I don't remember if I ever got around to it, but for years I've been meaning to write an Andrew Gelman style class post on people whose work is great but whose imitators drag down the field.
I go back and forth on Bob Dylan here. There is no counting how many coffee house hacks have convinced themselves that the obscure lyrics they are croaking out are the next Tangled Up In Blue. On the other hand, a lot of brilliant artists have done some of their best work inspired by Dylan.
With Tom Wolfe and Pauline Kael, however, the divide in quality between the originals and the imitators is much more sharp. For more than 50 years now, we have suffered through journalists and critics who have annoyingly affected the tics and mannerisms of both writers, while having none of the talent or insight and being completely unwilling to put in the hard work of research and revision that made Wolfe and Kael so formidable.
I don't want to oversell Nate Silver at this point (he's no Bob Dylan) but he deserves great credit for his Innovations in the way we cover politics. He saw the fundamental problem with remarkable clarity and understood the appropriate level of complexity needed for a solution. As a statistician, he has considerable limitations. When he strays too far from his areas of expertise such as when he writes about climate models, the dunning-kruger effect has a tendency to come down hard, but he does have a natural talent and an all too rare capacity to learn from his mistakes.
His success unfortunately has inspired a wave of data journalists who are more often than not terrible at their jobs. It turns out that being enamored with data and yet being bad statistics is often worse than ignoring data entirely.
Thursday, August 1, 2019
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Any conversation about electability has got to start with the fact that a white male has not won the popular vote since 2004.
The electoral discussion among pundits and data journalists has been taking some especially silly turns of late and before the bullshit accumulates to the same dangerous level it did in 2016, we need to step back and address the bad definitions, absurd assumptions, and muddled thinking before it gets too deep.
We should probably start with the idea electability. While we can argue about the exact definition, it should not mean likely to be elected and it absolutely cannot mean will be elected.
Any productive definition of electability has got to be based on the notion of having reasonable prospect of winning. With this in mind, it is ridiculous to argue that Hillary Clinton was not electable. Lots of things had to break Trump's way for him to win the election and, while we can never say for certain what repeated runs of the simulation would show, there is no way to claim that we would have gotten the same outcome the vast majority of the time.
This leads us to a related dangerous and embarrassing trend, the unmooring of votes and outcomes. This is part of a larger genre of bad data journalism that tries to argue that relationships which are strongly correlated and even causal are unrelated because they are not deterministic and/or linear. In this world, profit or even potential profit is not relevant when discussing a startup's success. Diet and exercise have no effect on weight loss. With a little digging you can undoubtedly come up with numerous other examples.
The person who wins the popular vote may not win the electoral college, but unless you have a remarkably strong argument to the contrary, that is the way that smart money should bet.
We should probably start with the idea electability. While we can argue about the exact definition, it should not mean likely to be elected and it absolutely cannot mean will be elected.
Any productive definition of electability has got to be based on the notion of having reasonable prospect of winning. With this in mind, it is ridiculous to argue that Hillary Clinton was not electable. Lots of things had to break Trump's way for him to win the election and, while we can never say for certain what repeated runs of the simulation would show, there is no way to claim that we would have gotten the same outcome the vast majority of the time.
This leads us to a related dangerous and embarrassing trend, the unmooring of votes and outcomes. This is part of a larger genre of bad data journalism that tries to argue that relationships which are strongly correlated and even causal are unrelated because they are not deterministic and/or linear. In this world, profit or even potential profit is not relevant when discussing a startup's success. Diet and exercise have no effect on weight loss. With a little digging you can undoubtedly come up with numerous other examples.
The person who wins the popular vote may not win the electoral college, but unless you have a remarkably strong argument to the contrary, that is the way that smart money should bet.
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Tuesday Tweets -- “rapid unplanned disassembly“ edition
The hyperloop achieved an impressive top speed shortly before “rapid unplanned disassembly“. You could get the same outcome much more cheaply by falling off of a tall building. @TUM_Hyperloop https://t.co/tjE9tAxm0N— Jarrett Walker (@humantransit) July 23, 2019
“Rapid unplanned disassembly“ is very likely to cause a loss of cabin pressure.@alon_levy @trnsprtst— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) July 24, 2019
Nice example of how mobile carriers are using and selling location data, which had gotten less attention than "big tech" https://t.co/EBoobJj7vb— Dean Eckles (@deaneckles) July 19, 2019
I think Lee is underplaying the role that the huge, broad-based spikes in the late 19th Century and post-war era were in forming the idea of the exponential progress curve (and how resilient the belief has been in the face of conflicting data).
It's interesting to imagine a world where humanity never invented the transistor and therefore never had a digital revolution. In that world, the obvious interpretation of economic history would be that the discovery of fossil fuels gave humanity a one-time growth spurt.— Timothy B. Lee (@binarybits) July 20, 2019
Key finding from a new @NavigatorSurvey analysis—over several months responses were collected for voters who approve of Trump on economy but NOT overall. What do they say for 2020?
