Rotundus.com

Oregon again says students don’t need to prove mastery of reading, writing or math to graduate, citing harm to students of color / Kids’ reading scores have soared in Mississippi ‘miracle’

Two stories this year, one in a Democrat-controlled state and the other in a Republican-controlled state (albeit with bipartisan support).

Morality justifies motivated reasoning in the folk ethics of belief

"many people will infer that a surgeon is more likely to be male than female, which is consistent with Bayesian reasoning given unequal base rates favoring men. However, when told that another person believes the same thing, people will condemn that person’s belief"

A Climate Hawk’s Issues With Electric Vehicles

On the use of certain scarce resources: "the amount ... needed for one long-range electric vehicle would be enough for either six plug-in hybrids or 90 of the type of hybrid that can’t be plugged in for a recharge. ... “The overall carbon reduction of those 90 hybrids over their lifetimes is 37 times as much as a single battery electric vehicle,” Toyota argues. That’s a stunning statistic if true."

Bjorn Lomborg on Twitter

"No, Tuvalu not sinking into ocean. Actual science shows Tuvalu 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 land area 2.6% because of more accretion than loss from sea level rise" (with link to study)

The AI Ethicist: Fact or Fiction?

"Drawing from a pool of ethical dilemmas published in the New York Times column “The Ethicist”, we compared the ethical advice given by the human expert ... with AI-generated advice. ... Our findings revealed no significant difference in the perceived value of the advice between human generated ethical advice and AI-generated ethical advice. When forced to choose between the two sources of advice, the random subjects recruited online displayed a slight but significant preference for the AI-generated advice, selecting it 60% of the time, while MBA students and the expert panel showed no significant preference."

Equality bias impairs collective decision-making across cultures

"Replicated across three countries (Denmark, Iran, and China), we show that participants assigned nearly equal weights to each other’s opinions regardless of true differences in their competence—even when informed by explicit feedback about their competence gap or under monetary incentives to maximize collective accuracy."

This is one of the more-interesting datapoints I've seen regarding the current situation in the Middle East:

One reason Hamas may call for genocide is that they will believe it be easy, because Palestinians are by and large extremely confused about how many Jews live in Israel. pic.twitter.com/RhD5dITgv3

— Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 (@lymanstoneky) October 17, 2023

As the original source notes census data suggests about 7.4 million, but 50% of Gazans think the correct number is a million or fewer. Here's an interesting quote from the piece on how it impacts the prospects for peace in the region:

Lacking basic knowledge of Israeli society is also correlated with support for attacks on its civilians; in TWI polling conducted in the West Bank, there is a twenty two percentage point increase in those who say that attacking ‘all Israeli Jews’ is a bad thing among those West Bank residents who have a more realistic perception of Israeli Jewish demographics.

The Psychology of Online Political Hostility: A Comprehensive, Cross-National Test of the Mismatch Hypothesis

"hostile political discussions are the result of status-driven individuals who are drawn to politics and are equally hostile both online and offline. ... we offer initial evidence that online discussions feel more hostile, in part, because the behavior of such individuals is more visible online than offline."

The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation system

Wonder to what extent this might still be true: "the system classifies a variety of negative comments about some demographic groups as not hateful while flagging the exact same comments about other demographic groups as being indeed hateful." It's easy enough to create a differently-aligned AI.

Democrats and Republicans aren’t divided by gender, they’re divided by marriage

"What would it look like if a major publication decided to produce a feature on masculinity but then assigned all the articles to women? Well, it would look a lot like Politico’s The Masculinity Issue, which did exactly that. ... one theme throughout the feature was that, in Katelynn Fossett’s words, over the last few decades, “women are voting for Democrats more, and men are usually sticking with Republicans.” ... Adding marital status to the mix, the GOP advantage among married men shoots up ... and shrinks among unmarried men to just 7 points. ... what most people don’t know ... is that among married women, Republicans still maintain a sizable 14-point advantage"