Algorithms for horny middle aged men

Facebook has been sending me friend suggestions for lots of 20 something women.  It also sends me friend suggestions for other types of people, but I noticed many months ago that this demographic made up a big chunk of my suggestions so I paid close attention to see if it continued.  After monitoring it for a half year or so I can safely say that 75% of my friend suggestions are adult women much younger than me.  A few were sex workers or scammers, but the majority of them were real people with one or two friends in common with me.  

Facebook's motivation for doing this seems obvious; get the middle aged straight guy to click on profiles of young women he wants to have sex with and increase engagement metrics.  However, that might be me leaping to conclusions.  Maybe Facebook just sends young women to everyone in friend suggestions... I don't know.

If my initial assumption holds true, then it is a sad thing indeed.  Getting messaged and friended by some older man who just wants sex is not something younger women on social media want or need.  They can get an infinite supply of that trivially, if they are interested - they can even get paid.  It seems like Facebook is trying to get me to engage more by encouraging crappy behaviour.

However, I would like to be sure that this is what is happening.  The four things that leap out to me that may be relevant are age, gender, sexual orientation, and relationship style.  Is this limited to men, middle aged people, straight people, or polyamorous people?  Perhaps some combination of all of the above.  Certainly Facebook knows I am in a relationship with a woman who is nine years younger than me as well as my spouse and perhaps that influences the algorithm's choices.

I would appreciate anyone replying here or on Facebook with your experiences in this.  Ideally include age, gender, orientation, and polyamorous or not, but if you don't want to include any of that just knowing if you have similar experiences to me would be useful.

I must find out the nature of our code overlords, and what they want they think of me.

Facts, but not all the facts

A few weeks ago I put out a call on Facebook for books I should read.  I got a big stack of them from the library and I am tearing through them.  Yesterday I wrote a post about Factfulness, where I talked about what a good book it is.  Most of the books on my list will be much the same I am sure.  At the moment I am planning on writing a post about each of them, but we will see if that actually happens.

There is one book in that recommendation list that is not going to get a "This book is great!" post.  It is called Black Rednecks and White Liberals.  The blurb on the back is from someone whose claim to fame is "Commentator on Fox News".  Between the title and that blurb source you can guess that it is written to push a right wing agenda, and you would be right.

However, while I could just deride the book as a bunch of evil nonsense, that wouldn't be doing it justice.  It is a classic example of facts carefully chosen and presented to create a specific conclusion.  The conclusion the author is trying to lead you to is that the struggles of black people in the US today are almost entirely their own fault because of their culture.  He has done a huge amount of research in support of this thesis, and as far as I can tell his facts are accurate.  The trouble with the book is not that it lies, but rather that it doesn't tell you the whole truth.

If you look at the edges of right vs. left debate on racism you will see two extreme camps.  One side is dedicated to the idea that racism is over and that any problems that black people have now are their own fault.  The other side contends that racism is the only thing, and if opportunity were equal that black people would succeed just as much as anyone else because their culture has nothing to do with their success or lack thereof.

Both extreme positions are wrong.  Culture matters in success of groups - just look at the incredible dominance of Asian students in math and science.  That isn't genetic, it is a consequence of culture.

Racism also matters, and black people are discriminated against in a thousand ways, large and small.

The author contends that groups throughout history who have venerated learning, hard work, saving, and study tend to become more successful generation by generation.  He also contends that black culture in the US has values that impugne education and support a spendthrift lifestyle.  This is a trend, not universal, of course, but I think he is correct in these assertions.  Just like the trend of Asian parents pushing their kids to do more math isn't true for all, so are these generalizations about black people only true statistically.

Clearly spending recklessly and despising education and study are not black only things.  I know plenty of white people who spend rather than save, and when I was young I was on the wrong end of 'learning is for losers' by plenty of white kids.  In fact the author suggests that these things are common among redneck cultures regardless of race, and has theories that seem plausible about the American South having these traits in abudance among the white population during the times of slavery in the US.  Seeing the way right wing folks talk about scientists and academics it is obvious this is still alive and well today.

The trouble is that people seize on that simple admission that culture matters, and immediately leap to the conclusion that racism is over.  This is nonsense, but I have seen it in my personal life when someone said "There isn't any racism anymore except anti white racism, black people's problems are all just black culture." and pointed me to this book as proof.

One of the core elements of the book is the author telling us of various teaching methods and programs that produced black graduates that had high success rates in employment and earnings.  He waxes poetic about how if you just teach black people to speak properly, save and invest wisely, and value education, they will suddenly be more successful.

