Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
Tuesday, October 27, 2015
This would tend to support the hack hypothesis
This would certainly qualify as making up things Niall Ferguson's right-wing audience would like to hear, though I'm not quite ready to give up on hack and ideologue
Hack and ideologue go together. If you're an ideologue, hack behavior can seem ok if it is serving a larger cause. So maybe Ferguson feels that, ok, sure, he's not connecting all the dots, but his larger point (that big-spending decadent liberals are betraying the magnificent legacy of Western civilization) is true, and from his standpoint that's what's important.
P.S. This discussion is somehow reminding me of the famous Linda, and the probability that she is a bank teller, or a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement. Taking one of these pieces of information makes the other piece more plausible.
Mark:
ReplyDeleteHack and ideologue go together. If you're an ideologue, hack behavior can seem ok if it is serving a larger cause. So maybe Ferguson feels that, ok, sure, he's not connecting all the dots, but his larger point (that big-spending decadent liberals are betraying the magnificent legacy of Western civilization) is true, and from his standpoint that's what's important.
P.S. This discussion is somehow reminding me of the famous Linda, and the probability that she is a bank teller, or a bank teller who is active in the feminist movement. Taking one of these pieces of information makes the other piece more plausible.
ReplyDeleteAhhh, yes, I knew I wrote about this already! See here.
ReplyDelete