Paul Harland

what an interesting question. my own view is that it is an extension of natural human curiosity, which I expect to continue as long as humanity does, but putting the practice into cultural context is valid and interesting.

Targeted by the right, Britain’s asylum hotels are places of fear and disorder. Bad political decisions made it so | Daniel Trilling In the frenzy of racism and culture warring, the issue of why hotels are used gets overlooked, says author Daniel Trilling

I wrote this to explain how we reached this point, in the hope it would be a resource for people arguing with friends and family, people with questions, perhaps even people thinking of joining a protest. Do share with anyone who might find it useful. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Anyone else noticed this? I think that more Google search results are for products, only tenuously related to the search topic, and that search elsewhere feels more random. Or am I just getting even more picky?

And again in the quoted Quartz article: qz.com/474671/move-...

"Overreach"?

I dunno whether to say "aim higher" or "keep digging".

I'm really really cheap. www.linkedin.com/in/paul-harl...

C'mon, I'm stuck now... Something "sparks open mines"...

(Drat, should've made it "outstrip lights")

Got my attention!

The good old saurus suggested "outstripping lights Wondermints" but I think that bandname's already been taken.

Is it the wot 3 words for the campus?

Moving further down the scale... Underneath snuffs boreddom.

Cosyness? Always double-check before pressing Send!

Outside kindles noseyness...?

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Fail to Return

Sorry to pollute the feed with technical financial terms, but this is all fxcking nuts
www.ft.com/content/8a16...

@batyraus.bsky.social Hello! Which posts in particular made you want to follow me?

That's how I got there - but thanks, looks interesting.

(P.S. Just browsing your stuff trying to get a sense of your views and saw you described Running on Empty as a "Hallmark film for terrorists". Maybe I ought to watch that one, get a few ideas? I saw Lumet's Deadly Affair again the other day. The colour was still a bit too dull for me.)

I do sound a bit like that, don't I? I opted to go vegetarian years ago, but maybe that's not going far enough. Mind you, Hitler did too - and that didn't stop him. Perhaps I could get into a few harmless conspiracies. Or write a novel. There's always the blog. Thanks, will have a think about it!

"The biggest problem for Starmer and co: the machinery of government is broken and they can’t fix it" - good opinion piece but... the end needs fixing.

Having only the other day tied myself up in a tangled thread where I got called "the Waffen SS guy", and for some time been labelled - unfairly, but of course I would say that - on a couple of Bluesky blocklists as "far right", should I embrace the mental anguish and go full Nazi? Or just Reform UK?

There was another poor guy a while back who kept getting copied by fake accounts so don't be surprised if they come back!

Thanks for pointing that out. Just been DM'd by them with a link to (presumably) some scam. Have you reported the account?

@bardigonfle.bsky.social I'm not happy with your DM when we've had no public interaction. What would I be voting for? I'm hardly likely to click on a link in a DM.

I don't agree with everything in this opinion piece but the interpretation of recent recognition moves seems very valid.

Going off at my normal uninformed tangent... It talks about "intelligence" and then later on the construct "healthy eating". One thing I sometimes wonder is what it means to act intelligently. Self-interestedly? Altruistically? Short or long term? Quickly give the right answers to a solved puzzle?

The above argument can just as well be applied to psychological constructs of which the exact nature is unclear. For example, extraversion is typically measured with a reflective model. Suppose that extraversion is just a summary of the scores on a set of extraversion items. In that case, why use the shared variance as a summary, rather than the unique variance or all variance? What is the justification for discarding unique variance if the shared variance holds no special status? There is none. The shared variance is just one way of reducing high dimensional data to fewer dimensions, and there are alternative techniques for data reduction that do not discard unique variance, e.g., Principal Component Analysis (PCA; James, Witten, Hastie and Tibshirani 2013). Thus, when the status of the construct is either known to be not a common cause (as in the healthy eating example) or is unknown (as in the extraversion example), the practice of interpreting only the shared variance among a set of items is not well supported.

Currently reading "Toward a causal interpretation of the common factor model" by Van Bork, Wijsen & @mijke.bsky.social (2017).

Can't believe I had missed that one -- really good stuff! Link to pdf: pure.uva.nl/ws/files/354...

So an AGI angle for Google here is navigating simulated spaces (although I meant it more loosely too): bsky.app/profile/indi... - article is a bit of a puff piece, it's not everyone's dream future.