Random fashion thoughts - Part II (A New Hope)

[King Calder]

Cathy is in open warfare against the industry

This is the crux, right? She's probably the most vocal critic of an industry that has otherwise gone unnoticed and unscrutinized for most of its existence. No one likes being criticized, especially when they've been very profitable while doing whatever they want.

Shah asked:

are you suggesting that data scientists are opposed to transparency?

and I would say that most data scientists aren't opposed to it as many just don't even care about it, or hadn't thought about it before, and find making it a priority cumbersome. Of those who do, many have bosses who don't. Cathy values equality, transparency, and justice and those define her perspective, just as her critics have other values that informs their perspective. Yeah Cathy probably thinks her opponents are morally corrupt, and while you could say that she's over-exuberant about it she is right in that it is not merely a technical disagreement but a moral one. Take a company like Faception:

Regardless of how you want to define "data scientists", numerical literacy doesn't help if there's divergent opinions that using facial recognition to profile people is wrong. An analogy would be that while we can argue about what nuclear detonators work best, and how to classify the engineers on the teams that build them, the larger question is whether we should have nukes at all.

 

[King Calder]

OTOH if someone could reverse-engineer FICO the bureaus would probably be interested in knowing about that, because even they don't really understand, necessarily, why a particular history results in a particular score—lots of these models are black boxes to the people who create them, too. Not for nothing is ML called the high-interest credit card of technical debt.

The bureaus have their own credit score to compete with FICO: https://www.experian.com/assets/consumer-information/product-sheets/vantagescore-3.pdf

No one uses it really because despite being cheaper (and arguably better) everyone who uses credit scores in underwriting uses FICO, has used FICO forever, and doesn't want to change. (Though that won't last forever.)

 

[cyc wid it]

Aren't machine learners the new programmers? Don't you guys get recruited by Amazon and Alibaba for NBA money?

Some, yeah.

 

[UrbanComposition]

Sooo I didn't even think of Chelsea boots because most are too Beatle-esque for my wardrobe but I really like these wedges from RO:

 

[UrbanComposition]

Are they the perfect lazyman boot? They would satisfy @emptym 's "no zipper with laces" policy.

 

[vcrash]

Those, especially, don't look like they'd be worth whatever upcharge RO would imply - maybe look at some of the Dries Van Noten lug-sole chelseas or even RM Williams/Blundstone?

 

[UrbanComposition]

I’m a sucker for teh wedge.

 

[FrankCowperwood]

I’m a sucker for teh wedge.

And your are looking for more fashion cred than, say, White’s offers, right?

 

[jet]

This threak has turned into find urbancomposition some boots he'll be satisfied with.

 

[GoldenTribe]

I missed all the details of the current Grailed fiasco (and I don't think I got any emails from them even though I have a couple of things for sale), so can somebody just tell me whether buying and/or selling still works or not?

 

[Coldsnap]

I was sold on the Sophnet x Danner boots from the start. Anyone know a reliable place I can proxy them?

 

[KaleidoscopicK]

I was sold on the Sophnet x Danner boots from the start. Anyone know a reliable place I can proxy them?

Have you tried Sophnet's web store? I think I saw them on there. Not sure if you need a proxy to buy from them though.

Edit: the remaining sizes are fairly limited.

 

[UrbanComposition]

And your are looking for more fashion cred than, say, White’s offers, right?

I know they do custom orders but the one place in SF that did their custom orders, Stompers, closed shop. Plus, I don’t think they do zipper boots.

@Coldsnap i think those Danner/Sophnet boots are on Haven.

 

[dieworkwear]

RFT: Wong Kar Wai is the GOAT and this scene of Tony Leung getting dressed is the best of the "man getting dressed scene" genre. Better than that famous American Gigolo scene with Richard Gere

 

[Landau]

FICO is literally a black box algorithm that companies who use it are contractually forbidden from trying to unlock or reverse engineer. Most of the data scientists I know from school and work with professionally are douchebags who either think their models capture objective truth or are openly disdainful of their clients who are "too dumb to understand their work." Many I know *hate Cathy O'Neil.

To be more precise, I think there's a lot of data scientists who are pretty arrogant in the pursuit of their work, and for every one who works at google and pushes their code on git there's another two working in like intelligence or education consulting who's building a black box for their PE owners to sell to municipalities or school boards with zero oversight or accountability.

To be fair, most people I know at google/facebook/microsoft/etc are also pretty arrogant in pursuit of their work (although they are more low-key about it), and the vast majority of what they do is also under some form of NDA/noncompete/garden leave kind of deal. More than that, I think data science is exactly the kind of field AI will conquer easily (as opposed to other things I think AI can never really capture barring some huge advancement in Algos that I don't know about/haven't happened yet); the exact thing AI's are good at are teasing out small, nuanced relationships between massive data sets.