(1)

False-flag tactics in social advocacy are selfish, since they (1) erode a public expectation of frankness in favor of monotonous cynicism, and (2) prime people's minds with the most-polarizing views of conversational participants, instead of framing them in ways that induce exchange of ideas. The right reason to critique the satirists here is for their anti-conversational tactics -- not their demonstrated anti-anti-racism -- since we shouldn't be okay with the same tactics

(1)

Stanford's in the news today for: Stanford just made tuition free for families earning less than $125,000 per year. The news is usually accompanied by pictures of smiling students and balloons:

...and it usually takes the article in question a few paragraphs to get around to noting that:

The announcement is an expansion of Stanford's old financial aid policy, which previously applied to students from families making less than $100,000 per year. (...)

...which raises the question: Just how many students at Stanford come from families with incomes greater than $100k and less than $125k? ...and just how desperately did those families need to have their tuition costs reduced from \(\leq\)$13.5k^[1] to $5k^[2]?

(EDIT | A bird in my ear mentions that $100k/yr puts you in the 80%tile of American families, which seems at least approximately-correct.)

(2)

About a year ago, Ken Griffin donated $125 million in support of Harvard's financial aid program, funding 539 full scholarships to Harvard. Kim Soffen, writing in the Harvard Political Review, wrote:

An important first note is that the recipients of this new pool of money will not be the poorest students at Harvard; even before this donation, Harvard already guaranteed full scholarships to any family making under $65,000 per year, and that families making up to $150,000 would not have to pay more than ten percent of their income. Consequently, these additional scholarships would be going towards students from families who are already safely

Recently, Milo King, on Gains From Trade, asks: What is the economic impact of divestment? A few years ago, and seemingly unrelatedly, the HPR came to the same conclusion, namely:

Because the stock market is efficient, selling off stock for reasons unrelated to that company's profitability will cause more amoral investors to step in and kindly take your depressed-price shares, reaping the spread for themselves. No long-term depression of prices, no pain felt by Exxon et al., and now the shareholder voting those shares has worse morals than you did. Oops.

Consider, for example, the widely-acclaimed divestment from South Africa, in protest of apartheid...

Despite the prominence and publicity of the boycott and the multitude of divesting companies, the financial markets' valuations of targeted companies or even

I'm still running an updated-almost-daily feed of readworthy links at My Faults My Own | Reading Feed. Check it out if you're a fan of these BoL's!

For reasons which may later become clear, I've written two subtly different versions of this post, for different audiences. Poets, dreamers, and readers who don't particularly care to erect walls between fantasy and reality, click here. Readers who don't have time for my mind games and just want to read a normal Bucket o' Links, click here.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip now ends,
The college stands another year, though still no more it spends,
The Game is near, the Band I hear, the freshmen all exulting,
While follow eyes the crimson flag, the Yalies we insulting;
                         But O Tom! Bas! Rav!
                            O the year we have in store,
                               When Gus and Sietse have left us,
                                  To lead us now no more.

O Captain! my Captain! Gus, hear the Mem Church bell!
Stand tall—for you Fair Harvard's sung—for you Ten Thousand trill,
For you TP and TomBasRav—for you town halls a-crowding,
For you they call, from Stillman still, for yet more club sports funding;
                         Here Captain! dear father!
                            Lead us forevermore!
                               It is some dream that you would leave,
                                 To captain us no more.

Not the Captain we deserved—the one we needed, true,
In uniform and beard he served—and fought for me and you.
The votes are cast, and soon we'll know the prez-elect—and then
We welcome Yale and know they'll fail to win the Game again;
                         Ten thousand men want victory!
                            But this much lies in store:
                               Gus and Sietse leave us soon,
                                  To lead us now no more.

First, meta of metas, if you like my takes on (some subset of) the week, maybe also check out other people's linkwraps that have come out in the last day or so:

• Unequally Yoked | 7 Quick Takes: Costuming, Conspiracy, and Counterfeiting (Leah Libresco is a one-time atheist blogger, now a Catholic blogger, and remains a devout rationalist. Unequally Yoked's 7QT's get the credit for convincing me to to BoL's.)
• My Biased Coin | Weekend Links (November 1 Edition) (Michael Mitzenmacher is currently my professor for Complexity and Algorithms, and often has insightful things to say on the inner workings of the ivory tower, being a research professor of theoretical computer science.)
• Slate Star Codex | Links for November 2014 (Scott S. Alexander, who also writes as Yvain, writes on his own blog and on LessWrong about...well...lots of things. But I appreciate his thoughts.)

1

"Space is hard and today was a tough day. We are going to be supporting the investigation as we figure out what

The only thing I have to say about #GamerGate is: Felicia Day, who is a person you know of if you were a nerd who grew up with the internet, has a really nice post on her own blog entitled "The Only Thing I Have to Say about Gamer Gate". For those of you less plugged into the internet gaming community, #GamerGate is more or less a whole lot of uproar by some sexist gamers who are angry that it's not okay in this day and age to be a sexist gamer. Writes Day:

"I have not said many public things about Gamer Gate. I hav tried to leave it alone, aside from a few @ replies on Twitter that journalists have decided to use in their articles, siding me against the hashtag. Why have I remained mostly silent?

Self-protection and fear.

...

HOW SICK IS THAT?"

More at her blog; I'm not going to steal her thunder.

Epilogue: After some trolls, in response to her post, issued public threats against Day and published her address, phone number, and other personal information online, she wrote on Facebook:

I posted this essay yesterday afternoon on Tumblr. Yes, personal information was leaked shortly after, but the