Note the presence of the word 'properly' in that last sentence.  What does he mean by speaking properly?  He doesn't define it.  

He means "like a rich white person who graduated from Harvard".

So yeah, if you teach black kids to speak like a rich white guy from Harvard, they will make more money.  But he completely fails to ask why that is, and if the best thing for society is to simply make black people act like white people.  Is that the goal of our educational system?  To force children to emulate the richest and most powerful so they can get jobs?

No, it is not.  If black people not speaking like rich whites from Harvard is preventing them getting jobs, maybe we ought to change that fact directly, rather than simply accepting it and trying to change black people!

(I do think that a cultural norm of supporting and encouraging study and learning is objectively good though, both for those in that culture and those outside it.)

If some black kids tell other black kids to stop studying because hitting the books is just acting white, then that will have negative effects on their long term educational and job prospects.  However, there is absolutely nothing I can do about that.  What I can do is try to push for a society that doesn't disciminate against those black kids so they at least have equal opportunity from outside their own culture.  That is something I can actively work on, so I will.  Assigning blame isn't going to help anyone, no matter who the blame gets assigned to.  All I can do is try to fix the thing that is within my power to affect, so I will do that.

I normally close with a recommendation to read the book I am reviewing.  I won't give that here.  There are some parts of the book that aren't about black culture at all that are interesting and informative, and even if you totally disagree with the author's conclusions like I do, there are a lot of facts you might find useful.  I view it much like my reading of the Bible years ago - I am glad to have these facts in my head now, because it will make me much better at refuting the arguments of people I disagree with.  I read the Bible in part to better argue with religious people, and I read this book to better argue with racist people.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals has plenty of facts.  Unfortunately, it is light on truth.

Facts don't care about your feelings

I just finished reading the book Factfulness.  It is a book that constantly repeats things I have been yelling about for years to anyone who will listen, so it should be no surprise that I loved it.  The book leads off with 12 questions about the world, mostly relating to human wellbeing and trends.  All questions have 3 answers, A, B, C and the average person gets 2 correct.

You read that right.  Guessing at random would give you 4 correct, but the average person is significantly worse than random guessing.  The author of the book talks about how in all his years administering these questions to huge numbers of people one person ever got 11 correct, and nobody got 12.

I got 11 correct, and I definitely should have got 12, but I rushed through.  That isn't because I am smarter than everyone else, but because the author of the book was trying to make a point, showing how badly humans do on specific sorts of knowledge, and that is a specific sort of knowledge I focus on.

The idea behind the book is that we are terrible at interpreting certain sorts of data and the information we are exposed to predisposes us to come to incorrect conclusions.  The book clarifies a lot of important facts that we usually get wrong, and provides techniques for preventing yourself from reaching those incorrect conclusions in future.  It is a combination of science, sociology, and psychology.  Through reading it we learn about what scientific research and facts tell us about the human world, why we get it wrong, and how we can make our brains be better at this sort of thing.

The key takeaway is that a lot of things are getting better.  For example, I have gotten into a few heated discussions about pollution where people tried to convince me that pollution is getting worse everywhere.  I brought up air quality in Toronto, and these people stated that it is getting worse every year.  I pointed out that we can falsify this both anecdotally and scientifically - just think about the smog pouring out of car tailpipes in decades past, and look at car tailpipes today.  Or, you know, you can just look up the numbers and see that air quality in Toronto has been constantly improving ever since we were able to measure it.

Lots of things are like this.  People see disasters on the news or charities begging for help with images of catastrophe and fail to realize that while individual problems exist, the global trend for nearly all measures of human well being is constantly improving.  We miss the forest for the trees.

Of course that doesn't mean we should rest on our laurels!  Both the author and I are convinced that we should do more for environmental causes and assisting those less fortunate in the world, but we should do that while being aware of the successes we have had.  "We have a lot more to do" can go along with "Many things are improving rapidly" without contradiction.

Everyone should read this book.  If all you get from it is a new understanding of global trends it will be worth it, but you can get so much more.  It can give you tools to be a better activist, a better environmentalist, and a better thinker.

Wrong measurements

Pinkie Pie has been talking about going back to school in the fall.  She is eager to try this out, largely because she wants to spend time with her friends.  She has enjoyed a great many books and shows about high school in her time, and I wonder if she has the wrong idea about what high school entails.

I have grave doubts.  Some of those doubts surround her ability to cope with high school and the workload, as her mental health struggles have made it extremely difficult for her to do the education we are doing at home, and I can't see how she could cope with a full courseload.

