Tuesday, May 28, 2024

Three quick observations on Donald Trump's not so good Saturday night






Interesting to compare this to the reception they gave RFK jr.

Some observers thought it went great, such as this Fox contributor.

 "The enthusiasm of the crowd"



Here's the CNN account:

Trump loudly booed at Libertarian convention when he asks attendees to ‘nominate me or at least vote for me’ 

... and here's how it was featured on the NYT site.



It didn't make the front page either. They did run an article... on A15, which is a good lead-in for my first observation.

1. Much of the "respectable" press, particularly the New York Times, is reluctant to pile onto an embarrassing story about Republicans. We won't go into the underlying causes – – God knows we been into that enough times already – – but the end result is often interesting and even important stories getting buried. This story is certainly entertaining, but is it important? Well that depends on...


2. How is the story of RFK Jr and the anti-VAX movement going to play out? This is why we've spent the past two or three years hammering home the importance of feral disinformation. What started out as an attempt from Trump and his supporters to minimize the political fallout of the pandemic has evolved into a political force that no one, least of all its creators, can control. Vaccines and anti-covid measures were arguably the one issue on which DeSantis was able to successfully attack Trump from the right.

We have no way of knowing how big the impact of this issue is going to be or even which direction it's going to break. It is possible that antiscience fringe liberals will go with RFK while like-minded conservatives will come back to Trump. It's possible that the anti-VAX crowd, which is disproportionately Republican, will break for RFK along party lines which would inflict considerably more damage on Trump than on Biden. It's possible that the whole thing will turn out to be a nothing-burger. Nobody knows and anyone who tells you that they do should not be trusted, but we can say that the potential impact could be enough to swing a close election under the right circumstances.


3. And what effect will this have on Trump and his campaign? Lots of moving parts on this one. As we have mentioned before, Trump has neither money nor surrogate, and his old go to, earned media, has become a decidedly mixed bag to say the least. Trump can't rely on ads and he can't send his running mate out on the campaign trail. His only real option to advance his message and shape the narrative is personal appearances, and yet, unless I forgot one, in the past month or so he has been exactly one day campaigning in swing states (his recent stop in NC didn't seem to include any events beyond waving). Since that day, he has given speeches in New Jersey, New York, and Texas. There were places he badly needed to be last Saturday.

The decision to appear at the libertarian conference (not to mention the considerable albeit failed effort to game the event) indicated that the campaign is worried about at least some of the third-party candidates taking support away from Trump, a notion further supported by the increasingly virulent attacks that he has been making on RFK.

If the objective was to shore up support among libertarians and the anti-VAX crowd, it appears to have been not only a failure, but a costly one in terms of embarrassment, opportunity cost, and wear and tear. Donald Trump is under a tremendous amount of stress and we have numerous anecdotes and indications that it is getting to him. What effect might this have on the election? There's really no telling. We are, once again, way out of the range of observed data.


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Monday, May 27, 2024

Memorial Day Repost


A good day for a recommendation

There is, of course, no such thing as the military perspective -- no single person can speak for all the men and women who have served in the military -- but if you are looking for a military perspective, my first choice would be Lt. Col. Robert Bateman who writes eloquently and intelligently on the subject for Esquire. Here are Bateman's recent thoughts on Memorial Day.
When the guns fell silent in the Spring of 1865, they all went home. They scattered across the country, back across the devastated south and the invigorated north. Then they made love to their wives, played with their children, found new jobs or stepped back into their old ones, and in general they tried to get on with their lives. These men were no longer soldiers; they were now veterans of the Civil War, never to wear the uniform again. But before long they started noticing that things were not as they had been before.

Now, they had memories of things that they could not erase. There were the friends who were no longer there, or who were hobbling through town on one or two pegs, or who had a sleeve pinned up on their chest. There were the nights that they could not shake the feeling that something really bad was about to happen. And, aside from those who had seen what they had seen and lived that life, they came to realize that they did not have a lot of people to talk to about these things. Those who had been at home, men and women, just did not "get it." A basic tale about life in camp would need a lot of explanation, so it was frustrating even to talk. Terminology like "what is a picket line" and "what do you mean oblique order?" and a million other elements, got in the way. These were the details of a life they had lived for years but which was now suddenly so complex that they never could get the story across to those who had not been there. Many felt they just could not explain about what had happened, to them, to their friends, to the nation.

So they started to congregate. First in little groups, then in statewide assemblies, and finally in national organizations that themselves took on a life of their own.

