Sunday, June 18, 2023

"It's amazing how strongly people feel about that. I talk about cutting taxes, people go like that, I talk about transgender everybody goes crazy. Five years ago you didn't know what the hell it was"


 


Kari Lake and friend.

 

In the mid-Seventies, All in the Family, the most popular TV show in the country routinely watched by over twenty million households, would feature a drag queen as a beloved recurring character.

 

By the Eighties, the topic was safe enough for the least edgy show on television to do an episode on it.

As Aubry points out later in the thread, the captain is baiting Gopher to get him to move past his initial bigotry, which was a familiar element of what was a common sitcom plot for at least forty years. Old friend/lover turns up having transitioned. lead character freaks out, mentor/trusted advisor reminds them that their friend is still their friend, and they learn to move past their prejudices. 

You can argue that these episodes were patronizing and that the message would have rang truer had producers actually hired a trans actor (which, with the exception of All in the Family, was almost never the case), but the important part, at least with respect to this post, is that it was no big deal. The producers undoubtedly got a few angry letters, maybe even lost a handful of viewers, but outside of a few small groups, no one paid any attention. 

 

 

As recently as 2016, the GOP's nominee would say in his acceptance speech, “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens” and no one would really care. And in this one case, Trump is not an outlier. You can find any number of examples of prominent Republicans taking LGBTQ positions that were entirely mainstream but which would outrage the base today.

 


There has always been homophobia and transphobia in our society just as there has always been racism, misogyny, and religious bigotry. It is important to acknowledge our history here, but there is a danger when looking at how much things are the same, of blinding ourselves to see to what extent things have changed in a dangerous and frightening way.


 

As Bob Chipman has pointed out, for decades, companies like Disney have leaned toward a mild, performative liberalism because it was good business. This mostly consisted of empty gestures like putting up a rainbow flag this time of year or running an ad with Fredrick Douglass during Black History Month, or declaring their love for the planet on Earth Day. These things were and are generally popular and allowed the huge corporations to come off as compassionate and concerned. This used to be the safest path, but times have changed.

Target pulled certain products from its Pride collection, citing confrontational behavior by shoppers and the need to protect its employees. Bud Light walked back its brief collaboration with a transgender TikTok influencer, but that didn’t stop it from losing its long-held status as America’s best-selling beer. The brand’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, issued a quasi-apology for simply doing business with a trans person, but that doesn’t seem to have appeased transphobic boycotters. At the same time, it appears to have alienated LGBTQ people and their allies. 

“When Kid Rock took out an automatic weapon and shot up a case of beer, you did not see anyone from Anheuser-Busch saying, ‘Hey this isn’t OK,’” said Mark Robertson, who has been watching these events play out from Chicago. He co-owns four LGBTQ bars in the city that used to serve a lot of Anheuser-Busch products until that apologetic statement from the CEO prompted Robertson to cut ties.



There's a lot of good reporting in Savannah Maher's piece, but it falls down badly on the most important part of the story.  Yes, LGBTQ marketing always generated protests -- there were angry letters and an occasional blip of publicity and a few people actually followed through with their "I'll never shop here again" threats, but on the whole the numbers were trivial and the positive PR and access to new markets far outweighed any downside. It was good business.

Being mildly pro-diversity has gone from the safest business strategies to being one of the riskiest because a majority of the conservative base has suddenly started passionately caring about something they never cared about before. 

 

 

 Though I know we are not supposed to be this blunt, it is difficult and probably counterproductive to try to ignore the Nazi in the room. The parallels are simply too obvious, not just with the Third Reich's persecution (culminating in mass murder) of homosexuals, but with the larger obsession with perceived decadence, and most of all in the way that a fairly low level and even arguably diminishing level of bigotry can suddenly boil over into a terrifying collective madness.

 

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Friday, June 16, 2023

John Galt

This is Joseph.

John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, has a number of conceptual problems. However, one major issue is the absolutism of individualism. You get quotes like: “No one provides unearned sustenance for another person.” There are a lot of conceptual problems with Objectivism. But today I want to think about two of them, that have leaked into the popular discourse, to ill-effect. 