.....“handling of economy” is not their driving issue
(full report: https://t.co/G1rqEdt8Xv) https://t.co/VOCHeLdwnt— Will Jordan (@williamjordann) July 19, 2019
We've been seeing the same thing in a number of supposedly red States. Ideologically they are moving to the center, perhaps even the left, on many ideological issues while becoming more Republican at the same time https://t.co/rt67z1gO0i— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) July 26, 2019
Not that you should expect better from one of those "Despite Thing, Voters in Trump Country Still Love Trump!" articles, but this polling showing him down 2 in Obama-Trump counties would be quite *bad* for Trump. He won Macomb County by 12 points in 2016. https://t.co/TePjzoDeJ1 pic.twitter.com/9T9ydanMeA— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) July 22, 2019
Thread by former @WSJ journalist who is fed up with what she saw this week during and after the Mueller testimony. https://t.co/PzRP6iYivK— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) July 26, 2019
Monday, July 29, 2019
Taking on the votes-don't-matter meme -- the EC doesn't always follow the popular vote, but that's the way the smart money should bet
And once again we are in the silly season.
First off, a quick disclaimer: You can never reasonably dismiss an incumbent president's chances of being reelected. No matter how poor the prospects look, there are always plausible paths to victory. Not taking Trump seriously would be irresponsible, but much of what we're hearing from the other extreme are just as foolish possibly more dangerous (the combination of defeatism, panic and bad reasoning seldom works out well).
Popular variations on the all-is-lost theme include:
"Trump is unstoppable unless the Democrats move to the right/move to the left/embrace my pet issue."
"Trump is actually pursuing a cunning plan that will insure victory."
"The popular vote doesn't matter. The electoral college went the wrong way two out of the last five elections."
Let's take that last one. The EC is a bad system that should have been scrapped long ago, but at least from a historical perspective, how likely are these undemocratic outcomes?
For starters, we need to be very careful with our terms. There is a subtle but absolutely fundamental distinction to be made between winning the presidency despite losing the popular vote and winning the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote. In 2016, there is no question that the popular vote went one way and the Electoral College went another. In 2000, however, the picture is much murkier.
When we talk about a split between the popular vote and the Electoral College we mean that, given a reasonably accurate count, the all-or-nothing allotment of votes and the minimum delegate rule for small states will cause the Electoral College totals to go in a different direction that the popular vote.
There is always a certain amount of fuzziness when dealing with ballots. There might be a very slight chance that Al Gore did not win the popular vote. There is a very good chance that he did win the electoral college. Once again, I want to be very clear on this point. I'm not talking about who was awarded the delegates. I'm talking about who would have gotten them had there been a properly conducted counting of the votes in Florida.
We've seen a recent wave of data journalist making bad distributional arguments about the implications of the Electoral College. Most of these arguments use Al Gore as an example despite the fact he does not at all illustrate their point, since who won Florida (and therefore the EC) is very much a disputed point).
If you remove Gore as an example, you have to go all the way back to 1888 to find another. This does not mean that this won't happen again for another hundred plus years. It does not mean that we don't need to worry about this in 2020. It does not even mean that a split between popular and electoral votes isn't The New Normal. What it does mean is that historically there is an extremely high correlation between winning the popular vote and winning the Electoral College.
Just for the record, the undermining of democracy by the conservative movement, particularly through voter suppression and under-representation, is perhaps my number one issue, even more than climate change and income inequality. I am very worried about gerrymandering and voter ID laws and somewhat concerned about the Senate, but the Electoral College, while not defensible, is way down on my list.
First off, a quick disclaimer: You can never reasonably dismiss an incumbent president's chances of being reelected. No matter how poor the prospects look, there are always plausible paths to victory. Not taking Trump seriously would be irresponsible, but much of what we're hearing from the other extreme are just as foolish possibly more dangerous (the combination of defeatism, panic and bad reasoning seldom works out well).
Popular variations on the all-is-lost theme include:
"Trump is unstoppable unless the Democrats move to the right/move to the left/embrace my pet issue."
"Trump is actually pursuing a cunning plan that will insure victory."
"The popular vote doesn't matter. The electoral college went the wrong way two out of the last five elections."
Let's take that last one. The EC is a bad system that should have been scrapped long ago, but at least from a historical perspective, how likely are these undemocratic outcomes?
For starters, we need to be very careful with our terms. There is a subtle but absolutely fundamental distinction to be made between winning the presidency despite losing the popular vote and winning the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote. In 2016, there is no question that the popular vote went one way and the Electoral College went another. In 2000, however, the picture is much murkier.
When we talk about a split between the popular vote and the Electoral College we mean that, given a reasonably accurate count, the all-or-nothing allotment of votes and the minimum delegate rule for small states will cause the Electoral College totals to go in a different direction that the popular vote.
There is always a certain amount of fuzziness when dealing with ballots. There might be a very slight chance that Al Gore did not win the popular vote. There is a very good chance that he did win the electoral college. Once again, I want to be very clear on this point. I'm not talking about who was awarded the delegates. I'm talking about who would have gotten them had there been a properly conducted counting of the votes in Florida.