The Mid-1860s are a key period in American history not just because of the War of Rebellion, but also because this period saw the rise of "social organizations." Fraternities, for example, exploded in the post-war period. My own, Pi Kappa Alpha, was formed partially by veterans of the Confederacy, Lee's men (yes, I know, irony alert). Many other non-academic "fraternal" organizations got their start around the same time. By the late 1860s in the north and south there was a desire to commemorate. Not to celebrate, gloat or pine, but to remember.

Individually, at different times and in different ways, these nascent veterans groups started to create days to stop and reflect. These days were not set aside to mull on a cause -- though that did happen -- but their primary purpose was to think on the sacrifices and remember those lost. Over time, as different states incorporated these ideas into statewide holidays, a sort of critical legislative mass was achieved. "Decoration Day" was born, and for a long time that was enough. The date selected was, quite deliberately, a day upon which absolutely nothing of major significance had occurred during the entire war. Nobody in the north or south could try to change it to make it a victory day. It was a day for remembering the dead through decorating their graves, and the memorials started sprouting up in every small town in the nation. You still see them today, north and south, in small towns and villages like my own home of Chagrin Falls -- granite placed there so that the nation, and their homes, should not forget the sacrifices of the men who went away on behalf of the country and never came back.
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Friday, May 24, 2024

We can no longer say "the most disastrous vehicle launch since the DeLorean." We might not be able to say "since the Edsel."

You can make the case that no auto has ever achieved punchline status faster than the Cybertruck. Certainly none have ever achieved it more deservedly.
 

Back in Black | The Daily Show



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Thursday, May 23, 2024

Deferred Tuesday Tweets -- “Would it be too much to pray for a day when the Bible gets a ‘Book of Trump,’ much like it has a ‘Book of Esther’"

Some stories are just made for Pitchbot...






Weird convergence of Fox and Nate Silver/Alex Shepard/Ezra Klein


More on this from Scott Lemieux  here and here.
 

Elsewhere in polling news

On to politics.




The GOP continues to have a vetting problem.



Dems in relative array






As we mentioned before, a substantial part of the GOP is convinced that the Black Lives Matter protests left many if not most American cities in smoldering ruins.




A substantial number of Republicans also believe this.




You really need to watch this video. The descriptions don't do it justice.



Trump and vaccines -- something to please everybody.


Another one for our brilliant billionaires file (# lords of Ithuvania)


First and last in our Red Lobster series.



"Keep watching the skies!"



How can you tell when a word is starting to lose all meaning.

AI and tech bros

This is less a well formed line of thinking and more the sort of thing you would throw out to students to get them thinking along different lines. A Zen koan for a comp sci class.











Kinda flows naturally from the first sentence.


The history of mathematics is filled with people who obviously had too much time on their hands.


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Ten years ago at the blog -- when ed reform met Peanuts


Friday, May 23, 2014

Good grief! -- Sally Brown on New Math

 I have been working on a long piece on the parallels between the New Math of the Sixties and the Common Core math of today. As part of my research, I came across an amusing quote from a Peanuts strip of the time.

From Wikipedia:

In 1965, cartoonist Charles Schulz authored a series of Peanuts strips which detailed kindergartener Sally's frustrations with New Math. In the first strip, she is depicted puzzling over "sets, one to one matching, equivalent sets, non-equivalent sets, sets of one, sets of two, renaming two, subsets, joining sets, number sentences, placeholders." Eventually she bursts into tears and exclaims, "All I want to know is, how much is two and two?"
What surprised me was how well Schulz captured the terminology. The part about one to one matching was particularly apt.

[Found it]






 

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Wednesday, May 22, 2024

The cost of being wrong – – political polling edition

Note: in this context, when I talk about the accuracy of the polls, I mean the correlation between the election results and where the polling averages were at the time the polls were being discussed. If I write a post today and ask if the presidential polls are accurate, I mean is what we're seeing in May a good indicator of what the results will be in November.

This is what pretty much everybody means when they talk about the accuracy of the polls except for pollsters and political scientists who generally mean the correlation between the election results and what the polls will be in the final three or so weeks of the campaign. These are very different concepts often producing very different numbers and those of us who work with or talk about numbers for a living should really clean up her act on this one.

Let's start with the recent primary in Maryland.

 


There were some very strange things about the polling around this election and probably the election itself, but the one aspect are interested in here is how it affected the decision to do this...