My other doubts surround the way school operates in general, particularly the way grades work.  I found a youtube video talking about many of the problems with grades and educational structures and it resonated strongly with me.

The youtuber in question leads off with a story about a kid who gets straight As but who is crushed by the school system because it encourages them to focus entirely on grades instead of learning and inquiry.  That is a negative consequence of our system to be sure, but kids that get straight As but are bored aren't the biggest trouble with the system.  The kids that can't cope with the structure and end up falling through the cracks are much more of a concern.

Still, the main point that grading takes over everything certainly stands.  We are stuck in a situation where parents and governments demand to have education measured.  It is extremely difficult to measure learning, so we rely on test scores as a stand in.  As is so often the case, we end up building the whole system to maximize our results on the metrics we made up, so we end up trying to raise test scores instead of trying to teach more effectively.

Some people will of course argue that we need test scores for university admissions.  There are schools that don't give marks and mature students that don't have standard marks and we make that work, so I don't think we need marks at all.  Still, if we had a bunch of tests for university admission at the end of grade 12 I would be fine with it.  However, numeric marks for younger kids is just a plague with no redeeming value.

We don't need to carefully rank children's learning.  We need to spend our time teaching them more, not working on giving them a number that isn't useful.

All this makes me not want to send Pinkie Pie to high school at all.  Sure, there are lots of things she will learn, but she will also spend way too much time grinding out pointless crap just so the high school can give her a number at the end.  I don't need any damn numbers, and neither does she.  She needs to learn, and to feel like the things she is doing are relevant.

Just like I did in high school, Pinkie Pie sees marks as pointless, and that will sour the entire experience.

Schools have been designed as a training ground for obedient cogs, setting them up to take their place in the machine.  Education is part of the mandate, but the structure is primarily designed to keep them under control and rigidly evaluated.  We are slowly changing this over time, and Ontario is gradually making progress, but it is at a glacial pace.

This shouldn't be taken as an attack on teachers - naturally, there are terrible teachers, but the vast majority I have encountered in my life or through Pinkie Pie have been dedicated to education and wished they could stop wasting so much time on standardized tests and marking.  Unfortunately when you work within the system, there is only so much you can do.

We need a huge rethink of what schools are for.  Unfortunately it will come too late for Pinkie Pie in any case, but if we want a society of creative problem solvers we need to stop spending their entire childhood telling them the thing we want from them is precise regurgitation of particular facts on one particular day.

I don't want a boss, employee, friend, or citizen to be ranked by their ability to score highly on a test, so let's remove that nonsense from our schools.

Am I a criminal?

Today I got in another altercation with religious zealots on the streetcorner.  It irritates me when they stand there handing out literature, but I don't do anything about that.  Today though they ratcheted up the annoyance by setting up a loudspeaker and blasting their "Repent you are going to hell" schtick at extremely high volume.  It was so loud that even in my condo 12 floors up and a block away it was unavoidable.  They had it going for a couple hours and I gradually got more and more angry.  Hundreds or maybe even thousands of people are spending their whole day listening to this pounding noise with its wretched message, and I am not okay with that.

This sort of thing is tricky to navigate because Wendy and I see it so differently.  She hates when religious folks make noise like this, but the idea of doing something about it directly leaves her anxious and upset.  I talked about going down there and yelling at the proselytizers, and this left her deeply worried.  I am sure it was partly social anxiety, but she was also worried one of them would shoot me or something.

I react in the opposite way.  I despise letting jerks crap all over everybody and not doing something out of fear.  I got more worked up as time went by and finally hit a point where I couldn't just sit anymore.  It was time to go get in a fight.

Before I arrived at the point of conflict though I had to make a decision.  Would I ask for change, or demand it?  Asking isn't going to get me in trouble, but it also won't do anything.  They will tell me that they are saving souls or some bullshit and keep on with their noise.  If I demand change though then I have to be ready to have my bluff called.  What do I do when they tell me to go to hell?

The fundamental question is this:  Am I willing to grab their loudspeaker and smash it to pieces if they refuse to turn it off?  Am I willing to commit a crime in order to get some jerks to stop polluting the public space?  Am I a vigilante?

I have to know the answer before I go in.  They don't necessarily know if I am bluffing, but I have to know.  I don't want a short stint in jail, but I also don't want to live in a society where we are so terrified of random assholes that we let them lower everyone else's quality of life.

Realistically of course if I grab a loudspeaker, smash it on the ground, and run, the chance of facing any consequences at all are remote.