One, this philosophy is immediately incoherent in a world with children. It tends to devalue non-productive entities, like children, as they cannot earn their sustenance. In the case of an infant, it is even impossible. Yet the decision to not support children as a society leads to a number of poor outcomes, as the current people do not live forever. We get the modern idea of children as a luxury good, as opposed to a critical piece of the future. But societies that are undergoing demographic collapse end up regretting not supporting their future citizens. Ayn Rand's vision has a common problem of libertarian thought -- it talks about an end state without a process to get there. Noziak's method of claiming property is both impossible to implement (how do you make sure that nobody was worse off at the time of the property claim) and simply at odds with the history of how property emerges (a lot of territory has changed hands to the determinant of somebody, even if they are no longer around to protest). Similarly, the world of hyper-competent adults has to have started with some quite dependent infants. 

Two, there is an odd idea in these works that the distribution of talent is oddly bimodal. You have the elite superstars and a bunch of others who are nowhere close. I don't want to say that there is nothing like this, but competitive human talents do not distribute this way on most areas I look at. 

Sports: Just look at Olympic results with objective times. I picked 15 km men's skiing as an example. Look at the times for the top two (37:54.8, 38:18.0) -- there are another 11 players before you get more than 2 minutes behind this time on a 15 km trek. It is not at all like one or two supermen cross the line, and then we go get coffee before the rest arrive. This distribution doesn't look at all like supermen.

Academics: We used to have to rank order students for scholarships. Ranking ordering is hard. It is rarely obvious who is the very top and the order definitely has judgement in it. We also don't see academic departments collapse when the best researcher leaves or retires. Instead, you just see another person become prominent. 

Business: Did microsoft collapse when Bill Gates left? Did Tesla collapse when Martin Eberhard stepped aside as CEO? Did Google fail without Larry Page? To ask the question is to answer it. There are some unique talents in business (Steve Jobs comes to mind, but he needed Wozniak or it would never have started) but companies can continue to be successful with these transitions. The graveyard is full of indispensable men.  

The truth is that there are a lot of talented people in the world who would like to end up in important positions. It isn't that bad government cannot do grave harm to a country. But that the issue is not that the elite might cause problems. More often than not, the elite are the problem. 

But the real insight here is that process is as important as outcome. There is a tendency to argue from current position, but everybody had a period of proving themselves in advance of being currently successful. One of the great flaws with Objectivism (I suspect that we'll get an editor's note as to how it is hard to just pick one), is that it both ignores process (infant -> child -> adult -> leader) and has a hopelessly naïve vision of how talent is distributed. 
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Thursday, June 15, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- I thought we could go two weeks without Musk, but I hadn't counted on dictator nostalgia.

I'm not really a finance guy, but I don't think this is a good sign.


 

Or this.


Since we've checked in, Musk has had some memorable tweets...


But this one stands out.



And in other tweets you thought were fake but aren't...






Elsewhere in the GOP.





While on the topic of "traditonal fiscal conservatism," remember those IRS cuts the Republicans demanded?




At least she didn't work in anything about the shape of the earth.


Watergate helped Nixon's stock with the far right.


Who would have thought that Ann Coulter would turn out to be the hitchhiker with the axe. *

Or that Hutchinson would be the sanest voice in the GOP.



As much as I hate to agree with this guy.




"The same issue"


If you're following the UFO story, you need to read this (there's  even a DeSantis angle).

AI News






I want to revisit this, but I suspect the post I end up with will just be a longer version of what Tuffy said.





And misc.

 








* Even the hitchhiker with the axe knows you shouldn't pick up the hitchhiker with the chainsaw. 
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Wednesday, June 14, 2023

Do I owe Ron DeSantis an apology?

[For the record, none of this applies to Michael Hiltzik, who pushed back on the standard narrative from day one.]

Andrew Gelman pushed back on my recent post about Ron DeSantis.

It seems to me that you're overstating your case. You say that DeSantis is "devoid of political talent." The fact that someone was nominated by a major party for governor of a competitive state, not to mention winning the election, that's a signal that he has _some_ political talent, no? I can buy the argument that DeSantis had some good luck, but "devoid of political talent"??

And, yes, Gelman does have a point.

For starters, absolute statements about people's character or abilities are almost always hyperbole to some degree. I probably should have been more careful with my language and I almost certainly should have added a couple of qualifiers.

First, when I talk about political talent, what I had in mind was the interpersonal side of the job, the ability to relate comfortably to people, move a crowd with the speech, show some charisma and stage presence. Obviously, there's a lot more to politics than that, and I should have been more clear.

Second, we are talking about the big leagues here. What constitutes practically no talent depends heavily on the standards of comparison. Just as the best performer in your community theater group would look hapless on the Broadway stage, Ron DeSantis shows few discernible gifts for the public facing side of politics compared to what we normally see on this level.

