The words "seduction community"

Catching up on Penny-Arcade and the associated newsposts brought this to my attention.

I wish it hadn't.

I'm not one to get moralistic about who people choose to have sex with; if some people who met five seconds ago choose to get it on, that's fine with me. It's only if the power dynamics get iffy that my hackles get raised.

The "Seduction Community" is basically selp-help -- with the all of baggage that brings -- where the objective is to form you into a grade A pussy hound, downing women like gazelle on the savannah. Learn to use Neuro-Linguistic Programming for speed seduction! Love Systems will teach you the secret of Same Night Lays!

Press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, a, b for pussy.

If you're unaware, the basic idea of Neuro-Linguistic Programming is to hack language and social cues in order to get people to do what you want. In reality, it's a bunch of pseudo-scientific tosh dressed up in fancy language, more accurately summarized as sales technique.

Picture it if you will: a jolly bunch of travelling salesmen, gathering to share tips, slap each other on the back, and improve their oily craft. Only instead of selling insecure, unassertive people stuff they don't need, they're selling insecure, unassertive people fucks they don't want.

You don't have to be Feminist McRage for that thought to make your blood curdle.

The internet might be a magical place where dreams come true in the form of mpeg files, but before it existed, I didn't have to go to sleep with the knowledge of people coming together all over the world to celebrate and reinforce their pathologies instead of having their delusions ground away by a world filled with people outside their little circlejerk.

1. Sexual Harassment 2. ???? 3. Children!

I have prejudices against Russia. In a way it's only natural; Finland and Russia have had a bit of a rocky history so it's only natural I'd absorb some level of distrust through osmosis. It's not something I'm particularly proud of, and I try to be aware of it and not let it cloud my judgement too much.

I really wish they try to help me out sometimes, y'know? It's got to be a two-way thing if we're going to make this work, and it's just not going to get any better if complete scumfuck things like this continue to leap at me from the headlines.

The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia's history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.

She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

"He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word," she earlier told the court. "I didn't realise at first that he wasn't speaking metaphorically."

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled

What do you have against science, Wired?

I thought we spoke about this before, but you persist with the silliness: "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete"

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

The big target here isn't advertising, though. It's science. The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses. These models, for the most part, are systems visualized in the minds of scientists. The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years.

Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete.

...

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

*sigh*

No. No, it's not. Data without a model *is* just noise. The value of a model is that you can make predictions with it. You can't do that with just data points, you have to connect them in some way. Even if you're only making inferrences from correlation, you're still creating a model. The hypothesis is the model. From it you make predictions, which you test. This is often how things start in a proper scientific investigation. Someone notices an interesting correlation and studies it further. You're just skipping the testing phase, relying on lots of correlation being sufficient instead.

Why do you refuse to learn how science works, Wired magazine? Is it because you fear that too much critical thinking will expose the singularity as a pipe-dream, that you won't get nerd-raptured away?

Come on. We can work through this together, if you'd only tell me why.

What we need more of is science.

What we need less of is people who do not understand how science works.

"The internet is changing the scientific method

If all other fields can go 2.0, incorporating collaboration and social networking, it's about time that science does too.

In the bellwether journal Science this week, a computer scientist argues that many modern problems are resistant to traditional scientific inquiry.

"There is an enormous success story for Science 1.0," Ben Shneiderman, a University of Maryland computer science professor said. "But the Internet is changing both the methods we use and the things we need to study. The challenge for the next 400 years is to understand how trust and empathy work."

In an editorial titled, "Science 2.0," Shneiderman argues that studying the interactions between people will be more important than studying the interactions between particles in bringing scientific solutions to big problems like disaster response, health care and energy sustainability.

Listen, here's how the scientific method works: you gather data, formulate a hypothesis, make predictions from said hypothesis and conduct experiments to verify your predictions. Correct hypothesis if needed, and iterate until solid. That's it! If you fuck with that you're no longer doing science and should be tarred, feathered, whipped and judged eligible to only recieve medical treatment from alternative medicine proponents.

Of course, what Shneiderman seems talking about is changing fields of of study, increasing collaboration and all that jazz, but changing some of the methods scientists use is different from changing the scientific method. This is a distinction the people at wired are either too ignorant to grasp, or too concerned with a sexy headline to let it bother them. Either way, they should get a good clout on the head and be sent to bed without supper.

It's hard out there for a pimp

Which is why they need intructional videos:

This is the definitive rulebook for pimping in Atlanta, by the notorious kings of the street who lay it all out for those who don't know. Charles Floyd Pipkins, aka Sir Charles, and Scooby give the real lowdown on what a pimp is all about.

Presumably containing advice on where to get a hold of a the most outrageous hats, as well as handy tips for slapping a ho around, picking up teenage runaways and the top five ways to hook someone one crack cocaine!