Comments, observations and thoughts from two bloggers on applied statistics, higher education and epidemiology. Joseph is an associate professor. Mark is a professional statistician and former math teacher.
A quick google search shows that 2014 was the year that Andreessen went big on Bitcoin. Crypto wasn't on our radar at the time, but had we been paying attention, we wouldn't have been all that surprised that this guy was involved.
Marc Andreessen has a new interview
up and it is characteristically packed with silliness. If things had
gone better for ViolaWWW, do you think Pei-Yuan Wei would have gotten
this annoying?
What did you do?
I just went to college. I did my thing. I
came out here in ’94, and Silicon Valley was in hibernation. In high
school, I actually thought I was going to have to learn Japanese to work
in technology. My big feeling was I just missed it, I missed the whole
thing. It had happened in the ’80s, and I got here too late. But then,
I’m maybe the most optimistic person I know. I mean, I’m incredibly
optimistic. I’m optimistic arguably to a fault, especially in terms of
new ideas. My presumptive tendency, when I’m presented with a new idea,
is not to ask, “Is it going to work?” It’s, “Well, what if it does
work?” ...
But clearly you don’t think everything’s going to work.
No.
But there are people who are wired to be skeptics and there are people
who are wired to be optimists. And I can tell you, at least from the
last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you’re
right.
On the other hand, if there’d been a few more skeptics
in 1999, people might have kept their retirement money. Isn’t there a
role for skepticism in the tech industry?
I don’t know what
it buys you. Let me put it this way. If you could point to periods of
time in the last hundred years when everything just stabilized and
didn’t change, then maybe yes. But that never seems to actually happen.
The skeptics are wrong all the time.
There is a huge survivor bias in the way Andreessen and other creative
disruptors compile their case studies. They only remember the lottery
tickets that paid off and this leads them to dispense some very bad
advice.
When it comes to investing in innovation, skeptics are right a lot --
quite possibly most -- of the time. We've been at this for well over a
century, at least since Edisonades
started showing up next to the dime Westerns. If you couldn't be a Bell
or a Wright, you could at least be the investor who got in on the
ground floor.
The trouble was, then and now, that there tend to be more Paige Compositors
than light bulbs. Uncritical blanket optimism is a bad way to approach
investments. I'd also argue that, if you're setting your sights higher
than Snapchat, it's also a bad way to promote innovation but that's a
topic for another post.
It is surprising, and then when you think about it unsurprising that, after all the major Republican scandals that have turned out to be 48-hour stories, it is the Mark Robinson one that had legs. The establishment media has tried to pretend that this is about the Nazi/slavery comments, but those still contested (okay, technically still contested) remarks on a chat site years ago are not all that worse than what the man has said on the record, and often on mic, as recently as a couple of years ago. Given the widely circulated videos of Robinson endorsing white supremacy and denying the Holocaust, if the Nude Africa comments had been unearthed from some obscure chat room in the 90s, they hardly would've caused a ripple.
This is about the porn.
This is about the luridness, the hypocrisy, the creepiness, and the "you knew it all along" quality of the story. Robinson was one of the most hateful "moralists" of MAGA whose anti-abortion stance seems to have been based entirely on slut shaming. Even a cursory Google search will turn up numerous on camera claims that we only have abortion because women can't keep their skirts down. (That same Google search will probably reveal that Robinson actually admitted in an ad to paying for his future wife's abortion back in 1989, another story that disappeared from view within a couple of days.) These comments attacking female (and, as far as I can tell, exclusively female) promiscuity alternated with Holocaust denial and endorsements of white supremacy.
Mark Robinson is just the kind of judgmental misogynist that women suspect of being a porn addict, and, in a move that would have been to on the nose for even the most hackneyed of streaming series but which is right on brand for 2024, it turned out he wasn't just a porn addict, he was pretty much the creepiest and most hypocritical version imaginable. Even in the highly expurgated CNN article (which was very much a PG-13 edit of an NC-17 movie) we learned that his interests included fantasizing about his experiences as a teenaged voyeur, constructing elaborate sexual fantasies about his sister-in-law, and most of all (queue up Robinson's anti-LGBTQ comments here) transsexual porn.
The other reason that the Robinson story continues to have legs is that he refuses to drop out of the election, which tells you a great deal about today's Republican Party. A Trump-endorsed, own-the-libs candidate, the very idea of dropping out of the race for the good of the party is alien to him. Dickishness is so fundamentally ingrained in this movement as to be possibly its defining trait. Sometimes it can be viewed as a show of dominance. More often, it is nothing more than an adolescent need for attention. It is followed not that far back by a refusal to conform to conventional standards, mores, even consensus views of reality. Staying in the race, even when told that winning is impossible and that by not dropping, you are threatening Republicans up and down the ticket, is entirely in character.
One of the points we've been making in dozens of posts for more than two years now is that Dobbs has pushed us into unexplored political territory. Over that time we've had any number of data journalists and news analysts assuring us that they have it all figured out, that they have factored in all the new developments, and that we should trust them. They haven't and we shouldn't. When it comes to the impact on presidential elections of Dobbs and of the radically changed landscape of reproductive rights, N = 0.