I don't want to spend too much time on examining Ron DeSantis's political career and what was behind it, been there done that, but it is worth taking a couple of minutes to look at 2018 and 2020. The margin a victory in the latter was substantial, but not particularly out of line with what we would expect given the makeup of the state and given that it has become ground central for the MAGA movement.

In the general election of 2018 he won by a fraction of a percent against a flawed Democratic candidate in a reddish purple state. Arguably, the one recent campaign where he overperformed was the 2018 primary and as much as one hates to concede a point to Donald Trump, the primary driver of that victory seems to be the decision to attach himself to the then president like a remora.

And if that categorization seems a bit unfair, watch the clip.




But all of this is straying from the main point. Politics is very much a field where it's better to be lucky than good and mediocre politicians catch favorable winds all the time. There's nothing very interesting about that part of the story, nor, at this point, is there anything particularly controversial about it. Here's how NYT columnist and reliable team player, Frank Bruni recently described watching DeSantis campaign. [Emphasis added.]

From the breathless media coverage of Ron DeSantis’s recent visits to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, you could easily get the impression that:

  • Voting starts in approximately five minutes.

  • You’re really watching a new Netflix series about a body snatcher’s attempts to pantomime just enough humanity to amass power on Planet Earth.

  • The Florida governor’s entire candidacy hinges on his wife, Casey DeSantis.


Bruni is one of the guys you go to for a consensus opinion and he is definitely delivered here. Suddenly everyone seems to have discovered that DeSantis isn't very good at this whole politics thing. Here's another recent opinion piece by Bruni that makes the same point at greater length. And since we're talking about standard narratives, we have to quote Politico.

For some time now she’s been seen mostly and by many as an absolute superstar of a political spouse, a not so “secret weapon,” even something like his saving grace — an antidote for her sometimes awkward husband, social in a way that he is not, charismatic in a way that he is not, generally and seemingly at ease in the spotlight in a way that he so often and so evidently is not.

The article later goes on to discuss "the perception of a novice, faltering DeSantis that’s also visible in a slide in early primary polls," and suggest the Casey is actually the brains behind the campaign.

I'm not sure I'd assign any value to the Politico piece as journalism -- there is usually little to be learned from juicy off-the-record quotes presumably from sources with axes to grind -- but as a gauge of conventional wisdom it's hard to beat.

I read the Bruni piece on first wives and skimmed the Politico profile of Casey DeSantis and I'm reasonably sure I managed to cull everything of value. There's nothing there that justifies the time it would take to read them. The only interesting aspect here is the complete and completely unacknowledged reversal in the narrative. [note to Andrew Gelman: yes, someone out there probably did acknowledge it but I don't personally know of an exception and I really liked that sentence.] 

For more than a year, the NYT, Politico and all the usual suspect, palpably delighted to have a leading Republican contender with Ivy League manners who didn't put ketchup on his steak, wrote article after article (some as late as this February) about how DeSantis was an unstoppable force. Now history has changed. We have always been at war with Eastasia and Ron DeSantis has always been bad at politics.


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Tuesday, June 13, 2023

Who would have thought that deciding to base a pick-up on those cars from Blade Runner would lead to engineering issues...

Before we get into this, it should be noted that the market reacted (or more accurately, failed to react) to this by pumping the stock up 15%. The main driver of the surge appears to be a deal with GM and Ford to partner up on an expanded charging network. The bull case seems optimistic, particularly when you remember that many of these same people justified their sky-high valuations partly because Tesla had exclusive rights to its charging network.

From "A Leaked Tesla Report Shows the Cybertruck Had Basic Design Flaws" by Jeremy White Aarian Marshall

In May, the German newspaper Handelsblatt began reporting on the “Tesla Files”: thousands of internal documents provided to it by a whistleblower. Among those documents was an engineering report that might give some insight into why the vehicle has taken so long to come to market. The report, dated January 25, 2022, which WIRED has examined, shows that the preproduction “alpha” version of the Cybertruck was still struggling with some basic problems with its suspension, body sealing, noise levels, handling. and braking.

This is on top of the issues we already knew about, including...

Stainless steel is not easy to shape or mold, “Hence the look as if it's the output of a student in an in-class ‘Pop Quiz Number 1’ for the course ‘Intro to Car Design,’” says Raj Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.  The material requires specialized welding techniques, and it doesn’t flex easily, which could be dangerous in a crash, when force usually absorbed by a “crumple zone” could be transferred to cabin occupants instead, Rajkumar says.

