Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org

This is deeply wrong, but it's an interesting *kind* of wrong.

Our perception of the past telescopes: there's the recent past, what we remember; the middle past, what our parents and grandparents remember; the long past, out of living memory but still preserved in familiar stories; and everything else. As I've said before, a lot of Americans' idea of *human* #history seems to go roughly as follows:

1. #Cavemen.
2. #Pyramids.
3. #Jesus.
4. Robin Hood and King Arthur.
5. #Columbus and #pirates.
6. #Pilgrims and George Washington.
7. #Cowboys.
8. World War Two. (One must have happened somewhere?)
9. #Hippies and #Vietnam.
10. The real world begins with the momentous event of my birth.

Nor is this uniquely an American problem—some places have better educational systems than others, but I think people everywhere hold similar mythologized versions of world events leading uniquely and inevitably to their own central place in the world.

So here's an extreme version of the same phenomenon applied to natural history. Most reasonably educated people have some idea that not all prehistoric animals lived at the same time (although poor #Dimetrodon is forever going to be mixed in with #dinosaurs) but they do tend to lump enormous spans of time together: #mammoths and #sabertooths, before that all dinosaurs all at once, and before that ... I dunno ... jellyfish or something.

#Creationists, of course, turn it up to 11.

For anyone who might be wondering.

https://www.quora.com/Do-members-of-various-countries-militaries-receive-any-special-benefits-for-their-time-spent-serving-in-the-air-force-compared-to-other-branches-of-their-countrys-military/answer/Daniel-Dvorkin-3

Years ago on Slashdot, someone stopped an argument-verging-on-flamewar by asking, "What is your expected outcome from continuing this discussion?" The other person said, "You know, I have no idea," and the thread ended.

I think about that a lot. There are all kinds of tests for what kinds of posts and comments you're about to write. "Is it true, is it useful, is it kind?" is a useful heuristic, but it doesn't cover all the possibilities. Most of the time, I'd like anything I post to check at least one of those boxes. Two is desirable, and all three is excellent. Still this leaves a lot of wiggle room.

"What do I expect?" covers *everything*, if you stop to think and give yourself an honest answer. Of course, if you're looking for a fight, it's easy to write something which meets that expectation! But if you're not—I'm not, most of the time, and neither are the people whose posts I want to read—asking this question and following it through can save everyone a lot of grief.

This is an ideal. I don't always live up to it. The closer I come, though, the happier and saner I am. For what it's worth, and fully aware of my own partial hypocrisy, I recommend keeping it in mind.

Statistics inside baseball. Read on if you want.

TIL that to fit a regression model for relative risk, you can use Poisson regression instead of the much finickier binomial regression with a log link. The first works on pretty much any reasonable data set. The second will fail about a quarter of the time, and it it works it will complain all the while.

Oh, and the relevant paper has been out for almost twenty years [1]. A five-year-old paper [2] shows that log-link binomial estimates *even when they work* are biased, while Poisson estimates aren't. As long as you use a robust variance estimator, the standard errors, and thus the p-values and confidence intervals, are nearly the same.

I've been tearing my hair out on this project trying to find a relative risk estimator that wouldn't choke on our data, and would execute in a reasonable amount of time for a large number of variables. Scouring software archives and statistical literature. Resigning myself to running warning- and crash-prone code, which I really dislike.

And the code for doing it the right way is *simple*.

`model = glm(reponse ~ predictor1 + predictor2, family=poisson)`

`library(sandwich)`

`library(lmtest)`

`coeftest(model, vcov=sandwich)`

Well. Live and learn.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/159/7/702/71883

[2] https://bmcmedresmethodol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12874-018-0519-5

Perhaps a bit late to the party, but I couldn't resist. You know, Shrewsbury's been there a long time, no rush.

This turned up on my Facebook feed. My response: "Here's to all the #antivaxers who didn't make it to 2023, and best wishes to the others for 2024."

"And so we get a curious phenomenon in the field of science fiction: sci-fi as a community in which science and scientists are valorised and in which anti-scientific ideas spread and are celebrated. While this may at first glance seem contradictory, the idea of the scientist as a heroic individual as opposed to science as a community of practice underpins this relationship when science fiction is in the mode of being a kind of fandom of science."

Yes. Exactly this.

Go straight ahead. It's important to keep balance in your life.

Seen in the wild: "On the bright side, Musk's genius business decisions might just make him a millionaire."

The first TV ad for #StarTrek, ever. Not an exaggeration to say the world changed that day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XuW964FDJ8

Unless of course they think your evil scheme sounds like fun, in which case have at.

Some answers just write themselves.

https://www.quora.com/How-can-evolutionists-account-for-the-fact-that-many-animals-exhibit-cooperative-behavior/answer/Daniel-Dvorkin-3

To be fair, and as the article acknowledges, #Mastodon *is* harder to use than #Twitter or #Facebook. A lot of the difficulty is in deciding where to get started, the paralysis of choice, and that can leave a bad taste in your mouth which affects the whole experience. First impressions matter.

But it isn't *that* much harder, and there's real value in choice too. More to the point—again as the article says—there's value in, well, values. Nobody's getting rich off Mastodon. It exists because people think something like it would be neat to have, and they want to share that neatness with others who think the same. There are egos involved to be sure, but no one person's ego can bring it all crashing down.

As a practical matter, it is AFAICT the first and only open-source, distributed, not-for-profit social media platform that registers as a threat to the big players. That counts for a lot in my book.

Remember when the internet felt promising instead of overwhelming, depressing, and sometimes terrifying? Mastodon's bringing some of that back, at least for me.