Researchers develop a method of detecting sarcasm in tweets that is better than humans at correctly identifying if a tweet is sarcastic.

They also tested it against humans, using volunteers recruited through the crowdsourcing site Mechanical Turk. They found it was better than the humans at spotting sarcasm and other emotions on Twitter. It was 82 percent accurate at identifying sarcasm correctly, compared with an average score of 76 percent for the human volunteers.

Suppose I wanted to convince you that men and women had physically identical bodies. I run studies on things like number of arms, number of kidneys, size of the pancreas, caliber of the aorta, whethr the brain is in the head or the chest, et cetera. 90% of these come back positive – in fact, the only ones that don’t are the ones like “breast size” or “number of penises”. I conclude that men and women are mostly physically similar. I can even make a statistic like “men and women are physically identical in 78% of traits”.

Just kidding.

By now, you've probably heard about that Google employee who wrote a memo about gender diversity measures at Google.

The customary liberal response (which I admit is also my knee-jerk response despite me not really identifying as a liberal) is that gender diversity measures are good and right because of reasons X, Y, and Z.

Here, Scott Alexander, (one of the best writers on the internet today) explains why liberals are wrong-ish about this whole subject.

I think he's swung me into his camp.

Trump: I'm bringing back the horse stable cleaning jobs!

Trump: I'm bringing back the cow hide tanner jobs!

Trump: I'm bringing back the leech collector jobs!

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Why are we wanting coal jobs back again?

(because votes, not because its an actual good idea)

448 million social media posts per year by government employees. Intriguingly, they don't engage with critics of the government:

In contrast to prior claims, we show that the Chinese regime’s strategy is to avoid arguing with skeptics of the party and the government, and to not even discuss controversial issues. We infer that the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to regularly distract the public and change the subject, as most of the these posts involve cheerleading for China, the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, or other symbols of the regime.

Instead of a trillion dollars in war costs and thousands to millions dead, how about giving NK leadership (not the government, the actual people) $500 billion to step-aside/reunite-with-SK/be-not-crazy?

Preliminary musing on side effects:
Downsides: Incentive for future crazy leaders.
Upside: People don't die.

The internet has so ruined me so that I basically don't believe anything with a headline like this article. However, this seems to be actual research and not something stupid like you'd see passed around on Facebook.