Experts have noted that the odd shape of the vehicle, and particularly its sharp edges, will make it hard for the Cybertruck to meet pedestrian protection rules in Europe, and possibly in other markets.  “These long, unbroken sheets of metal, with the sharp lines and a humongous windshield, make me think there’s going to be some real issues with potentially passing safety regulations, especially outside the US,” Gartner’s Ramsey says.

Addressing all of these manufacturing and engineering issues is likely to have substantially pushed up the price of the Cybertruck. Musk initially said the pickup’s price would start below $40,000. However, by 2021 those attractive price estimates had already been removed from Tesla’s website. Musk told shareholders last year that the vehicle’s specifications and pricing had changed since its introduction in 2019.

 It was, however, this paragraph that particularly caught my eye.

“You need something new to reinvigorate the story. Whether that’s the humanoid robot, the Tesla Semi, the Cybertruck, Full Self-Driving, all of those are fair game in the eyes of the Tesla PR machine to keep the narrative going about continued growth,” says Jeffrey Osborne, a managing director and senior research analyst who covers Tesla at the financial services firm Cowen. “The logical [first] one of all of those is the Cybertruck.”

 We've been making similar points for a while now. From 2017:

Finally, it is essential to remember that maintaining this “real-life Tony Stark” persona is tremendously valuable to Musk. In addition to the ego gratification (and we have every reason to believe that Musk has a huge ego), this persona is worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Musk. More than any other factor, Musk’s mystique and his ability to generate hype have pumped the valuation of Tesla to its current stratospheric levels. Bloomberg put his total compensation from Tesla at just under $100 million a year. When Musk gets tons of coverage for claiming he's about to develop telepathy chips for your brain or build a giant subterranean slot car race track under Los Angeles, he keeps that mystique going. Eventually groundless proposals and questionable-to-false boasts will wear away at his reputation, but unless the vast majority of journalists become less credulous and more professional in the very near future, that damage won’t come soon enough to prevent Musk from earning another billion dollars or so from the hype.

And from 2022:

 

Maintaining his current fortune requires Musk to keep these fantasies vivid in the minds of fans and investors. People have to believe that the Tesla model after next will be a flying exoskeleton that can blow shit up.

Here are the primary exoskeletons of the Musk empire as of 2022.

Full Self Driving (Beta but see below)

Cyber trucks (one handmade prototype after all these years. Accepting checks now. Production always "next year")

Optimus the friendly robot (literally a dancer in a robot suit)

Fitbits for your brain (mainly an excuse to torture small primates to death)

Super fast tunnelling machines (actually slower than the industry standard)

And the one of these things which is not like the other...

Starlink (doable technology, absurd business plan, horrifying externalities)

From a business standpoint, FSD is the most important and a big chunk in the stock plunge may be a reflection of how it's going.


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Monday, June 12, 2023

"Melted, that would be enough to hypothetically drape almost 5 inches of water across the entire state of California."

It's been strange watching California's weather become such a big national story, partially because of the disconnect in tone The attitude out here has been appreciative than you might have guessed from the coverage. We got stunning levels of desperately needed precipitation with far less flooding than feared (though we still aren't entirely out of the woods) and little loss of life (mainly from swimmers and kayakers as far as I can tel.).

We've also gotten lucky with a cool Spring and early Summer that has spread the out the snowmelt, giving us a relatively steady flow of water that should continue well into the Summer, which is what we were hoping for.

From the LA Times June 8, 2023

 

That was UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain’s warning to Californians in late March, days before officials announced that this year’s Sierra snowpack contained historic volumes of water.

After years of drought and restrictions on water use, a series of atmospheric rivers between January and March brought epic amounts of rain and snow to the parched state. Heavy precipitation and below-average temperatures meant that snow accumulated for months high in the Sierra Nevada mountains along California's eastern border.

At its peak, the snowpack contained roughly the same amount of water as a full Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the country.

The snowpack itself acts as a natural water storage system for California. When the region’s climate shifts from cold and wet to warm and dry, the snow gradually melts down from mountain rivers and creeks, filling reservoirs and, possibly, causing further flooding in the Central Valley’s once-dry Tulare Lake.

State water managers say the snowmelt has likely peaked for the season, so long as temperatures remain relatively cool. Another rise in the melt is expected next week.

