If Google fixed dots-don't-matter, couldn't someone still sign up for Netflix with [email protected]?
If Netflix checks for + address duplicates, then that's not an issue. But you could still have the situation where someone signs up for, let's say, Hulu with your standard [email protected] account. And then you could still end up paying if you forget whether you ever signed up for Hulu or not (maybe you were about to sign up and didn't, maybe you planned to in the future).
Email validation seems like the most important defense against this kind of thing. Dots mattering seems secondary.
Feelings get in the way of changing minds. Ignoring your own or your opponents' feelings doesn't make them go away.
Take a look at the article. How is someone who is concerned about sex differences in representation going to feel when they read, "Many academics in the modern world seem obsessed with the sex difference..."?
The article shoots itself in the foot in the first sentence. It's not going to change minds because it doesn't consider feelings.
Writing in a way that gets the facts right, and uses good arguments, and is worded in a way that doesn't turn off your opponents is hard. But it can be done. I think slatestarcodex.com often does it (though not always).
> When AlphaGo does lose, it seems to happen when outright bugs cause it to make moves that are readily recognizable as mistakes
I'm not sure this is true. It made the wrong move at move 79 in game 4, but I'm not sure that should be considered an obvious mistake.
My understanding is that the moves that people said were most obviously mistakes later in the game were a result of it being behind (and desperately trying to swing the lead back in its favor), rather than a cause.
You're right that it doesn't tell the whole story, but one of the major findings in the last century of psychology is that the one-number summary actually contains a surprising amount of information.
"Mental tests may be designed to measure different aspects of cognition. Specific domains assessed by tests include mathematical skill, verbal fluency, spatial visualization, and memory, among others. However, individuals who excel at one type of test tend to excel at other kinds of tests, too, while those who do poorly on one test tend to do so on all tests, regardless of the tests' contents."
"[G factor] is a variable that summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive tasks, reflecting the fact that an individual's performance at one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to his or her performance at other kinds of cognitive tasks."