I have to admit I have not read the article (my queue is full and you'll notice there's no revenue coming in from this blog) so if I'm wrong about this, please let me know in the comments, but I doubt that Trone would have spent what is for most of us a substantial fortune had the polls consistently shown him behind by 10 to 15 points instead of ahead by that margin.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, the impact wasn't that big a deal one way or the other. Billionaires often spend their money on even more wasteful things. At least this stimulated the state media economy. For a case of inaccurate polling causing truly disastrous results we would need to go back about eight years.

This article by Amy Chozick is essential reading whether you're interested in the history of the 2016 election or in the workings of the New York Times. In the case of the latter, this is the most honest and unflinching writing I've seen about the paper from anyone still in its employ since they lost Margaret Sullivan.

[Emphasis added]

It’s dizzying to realize that without even knowing it, you’ve ended up on the wrong side of history. Months after the election, every time I heard the words “Russia” and “collude,” this realization swirled in my head, enveloping everything.

...

 Editors and reporters huddled to discuss how to handle the emails. Everyone agreed that since the emails were already out there — and of importance to voters — it was The Times’s job to “confirm” and “contextualize” them. I didn’t argue that it appeared the emails were stolen by a hostile foreign government that had staged an attack on our electoral system. I didn’t push to hold off on publishing them until we could have a less harried discussion. I didn’t raise the possibility that we’d become puppets in Vladimir Putin’s master plan. I chose the byline.

...

A few weeks before Election Day, I was stuck in my cubicle poring over John Podesta’s emails. I wanted to be on the road. “I just feel like the election isn’t happening in my cubicle,” I said. “But it’s over,” an editor replied, reminding me that the Times’s Upshot election model gave Mrs. Clinton a 93 percent chance of winning. The ominous “they” who would keep the glass ceiling intact didn’t look that powerful then.

We can go back and forth as to whether the polls were wrong or the NYT model was wrong (I'm inclined to say more the second than the first), but either way, if the editors and reporters at the paper had believed that Hillary Clinton had a 60% chance of winning or worse yet a 50-50 chance, it is unlikely they would have made those same decisions. As the account spells out explicitly, they knew they were at best in that ethically gray area, helping a foreign power influence a national election in exchange for revelations of limited news value. I am a bit of a cynic, especially when it comes to the New York Times, but even I don't believe they would have been so reckless had they known what they were likely to unleash.

Journalism professor and press critic Jay Rosen says reporters should focus on the the stakes of the election, not the odds, but when you focus on the odds and get them wrong, that's the worst of both worlds.

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Tuesday, May 21, 2024

A quick note on Ezra Klein's latest exercise in meta-panic

As previously mentioned, the definitive rebuttal to Ezra Klein's NYT opinion piece is Josh Marshall's "A Quick Survey of Numbers, Vibes and the Inner Lives of Campaigns" which actually came out two days before Klein's piece (making it technically a pre-buttal). At the risk of piling on, I am going to add a few comments starting with this.

Klein buys into the Biden is in denial narrative with the following:

From Seven Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (and What He Should Do About It)

The polls are wrong. This appears to be Biden’s view. “The polling data has been wrong all along,” he told CNN last week. Axios reports that polling denial is pervasive in Biden’s campaign.

There are two things to say about this. The first is that it’s false. Even as pundits predicted a red wave in 2022, the polls showed Republicans falling short, and they were right. “The polls were more accurate in 2022 than in any cycle since at least 1998,” FiveThirtyEight reported.

Putting aside the problems with Axios's story, there are at least three problems with this claim.

1. It ignores the clear reality of how candidates spin news. If everyone who was behind in the polls and suggested they were wrong was delusional, then the great majority of politicians of the past 75+ years were at some point mentally imbalanced.

2. The polls actually have been wrong in a substantial and consistent way regarding the primaries, particularly the performance of Nikki Haley. The NYT's own Nate Cohn actually wrote a column offering different explanations for the repeated fails. (These explanations are not aged particularly well, but that's a topic for another post)

3. And this is the biggie. The 538 link that Klein provides does not in any way support his point. Time frames matter. The 538 piece, which is quite good, clearly states they are talking about how closely the average of the final 21 days matches the actual vote. This is a very different question than do polling numbers six months away from the election correlate strongly to the final outcome. That is an answerable question and there has been some research into it, but it is not, as far as I can tell, addressed at all in this piece.

We'll come back to this later. 