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Friday, June 9, 2023

Ten years ago at the blog

Thomas Friedman demonstrates the Roommate Effect

I have mixed feelings about criticizing Thomas Friedman. For one thing, it's been done. For another, he did some really impressive reporting on the Middle East and I suspect that, if he stuck to that topic, he would still be adding a great deal to the conversation.

In the role of public intellectual, though, he's pretty much been a disaster (insert Peter Principle digression here), and he keeps coming up with passages that are simply too representative not to use as examples of bad punditry.

Which brings us to the roommate effect. The roommate effect is one of the reasons that people who go to elite schools to tend do well professionally.

Imagine a small town populated predominately by people in their early 20s with similar backgrounds who are new to the area. Young people are good at making friends and this scenario is almost perfect for forming new relationships. You have roommates and friends and friends of roommates and roommates of friends. You meet people in the cafeteria and in the coffee houses and in the bars. You find people with common interests in music or movies or art or sports. These people tend to form much of the base of a social network that you will rely on for the rest of your life.

This part of the experience is common to anyone who has gone to a traditional college. But in an elite school, there is a fairly good chance that a new friends will be someone who is or is connected to someone who is rich/famous/powerful. Playing in a college pool league with the son of a Fortune 500 CEO is likely to be a good career move.

And that brings us to this recent Friedman column (mercilessly but not inaccurately satirized by Timothy Burke). The column is basically an unpaid advertorial for the job placement firm HireArt. The weaknesses of the column are a subject for another post; Friedman's lack of understanding of education and the job market is genuinely profound. However he does manage, quite unintentionally, to make an important point about the way things actually work (emphasis added for those who like to skim):
One of the best ways to understand the changing labor market is to talk to the co-founders of HireArt (www.hireart.com): Eleonora Sharef, 27, a veteran of McKinsey; and Nick Sedlet, 28, a math whiz who left Goldman Sachs. Their start-up was designed to bridge the divide between job-seekers and job-creators.
...

The way HireArt works, explained Sharef (who was my daughter’s college roommate), is that clients — from big companies, like Cisco, Safeway and Airbnb, to small family firms — come with a job description and then HireArt designs online written and video tests relevant for that job. Then HireArt culls through the results and offers up the most promising applicants to the company, which chooses among them.
In case you're wondering, Eleonora Sharef got her bachelor's from Yale.
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Thursday, June 8, 2023

Thursday Tweets -- now less musky

We are overstocked with bad science this week (AI, UFOs, Flat Earthers and RFK jr.), I thought I'd skip any tweets about a certain individual, though I suspect some of his known associates may make an appearance.


I love this analogy.







While not quite the same tech Apple just unveiled, it is always worth remembering that VR has been the next big thing for longer than many of the people saying VR is the next big thing have been alive.





I give you the perfect AI hype story.


Seguing from techbros to politics...




If he can hold on to the spotlight, Christie could make this interesting and by the standards of today's GOP, he may be the leper with the most fingers.


If you had told me that Ann Coulter would make a persuasive argument for contributing to the Chris Christie campaign...



Remember when Republicans didn't like Russian stooges?




I did Nazi that coming...

But with water (h/t to Seva Gunitsky)


Just so everyone remembers, the Miss Teen USA competition includes girls as young as 14.



Credibility...



I've been trying to sucker Andrew Gelman into doing a post on this. Read the thread to see why someone needs to write this up.



More from Devereaux.

I recall a story from a sci-fi collection about a menial office worker who was convinced he should have been born in the days of knights. A stranger appears and tells him he was right. There's a flash and he finds himself in a stable holding a shovel.

A visit to Aesthetica's page reveals exactly what you'd expect, implicit racism, explicit misogyny, and lots of bad fantasy art.


Speaking of flakes.



When friends tell me we wouldn't have these problems if we had a parliamentary system.

Just because we're taking a break from you know who doesn't mean we can't check in with another member of the PayPal mafia.





Also any famous person goes to the hospital. (see what they're saying about Jamie Foxx)



I promised you UFOs.


 
This is a long thread (it started in 2020) but you should read the whole thing).



 

 Come for the flat-earth content. Stay for the masterclass in how not to defend yourself from mockery.


In a case of bringing satiric coal to Newcastle, an Atlanta comic weighs in.


In case you thought RFK jr was was a one trick pony.


I do give this guy credit for leaving the tweet up.



Thunderbird going upscale is a development I did not (and did not wish to) see coming.


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Wednesday, June 7, 2023

The sad part is he's still better at his job than Chapek was

Living within walking distance of the Warner Brothers lot, I see an uncountable number of For Your Consideration billboards and I hear a lot about the strike.