We can't quantify or calibrate. The best we can do is try to keep track of what's going on and make a few very cautious assumptions about direction and the range of magnitude. With all that in mind, the Republicans are doing an extraordinary variety of things seemingly designed to drive women away from the party. There is no statistical basis for predicting just how big of an effect this will have, but it is difficult to see it being positive for the GOP in November.
PS And in
case you were wondering. No, he's not going down quietly.
If you're interested enough in politics and history to read this post, you should definitely take a few minutes and check out this bit by Mort Sahl on the Hollywood Palace (sort of a poor man's Ed Sullivan Show, but not without its notable moments).
Listen for the Reagan reference at the beginning, "even the New York Times" around two and a half minutes, Mitt Romney's dad, and lots of other familiar names, but mainly pay attention to the way Vietnam had become the issue that defined left and right, especially when it came to Bobby Kennedy.
The story is complicated, particularly when you factor in Roy Cohn, Trump's mentor and RFK's bitter rival. I don't have any big point to make, just provide an ironic bit of context.
Senator McCarthy dated Kennedy sisters Patricia and Eunice in Washington when they visited Jack, and on Cape Cod, where Eunice thought it fun to push McCarthy out of her father’s boat until she learned he couldn’t swim. The Wisconsin senator played shortstop for the Barefoot Boys, the Kennedy family softball team (McCarthy was benched after making four errors). And he cracked a rib during one of the storied touch football games on the lawn in Hyannisport.
...
Months later, it was Bobby’s turn to get a boost from McCarthy, who had been reelected and elevated to chair the powerful Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. One of the first calls McCarthy took, when searching for a chief counsel, was from the other Joe. This time the senior Kennedy was plugging Bobby, whom he’d once described as the runt of his litter of nine — the lamest athlete, most tongue-tied, and least likely to matter. He now understood that Bobby was the most like him of his children, in everything from his capacity to hate as well as love, to his hard-as-nails single-mindedness (in Joe’s case it was to make money so his kids wouldn’t have to, while Bobby’s three totems were, in descending order, the Kennedy family, God, and the Democratic Party).
During his undergraduate years at Harvard in the late 1940s, Bobby had shown where he stood on McCarthy’s soon-to-be holy war against Communism when he defended the senator in impassioned debates with friends. In a law school paper, he argued that President Franklin Roosevelt had sold out US interests in his agreement with the Soviets on the configuration of postwar Europe. His first job after law school in 1951 was investigating Bolsheviks at the Internal Security Division of the Justice Department. And as manager for his brother Jack’s Senate campaign, he attacked Senator Lodge for being soft on Communism.
Now, as McCarthy weighed his options for chief counsel, Bobby said he was almost as alarmed as the senator about the “serious internal security threat to the United States,” adding that “Joe McCarthy seemed to be the only one who was doing anything about it.” The lawmaker and the newly-minted lawyer both had the whatever-it-takes instincts of alley fighters, which Bobby believed they’d need in a Cold War where the enemy fought dirty. “Joe’s methods may be a little rough,” Bobby once told a pair of journalists, “but, after all, his goal is to expose Communists in government, and that’s a worthy goal. So why are you reporters so critical of his methods?”
There was one last reason why a job with McCarthy was so appealing to Bobby Kennedy. Bobby knew his father admired McCarthy, and he saw the senator as a reflection of much that he loved in his dad. Working for a tough-minded jingoist like McCarthy also was Bobby’s way of trying to erase the public’s lingering memory of Joe Kennedy as a Nazi apologist and, as many British still saw FDR’s early-war ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, a coward. What Bobby failed to see was that his father — an isolationist who believed that Communists, like fascists, could be accommodated until their regimes collapsed from within — was far less of a cold warrior than McCarthy was. Less even than Bobby himself was on the way to becoming.
...
Both Bobby and Jack understood McCarthy’s magnetism as well as the menace that turned his name into an “ism” personifying character assassination and fear-mongering. How they responded to that spoke volumes about the brothers’ own differences in temperament and outlook. The silky-smooth and highbrow Jack wanted little to do with McCarthy; the more gut-trusting, free-spirited Bobby embraced the Wisconsinite as a friend. The public may have thought McCarthy a “monster,” but he actually “was just plain fun,” Bobby’s widow, Ethel, told me. “He didn’t rant and roar, he was a normal guy.”
...
Bobby was quicker to grasp the immorality but was more loyal than his big brother, and even his father. While he’d worked for McCarthy for just seven-and-a-half months, Bobby stayed his friend till the end, making his last visit to the senator just before McCarthy died. His job with Joe launched Bobby’s career, injecting into his life passion and direction glaringly absent before then. His relationship with the Wisconsin senator became, too, a paradox he couldn’t escape, serving for some as a testament to his fidelity and patriotism, and for others as a measure of his youthful misdirection.
Senator McCarthy died at the age of 48 in 1957, liquor having eaten away at his liver. Jack stayed away from the funeral and urged his brother to do the same, but Bobby insisted on being there. At the church in Appleton, Wisconsin, however, he sat in the choir loft where nobody would see him; at the graveside, he stood apart from other Washington officials. And when the service was done, he begged journalists not to mention his being there for fear of embarrassing himself and his brother, the man who would become president of the United States in just three years.
