In terms of war, corruption, oppression, unnecessary deaths, and overall human well-being, this is by far the best time to be alive in human history.
It’s really not even close.
For those that are actually interested:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250107814/ref=cm_sw_r_oth_api_i_ujXXDbDQ5PDWJ
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143111388/ref=cm_sw_r_oth_api_i_0nXXDbKSSRGA7
You’re not wrong. Even in developing countries it’s better than at any time in history. Check out the book Factfullness if you like to read. It’s pretty amazing.
That came from data pulled off OkCupid and you can read more about this and other findings in Dataclysm, which was written by OkCupid founder Christian Rudder. It's actually a very interesting read and it covers trends in behavior beyond just that which applies to dating or attractiveness.
It's worth noting that the same data showed that a vast majority of men find women most attractive between the ages of 18 - 23 or so whereas women were pretty consistently attracted to men with a few years of their own age. There are also a lot of variables that affect what metric they're using to gauge "attractiveness" so I would take that figure with a grain of salt.
A large percentage of men don't even put much effort into their baseline appearance, either because they don't want to, don't have to, or don't think to. If we're talking about looks and looks alone, then I'm not entirely surprised. Maybe it's not 80%, but if you're comparing one group of people who have been conditioned to put a little extra effort into their appearance, to another that hasn't, or has even been discouraged from doing so, then I could see why perceptions of attractiveness would skew in one direction more than the other.
Basically, don't take a line from an OkCupid blog to heart.
> "Collectively, the world is more stressed, worried, sad and in pain today than we've ever seen it,"
I would contend that this statement from the article is contentious. Was the world less stressed during the major wars that have plagued it? What about the cold war?
Here are multiple counterexamples of things going better: https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250107814
Scroll down and have a look at the graphs
Lastly, this is a short time-span. Movement upwards could simply be regression toward/away from the mean
If you want to understand the thinking behind this, I highly recommend reading the book that Bill Gates just gifted to every person graduating college this year: Factfulness https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250107814
In fact, I recommend reading it anyway, if for no other reason than for the good tips on improving your critical thinking skills.
The attraction graphs look very similar to ones that I saw in a book I read recently -- Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves. It's written by the co-founder of OkCupid, so loads of the data came directly from there. That's what the OP graphs look like to me. You can use the "look inside" feature and search for "attraction"; page 47 has one of the graphs I'm referring to.
I try to shut off the hysterics as much as possible. NEVER watch tv news and especially none of the dedicated news channels.
Also read and think about things like this book.
https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Better/dp/1250107814/
> make his claims but not provide souce code showing how a bias could be hidden in an algorithm without it being immediately obvious to many coders at google
Because with machine learning and AI, even the developers don't understand how the decisions are made.
You should read Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil, which goes into how biased training data, programmers, etc can result in biased algorithms. It's pretty fascinating.
A lot are clearly copy and pasted. If it doesn't reference or ask about something in my profile, I don't bother responding.
If you're interested in this sort of thing, you should read Dataclysm.
I had a highschool math teacher who always told us to be warry of statistics and even had a book he shared.
How to Lie with Statistics https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393310728/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_mfP4DbK80WD65
> My boss is an understanding person and knows that we're stressed, but the larger organization seems uninterested in reorganizing to lessen our burden.
That's all you really need to know. You expressed a concern about the health of the team(s), and the broader org said "no, this is fine". They can live with all the benefits and consequences that come with that decision. All you need to know is whether or not you can live with all the benefits and consequences of that decision.
> Are most jobs like this?
I would say no, but practices that promote burnout aren't exactly uncommon -- toil is one example.
It's not uncommon for organizational practices/structures to foster high levels of burnout, but most orgs who give a shit will tend to fix those problems because turnover tends to be more expensive than simply fixing the problems that cause the turnover. Kinda sorta depends on the business's priorities, though. Showing the value of strategic investment in technical resources is ... difficult at times. I like the approach taken by Accelerate -- numbers and figures are what your manager needs to be focusing on, though it is hard to do when you're drowning already and engagement from leadership is low to non-existent anyway.
> Nei selvfølgelig ikke. Og det er jo fordi det er politikken til folk som Obama-Biden og forgjengerne deres helt tilbake til Reagan som er grunnen til at en karakter som Trump i det hele tatt kom på banen og vant valget.
Så det at autoritære, populistiske politikere på høyresiden er på fremmarsj over hele verden, det er tilfeldig? Det er Demokratene sin feil?
>Et av endeløse problemene for liberalere som støtter den uendelige akselerasjonen til den globale teknokratiske kapitalismen er at jo raskere en økonomi endrer seg jo større del av befolkningen er det som blir kastet på dynga
Dette er fundamental feil. Det er lavere fattighet på verdensbasis i dag enn det noen gang har vært før. Globaliseringen har, uten sammenligning, gjort verden (både lokalt og verdensomspennende) bedre.
>de menneskene som blir kastet på dynga har dessverre for liberalerne fortsatt stemmerett.
Det er ingen som blir kastet på dynga. Du hadde hatt godt av å lese Hans Roslings bok <em>Factfulness</em>, det er mye du kan lære der.
Rosling's last book, Factfulness, tackles 10 common myths (or urban legends, if you wish) concerning the state of the world and how it is majorly improving, directly countering the majority view in the developed world.
Buy it at Amazon or Bookdepository (with free shipping worldwide).
