I strongly recommend Marjorie Hershey's work on the "constructed explanation," the post-election battle to winnow a narrative about what just happened. If interested, begin with:
Hershey, Marjorie Randon. "The constructed explanation: Interpreting election results in the 1984 presidential race." The Journal of Politics 54.4 (1992): 943-976.
Insightful as always. I’m not as big a MY hater as a lot of people but he does often fall into the same type of thinking as some of the EA-AI-databro set. I think one of the most telling confessions of this era was when SBF proudly claimed to never read books because blog posts are better for understanding complex topics. I read that and thought, people are giving this arrogant dilettante all their money?
Ben Recht (a statistics professor at Stanford, certainly deep in the belly of the beast) had a pre-election take on polls that lines right up with what you're saying: "Polls are infotainment, so they are better evaluated as media properties than as scientific instruments."
It's all too easy for people to confuse the presentation of concepts in numerical terms for rigor, especially when there are now huge companies with a vested interest in getting us to try and bet on those numbers.
Recht's book "The Irrational Decision" might be of interest to you: it presents a broad critique of the instrumental reason intrinsic to mathematical optimization and machine learning, and the silliness that results when people think that being rational means behaving like a convex optimization algorithm.
This nicely articulates what I've been thinking since last week, thanks. There seems to be a narcissism of small differences, too, where minor disagreements on policy become magnified and threaten to erupt into factional warfare. Neither the progressive left or moderate camps within the Democratic Party are large enough to dominate the other, and both are needed to eradicate the Trumpist cancer.
RE: "Who knew Trump would act so irrationally?" "I'm sorry, *what*?" pretty much sums it up. Maybe with a few more ??!!!
Another insightful post by John. His observation about the "over/under performance" catch-22 aligns with this post from Corey Robin: https://substack.com/@coreyrobin/note/c-384950391?r=m7ius&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web.
I strongly recommend Marjorie Hershey's work on the "constructed explanation," the post-election battle to winnow a narrative about what just happened. If interested, begin with:
Hershey, Marjorie Randon. "The constructed explanation: Interpreting election results in the 1984 presidential race." The Journal of Politics 54.4 (1992): 943-976.
looks great
Insightful as always. I’m not as big a MY hater as a lot of people but he does often fall into the same type of thinking as some of the EA-AI-databro set. I think one of the most telling confessions of this era was when SBF proudly claimed to never read books because blog posts are better for understanding complex topics. I read that and thought, people are giving this arrogant dilettante all their money?
Ben Recht (a statistics professor at Stanford, certainly deep in the belly of the beast) had a pre-election take on polls that lines right up with what you're saying: "Polls are infotainment, so they are better evaluated as media properties than as scientific instruments."
https://www.argmin.net/p/off-to-the-races
It's all too easy for people to confuse the presentation of concepts in numerical terms for rigor, especially when there are now huge companies with a vested interest in getting us to try and bet on those numbers.
Recht's book "The Irrational Decision" might be of interest to you: it presents a broad critique of the instrumental reason intrinsic to mathematical optimization and machine learning, and the silliness that results when people think that being rational means behaving like a convex optimization algorithm.
This nicely articulates what I've been thinking since last week, thanks. There seems to be a narcissism of small differences, too, where minor disagreements on policy become magnified and threaten to erupt into factional warfare. Neither the progressive left or moderate camps within the Democratic Party are large enough to dominate the other, and both are needed to eradicate the Trumpist cancer.
Curious what to make of the rather simple observation that the popularity of leadership is inversely related to the price of gasoline?