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Monday, May 20, 2024

Meta-panic -- intensified panic over the lack of panic in another.

This piece from Josh Marshall nicely captures the divide in what we somewhat euphemistically call the "liberal press."On one side is the meta-panic crowd, represented by people like Ezra Klein and Nate Silver, journalists and pundits equally worked up about what they see is the inevitable doom of the Biden campaign and by the fact that Biden and so many others don't actually see it is doomed. On the other side are calmer voices such as Josh Marshall and Tom Bonier who are more sanguine about how things are going, are more likely to take a holistic view of the data, and who, to be ball peen hammer blunt, tend to have a way better track record. (Obviously, I'm not playing coy about whom I'm inclined to agree with here.)

The post also serves as a remarkably effective prebuttal to the op-ed Klein published a few days later, effectively dismantling most of the NYT opinion piece's arguments days before Klein made them. Marshall comments directly on the op-ed in this Twitter thread. He was not impressed.

We'll try to say more about Klein's arguments in some future posts, but TPM is the essential read here.

 From Marshall's "A Quick Survey of Numbers, Vibes and the Inner Lives of Campaigns":

Remember that Axios piece that said Biden was in denial about his poll numbers? The idea here is that because Biden isn’t shaking up his campaign or firing his campaign manager or switching his message he’s not only behind but sleep walking toward defeat. When I saw the whole debate thing flare up yesterday it struck me as a total power move by Biden. He dared Trump to debate him. Trump quickly agreed. In principle. Then Biden said, great let’s do this CNN one. Not only a power move but Biden got Trump to agree to what is almost universally seen as a less-than-Trump-friendly format — no Fox, no audience, just the two men and two legit journalists, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

...

[Jonathan Last piece in the Bulwark] is quite good. It captures the balance, the heart of it. Yes, Biden’s a bit behind. But there is a poverty to what we might call “make some changes” discourse. It’s tough running behind in a campaign. It’s tough running just a bit behind (which is the accurate characterization of this race) when the stakes are so damn high. You also want your candidate to have a good theory of the campaign and be confident in that theory. We’ve seen plenty of campaigns hit a point where they just start throwing spaghetti against the wall, seeing what will stick. A “reboot,” a “reset,” a new campaign manager. The result is almost universally ugly as fuck. You ditch your strategy for a new one. But that one doesn’t work any better. How long do you hold on to a runner-up strategy when it’s not working any better than your first choice? Probably not long. Soon you’re on to your second reboot and your third strategy and everyone inside the campaign and out knows you’re in a death spiral. It’s pretty hard to get your voters and activists and campaign workers pumped when you’re sending the signal loud and clear not only that you think you’re losing but that you’ve decided you have no idea what to do to change the situation. Like I said, a death spiral.

Sometimes you’re 10 points back a month before Election Day and your theory of the campaign hasn’t worked so … really, what the fuck else are you going to do? This is why a lot of campaigns not only lose but lose ugly. Because they’re simply out of options. And if you’re definitely losing the non-risk of losing ugly is worth taking for the slight chance you’ll happen on something that works better.

Needless to say, being a point or at most two back six months before the election is not that situation. You absolutely don’t want your campaign doubting its theory of the election or its strategy, “making changes” as they say. Especially when it is a good theory of the election (which I take to be: use key issues to consolidate fractures in the D coalition and focus everyone on the binary choice between Biden and Trump). But you do want to remain on the offensive and be on the lookout for opportunities to create moments of volatility in which existing strategies can get traction. And like Last, I think this debate move is a good example of that. Stay on offense, always on offense. Maximize the time you’re acting rather than reacting.

 

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Friday, May 17, 2024

Things continue to heat up


This is a fairly minor turn in the ongoing New York Times saga, but it's still interesting as an indicator of just how tired of the paper of record many serious journalists have become.

Here's the tweet started it.

Astead W. Herndon is a national NYT politics reporter who has been remarkably loyal to the narrative for a long time now.


Notice what Herndon did there. He took one data source and tried to pass it off as two. The claim that voters say that age is the biggest issue is based solely on polls. Even back on February 8th, when we had actual primaries and elections, we saw no indication of that whatsoever. For the record, I'm sure he actually believes the narrative. Unfortunately, when you're talking about a dysfunctional culture, believing can be worse than lying.


But getting back to the May 14th tweet. In and of itself, a silly but hardly unexpected statement. It combines adherence to the paper's established narrative (particularly with respect to MSNBC) with the absolute conviction that the speaker is correct and that anyone who disagrees is either stupid or blinded by ideology.