Das kannst Du in einem Architekten Plan machen aber in einer Infografik hat das nichts verloren, wenn der Platz nicht reicht muss man eben eine andere Darstellungsform finden. Das weiss auch jeder Grafiker, ansonsten mal bei Edward Tufte oder anderen nachlesen:
https://www.amazon.de/Visual-Display-Quantitative-Information-Edward/dp/0961392142
Lähteeksi on mainittu Hans Roslingin tuore kirja Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
People have always been treated like shit, though. As I understand it, what's changed is our exposure. With 24/7 media/internet, we're just seeing things we wouldn't have seen before. They were still happening before. We just didn't see them. It's also much easier to focus on specific types of discourse and information and that can make it seem like such information is increasing in amount. It's not. We're just exposing ourselves to more of it. If I started following r/Malta, it'd be tempting in a couple months to slide into the thinking that shit is "suddenly" heading south there. All the bad stories. All the abuses. In reality, it was always there because people are dicks regardless. Collectively, from what I understand, though, things are overall getting better in a lot of ways. I don't know how much bias is in it, but someone recommended the book Factfulness the other day. Haven't ordered it yet, but I'm going to because personally I'd like a little positivity in my geopolitical forecasts for once.
If every republican read how to lie with statistics -Darrell Huff (1954) Fox viewership would drop. Hell, Democrats or anyone for that matter should read this. It makes trusting a news source a lot harder when you immediately pick out devious tricks to engineer partial truths.
One of the best books I ever read was "How to Lie With Statistics". Although the examples are dated, the basics are still very valid.
Estaba Leyendo Factfulness, y en verdad doy gracias a personas como el Doctor Monckeberg que lograron con su trabajo erradicar la desnutrición, combatir la falta de estimulación a edades tempranas, y en general disminuir la mortalidad infantil. También por impulsar un programa de salud que estuviera enfocado a suplir las necesidades de salud básicas más inmediatas de la población, además del programa integro para madres, lactantes, niños.
En las propias palabras del Doctor: Es el avance más trascendente en la historia de este país.
I agree with the overall point of learning and continuous improvement, but I think a lot of common sense and research indicates that Mean Time to Restore is a very important metric to measure and improve. And if I had to choose, I would definitely pick Mean Time to Restore over Mean Time to Retrospective. If you can measure both, great.
As an example, Time to Restore is one of four metrics included in Software Delivery and Operational Performance which predicts organizational performance, as shown in the State of DevOps reports and the related Accelerate book.
It's not an oxymoron. You can have two sets of true facts about a situation, which depending on which things are emphasized, gives you an entirely separate narrative of how things are going.
One could say, for instance, "Murders in Chicago are up 1200% this year! Highest number of deaths on record!" And that would be one set of facts.
One could also say, "There were 12 murders in Chicago, compared to 1 last year. The 10 year average is about 10 murders per year, so this isn't outside of the expected range of deaths. Also, it's a city of 3 million, so this is in fact a fairly low amount of murders on a per capita basis."
Those are two sets of facts reporting on the same incident, both true but you can tell they paint entirely different narratives about how to feel about the situation.
What this shows is that you cannot simply say, "Well, just report the facts, and everything else will work itself out." There is a meta element to this, where you choose which things to emphasize, and which to de-emphasize, and by this choice of emphasis you inevitably are shaping the way things are understood, because humans understand events not by a bulleted list of facts, but as a narrative, a story.
These things you have to take into consideration when you're talking about media and the spread of information, especially political information.
For more fun like this, check out How to Lie with Statistics.
Did it once. Won't do it again unless there is a purely paper benefit (ex right now I can't visit my boyfriend's family in France with a US passport and COVID. I could if we were married). I'd revisit the idea if I had kids but here's what changed my mind...
I realized its something you need to do if your country isn't at income level 4 (according to factfulness) where your population is still growing and you need community to help provide basic needs.
However, once your country is rich enough, then babies have lower infant mortality rates. Everyone (even religious people) reproduce less. Population growth stops. Everyone has access to things that support the first 2 steps in Maslow's heriarchy of needs (shelter, healthcare, food, parental leave). All of a sudden you realize you don't need the marriage to help you or your kids survival.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250107814/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_25qxFbNDQ8XRM
It's not a big deal to be lazy about getting directions to the bank. Algorithms are genuinely dangerous right now, already, because people feed poorly curated data into an equation that's almost entirely unrelated to what the powerful people pretend it's doing, and then nobody bothers to check whether it's getting good results until a lot of lives are ruined by things ranging from being denied loans to getting accidentally put on the no-fly list to being constantly tailed by police with a grudge because the math says red cars in your zipcode are all criminals.
Read a book by Hans Rosling called Factfulness
That's what's shown on the news, because that's what news do, i.e. they're not going to report "Here we are at a stable country with no war in 100 years."
In most metrics that you can measure we're doing very well in the world.
You can absolutely go faster. Not by saying "go faster," but there are practices and organizational techniques that make quantifiable differences in how fast you can deliver software. A lot of it's stuff we've already heard of: good version control practices, CI/CD, test automation, rapid feedback cycles, limiting work in progress, good communication, keeping processes lightweight, etc. There's even a research-backed book that delves into this.
Possibly the worst set of graphs I've ever seen
​
https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728
This book is a amazing: Discovering Statistics Using R by Andy Field
If you are doing self-study, it is easy to lose momentum. This book is hilarious, personal, and transcends the textbook genre.
THIS! Here's the link on Amazon
with you. He’s great, and “underachieving” in the tournament is really this:
edit: also, thanks for McKoy. Most UNC fans don’t realize what a contributor he’s going to be.