We've seen a recent wave of data journalist making bad distributional arguments about the implications of the Electoral College. Most of these arguments use Al Gore as an example despite the fact he does not at all illustrate their point, since who won Florida (and therefore the EC) is very much a disputed point).
If you remove Gore as an example, you have to go all the way back to 1888 to find another. This does not mean that this won't happen again for another hundred plus years. It does not mean that we don't need to worry about this in 2020. It does not even mean that a split between popular and electoral votes isn't The New Normal. What it does mean is that historically there is an extremely high correlation between winning the popular vote and winning the Electoral College.
Just for the record, the undermining of democracy by the conservative movement, particularly through voter suppression and under-representation, is perhaps my number one issue, even more than climate change and income inequality. I am very worried about gerrymandering and voter ID laws and somewhat concerned about the Senate, but the Electoral College, while not defensible, is way down on my list.
Friday, July 26, 2019
Family Friendly?
This is Joseph.
This tweet makes an excellent point:
The context was the cost of summer camps when you have two working parents, without anywhere near enough holidays to cover the summer. This has to be one of the odd contradictions of modern thinking; I first noticed in in Ayn Rand's book "Atlas Shrugged" where she glossed over the role of children in a hyper-capitalist society. While not everyone is a fan of Ayn Rand, it was an early sign of a fault point in the individualist culture we have created.
The problem is that we can't really decide on two things. One, is the basic unit of humanity individuals or families? This isn't meant to be exclusionary, but simply to point out that humanity, as a project, requires new humans so if there is a commitment to the species they have to come from somewhere. I don't want to say how these come together -- family is a very diverse entity -- but they are real mechanisms for child rearing.
Two, is the social contract that Western Democracies have created is about previous generations being transferred wealth in their old age from upcoming generations. This works best when there is a continuing flow of upcoming generations and that requires some investment in the future as well.
I am not sure about the solutions, but I am pretty sure that the solution set does not include seeing children as expensive consumer goods.
This tweet makes an excellent point:
The context was the cost of summer camps when you have two working parents, without anywhere near enough holidays to cover the summer. This has to be one of the odd contradictions of modern thinking; I first noticed in in Ayn Rand's book "Atlas Shrugged" where she glossed over the role of children in a hyper-capitalist society. While not everyone is a fan of Ayn Rand, it was an early sign of a fault point in the individualist culture we have created.
The problem is that we can't really decide on two things. One, is the basic unit of humanity individuals or families? This isn't meant to be exclusionary, but simply to point out that humanity, as a project, requires new humans so if there is a commitment to the species they have to come from somewhere. I don't want to say how these come together -- family is a very diverse entity -- but they are real mechanisms for child rearing.
Two, is the social contract that Western Democracies have created is about previous generations being transferred wealth in their old age from upcoming generations. This works best when there is a continuing flow of upcoming generations and that requires some investment in the future as well.
I am not sure about the solutions, but I am pretty sure that the solution set does not include seeing children as expensive consumer goods.
Wonder when they stopped running Thunderbirds reruns in South Africa.
Listening to this, I can't help but try and reconstruct the conversations he had with the actual engineers who tried to explain these ideas to him. He gets most of the phrases right but there's no indication he understands the challenges involved in what he's talking about.
Personally, I want to see him add one of these pilot slides.
Personally, I want to see him add one of these pilot slides.
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Trickle-down innovation
This is Joseph
I think that this might be the single worst argument in health care today:
Second, the system is actually poorly designed for the example. Antibiotics are always going to be less profitable than chronic use drugs. Maybe the slower pace of development is because of the current system that focuses rewards elsewhere?
Third, isn't this the same argument as "trickle down economics"? If we make health care CEO's rich then others will also seek to become rich and that will drive innovation. How did that work with economics?
The US spends twice as much GDP per person as the UK. The difference between the two systems is about 8% of GDP. US GDP is around 20,000 billion dollars, so 8% of that would be 1,600 billion. The NIH budget is around 40 billion. Let's spend only half of that on research -- I wonder what endless productive NIH could do with a 840 billion dollar budget to drive medical innovation?
And this is with me not even really trying -- just thinking off of the top of my head. I think we should be careful with the assumption that innovation by industry is all about improving care. Some is and there are dedicated people in industry who work hard to help patients. But some of this is clearly rent-seeking and profit taking. It's not clear if we could redo the system that we couldn't save money AND be more innovative.
Just a thought.
I think that this might be the single worst argument in health care today:
The slowdown in pharmaceutical innovation is widely acknowledged, well-documented, and deeply troubling. Most Americans have health insurance. Most Americans are able to get care if they need it. What matters at the point of crisis, then, isn’t just whether someone is covered, but what that coverage can buy. The best insurance in the world won’t save us if our antibiotics fall behind drug-resistant bacteria.