Overall, average pay for Hollywood’s top execs climbed to $28 million in 2021, up 53% from 2018 (and roughly 108 times the average writer’s pay) according to the analysis, which uses compensation data from the research firm Equilar and includes stock options, base salaries, bonuses and other perks.

Meanwhile, average pay for Hollywood writers has remained virtually flat at about $260,000 as 2021, the Times reports. Median screenwriter pay has dropped 14% when adjusted for inflation over the last five years, according to statistics from the Writers Guild of America, the TV and film writers’ union with 11,500 members.

 

The top 10 highest-paid Hollywood executives in the last 5 years includes:

  1. David Zaslav, Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.: $498,915,318
  2. Ari Emanuel, Endeavor Group Holdings Inc.: $346,935,367
  3. Reed Hastings, Netflix: $209,780,532
  4. Bob Iger, Walt Disney Co.: $195,092,460
  5. Ted Sarandos, Netflix: $192,171,581
  6. Rupert Murdoch, Fox Corp.: $174,929,867
  7. Lachlan Murdoch, Fox Corp.: $171,359,374
  8. Brian Roberts, Comcast Corp.: $170,158,088
  9. Joseph Ianniello, Paramount Global: $152,793,125
  10. Patrick Whitesell, Endeavor Group Holdings Inc.: $143,584,597

 Let's take a look at Zaslaz. To be fair, most of that half billion came from before the merger, when he was CEO of Discovery and had a very good run pumping out cheap and profitable reality shows. It's difficult to argue anyone deserves that kind of compensation, but at least he was competent... was competent.

Since the merger, the studio is arguably floundering worse than it was before (and that's saying something). He rebranded the streaming service with the painfully generic name Max. He put James Gunn in charge of the superhero line apparently without seeing either Suicide Squad or Peacemaker. (Gunn is a brilliant filmmaker and Guardians shows he can make an effort to play by the studio rules but there's a lot of Troma in his DNA. Seriously, watch his deeply transgressive  DC work or, better yet, Tromeo and Juliet, and ask yourself, is this really the guy you want to give the car keys to?)

Perhaps the worst part of Zaslav's tenure has been the recent turmoil at CNN. Particularly since the Trump town hall, ratings are down, credibility is shot, and the talent is edging toward open revolt.

 And then there's this.

 
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Tuesday, June 6, 2023

The term of the day is "Reverse Centaur"

 From Cory Doctorow:

In AI circles, a “centaur” describes a certain kind of machine/human collaboration, in which “decision-support” systems (which the field loves to call “AI”s) are paired with human beings for results that draw upon the strengths of each, such as when a human chess master and a chess-playing computer program collaborate to smash their competition.

...

By contrast, an Amazon driver is a reverse-centaur. The AI is in charge, and the human is the junior partner. The AI is the head, telling the body what to do. The driver is the body — the slow-witted, ambulatory meat that is puppeteered by the AI master.


Doctorow provides further details in this post (complete with the wonderful phrase "digital phrenology").

Amazon DSP vans have Netradyne cameras inside and out, including one that is always trained on drivers' faces, performing digital phrenology on them, scoring them based on junk-science microexpression detection and other imaginary metrics.

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Monday, June 5, 2023

Over the next year and (almost) and half, you're going to hear a lot of historical "rules" from 538, the Upshot, etc. Here's a counter example to keep in mind when they start to sound persuasive.

 The pattern was clearer than almost any of the rules that were dredged up by data journalists in the past couple of elections to support this or that prediction. This is a forty year run with plenty of examples of candidates with and without the trait and 100% accuracy.

Then it just stopped. The lesson here is that even with the most convincing historical precedent based argument, you shouldn't assume the future should look like the past.

Monday, November 18, 2019

Fun with Political Trivia

This picks up on a recent thread (telling which one might be too much of a clue). The ones and zeros represent a trait of Democratic candidates from 1964 to 2004. Take a look and think about it for a moment. Here's a hint, the trait is something associated with each man well before he ran for president.

Johnson           1
Humphrey       0
McGovern       0      
Carter              1           
Mondale          0           
Dukakis           0           
Clinton            1                 
Gore                1                      
Kerry               0


As you might have guessed, the relationship between this trait and the popular vote didn't hold in the previous or following elections. The trait is not at all obscure. It was well known at the time and figured prominently into their political personas, This is not a trick question.

Read more »
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