Daily Bookmarks to GAVNet 02/12/2021

Daily Bookmarks to GAVNet 01/15/2021

Daily Bookmarks to GAVNet 02/01/2021

Daily Bookmarks to GAVNet 01/31/2021

Daily Bookmarks to GAVNet 12/31/2020

@cain_nate My friend Nate Cain and I have worked hundreds of hours with various politicians and legal groups trying to explain the election laws and how they fit together. There are many misperceptions of what happened during this election and what it means.

Simply put, our election laws are an intricate tapestry designed to ensure accuracy and prevent fraud. They work together like parts of a car. But when certain parts fail, the car is just a hunk of scrap iron and plastic. In this case critical parts failed.
2/

You do not have to prove fraud or intent, you just have to show that the election officials were unable to conduct an election that met the law and relevant certification requirements. In this case, the election does not come close to meeting accuracy requirements.
3/

These specifications are found deep in laws like FISMA, HAVA, and state adoptions of EAC guidance. 1 ballot error out of 125,000 or 1 position read error out of 500,000. Just look at the discrepancies between incoming ballot counts and total votes, the system fails.
4/

It is worse in the the swing states in Democrat strongholds but it is bad in many places. You add the apparent losses of ballots through the Mail and error rates in the ‘system’ are staggering. Why do we have these rules? Sure it is to prevent fraud, but......
5/

So, here's my contrarian take on Why Trunk-Based Development Is Great But Probably Won't Work For You. Buckle up, it's a long one.

From time to time I talk about, or boost someone else's discussion of, "classical" continuous integration/trunk-based development/push-to-master/whatever. I do this because I've personally worked like this and I genuinely think it's a marvelous way to write software.

I've also, at this point in my career, failed—a bunch of times!—to bring this technique into practical use on the teams and organizations I've worked with. As a result, while I still do it myself, I don't focus as much on encouraging it in others.

The technoculture that's presently in vogue is what I think of as async/individual—optimize for the individual, performance-manage the individual, decouple the individual from others so they can be their best, most productive, most heroic selves.

This is in contrast to what I think of as sync/team—a culture that leans into interdependence and collaboration. If you've never worked on a team that collaborates very closely every day for months or years on end (and likes it) you've likely not experienced a team like this.

Survivorship Bias 101

History is written by the victors. But if we exclusively focus on these successes, we allow survivorship bias to distort our understanding of the world.

But what is "survivorship bias" and how does it work?

Here's Survivorship Bias 101!

👇👇👇

1/ First, a few definitions.

Survivorship bias is the logical error of concentrating on survivors (successes) and ignoring casualties (failures).

When we do so, we miss the true "base rates" of survival (the actual probability of success) and arrive at flawed conclusions.

2/ When we completely ignore failures, we lose our ability to correctly identify the differences between successes and failures.

Put simply, exclusively focusing on successes may actually inhibit our ability to identify (and replicate) the actions that led to such success.

3/ Cicero wrote on the topic over 2,000 years ago.

An atheist named Diagoras is shown portraits of people who prayed and were saved from death at sea as proof of God's existence.

Diagoras replies, "I see those who were saved, but where are those painted who were shipwrecked?"

4/ Cicero cuts right to the point - we cannot conclude that prayer led to being saved from the sea if we ignore those who prayed and then drowned.

Survivorship bias can lead to a deeply-flawed understanding of cause-and-effect relationships.

Let's look at some examples.

As a scholar who has researched and written quite a bit about the Anabaptists, can we set a few things straight?

1. Baptists are not Anabaptists. Their history is theirs; ours is ours. We have similarities, but we are not them. We honor them by not using them for our purposes.

2. Not all Anabaptists were in Münster, and many if not most Anabaptists at the time were just as appalled as we are by the Münsterites. So please drop the tropes equating all Anabaptists with Münster. Informed and honest scholars are known by their right retelling of history.

3. The same truth applies to the other types of Reformation Radicals. There is a great difference between those who have become known as Evangelical Anabaptists on the one hand and Spiritualists, Rationalists, etc. on the other hand. Respect them as you also wish to be respected.

4. Yes, there were Anabaptists who toyed with various heresies, including Arianism, Socinianism, and Celestial Flesh Christology. But there were also many Anabaptists who affirmed, commented upon, and used the traditional Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, and Athanasian Creed.

And if you want to do the honest research, you can also find a few heretical Roman Catholic Popes and more than a few heretical Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans. and whomever else you want to talk about. Good historical theology doesn’t play favorites; it speaks the truth.

A lot of women get in touch to ask me about #coercivecontrol and come to the conclusion that their partner is controlling, but not abusive enough that they want to leave.

So when is the right time to leave?

A THREAD

Is it when he calls you an ugly bitch the first time?
Or do you wait for him to call you it again?
Or do you wait until he has so completely undermined your sense of self worth that you don’t think you can leave?

Is it when he says that no one will love you like he does?

Or do you wait until he says that no one else COULD love you.

Or that you are unloveable?

Do you leave when he says he likes women to be women?

Or do you wait until he says you are fat and unless you lose weight, he will divorce you?

Do you leave when he pushes you into the wall and then claims he lost control because you made him so jealous?

Or do you wait until you no longer go anywhere, for fear of making him jealous?