What was surprising was just how out of f*cks the normally easy-going Josh Marshall and James Fallows were. I'm going to be a bit redundant here and print out the texts of the tweets just so everything will be properly displayed.


Here's Fallows:


Post below is from NYT politics reporter. Here's how "clearing the field" actually works. 

1) Both parties full of people who think they should be prez. 

2) *As soon* as any of them thinks it would pay off for them, or the party, to run against an incumbent, they do so. See: 1968 D, 1976 R, 1980 D, 1992 R. 

3) For 2024, No Dem (ex Phillips) thought this made sense. See: Newsom, Whitmer, anyone else. 

4) When an incumbent gets a serious primary challenge, THAT PARTY LOSES. See: 1968 D, 1976 R, 1980 D, 1992 R. Not proof, but a pattern. 

5) Only recent incumbent to lose *without* a serious primary challenge: Trump in 2020. 

6) Dem candidates, and Dem voters, were ones who "cleared" this field.

And Marshall:

I was chatting with a timeser recently abt some of my criticisms of the paper. And this person made some very good/fair points. But there are ears melting and being broken down to subatomic particles on other planets by the intensity of this “YOU DIDNT TAKE MY ADVICE TO HEART” primal scream. This is a straight news reporter. How can you hope to cover a race with any degree of perspective when you’re this gunned up about it? 

Also Dems cleared the field? What? You don’t clear the field for the incumbent president. That’s a deeply silly thing to say. He’s the incumbent president. There’s no field. The question is whether someone takes the inherently publicly self destructive decision to challenge the incumbent which also almost always makes it even harder for the party to win the election. Those are the reasons it almost never happens. 

How do you say something like this? How can you play football if you don’t know the ball isn’t round? 

These are really elementary things.


And of the related subject of the reaction to Joseph Kahn's dickish interview.

Having read the interview, I suspect that the person looking for the safe space was Kahn.

Lots more on this next week.

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Thursday, May 16, 2024

Ten years ago, the NYT et al. was railing against the unfairness of the SAT and ACT. Now, they're basically saying what we were saying then.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

The SAT probably is unfair to the disadvantaged but not for the reasons you've been hearing

This is another one of those posts that I started weeks ago as part of the big SAT thread then didn't get around to posting. One of the big questions was the fairness of the test. I had alluded to the problem but usually as a side question. Part of the reason I didn't spend more time on the question was because of my specialty. Though I did originally certify to teach math and English, I've been focused almost entirely on the former for a number of years, and almost all of the prep work I've done with student has been on the math side.

If I had been working with the verbal part, I would have had to address some uncomfortable questions. The verbal SAT is a good, well-designed and informative test but there are inescapable concerns about its fairness. It is very difficult to design a verbal reasoning test that is not culturally biased. Language and culture are so intertwined that it is almost impossible to even discuss one with out considering the other. Cultural biases are not nearly as much of a concern on the mathematics side of the test.

Still, even in the reasonably objective and unambiguous world of mathematics, there are any number of ways in which background can give an unfair advantage. These include (but are by no means limited to) enrichment activities, role models, high-achieving schools and community culture, support and tutoring, and expensive prep classes.

This last item has become one of if not the central element in the SAT/fairness discussion. All stories on the subject seem to be contractually obligated to talk about expensive test prep courses and yet, as far as I can tell, they all frame the issue in a way that makes the criticisms completely invalid.

There are two fallacies in this standard line of argument: The first is based on confusion over absolute versus relative values; the second is based on a common but profoundly wrong concept of the test itself.

As an absolute statement it is true that if prep courses do any good at all then the ability to pay for them will provide an unfair advantage. The question on the table now, though, is not absolute. The people who are arguing for the elimination of the SAT are also arguing, sometimes implicitly, often explicitly, for grades to take a much larger role in the college selection process to take up the slack. This leads to a very different question: does having money give one a greater advantage on the SAT then it does on GPA?

Private tutoring centers are a huge national industry, and if you send your child to one for any length of time, the cost will probably be far greater than what you would've spent on an SAT prep course. We could, of course, have a long discussion about the intrinsic value of what is taught in one versus the other, but from an economic fairness standpoint, all we care about is the cost and the effectiveness in improving the given metric.