I decided I was willing to take the risk.  I would prefer to do the smallest dollar amount of damage possible because that mitigates my risk so I would rely on angry yelling at first, and then would hope to steal their cables or something to render the loudspeaker inoperable.  If the loudspeaker needed smashing though, I was ready to smash it.

I stalked towards them, filled with rage, ready to create a tremendous scene, and realized that the noise had stopped.  A cop was standing beside the religious people talking to them, and had clearly made them turn off the loudspeaker.

I stalked up next to them, stood there staring death at the religious guy, and got a glance from the cop that said "Oh crap, another angry person to death with, maybe if I don't meet his gaze he will go away."  

I did not go away.

I waited a minute and then went on an angry rant about how everyone in their homes around here can hear this junk and have been putting up with it all afternoon.  The cop politely told me it was under control.

The level of tension dropped.  The cop went off to talk to another religous person and the leader and I started talking, but the stakes of this conversation were extremely low.  There is a cop 4 meters away.  We can yell at each other, but we both know neither of us is going to take a swing at the other.  Violence will not ensue.  If the cop hadn't been there though, the encounter might go entirely differently.  At that point we might be hesitant to threaten each other because the other person might actually turn to violence, so anyone escalating would have to worry about personal safety.  As it was though we were free to scream at each other knowing that it wouldn't go further than that.

So we screamed at each other.

Dude:  I *had* to make the volume super loud, because of the construction nearby.

Me:  You *chose* to make it so loud that it was a huge detriment to everyone within a block, this wasn't something that happened to you, this was you being an asshole.

Dude:  Hah!  I am trying to save you and bring you into the arms of Jesus.  What were you gonna do about it anyway?

Me:  If I hear that crap again, I am going to come down here, grab your loudspeaker, and chuck it into one of the construction holes where it will smash to pieces.

Dude:  You don't scare me, with all your big muscles! I was in prison! (Actual quote, I swear.) 

Me:  I am not trying to scare you, you moron.  I am *telling* you that if that speaker goes on again, I will destroy it.

Dude:  You are just made of meat, and you will stand before Jesus in judgement.

Me:  Really?  Are you going to threaten me with the wrath of Odin?  How about Zeus?  Or Nanabijou?  Maybe the Easter Bunny?  Your best friend invisible space wizard is a *myth*.

Dude:  You will go to hell!  Repent!

I didn't repent.

Thankfully, through some combination of serious legal threats from the police and threats of vigilante property destruction the loudspeaker has remained silent.  I feel so much better, sitting in my kitchen *not* hearing fire and brimstone coming from the streetcorner.

I should do this more often, it feels great.

Heavy

A few months ago I looked at myself and realized that I had put on some weight over the course of the pandemic.  I had noticed a few times that I had a bigger tummy than before, and finally it was undeniable - this was no longer a 'drank a lot of water' or 'big dinner' tummy, but long term weight gain.  Upon realizing this, it was obvious why.  I had spent many months sitting in my chair, not getting proper exercise.  I was still doing all my weight training but I wasn't doing any walking except to go to the grocery store.

I was also getting high late at night and snacking on all the things way too often.  The pandemic has led to me being frustrated and lonely, not able to do the things I am used to doing that bring me so much joy.  My DnD games were on hiatus, my travels for gaming conventions were all cancelled, board game nights not allowed, and even visiting The Flautist was off the table.  That left me feeling blue, and pot and snacks helped dull the pain and upset.

My response was quick.  I needed to get more active and stop piling junk into my body.  I added on 30 minutes of walking every day and cut out most of the late night snacking.  This was good in other ways too, because quite frankly I didn't need that food and the walks gave Wendy and I time together and improved my mental health on its own, entirely separate from body shape or size.

I am one of those lucky people whose hunger effectively regulates my weight.  If I just eat when I am hungry and eat healthy food my body maintains a weight I am happy about.  I don't have to starve myself to get to a good weight, I just have to stop messing with my appetite with drugs.

Over the past 2.5 months my weight has dropped back closer to where it was pre pandemic.  Before I began weightlifting I was at 175 pounds, and over the last five years I added on 30 pounds of muscle to sit at 205.  In March of this year I was up to around 215, and now I have dropped back down to 210.  This got me thinking a lot about how I think about my body and how society thinks about fat.

The most absurd thing is the way BMI scores me.  For most of my life I was extremely skinny and yet I scored right in the normal range for BMI.  The system takes your height into account, but it does it so badly that everyone who is tall is shifted heavily towards the overweight side of the spectrum.  Right now I am officially overweight by BMI, which is absurd.  I am a skinny guy with a bunch of extra muscle and five pounds of extra fat, there is no possible way I should be considered overweight.  This picture, for reference, is of an officially overweight person.

