Quotulatiousness

July 9, 2015

The first female NFL referee

Filed under: Football — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Amy Trask hopes that Sarah Thomas gets booed. I’m pretty sure she’ll get her wish (and then some):

I have never met Sarah Thomas, but I appreciate the significance of her achievement. When Sarah Thomas takes the field as an official at the start of the 2015 season, she will be the first woman to do so (other than in a temporary, replacement capacity) in the National Football League. I congratulate her and I wish her the very best for continued success.

I also hope that Sarah Thomas is booed.

When Sarah Thomas throws a flag she shouldn’t have thrown — which she will, as all officials do — she should be booed. When Sarah Thomas fails to throw a flag she should have — which she will, as all officials do — she should be booed. Sarah Thomas should be booed as loudly and as resoundingly as her male colleagues are booed.

Gender equality means gender equality. And if gender equality is the expectation, all consequences that flow therefrom must be accepted, whether one likes them or not.

When Sarah Thomas takes the field, she should do so without regard to gender. If one wants to be considered without regard to gender, then one should not consider one’s gender. Since I do not know Sarah Thomas, I do not know whether our views on these issues are similar. My hunch, though, is that Sarah Thomas has comported herself without regard to gender throughout her career.

It makes no sense to undertake one’s responsibilities — on the field, in an owner’s meeting, in a boardroom, as a physician, as a judge, as an astronaut, as a farmer, in the military, or otherwise — with any thought given to one’s gender. How can a woman hope (or insist, or demand) that she be considered and treated without regard to gender, while giving thought to her gender?

Might Sarah Thomas encounter some gender-based resistance? Of course.

My experience suggests she will not encounter any such resistance from Pete Morelli, the head of her officiating crew. I never encountered anything I believed to be gender-based resistance during any of my interactions with Pete or with any other officials. I never sensed that Pete or any other officials treated me any differently than they treated my male counterparts. (Some of them did not like my shouting and swearing—but to the extent they objected to it, I do not believe they did so because I was a woman.)

The “best novels” list … from 1898

Filed under: Books, History — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

Top ten and top 100 lists are everywhere, it seems, but just how useful are they? In the Times Literary Supplement blog, Michael Caines shared a list from more than a hundred years back, showing what the compiler of that year thought were the “best” novels:

Is it true, as Samuel Johnson declared, that nothing “odd”, in literary terms, will last? As mentioned a while ago, for a certain well-placed critic, writing in 1898, that odd book Tristram Shandy could not be considered among the hundred best novels ever written. Now here’s what he actually thought were the best.

Sometime editor of the Illustrated London News, an authority on the Brontës and Napoleon, Clement K. Shorter was in the middle of a flourishing career when this list appeared in the monthly journal called The Bookman. He doesn’t explain what exactly makes a book one of the “best”, only that he has deliberately limited himself to one novel per novelist. Living authors are excluded – although he cannot resist adding a rider of eight works by “writers whose reputations are too well established for their juniors to feel towards them any sentiments other than those of reverence and regard”. In fact, I’d say if he’d been trying to prophesy what would still be regarded as a classic a century later, Shorter’s shorter list is more proportionally successful than his longer one.

As intended, Shorter’s list might still serve as an “actual incentive” to discovery, as he hoped, for “the youthful student of literature” (one to put next to David Bowie’s, maybe) at least partly because of what seem now to be its many oddities. People have become less hesitant, for example, before praising the living (the more junior the better) and, one suspects, less willing to praise P. G. Hamerton’s Marmorne. I’m not sure Bracebridge Hall is even in print on this side of the Atlantic. And would you have chosen Silas Marner over Middlemarch?

It’s just a list, of course, and Shorter acknowledged that others could probably come up with “numerous omissions”. It’s curious to see what we might call classic or canonical novels among the works they’ve outlasted, though. Praise for, say, Jane Austen might have echoed down the centuries, but this doesn’t mean that we share the same aesthetic values as readers who praised her in the early nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.

It’s difficult to imagine any except the most foolhardy of readers reading every book on Shorter’s list now, let alone agreeing with him. In John Sutherland’s compendious Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, however, may be found informed summary views of many of the lesser-known names below – see the parenthetical quotations for the ones that interested me.

For that full 1898 flavour, names and dates are as Shorter gives them.

Price Ceilings: Misallocation of Resources

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 25 Feb 2015

Suppose there is a mild winter on the West Coast and a harsh winter on the East Coast. As a result of the weather, people on East Coast will demand more home heating oil, bidding up the price. Under the price system, entrepreneurs will be incentivized to take oil from where it has lower value on West Coast to where it has higher value on the East Coast. But when price controls are in place, even though the demand is still there from the East Coast, there is no signal of a higher price, eliminating the incentive for entrepreneurs to transport oil from west to east. In fact, this happened in the 1970s, resulting in oil going to lower valued uses on the West Coast while many people on the East Coast didn’t have enough oil to heat their homes. In this video, we’ll look at a diagram to visualize this misallocation of resources.

QotD: People trust Wikipedia “Because An Argument Is Better Than A Lecture”

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

That’s because, as I’ve been trying to scream at you people for the past three years, the corporate mass-media news industry sucks. More specifically, the once proud fourth branch of our government has been reduced to screaming-head opinionators formulating commentary on the basis of politicized ratings. In other words, Wikipedia and the news are in two different businesses: one is about facts and the other is about shock and spin. Argue with me all you like, you know it’s true.

But perhaps even more importantly, the general public trusts crowd-sourced Wikipedia articles more than the news because an argument is always more trust-worthy than a lecture. That’s the real difference. If you want to know how good a teacher in a school is, you gather up the best student, the worst student, the principal and the teacher and then analyze what they all say together. You don’t ask the school’s PR director. Wikipedia, even when it comes to contested or hotly-debated articles, does this extremely well, even concerning itself. The linked article above discussed a number of articles about how reliable Wikipedia is, some of which disagreed with others, and all were found on the Wikipedia page for itself.

    Regardless the disputes over individual studies and their methodologies, how I found them is almost as telling as their results. I came across them because Wikipedia provided external references, allowing me to corroborate the information. This is one of the site’s great merits: the aggregation of multiple sources, correctly linked, to build a more complete picture. As the results of the Yougov poll perhaps suggest, this surely seems more reliable than getting the coverage of an event from one newspaper.

The truest answer to a question can rarely be told by a single source, which is what makes the sources section of a Wikipedia page so valuable. What is the corollary in a news broadcast? Perhaps a single expert? Maybe once in a while they’ll have two sides of a debate spend five minutes with one another? They’re not even close. The argument itself can be instructive, but that argument never happens on most news shows.

This doesn’t mean you blindly read Wiki articles without questioning them. But a properly sourced article is simply more trustworthy than a talking head telling you how to think.

Timothy Geigner, “Why Do People Trust Wikipedia? Because An Argument Is Better Than A Lecture”, Techdirt, 2014-08-18.

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