🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

@radiojammor

> Oh, so you are paying a universal basic income and providing shelter.

There you go lying about what I said again.. and i asked you to go away the last time.

> Well look at you, you are actually a UBI advocate!

A soup kitchen is not a UBI, you are being blocked now for thinking it is.

@scottsantens

@freemo @JoeQuinlan @florida_ted It is both flaws in judgement and flaws in ethical standards.

If half of an airline's flights are full and half are empty, passengers will complain that the flights are full every time, contrasting with the assessment of the crew who report that half of the flights are empty. How do you call this effect/paradox? (I forgot)

The same effect explains that if you have an average number of friends (= popularity), more than half of your friends are more popular than you.

Or when your doctor tells you you're in average physical condition but each time you go cycling, most cyclists you come across are faster than you (because the fast cyclists are also the ones who spend the most time on the roads and are encountered disproportionately).

#stats #statistics #math #paradox

@mjambon Yea its a bit harder to understand because its a bit of applying it in the opposite way you normally think of it.

So regression to the mean is explained one way that i think is not particularly counter intuitive to how it is applies but let me start with the basics.

Formally, regression to the mean is all about how if you take lots of samples of things with all sorts of bizzare distributions, in the end they will eventually average out to a normal distribution (thus explaining why normal distributions tend to be the default and crop up everyone)...

In practice though the fallacy aspect arrises when you pay attention to addressing outliers, and on resampling they appear to have been "fixed", when in reality they only cropped up as outliers in the first place due to random chance and nothing as changed.

A very typical example given is if you look at a city and pick the top 5 intersections where accidents took place last year and put additional safety measures in place the next year you will notice that those intersections have reduced the number of accidents significantly. You assume this is due to your safety measures when in fact that would have happened regardless since they were only outliers by random chance and they simple "regressed to the mean"...

So how does that apply here. Well like i said its a bit of what i just said but kinda in reverse. You are assuming your sampling is average, when in fact you are samping outliers. So while the reality tends to regress towards the mean (went home after their normal average length bike ride) those that remain are the outliers but you dont recognize them as outliers. So its the same principle of regression to the mean just, the inverse of it.

Make sense now?

@Shamar @toiletpaper @scottsantens > Uhm... no: only van Gogh was an artist.

Sorry, yes I mispoke. I should have said "people" not artist. Otherwise my poiunt stands

> Meucci was a inventor (invented the phone)

I am aware of who is. He had the marketable skill of being able to create a device that was more less a telephone, but lacked the complete set of marketable skills needed to market it. Namely, he was not particularly skillful in how to create or file patents and thus was unable to monetize his invention.

Which is again in strong support of my position, you need **marketable** skills, not just some random melange of skills that might create genius, but will prevent that genius from having utility since you lack the needed, and complete, skills to take it there.

> and Olivetti was a visionary enterpreneur (his company invented the first programmabke desktop computer, then illegally copied by HP).

Olivette is in fact the strongest example in support of my point. He managed to start a company, it was quite successful during his lifetime (albeit it more so after too). In fact in his own words he praised the capitalist system, specifically the USA where he moved to be the pinnacle of modern economies.

> The market was unable to understand the utility provided, because it simply does not work as in the classical economy models.

What are you talking about, the market cant "understand" utility, again thats not what utility is... The market can not exist in any state other than one in which utility is represented in the market, it is by **definition**.

Not to mention these are all examples of things where the market literally did demonstrate the utility. Van gogh had his paintings sold for millions. The fact that it was after his death only means they had utility to people later and not before... When he was alive his paintings brought people less joy, and thus had less utility,a nd people paid less for it. Later after his death people enjoyed his paintings more, meaning they had more utility then they had during his life, and as such their price reflected it.

Similarly with Meucci, his invention certainly had utility to people, but since he poorly documented the patent his invention it had less utility for people. A well documented good idea has more utility (by a large margin) then a less documented one.

And finally again Olivette literally had a very successful company and very much realized the utility of his work in his life.

> There is an annoying feature of the market called information asymmetry that makes often impossible to understand (and thus pay for) what provide value. It's a slightly advanced topic in microeconomics (that in fact, I studied at the University, in the course of Political Science, decades ago).

Again you seem to fail to understand the meaning of utility here. The utility of a thing is intimitatly related to the information attached to it. If your product is not well documented or have the info needed to show its value it objectively has less utility, the information you attach to a thing is a large part of how much utility that thing has. Things dont exist in a vacuum.

> So there is no need to continue this convesation: keep thinking that I confirmed your opinion if it make you feel better than understanding what I actually wrote..

I mean, you can also just actually listen to what i said and try to understand it rather than disagreeing with concepts you clearly never bothered to understand before you decided if you agreed with it... that works too.

@toiletpaper @scottsantens

@undefined @toiletpaper @scottsantens @Shamar

> Uhm.. no: to act ethically you (reasonably) need to study ethics.

I have studied ethics quite a bit, both in university where we had quite a few classes on it and in my own time.

> Studing ethics is not enouth to be ethical, sure, but it is required.

No its literally not required. Obviously it can help if your trying to solve large complex problems, sure. But I know people with downsyndom who cant even read who exhibit better ethics than most people I know. If you care about people and show kindness you will likely be more ethical than someone no matter how well studied they are on the subject. At least in your day to day life. I dont expect such a person to define the ethical considerations of a nation, but that is far from saying they cant be ethical.

> Being good is different from being ethical, for example. Adherence to a certain form of morality is not being ethical.

Wrong... To quote wikipedia: "Ethics or moral philosophy is the philosophical study of moral phenomena." Similar to be ethical is the adherence to ethics. that is, the expression of moral phenomena.

> But ethics is a deep branch of phylosophy and for sure I'm not qualified to teach it (over mastodon :-D)

Yes it is a deep branch of philosophy... and we are agreed, you are not qualified since you are getting even the fundamental concepts wrong, let along the deep study of the branch of philosophy which goes well beyond that.

For the record I also dont consider myself qualified to be an expert on philosophy, though I am well studied on the topic.

@toiletpaper @scottsantens

@undefined @toiletpaper @scottsantens @Shamar > you are just showing that you know nothing about art (or its history).

You said I know nothing about art or its history and then said absolutely nothing that contradicted what I said... In fact you agreed perfectly with what I said.

> The ability of the market to pay for value is well shown in the cases of van Gogh, Meucci, Olivetti and so on...

Yes those are all examples of artists who made far more after their life. Which I already said occurs... you literally just insult me, say i wrong, then just went on to say how i was wrong and didnt actually disagree with a word I said...

> The market is not rational.

Never said it was, or that it needs to be. The market is based on utility, but you clearly do not understand what utility means, it doesnt mean something is rational. It means it serves a purpose to someone, and bringing enjoyment is a valid purpose and would be an example of utility.

@toiletpaper @scottsantens

@scottsantens

As someone who is strongly against UBI, and strongly supportive of welfare I can earnestly say people simply not working is not at all the reason I (or most people against UBI in my opinion) are against it.

The reason i am against it is because it causes people more harm than good. People who are in a position where they need assistance need to be given the tools to get out of their situation, and the help to get there needs to be conditional on this (and we should be spending the money that goes with that). Financial assistance should be conditional with mandatory job training or mental health therapy needed to help someone succeed, not just money.

In fact when there are underlying bad habits, as can often be the case, it is possible money can even make a persons condition worse and cause them to sleep farther into poverty.