This is particularly pressing for Democrats because the best argument against centralized price setting is that it will slow innovation. So what plans do Democrats have to boost innovation in the health care space? Sanders, for his part, has an interesting idea to use prizes to generate new pathways for pharmaceutical development, but he’s one of the only Democrats with any kind of plan along these lines, and he doesFirst, even with the current system we are seeing a slow down in innovation. There is an assumption that that isn't driven by it being easier to rent-seek with current than to come up with new ones. Or by intrinsic limitations in what low hanging fruit might be left.
Second, the system is actually poorly designed for the example. Antibiotics are always going to be less profitable than chronic use drugs. Maybe the slower pace of development is because of the current system that focuses rewards elsewhere?
Third, isn't this the same argument as "trickle down economics"? If we make health care CEO's rich then others will also seek to become rich and that will drive innovation. How did that work with economics?
The US spends twice as much GDP per person as the UK. The difference between the two systems is about 8% of GDP. US GDP is around 20,000 billion dollars, so 8% of that would be 1,600 billion. The NIH budget is around 40 billion. Let's spend only half of that on research -- I wonder what endless productive NIH could do with a 840 billion dollar budget to drive medical innovation?
And this is with me not even really trying -- just thinking off of the top of my head. I think we should be careful with the assumption that innovation by industry is all about improving care. Some is and there are dedicated people in industry who work hard to help patients. But some of this is clearly rent-seeking and profit taking. It's not clear if we could redo the system that we couldn't save money AND be more innovative.
Just a thought.
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
The Hype Economy runs on faith -- more on Netflix
I was going to run something on this Bloomberg piece, then life got busy and a few weeks passed and soon a number of other posts (including some about Netflix) were demanding to be written. Then this happened and the following seemed too relevant to put off. [emphasis added]
Just the same, Netflix has been producing more on its own. The company will release 1,000-plus pieces of original programming this year. By the time “The Office” deal ends, Netflix will have at least 3,000 new programs in its library and likely surpass 200 million subscribers worldwide.There is no rational argument for this position. Netflix is in the process of losing the shows behind roughly three quarters of its viewer-hours. It is maxed out on production without clear ownership of many of its most popular originals (such as She-Ra). It is spending at an unsustainable pace. It's about to fall into the ultimate competitive wood chipper.
“People are missing it,” said [Michael Nathanson, an analyst at MoffettNathanson LLC]. “The loss of back titles will not kill Netflix or slow subscriber growth. It just forces them to make more original content.”
Faith-based investing can keep things going a long time, but eventually reality-based results make doubter of us all.
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Tuesday Tweets -- One Small Step
People want to make this a story of inspiration and working together, the truth is a bit less feel-good but perhaps more instructive. When LBJ (DC’s leading space advocate since the 50s) came to power he pushed through massive and often unpopular spending for Apollo. https://t.co/vi33fiYHFR— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) July 21, 2019
For example, this suggests that the way to address climate change is to nominate a Democrat who strongly believes in the seriousness of the problem then completely crush the Republicans so that they can offer no resistance when you spend what it takes.@trnsprtst @deaneckles— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) July 22, 2019
‘AirTalk’ Live – One Small Step, 50 Years Later https://t.co/revWDtwamn via @YouTube— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) July 20, 2019
US May 31 '61: It has been estimated that it would cost the US $40 billion to send a man to the moon. Is it worth it? pic.twitter.com/lnpRQuQKpn— Historical Opinion (@HistOpinion) June 10, 2014
US Dec 23 '49: Do you think that men in rockets will be able to reach the moon within the next 50 years? pic.twitter.com/TNI1AeHHXp— Historical Opinion (@HistOpinion) May 31, 2014
US Jan 22 '60: Which country–the United States or Russia–do you think will be the first to send a man into space? pic.twitter.com/igVxc4Yt6C— Historical Opinion (@HistOpinion) March 18, 2014
Here’s the cover and opening pages of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1986 future-telling book July 20, 2019. Published 17 years after the moon landing, it predicts what the world will look like on the event’s 50th anniversary.
From the Kirkus review:
“Clarke invo… https://t.co/PMQKLpT3H2 pic.twitter.com/P84JjP2f2w— 70s Sci-Fi Art (@70sscifiart) July 20, 2019
Monday, July 22, 2019
Netflix represents the overlap of the two great traditions of creative accounting-- Hollywood and Silicon Valley
[I scheduled this a few days ago. Eventful days.]
Since writing this, I've run the story past a number of people who have worked with this kind of consumer data at large companies, and every one of them has had the same reaction. All of them suggested that Netflix was tracking these numbers; it just didn't want anyone to know what they said. I'm also coming around to that conclusion.
I have a feeling that Netflix's transparency is about to become a bigger part of this story.
As mentioned before, some aspects of the Netflix narrative such as the company building and HBO type content library, are simply, factually incorrect. Others, while not blatantly wrong, are difficult to reconcile with the facts.