A valid argument here would start with a comparison of the ways that privilege can provide an unfair advantage on the SAT versus GPA, but what we've gotten so far is the pseudo-argument: A is worse than B because A is bad ("French Fries are so fatty; I think I'll have onion rings instead."). As far as I can tell, none of the many stories describing the potential impact of prep courses even mention the existence of the private tutoring industry.

The other fallacy here is the very wrong but very common belief that the SAT is some kind of mysterious black box, the secrets of which can only be revealed by one of the illuminated. I've already been through this at some length but just to reiterate, because of the stability of the tests and the large number of previous editions that the College Board has published, the SAT is one of the most transparent exams you're ever likely to take.

At least on the math side (which is the area I have some experience with), this transparency, along with the nature of the questions, makes the test surprisingly easy to teach and to teach yourself. In the latter case, it goes like this:

Take one of the old tests (don't worry about the time limit);

Check your answers;

Read the explanations for the ones you got wrong;

If you don't understand the explanations for some of those problems, take them to a teacher or administrator and ask for help (as a former teacher, I can tell you that educators love to see this kind of initiative and will go to great lengths to encourage it). There are also free after-school programs that would be glad to help (I volunteer at one of them);

Repeat the process. After you start breaking fifty or sixty percent, work on reducing your time.

If it's this easy, why does anyone bother with a pricey prep course? Well, for one thing, it's not that easy. We are talking about a tremendous amount of work and self-discipline. The courses provide structure and external discipline, not to mention a large dose of motivation and reassurance to counteract the test's foreboding reputation (a problem greatly compounded by journalists' tendency to talk about the exam in dark and mysterious terms).

To sum up, there is tremendous unfairness in our education system. The SAT is sometimes part of that unfairness, but neither for the reasons or to the extent you often hear.
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Wednesday, May 15, 2024

I've spent almost a decade pointing out Nate Cohn's statistical and logical errors. It's a nice change of pace to talking about his plain old bad reporting.

From Monday's NYT:

Gerard Willingham, 30, works as a web administrator and lives in Riverdale, Ga. He voted for Mr. Biden in 2020, but he plans to vote for a third-party candidate in November because of the president’s response to the conflict in Gaza, the issue about which he cares most right now.

“I think it’s made quite a bit of difference in that it made me more heavily than in the past push toward voting for a third party, even if I feel that the candidates almost 100 percent won’t win,” Mr. Willingham said. “It’s starting to reach into my moral conscience, I guess.”


I doubt Cohn himself actually did any of the interviewing for this story, but it's his byline so he gets to take responsibility for this...


 

Before I share a tweet, I like to check out the source (and often more importantly, who follows them). This guy looks pretty solid. 


 

 As far as I know, there's no way of telling when the NPR's Fowler saw the NYT story, but The tweet was time stamped at 12:37 PM the same day that NYT article ran so it was at most a matter of hours for him to do the research necessary to uncover the lie. Furthermore, he did this on his own without the resources of the paper of record.


Since then, other details have emerged supporting the idea that Willingham lied or the paper misreported what he said.



This is the latest in a long series of fact checking fails in the political reporting of the New York Times, as was noted by a number of tweets along these lines.

To understand what's going on here you first need to go back to the process behind the typical New York Times story (according to former editor, Michael Cieply). 

From Deadline: [Emphasis added.]

Having left the Times on July 25, after almost 12 years as an editor and correspondent, I missed the main heat of the presidential campaign; so I can’t add a word to those self-assessments of the recent political coverage. But these recent mornings-after leave me with some hard-earned thoughts about the Times’ drift from its moorings in the nation at-large.

For starters, it’s important to accept that the New York Times has always — or at least for many decades — been a far more editor-driven, and self-conscious, publication than many of those with which it competes. Historically, the Los Angeles Times, where I worked twice, for instance, was a reporter-driven, bottom-up newspaper. Most editors wanted to know, every day, before the first morning meeting: “What are you hearing? What have you got?”
 
It was a shock on arriving at the New York Times in 2004, as the paper’s movie editor, to realize that its editorial dynamic was essentially the reverse. By and large, talented reporters scrambled to match stories with what internally was often called “the narrative.” We were occasionally asked to map a narrative for our various beats a year in advance, square the plan with editors, then generate stories that fit the pre-designated line.

Reality usually had a way of intervening. But I knew one senior reporter who would play solitaire on his computer in the mornings, waiting for his editors to come through with marching orders. Once, in the Los Angeles bureau, I listened to a visiting National staff reporter tell a contact, more or less: “My editor needs someone to say such-and-such, could you say that?”

