don’t be an accelerant

So this is deeply related to the post yesterday, but it reflects on the online version of things. It’s complex and so I have to write at length, so if you don’t feel like reading a couple thousand words, please exercise your privilege not to read it. As with my post yesterday, I want to take a […]

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I’m still fresh out of ideas

So, to state the obvious: Jon Chait is a jerk who somehow manages to be both condescending and wounded in his piece on political correctness. He gets the basic nature of language policing wrong, and his solutions are wrong, and he’s a centrist Democrat scold who is just as eager to shut people out of […]

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listen to Adolph Reed

Here’s a really interesting conversation on the Remix with Dr. James Peterson with Dr. Adolph Reed, one of the most prescient, brilliant commentators on left-wing politics, race, and activism. I highly recommend you listen to it; it’s less than a half hour. I don’t agree with Dr. Reed on everything. In particular, I’m much less […]

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Winograd’s dilemma

Via the Dish, I read this hype-ridden piece on the “astonishing” progress of Google Translate, and this far more sober piece by Lance Ulanoff. Ulanoff writes, “Initially… the translation was perfect, but when I started to speak in longer sentences, it basically fell apart and got a lot of it wrong. As I tested with others […]

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looks like The Atlantic needs to print a retraction

The Atlantic recently printed a sensationalistic story about the perceived difficulty for even the highest-achieving poor minority students to get into the City University of New York system. The article reflected on a claimed general trend but focused significantly on an individual student. CUNY objected to some of the article’s claims, and a minor correction was […]

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