One of the accepted truths of the Netflix narrative is that CEO Reed Hastings is obsessed with data and everything the company does is data driven (for example "What little Netflix has also shared about its programming strategy is that its every decision is guided by data."). The evidence in support of this belief is largely limited to a model that Netflix crowd sourced a few years ago and to endless assertions from executives at the company that they do know what they are doing despite evidence to the contrary.
Of course, all 21st century corporations are relatively data-driven. The fact that Netflix has large data sets on customer behavior does not set it apart, nor does the fact that it has occasionally made use of that data. Furthermore, we have extensive evidence that the company often makes less use of certain data then do most other competitors.
On pertinent case in point, particularly for the SEC, is churn rates.
In other words, Hasting should have a good, data-supported explanation for a recent sudden loss of subscribers.
When contemplating a price increase, well-run companies look at the impact on retention and on acquisition. When Netflix management said
Just to be clear, for years analysts and the SEC have been asking for more data, or at least more detailed statistics and Netflix has been saying "trust us, the aggregate number are good enough." Now the company appears to have screwed up badly, and they've done it in pretty much exactly the way you would expect a company to screw up when it doesn't drill down into the data.
Since writing this, I've run the story past a number of people who have worked with this kind of consumer data at large companies, and every one of them has had the same reaction. All of them suggested that Netflix was tracking these numbers; it just didn't want anyone to know what they said. I'm also coming around to that conclusion.
I have a feeling that Netflix's transparency is about to become a bigger part of this story.
Monday, October 20, 2014
The myth of a data-driven Netflix
There's been a lot of talk about Netflix stock this week (usually with words like "plummet"), but a big part of the story has largely gone unnoticed, probably in part because it involves statistics.As mentioned before, some aspects of the Netflix narrative such as the company building and HBO type content library, are simply, factually incorrect. Others, while not blatantly wrong, are difficult to reconcile with the facts.
One of the accepted truths of the Netflix narrative is that CEO Reed Hastings is obsessed with data and everything the company does is data driven (for example "What little Netflix has also shared about its programming strategy is that its every decision is guided by data."). The evidence in support of this belief is largely limited to a model that Netflix crowd sourced a few years ago and to endless assertions from executives at the company that they do know what they are doing despite evidence to the contrary.
Of course, all 21st century corporations are relatively data-driven. The fact that Netflix has large data sets on customer behavior does not set it apart, nor does the fact that it has occasionally made use of that data. Furthermore, we have extensive evidence that the company often makes less use of certain data then do most other competitors.
On pertinent case in point, particularly for the SEC, is churn rates.
But Netflix disagrees. “With respect to various operational metrics, management has evolved its use of these metrics as the business has evolved,” it wrote the SEC in response. Because it is so easy to quit and then restart a Netflix subscription, it said, “the churn metric is a less reliable measure of business performance, specifically consumer acceptance of the service.”This is problematic on any number of levels. In terms of marketing, pricing and long-term corporate strategy, having a complete picture of how long people stay and why they leave is huge. The only excuse for not reporting churn would be if you had such a detailed picture of who was leaving and why that this additional metric was redundant.
In other words, Hasting should have a good, data-supported explanation for a recent sudden loss of subscribers.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings blamed the subscriber drop-off on a $1 price increase the company instituted back this spring.Phrases you don't want to hear in these circumstances include "our best sense" and "that's what we think." They convey the impression of a CEO who was blindsided by a bad day at the NASDAQ.
"Our best sense is it's an effect of our price increase back in May," Hastings said Wednesday night in an interview with CNBC. "With a little bit higher prices, you get a little bit fewer subscribers. So that's our sense of it. But we can't be 100% sure. We had so much benefit from Orange in Q2 and the early Q3, but that's what we think."
When contemplating a price increase, well-run companies look at the impact on retention and on acquisition. When Netflix management said
[M]anagement believes that in a largely fixed-cost streaming world with ease of cancellation and subsequent rejoin, net additions provides the most meaningful insight into our business performance and consumer acceptance of our service. The churn metric is a less relevant and reliable measure of business performance, and does not accurately reflect consumer acceptance of our service.They were basically saying that losing one customer and gaining another is the same as keeping the same customer. That's a dangerous approach under the best of circumstances but it can be deadly when trying to gauge the impact of a pricing change.
Just to be clear, for years analysts and the SEC have been asking for more data, or at least more detailed statistics and Netflix has been saying "trust us, the aggregate number are good enough." Now the company appears to have screwed up badly, and they've done it in pretty much exactly the way you would expect a company to screw up when it doesn't drill down into the data.
Sunday, July 21, 2019
More Apollo reblogging
Monday, June 11, 2018
An alternate narrative of JFK's commitment to the moon
[I would love some pushback on this. The following goes very much against the conventional narrative which always makes me nervous. If I missed something obvious, I'd rather it gets pointed out here before I build on it.]
The standard story centers on how the nation's imagination was captured by an audacious dream of sending a man to the moon. You've all heard the words of the speech that inspired the country, “We choose to go to the moon...” Except it didn't. The speech was an attempt at drumming up support for a not-that-popular program. As best I can tell, it was a fairly minor and underwhelming effort. It only achieved greatness retroactively due to the tragedy and triumph that came afterwards.