The bigger shock came on being told, at least twice, by Times editors who were describing the paper’s daily Page One meeting: “We set the agenda for the country in that room.”


The impetus is on the reporter first and foremost to find anecdotes which support the narrative. I'm certain there are times when a reporter will come back the next day with a great quote that goes against the story the editor wanted to tell – – most journalists on some level want to be good at their jobs – – but that's not how the incentives line up. The safest course of action is to find someone who will say what your boss wants to hear. The more difficult it is to find those narrative aligned anecdotes, the less likely a reporter, particularly a journeyman reporter overworked and with little sense of job security, will be to look a gift source in the mouth.

The other part of the equation is a lack of consequences for leaving out significant facts or printing things that just aren't true. If the people at the top actually cared about getting these details right, these mistakes would become increasingly rare and, when one did slip through, it would immediately be addressed and very publicly corrected. Furthermore, routinely getting facts wrong would not be a path career success with the paper.

As of this writing, neither Nate Cohn nor the New York Times have acknowledged the error, let alone fixed it.


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Tuesday, May 14, 2024

Either ineffective or unaltruistic

I'm not saying that effective altruism is a scam. I believe that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett sincerely want to use their billions to improve the world. Furthermore with one or two notable exceptions, I think that the Gates foundation and similar organizations have produced important, worthwhile work.

My feelings about some of the specific proposals and methods are a bit more mixed. There's nothing wrong with taking a cold cost-benefit approach to these questions – – if anything that's how I like to do it – – but too much what we've seen has been both overly assured of its own rightness and insufficiently aware of the assumptions that have to be made and the innate murkiness of many of the questions that have to be answered.

My three major issues with effective altruism are:

I have an instinctive distrust of "we're just saying _____________" pitches where invariably the seemingly simple common sense statements are hiding lots of far more debatable and less straightforward claims;

while there are notable exceptions and I can almost hear the eyes rolling what I say this, I generally trust the judgment of governments over rich people in these matters;

any philosophy built around encouraging individuals to accumulate fantastic fortunes so that they can spend them on worthy causes will soon run into the problem that while lots of wealthy people will loudly voice their support for this idea, their actual commitment to the first part will be considerably more reliable than their commitment to the second part.

On a somewhat related point, check out this story from Matt Levine's newsletter:

A less clever — but faster? — form of effective altruism would be “we build a giant casino for crypto gambling, then we steal all the money and use it to buy mosquito nets.” Arguably that is closer to what Bankman-Fried was actually up to, though that’s not quite right either. FTX actually recovered most of the client money, but also it does not seem to have notably devoted a ton of customer money to effective charitable works on behalf of the world’s poorest. 

“We build a giant casino for crypto gambling, steal the money and use it to buy a castle for effective altruist philosophers” is even weirder? Like that’s a good assignment for a philosophy class? “Explain, using utilitarianism, how this is Good, Actually”:

Effective Ventures Foundation bought Wytham Abbey in April 2022 for £14.9 million ($18.6 million) with grants from Open Philanthropy, whose funders include billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. The purchase initially stirred controversy that a charity dedicated to the most efficient use of money for the maximum good was buying one of the finest manor homes in England—and later for Effective Ventures’ connections to crypto swindler Sam Bankman-Fried. ….

While grants from Open Philanthropy were used to fund the purchase and maintenance of Wytham Abbey, Effective Ventures also received money from FTX Foundation—the charity associated with Bankman-Fried, who was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Effective Ventures has since come to a settlement with the FTX estate and paid back the $26.8 million given to it by FTX Foundation.

It’s amid such turmoil that Wytham Abbey is being listed on the open market for £15 million with Charles Elsmore-Wickens at Savills, who spoke exclusively with Bloomberg ahead of the historic listing. For that price, a buyer would get a 27,000-square-foot stately home with 27 bedrooms and 18 bathrooms on 23 acres just 3 miles west of Oxford.

Fine right FTX didn’t actually buy them the castle, but now they have to sell the castle after paying back the money that FTX did give them. Probably that was for mosquito nets.

 

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Monday, May 13, 2024

Would manipulating stocks by spreading conspiracy theories about stock manipulation be considered meta-fraud?

Even by meme stock standards, Trump Media is an insane story.

For starters, as James Surowiecki points out "His company has $4 million in revenue, and it lost $58 million last yr, and it was valued at $9 billion, making it arguably the most overvalued company in history."

