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If you work at the company you have almost certainly signed an agreement not to disclose such information; if you do so, you are violating the agreement. But that isn't insider trading.

If you hold a position of fiduciary responsibility within the company (or gain information from someone who does) that's a different matter. But the analogy there would be hacking into the company to read internal records, not just looking over a fence. in both cases, it's a crime.


Remove them and replace them with...Doritos?

I seem to have touched a nerve.

In my defense, it may have been a stupid joke but it's not as stupid as trying to prevent brain damage by taking cannabinoids at levels known to cause brain damage.


They can’t all be winners, right?

Here. Take my upvotes to balance it out a smidge.


Several decades? Seriously?

Several decades ago, we barely had the internet, rockets were single use only, and smart phones were coming any day now. CRISPR was yet to be named, social media meant movies from Blockbusters or HBO that you watched with friends. GLP-1 was a meh option for diabetics.

I agree with your overall point but...your time frame is way off.


> Your analysis is useless, irrespective of how correct it is.

Generally, knowing the truth is more useful than the alternative.

> There are countries with a freer press that fare better.

That's a non-sequitur if I ever saw squirrel.

> Throwing your hands in the air and saying "it's all pointless, only fools > care about improving things" is detrimental to fixing this mess.

No one said that.


Nothing compared to what the misuse of statistics to give bunk a veneer of mathy authority has done though.

Ah yes and the alternative of just engaging in magical thinking is working out so well.

That quote is solely used to add thin validation to simply rejecting critical consideration of every evidence.


I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm firmly in favor of fact based thinking, and (I suspect) share your disdain for magical thinking. My objection is to the selective use of statistics to shape the facts to support a predefined narrative.

Statistics are, first and foremost, a set of techniques for summarizing and simplifying data by reducing a large amount of raw facts to a few easily grasped parameters. They can be very powerful when used for good (e.g. to help you answer your own questions about the data) but that very power can even more readily be abused for evil when they are used to persuade others. This is what the quote refers to. Statistics are a powerful way to lie. That's what it says, and it is true.

Examples: p-hacking, Anscombe's quartet, all manner of chart crimes, the numerology of quants (there's some magical thinking for you), the isolated, uncontextualized "significant numbers" so loved by journalists, etc.

As for your claim that it is "solely used to add thin validation to simply rejecting critical consideration of every evidence"... do you have anything to back that up? Note that as worded it is clearly false, since I am using it in the original sense and it only takes a single exception to refute such a broad claim.


I was just thinking the same thing.

The vitriol/projective pessimism on display above seems wildly inauthentic.



It’s missing the part that any non-whitelisted Starlink terminal entering Russian territory should automatically be blocked.

This would deny all Russians the use of Starlink.


The issue isn't Russians using Starlink inside Russia (they have other option, e.g. wired system, etc. there); the issue was their using it for drones and other combat operations inside Ukraine (including Ukrainian territory presently held by Russia).

Not the GP, but I'm an avid reader. One of the books I read (Strunk & White's Elements of Style) had this to say to aspiring writers: "Omit needles words."

I think the point is that some of the extra words OP is complaining about aren't needless. It's on the writer to know their audience, but it's also asking a lot to tune a message in a PR review to the one particular person who demands bluntness, especially if they don't know that person well. If the majority of people in the organization respond positively to a certain style (which may involve some amount of phatic speech), then the person who is "over-writing" here is probably making a good decision.

Once I build rapport with someone, I tend to be more blunt, but still balance that with the fact that other people may be reading the interaction, and I don't want to model a rude communication style.

An organization can choose to promote a very direct approach to feedback (Bridgewater is famous for this), but it requires top-down work to get everyone on the same page, not just expecting one developer to mind-read another.


Nobody is advocating for a rude communication style; the disagreement is over what constitutes rudeness.

Some people/cultures see being blunt or to the point as rude.

Others see beating around the bush, wasting time and hogging the listener's brain space with fill material that serves no purpose other than delaying the actual closure/completion of the thought (including insisting on various rituals, either verbal or, in some cases, physical, such as drinking a cup of tea (or coffee) and not broaching the actual subject until both parties have finished drinking), or perhaps (though I suspect this is less common as an actual motivation than generally supposed) taking pains to respect the imagined feeling of the listener, and possibly most importantly, to reaffirm the social hierarchy, as rude.

It's just a difference of perspective.


Nicely put. I like the worked example in para 2. :-)

Tell me, did you ever watch Yes, Minister or Yes, Prime Minister?

If not, I think you might enjoy them.



Dang! A typo, a typo; I do confess't.

One will note that the book, while short, contained more than that one sentence.

Indeed. And all of them, iirc, to the point.

Or maybe more like expecting Italian food and getting pizza?

It's not anti-science, it's anti-science-journalism-hype.

Science depends on accurately reporting facts, being clear about the limits of your findings, and seeking explanations that survive scrutiny. Science journalism has other priorities that are often in conflict with those of science.


In this case, it was in the headline of the article. I don't know how much clearer one would expect it to be.

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