What else does the standard narrative get wrong?
1. Despite everything you hear about the tensions between JFK and LBJ, Kennedy knowingly committed his administration to what was probably Johnson's most cherished policy objective going back to his days in the Senate. Kennedy even put Johnson in charge of National Aeronautics and Space Council. Increasing the budget for manned space exploration was deeply controversial with in the administration. Kennedy's own science advisor, Jerome Wiesner was strongly opposed to it. One of Kennedy's last acts as president was dismissing Wiesner.
2. Of course, administrations failed to deliver on commitments all the time. It could very easily have been pushed aside and things turned out differently.
3. Is also worth noting that while we now see this as a bold objective, the goal did not seem as wildly ambitious at the time. [This is where I veer sharply from the conventional narrative, so this would be a good place to focus your objections.] It is essential to remember where the country's attitudes and expectations toward technology and progress were in the early sixties. As I have said probably too many times, like the late 19th/early 20th centuries, the postwar era was a period of explosive ubiquitous change. As with the turn of the century, there was a sense of constant acceleration. Everything seemingly came faster and easier than the experts predicted. Kennedy was being ambitious, but probably not as ambitious as we tend to remember him being.
4. While modern commentators choose to emphasize soaring rhetoric and the importance of visionary leaders, the overwhelming driver of the space race was the Cold War. There were very real and disturbing consequences to losing this race, both strategic and symbolic. What's more, there was a strong symbiotic relationship between the military and programs like Mercury and Apollo.
5. The Apollo program proved to be far more expensive than expected and quite controversial. Even with the impetus of the Cold War, the decision not just to see it through, but to make the deadline owes a great deal to a series of events breaking in its favor, particularly the assassination and the '64 landslide. Both the legend of JFK and the political power of LBJ meant that Apollo would get what it needed.
Today the very term “moonshot” has become one of the most reliable red flags for bullshit in the 21s century. We tell ourselves lies about what happened than hold up a fabricated past to justify the lies we tell ourselves about the present.
Saturday, July 20, 2019
Repost: Some context for the Apollo Anniversary
Thursday, November 8, 2018
A few points on Willy Ley and "the Conquest of Space"
To understand the 21st century narrative around technology and progress, you need to go back to two eras of extraordinary advances, the late 19th/early 20th centuries and the postwar era. Virtually all of the frameworks, assumptions, imagery, language, and iconography we use to discuss and think about the future can be traced back to these two periods.The essential popularizer of science in the latter era was Willy Ley. In terms of influence and popularity, it is difficult to think of a comparable figure. Carl Sagan and Neil Degrasse Tyson hold somewhat analogous positions, but neither can claim anywhere near the impact. When you add in Ley's close association with Werner von Braun, it is entirely reasonable to use his books as indicators of what serious people in the field of aerospace were thinking at the time. The excerpt below comes with a 1949 copyright and gives us an excellent idea of what seemed feasible 70 years ago.
There is a lot to digest here, but I want to highlight two points in particular.
First is the widespread assumption at the time that atomic energy would play a comparable role in the remainder of the 20th century to that of hydrocarbons in the previous century and a half, certainly for power generation and large-scale transportation. Keep in mind that it took a mere decade to go from Hiroshima to the launch of the Nautilus and there was serious research (including limited prototypes) into nuclear powered aircraft. Even if fusion reactors remained out of reach, a world where all large vehicles were powered by the atom seemed, if anything, likely.
Second, check out Ley's description of the less sophisticated, non-atomic option and compare it to the actual approach taken by the Apollo program 20 years later.
I think we have reversed the symbolic meaning of a Manhattan project and a moonshot. The former has come to mean a large, focus, and dedicated commitment to rapidly addressing a challenging but solvable problem. The second has come to mean trying to do something so fantastic it seems impossible. The reality was largely the opposite. Building an atomic bomb was an incredible goal that required significant advances in our understanding of the underlying scientific principles. Getting to the moon was mainly a question of committing ourselves to spending a nontrivial chunk of our GDP on an undertaking that was hugely ambitious in terms of scale but which relied on technology that was already well-established by the beginning of the Sixties.
________________________________________________
The conquest of space by Willy Ley 1949
Page 48.
In general, however, the moon messenger [and unmanned test rocket designed to crash land on the moon – – MP] is close enough to present technological accomplishments so that its design and construction are possible without any major inventions. Its realization is essentially a question of hard work and money.
The manned moonship is a different story. The performance expected of it is, naturally, that it take off from the earth, go to the moon, land, takeoff from the moon, and return to earth. And that, considering known chemical fuels and customary design and construction methods, is beyond our present ability. But while the moon ship can make a round-trip is unattainable with chemical fuels, a moon ship which can land on the moon with a fuel supply insufficient for the return is a remote possibility. The point here is that one more attention of the step principle is possible three ships which landed might have enough fuel left among them for one to make the return trip.