Then there was the disintegration of the company's auditor, the kind of revelation that would normally make people reexamine a high-flying stock, but as the inimitable Matt Levine points out, with Trump Media this sort of thing doesn't matter. 

(From his newsletter)

 

The funniest job in public accounting is now open:

The Securities and Exchange Commission accused the auditor of Donald Trump’s social-media company of massive fraud affecting hundreds of companies and more than 1,500 regulatory filings.

BF Borgers CPA PC and its founder, Benjamin Borgers, will be permanently suspended from practicing and appearing as accountants before the SEC, and will pay a total of $14 million in fines to settle the probe, the SEC said in a Friday release.

“Ben Borgers and his audit firm, BF Borgers, were responsible for one of the largest wholesale failures by gatekeepers in our financial markets,” Gurbir Grewal, the SEC’s enforcement chief, said in a statement. “Borgers and his firm completely abandoned that role, but thanks to the painstaking work of the SEC staff, Borgers and his sham audit mill have been permanently shut down.” …

Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. became a public company in March. Trump Media “looks forward to working with new auditing partners in accordance with today’s SEC order,” a representative for the company said.

I’m kidding, the job isn’t actually open; last week Trump Media “engaged Semple, Marchal & Cooper, LLP (‘SMC’) as BF Borgers’ replacement.” Here is the SEC’s press release; here is the order shutting down Borgers; here is the SEC staff statement on what to do if you are a pubic company that used Borgers and now needs to find a different auditor. [2]

I have said before that, since Trump Media’s financial statements don’t matter — to its shareholders, to its managers, to its stock price, to its value proposition for its promoters — it doesn’t especially matter that Trump Media used a “sham audit mill.” Still it’s not, you know, good. When it turns out that a company has a fake auditor, that raises some questions. I guess not that many questions. When Trump Media went public, I would not have guessed that it employed a fake auditor, because I was not aware that that was a thing. But if someone’s going to employ a fake auditor, why not Trump Media.

But the fun doesn't stop there. One of the safety valves that keep the upward pressure from getting too high on these stocks is shorting. Grifters trying to inflate stock bubbles hate short sellers. The classic case being Elon Musk who has demonized them to the point of antichrist status, but Trump Media seems to have hit upon a new innovation in that direction.

Trump Media is making a point of telling its shareholders how to prevent their stock from being loaned to short sellers — who bet the price of the shares will drop.

The short-selling-prevention tips posted Wednesday on Trump Media’s website come as its DJT stock has fallen sharply in price since it began being public trading on March 26 — and as short sellers have taken a keen interest in the owner of the Truth Social app despite relatively high fees to finance such trades.

“It certainly shows concern” about short selling of Trump Media stock, said Kevin Murphy, a business professor at the University of Southern California who is an expert on executive compensation.

“I haven’t seen it before,” Murphy said when asked how common it is for companies to give shareholders instructions on how to thwart short sellers.

“Managers who ... think the stock is undervalued aren’t going to be overly concerned about short sellers,” he said.

 

It's possible that the anti-shorting measures have had an impact. The stock has gained back most of the ground it lost in the first half of April.

 

Then again, that might have more to do with this.


From CNBC:

Shares of Trump Media shot up more than 9% on Wednesday, hours after the company revealed it was urging House Republican committee leaders to investigate possible “unlawful manipulation” of its stock.

The stock boost also came one day after a deadline passed for former President Donald Trump, the company’s majority owner, to become eligible for an additional 36 million “earnout” shares. That stake was worth more than $1.3 billion as of the share price at 3:25 p.m. ET.

It was unclear what spurred the sudden rise of Trump Media, which began the trading day down nearly 5% before turning positive later Wednesday morning.

The company’s CEO, Devin Nunes, in a letter Tuesday asked the GOP chairs to probe “anomalous trading” of the stock in order to gauge the extent of the alleged manipulation and “whether any laws including RICO statutes and tax evasion laws were violated.”

The request doubles down on Nunes’ claim that Trump Media, which trades under the ticker DJT, is the apparent victim of “naked” short selling, the practice of selling a company’s shares without first borrowing them for that purpose.

Trump Media, which began trading on the Nasdaq on March 26 after completing a lengthy public merger, was far and away the most expensive U.S. stock to short as of early April.

 I'm not going to try to unravel this or comment any further except to share a quote that meme stocks always bring to mind.

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