultra vires.”

That should shut up the High Court for a while with their judicial review decisions.

But adding a second section to the Act will make sure that Ministers will act in the interests of all of us. So for the avoidance of doubt, Section 2 provides:

    “The power given by Section 1 of this Act shall include the banning of things by any Minister of the Crown.”

But what things can be banned? Well, here’s Section 3:

    “The things to be banned referred to in Section 2 of this Act shall be the things which a Minister of the Crown says are bad for us.”

Which in turn leads us to Section 4:

    “What is bad for us for the purposes of Section 3 shall be determined by a Minister of the Crown with regard either to (a) headlines in the tabloid press of the day and/or (b) the headlines the Minister of the Crown would like to see in the tabloid press tomorrow.”

Section 5 will then provide:

    “Any person

    (a) voicing opposition to a determination made under Section 4 of this Act; or

    (b) acting in breach of a ban made under Section 1 of this Act, shall be deemed to not care about the children and/or to be soft on terrorism.”

The Act should also include the following power at Section 6 so that any emerging issues can be addressed:

    “In the event something must be done, a Minister may at his or her discretion choose a thing to do, and the thing chosen shall be deemed as the something that must be done.”

This discretionary power, however, is subject to Section 7:

    “The thing chosen under Section 6 shall not have any rational or proportionate relationship to any intended objective.”

The way a lot of ministers carry on, you’d think this act had already been promulgated…

Gavin McInnes gives a shout-out to the Rebel Alliance

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:07

No, he really did:

Gave a shout out to the Rebel Alliance on Fox last night. They are a group of kids in the future who live in the sewers like Ninja Turtles and refuse to pay our bloated pensions. That’s the problem with all this talk of the debt we’re saddling our children with. It assumes they’re going to pay it.

What if they just say, “Fuck off” like they do in Costa Rica? The taxes are too high there so most people just refuse to pay. When everyone does it, the government can’t do anything about it. This next generation is tech-savvy enough to create their own currency and barter their own exchanges and the sewers they live in won’t be gross. They’ll be like a cool teen’s bedroom from 1990.

H/T to Kathy Shaidle for the link.

Bruce Schneier on the human side of the Heartbleed vulnerability

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:24

Reposting at his own site an article he did for The Mark News:

The announcement on April 7 was alarming. A new Internet vulnerability called Heartbleed could allow hackers to steal your logins and passwords. It affected a piece of security software that is used on half a million websites worldwide. Fixing it would be hard: It would strain our security infrastructure and the patience of users everywhere.

It was a software insecurity, but the problem was entirely human.

Software has vulnerabilities because it’s written by people, and people make mistakes — thousands of mistakes. This particular mistake was made in 2011 by a German graduate student who was one of the unpaid volunteers working on a piece of software called OpenSSL. The update was approved by a British consultant.

In retrospect, the mistake should have been obvious, and it’s amazing that no one caught it. But even though thousands of large companies around the world used this critical piece of software for free, no one took the time to review the code after its release.

The mistake was discovered around March 21, 2014, and was reported on April 1 by Neel Mehta of Google’s security team, who quickly realized how potentially devastating it was. Two days later, in an odd coincidence, researchers at a security company called Codenomicon independently discovered it.

When a researcher discovers a major vulnerability in a widely used piece of software, he generally discloses it responsibly. Why? As soon as a vulnerability becomes public, criminals will start using it to hack systems, steal identities, and generally create mayhem, so we have to work together to fix the vulnerability quickly after it’s announced.

A real-life experiment – does a higher minimum wage cause job losses?

Filed under: Business, Economics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Seattle just changed their minimum wage to $15 per hour (that’s the city, but not the surrounding suburbs). Tim Worstall outlines what we may see in this handy real world economic experiment:

The first and most obvious effect of a $15 an hour minimum is that there are going to be job losses. Don’t forget that the message from the academic literature is that “modest” increases in the minimum don’t seem to have “much” effect on employment levels. And we’d all agree that a $100 minimum would have rather large effects. So our puzzle here is to try to decide what is the definition of “modest”. Clearly $100 an hour isn’t. But also we can dismiss something like $1 an hour as being problematic. Since no one at all gets paid a sum that small making the minimum $1, or $1.50, has no effect on anything whatsoever.

The best result we have from the academic literature is that a minimum wage in the 40-45% region of the median wage has little to no effect on unemployment. The reason being similar to that of a $1 one. So few people get paid so little that it just doesn’t affect the wages of anyone very much. The same research tells us that once we get to 45-50% of the median wage then we do start to see significant unemployment effects.

This $15 an hour in Seattle will be around 60% of the local median wage. We would therefore expect to see reasonably large unemployment effects.

We would also expect to see unemployment among high school graduates rise very much more than the rate in general. For this minimum applies only inside the City of Seattle: it doesn’t apply to the surrounding counties or suburbs that aren’t part of that political jurisdiction. Imagine that you were a college graduate having to do some basic work to make ends meet while you were waiting for that career opening. If you’re going to get $7.25 outside Seattle and $15 inside it you’d probably be willing to make the trip each day to earn that extra. Of course, as a high school graduate you would too. But now think of yourself as the employer. You’ve got the choice of a college graduate or a high school graduate, both willing to do the same job at the same price. Who are you going to hire? Logically, the higher grade worker, that college grad.

So we would expect minimum wage jobs within Seattle to be colonised by those college grads at the expense of those high school ones. We would therefore expect to see a much larger rise in the unemployment rate of those high school grads as against the general unemployment rate. In fact, we’d expect to see this happening so strongly that we’d take the empirical evidence of that widening unemployment gap to be evidence that it was this minimum wage rise causing it.

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