This, of course, involves great risk, since the failure of one ship would doom them all. Probably the manned moon ship will have to be postponed until there is an orbital nation. Take off from the station, instead of from the ground, would require only an additional 2 mi./s, so that the total works out to about 7 mi./s, instead of the 12 mi./s mentioned on page 44.
Then, of course, there is the possibility of using atomic energy. If some 15 years ago, a skeptical audience had been polled as to which of the two "impossibilities" – – moon ship and large scale controlled-release of atomic energy – – they considered less fantastic, the poll would probably have been 100% in favor of the moon ship. As history turned out, atomic energy came first, and it is now permissible to speculate whether the one may not be the key to the other.
So far, unfortunately, we only know that elements like uranium, plutonium, etc., contain enough energy for the job. We also know that this energy is not completely accessible, that it can be released. He can't even be released in two ways, either fast in the form of a superexplosion, or slowly in a so-called "pile" where the energy appears mainly as he. But we don't know how to apply these phenomena to rocket propulsion. Obviously the fissionable matter should not form the exhaust; there should be an additional reactant, a substance which is thrown out: plain water, perhaps, which would appear as skiing, possibly even split up into its component atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, or perhaps peroxide.
The "how" is still to be discovered, but it will probably be based on the principle of using eight fissionable element's energy for the ejection of a relatively inert reactant. It may be that, when that problem has been solved, we will find a parallel to the problem of pumps in an ordinary liquid fuel rocket. When liquid fuel rockets were still small – – that was only about 17 years ago and I remember the vividly – – the fuels were forced into the rocket motor by pressurizing the whole fuel tank. But everybody knew then that this would not do for all time to come. The tank that had to stand the feeding pressure had to have strong walls. Consequently it was heavy. Consequently the mass ratio could not be I. The idea then was that the tank be only strong enough to hold the fuels, in the matter of the gasoline tank of a car or truck or an airplane, and that the feeding pressure should be furnished by a pop. Of course the pump had to weigh less than the saving in tank wall weight which they brought about. Obviously there was a minimum size and weight for a good home, and if that minimum weight was rather large, a rocket with pumps would have to be a big rocket.
It happened just that way. Efficient pumps were large and heavy and the rocket with pumps was the 46 foot the two. The "atomic motor" for rockets may also turn out to be large, the smallest really reliable and efficient model may be a compact little 7 ton unit. This would make for a large rocket – – but the size of a vehicle is no obstacle if you have the power to move it. Whatever the exhaust velocity, it will be high – – an expectation of 5 mi./s may be conservative. With such an exhaust velocity the mass ratio of the moon ship would be 11:1; with an exhaust velocity of 10 mi./s the mass ratio would drop .3:1!
The moon ship shown in the paintings of the second illustration section is based on the assumption of a mass ratio of this order of magnitude, which in turn is based on the assumption of an atomic rocket motor.
Naturally there would be some trouble with radioactivity in an atomic propelled rocket. But that is not quite as hard to handle as the radioactivity which would accompany atomic energy propulsion under different circumstances. A seagoing vessel propelled by time and energy could probably be built right now. It would operate by means of an atomic pile running at the center high enough to burden and water steam. The steam would drive a turbine, which would be coupled to the ships propeller. While all this mechanism would be reasonably small and light as ship engines go, it would have to be encased in many tons of concrete to shield the ships company against the radiation that would escape from the pile and from the water and the skiing the coolant. For a spaceship, no all-around shielding needed, only a single layer, separating the pilot's or crew's cabin in the nose from the rest of the ship. On the ground a ship which had grown "hot" through service would be placed inside a shielding structure, something like a massive concrete walls, open at the top. That would provide complete shielding or the public, but a shielding that the ship would not have to carry.
The problem that may be more difficult to handle is that of the radioactivity of the exhaust. A mood ship taking off with Lee behind a radioactive patch, caused by the ground/. Most likely that radioactivity would not last very long, but it would be a temporary danger spot. Obviously moon ship for some time to come will begin their journeys from desolate places. Of course they might take off by means of booster units producing nothing more dangerous in their exhaust them water vapor, carbon dioxide, and maybe a sulfurous smell.
Friday, July 19, 2019
Remembering the Moonshot
A bit of debunking...
And a bit of history.
And this.
From Wikipedia:
Man Will Conquer Space Soon! was the title of a famous series of 1950s magazine articles in Collier's detailing Wernher von Braun's plans for manned spaceflight. Edited by Cornelius Ryan, the individual articles were authored by such space notables of the time as Willy Ley, Fred Lawrence Whipple, Dr. Joseph Kaplan, Dr. Heinz Haber, and von Braun. The articles were illustrated with paintings and drawings by Chesley Bonestell, Fred Freeman, and Rolf Klep, some of the finest magazine illustrators of the time.
For more, check this out.
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Though I have to admit, Alex Jones' chocolate bone broth looks delicious
Paul Krugman's excellent op-ed uses Rick Perlstein's seminal the Long Con as a starting point to discuss the role of Snake Oil in the 21st Century Conservative Movement.
