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Comment But our brand of dog food tastes bad! (Score 1) 32

"The Emmy Awards, or Emmys, are an extensive range of awards for artistic and technical merit for the television industry."(Emphasis mine).

Wow. Nothing screams confidence quite like platform-X needing to play its own awards show on platform-Y just to get enough eyes to make it worth the effort. So cooked the smoke detector battery already went dead.

"None of y'all watch any of what we're going to talk about tonight, but hey, we have a second-rate comedian hosting, and maybe a band or two if they can get rides from the nursing home! And, uh, one of the regu... uh... recurring Seinfeld cast is in the audience tonight! Your parents couldn't get enough of it!"

Comment Re:More uncanny, worse agents, allocated less (Score 1) 156

Yeah, it's not a good study. If nothing else (and there is much else) the sample size is too small.

OTOH, I find it difficult to understand why so many people seem to think it's "obviously wrong", when I would have predicted that result from a good study. People tend to be unreasonably biased, and not just about sex. There've been studies where two groups of people were divided at random. Those who ended up in each group tended to prefer their group over the other, even though the group didn't exist outside of the study. (I say that, but I don't know for sure that the folks didn't maintain their groups after the study was over...but it was a pretty short study.)

Comment Re:Figure 4: Our Data is Crap (Score 1) 156

That's a difference, it's just not a significant difference. It might well justify a larger study with more careful controls. But the result they produced is what I would have guessed, so I'm a bit biased.

Still, look at any sports team match. People tend to favor one side over the other for reasons that have nothing to do with skill.

Comment Re:Probably due to methodical errors (Score 1) 156

I'm sure that's happening. I'm also sure it's only a part of the story. Some of the other posts have raised other contributory issues, like image quality. And actually I think your point is a valid example of a more general trend, i.e. people tend to favor those who are more socially approved. The reasons for the social approval are nearly irrelevant, but different groups within society will use different measures. (E.g. Catholics will tend to approve of different people than Unitarians, even if they adopt the same proposals.) Think of how some people rate their favorites sports team vs. the way they rate the other side.

Comment Re:you cant be serious. (Score 1) 156

The study *is* flawed. The sample size is too small, and I doubt that the people tested replicate the world population average.

But it *is* "food for thought", and the result is the one I would have expected. People *do* tend to be biased in favor of the socially more approved of groups. (You don't need a study to prove that. Just read either the news or history, especially the history of a conflict.)

Comment Re:Probably due to methodical errors (Score 1) 156

NGL, I'm definitely liberal-leaning, yet I sincerely believed the "pay gap" was 99% explained by reproductive status and a general willingness to negotiate more aggressively for better pay (or similarly, willingness to apply for more aspirational jobs beyond the applicant's qualifications and experience level)>

The former is clearly protected under Title VII, but that doesn't change the physical reality of someone who left the workforce for five years having five years' less experience than their peers. The latter is a much harder social indoctrination (or maybe just a testosterone) problem.

This new study though... Holy shit, that's pretty black-and-white! Barring some non-obvious methodological issues, there's nothing here to argue with. We now have concrete data that even the label "male" or "female" applied to a genderless construct adversely affects perceived value.

Comment Re:Who cares? (Score 1) 269

Finally, a sane voice among the noise! The arguments about "which" time we keep are slowly killing us all from inaction year after year after year. "Perfect is the enemy of good".

I seriously couldn't care less if we go to permanent standard time, permanent DST, or hell, just ditch time zones altogether and go to permanent global UTC. It makes no difference whatsoever whether we wake up at 6am EST, 7am EDT, or 11am UTC, they're all the same damned thing from a biological perspective.

The only approach that isn't perfectly fine is resetting the clocks multiple times each year because some morons can't stand the idea of waking up at "2:30am" even though that's still roughly their local dawn.

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