Posting a hodgepodge of links after a rather wonderful time hiking and camping, solving puzzles, and the semester starting all together too soon for my taste.
[Trigger warning] More details on Walter Lewin’s actions.
The unbearable maleness of Wikipedia.
Hanna Wallach’s talk at the NIPS Workshop on fairness.
Reframing Science’s Diversity Challenge by trying to move beyond the pipeline metaphor.
An essay by Daniel Solove on privacy (I’d recommend reading his books too but this is shorter). He takes on the “nothing to hide” argument against privacy.
I don’t like IPAs that much, but this lawsuit about lettering seems like a big deal for the craft beer movement.
I’ve always been a little skeptical of Humans of New York, but never was sure why. I think this critique has something to it. Not sure I fully agree but it does capture some of my discomfort.
Judith Butler gave a nice interview where she talks a bit about why “All Lives Matter,” while true, is not an appropriate rhetorical strategy: “If we jump too quickly to the universal formulation, ‘all lives matter,’ then we miss the fact that black people have not yet been included in the idea of ‘all lives.’ That said, it is true that all lives matter (we can then debate about when life begins or ends). But to make that universal formulation concrete, to make that into a living formulation, one that truly extends to all people, we have to foreground those lives that are not mattering now, to mark that exclusion, and militate against it.”
A nice essay on morality and progress with respect to Silicon Valley. Techno-utopianism running amok leads to bad results: “Silicon Valley’s amorality problem arises from the implicit and explicit narrative of progress companies use for marketing and that people use to find meaning in their work. By accepting this narrative of progress uncritically, imagining that technological change equals historic human betterment, many in Silicon Valley excuse themselves from moral reflection.”
An Ergodic Walk 