Why should marketing scams be linked to political extremism? It’s all about affinity fraud: once you establish a persona that appeals to angry, aging white guys, you can sell them stuff that will supposedly protect their virility, their waistline, and their wealth.
And at a grander level, isn’t that what Fox News is really about? Consider it not as an ideological organization per se but as a business: it offers cheap programming (because there isn’t much reporting) that appeals to the prejudices of angry old white guys who like to sit on the couch and rant at their TV, and uses its viewership to help advertisers selling weight-loss plans.
Now, normally we think of individuals’ views and interests as the forces driving politics, including the ugly polarization increasingly dominating the scene. The commercial exploitation of that polarization, if we mention it at all, is treated as a sort of surface phenomenon that feeds off the fundamental dynamic.
But are we sure that’s right? The Alex Joneses, Ben Shapiros, and Fox Newses of the world couldn’t profit from extremism unless there were some underlying predisposition of angry old white guys to listen to this stuff. But maybe the commercial exploitation of political anger is what has concentrated and weaponized that anger. In other words, going back to where I started this essay, maybe the reason we’re in a political nightmare is that our political behavior has, in effect, been parasitized by marketing algorithms.
...
Anyway, I think it’s really important to realize the extent to which peddling political snake oil, whether it’s about the economy, race, the effects of immigration, or whatever, is to an important extent a way to peddle actual snake oil: magic pills that will let you lose weight without ever feeling hungry and restore your youthful manhood.
And if you haven't seen it before, you really need to check this one out.
Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Repost for the Death of a Dog Whistle
Back during the run-up to the election, we had a long thread on the way that conservative movement media strategy and self-serving, short-sighted journalistic norms had combined to allow Republicans to manipulate the press. One of the recurring points in that thread was that Trump was a stressor and that the system was starting to show the strain.
From Reagan through Ryan, this carefully constructed messaging and spin machine allowed Republican politicians to make dishonest or offensive statements with little or no penalty. Even when a reporter did correct the record, it was done often accompanied with a generous dollop of false balance.
Working in concert with the openly partisan media of Fox News, it was remarkably effective, allowing the GOP to maintain cordial relations with a press corps they claimed was biased against them. It was a robust system as long as there was minimal effort put into keeping the messaging at least marginally defensible. Now we're seeing what happens without that effort.
Tuesday, August 9, 2016
The loss of plausible deniability
One important point to keep in mind while following this year's election is that, of the truly objectionable things about the Trump campaign, very few are actually new. Instead, we have all sorts of practices that have always been unacceptable, but which are now being presented in a way that makes them undeniable.If you remember the elections of 2000 and 2004, you will probably recall talk of Karl Rove and his mastery of "political jujitsu." It was generally discussed as if it were some sort of mystical Jedi mind trick that allowed Rove to make strengths into weaknesses and weaknesses into strengths. Mainly, it came down to the realization that most reporters would respond to obvious lies with straight faces and no follow-up questions.
In 2004, I remember Republican operatives making the argument that George W. Bush's military record compared favorably with that of John Kerry. Just to review, Kerry was a legitimate war hero in terms of courage, sacrifice, and effectiveness. On the other side of the ledger, even if we push aside all of the accusations and contested points about favoritism and completion of requirements, there is a relatively cushy stint in the National Guard.
These and other clearly untrue statements were usually allowed to stand largely because this was a symbiotic relationship. It was in both the source's and the journalist's interests to keep this relationship going and not to push the boundaries in either direction.
The lies we've been hearing recently are not necessarily that much more blatant, but Trump and associates are no longer observing the social conventions that traditionally went with them. If a reporter asks about your candidate's military service and you reply by saying all sorts of nice things about the National Guard, that reporter can move onto the next question without looking like a complete moron. If you look reporters in the face and tell them that twice cheating on then dumping your wife for a younger, more glamorous woman qualifies as a sacrifice, you leave the reporters looking like asses just for letting you get the words out of your mouth.
Which brings us to (from TPM):
Khizr Khan, the father of the Muslim soldier, said in his speech at the Democratic convention last week that Trump had "sacrificed nothing." And Trump hit back over the weekend, saying that he's "made a lot of sacrifices," like creating jobs."Creating jobs" normally implies actually paying the people who do work for you, but we can save that for another day.
During a CNN panel discussion Sunday, Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes defended Trump's comments.
"Mr. Trump was responding to the fact of sacrificing. Nowhere ever did he ever say that his sacrifice was equivalent or more or even close to what the Kahn’s had given up," she said.
CNN host Fredricka Whitfield then asked, "Is creating a job considered a sacrifice?"
"You know what, creating jobs caused him to be at work, which cost him two marriages,” Hughes said in response. “Time away from his family to sit there and invest.
Clinton surrogate Bernard Whitman jumped in to say, "infidelity cost him."
"No, actually being away from his family, he’s admitted it,” Hughes insisted. "That is the spin of the media and ongoing bias."
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