Yeah.  'Overweight'.  Now it is clear that BMI does not take into account muscle mass.  This makes it a stupid system, but the fact that it takes height into account so badly that tall people of totally normal build are considered overweight is pathetic.  We shouldn't be using this system for medical diagnosis, or anything else.  It is a classic case of measuring what we can easily measure and confusing that for measuring the right thing.

Figuring out a simple system to categorize people's weight isn't easy.  I don't have a replacement system to offer.  (Improving BMI to properly take height into account is easy, and the fact that we haven't done it is an embarassment.)  However, if a system is garbage we shouldn't stick with it just because we don't have an easy alternative.  Sometimes you just have to toss the system out when it is crap.

This did get me thinking about why I so quickly decided to change my lifestyle.  The main thing was I could see that snacking and sitting weren't good for me.  That is true regardless of my weight, and adding in extra walking and fixing my diet are good by all metrics.

However, I can't deny that part of the motivation was that I didn't like the way my tummy looked.  I was thinking to myself "Dammit I do 200 pushups, 56 deadlifts, and 56 rows a day.  Shouldn't I have a bloody six pack?"  I have never had a six pack, and at this point I am never going to.  My extra bit of belly still bothered me though, and it shouldn't.

That 10 exra pounds around my middle is not a health hazard.  Nobody needs a six pack, and in fact getting one is actually hazardous to the health of most people.  Our bodies are made to store some fat!  I looked fine.

But no matter that I have tons of muscle, no matter that I looked fine, my brain still insisted that I absolutely had to change things.  Vanity and desire for status clearly drove my behaviour no matter how much I could use health to justify it.

That is the way our society deals with fat in a nutshell.  We moralize over people's weight, and go on about health hazards, but most of that is just denying the truth that we want to be skinny for status, and we mock heavy people for that same lack of status.

It sucks.

No matter that I know all this, no matter that I don't want to villify fat, I still made a swift and binding decision to change things when I got some of my own.  

A health condition

A few days ago I was getting groceries and had a difficult interaction with a person in the lineup outside the store.  He was an older man who was wearing a mask in a half assed fashion with it loosely covering his mouth but slid down so it no longer covered his nose.  As we stood in line his mask slipped further and further down until it was sitting around his chin.

It is possible that he didn't notice, and this was entirely unconscious, but I am willing to bet a lot of money that the actual explanation isn't "whoops!" but rather "I don't give a shit about covid transmission and masks are annoying, so I will pretend this just happened and I didn't notice".

I politely said to him "Oh, in case you hadn't noticed, your mask appears to have slipped down."  In text that could appear innocuous, but obviously everyone is going to read that as "Put your damn mask on properly fool, I don't want to get covid from you."

He replied by saying that he didn't *have* to have a mask on, because he had a 'medical condition'.  He followed up by snarkily saying that he would put his mask on, just for me.

I found this infuriating.  I am not trying to enforce some sort of arbitrary dress code.  I don't give a shit about the rules!  I care about disease transmission.  This isn't about me trying to make sure everyone does as they are told, it is about me wanting to end this damnable pandemic.  It isn't about whether you *must* wear the mask, it is about doing so because it is your civic duty to protect other people even if you don't care about your own health at all.

I didn't yell all of that at him, much as I wanted to.  He put on his mask, and for the moment it covered all the breathing bits of him.  He got into the store and immediately took his mask off again once he was more than a few meters from me.

Does he actually have a medical condition that makes mask use unsafe for him?  Possible, but I doubt it.  He was wearing and using a mask, but used it only enough to create plausible deniability.  However, his actual medical status doesn't change my situation at all.  I am still pissed about all the people I see putting in the absolute bare minimum amount of effort required to get people off of their backs.  I am pissed about the woman in my building who held a mask five centimeters in front of her face while talking to the concierge in an attempt to pretend she was actually wearing it.  I am grumpy at all the people wandering about the mall with masks hanging half off of their faces, just having it on enough to not get yelled at.

I wish I knew what I should do about these things.  I am a big loud dude - if I get aggressive with people about this stuff, they are likely to do whatever I say.... for just long enough to get out of my presence.  Is it even worth trying to convince selfish jerks to do the right thing if they are only going to do it as long as my gaze is directly on them?

I don't know.  What I do know is watching people who chafe under the restrictions of the pandemic behave in ways that extend the pandemic makes my blood boil.