“Go into the London Stock Exchange – a more respectable place than many a court – and you will see representatives from all nations gathered together for the utility of men. Here Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt. Here the Presbyterian trusts the Anabaptist and the Anglican accepts a promise from the Quaker. On leaving these peaceful and free assemblies some go to the Synagogue and others for a drink, this one goes to be baptized in a great bath in the name of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, that one has his son’s foreskin cut and has some Hebrew words he doesn’t understand mumbled over the child, others go to their church and await the inspiration of God with their hats on, and everybody is happy.” --Voltaire
Chris and I were too tired to go to Mineo's last night.
Good to see the Clarksons this weekend.
Beautiful sky.
My online course is over and good riddance. But I nonetheless plan another next month, this one from a guy I know.
I hope Ned and Caroline will help me with a Wordpress this week.
A business is rising: Repomen grabbing scooters. They contract with people who do not want scooters dropped on their property. "it’s a very simple concept,” a scooter repo guy says. “They have taken their stuff and placed it on someone else’s property without permission.”
Aristotle said it is unjust to treat equals as unequal (I.e. treating a man and women different in a divorce settlement) but equally unjust is treating unequals as equals (i.e. holding a child to a contract with adults).
President Bush, President Obama, and both parties in Congress deepened the red ink with the TARP bailouts, which were initially expected to cost $700 billion, as well as with President Obama’s nearly $1 trillion stimulus law, which failed to rescue the economy even by the White House’s own metrics. By 2009, the deficit had exceeded $1 trillion for the first time, reaching $1.4 trillion. Horrified by Washington spenders, CNBC’s Rick Santelli stood on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009, and called for a “tea party” to end the bailouts, stimulus payments, and red ink. Grassroots tea-party groups formed — further enraged by the later enactment of an expensive new Obamacare entitlement — and helped Republicans capture the House in 2010 with a stunning 63-seat pickup and also pick up seven Senate seats. The result was the 2011 Budget Control Act which limited federal spending.
The current budget deal would essentially repeal the final two years of the 2011 Budget Control Act and raise the baseline for future discretionary spending by nearly $2 trillion over the decade.
Not at all sure where this thing on Rashida Tlaib came from but she seems nice: https://twitter.com/NewsChute/status/1152675252901752832
An Education Week article reported that in the 2015-16 school year, “5.8% of the nation’s 3.8 million teachers were physically attacked by a student.” The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics show that in the 2011-12 academic year, there were a record 209,800 primary- and secondary-school teachers who reported being physically attacked by a student. Nationally, an average of 1,175 teachers and staff were physically attacked, including being knocked out, each day of that school year.
On this day in 1958, the U.S. Congress passed legislation establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a civilian agency responsible for coordinating America’s activities in space.
Push Button Research
In 2008, Science, one of the top scientific journals, published a paper by a group of psychologists that claimed to find biological differences between liberals and conservatives. According to the paper, conservatives tended to react more to “sudden noises” and “threatening visual images.” This result, which suggests that political liberalism and conservatism spring from deep, indelible sources rather than reactions to the issues of the day, suggests that polarization will never end -- that the populace will always be divided into two camps, separated by a gulf of biology.
This raises an interesting point. Although early experimenters in physics and chemistry generally had to build one apparatus to test each hypothesis, modern researchers gather reams of data and run a large number of statistical tests on it. Many big institutions with good computer systems do this all the time. In this model the thesis emerges from the data, not the other way around. That increases the chance that the researchers will find spurious correlations, especially if they choose which tests to perform based on the results of previous tests. This problem is especially severe for fields like economics and biostatistics that rely on observational data not produced in a lab, since running test after test can be accomplished with the press of a button.
Fast forward to now. In a working paper published this month, another team of psychologists attempted to repeat the experiment, and also conducted other similar experiments. They failed to find any evidence linking physical-threat perception with political ideology. But when they tried to publish their paper, Science desk-rejected it -- that is, the editors refused to even send the paper out for peer review, claiming that the replication study simply wasn’t noteworthy enough to be published in a top journal. Meanwhile, another team of researchers also recently tried to replicate the original study, and failed. So even though at this point the evidence proving a biological basis for liberalism and conservatism seems to have been invalidated, it’s unclear whether this fact will make it into the public conversation.
A recent article in Bloomberg by Noah Smith concluded that science was suffering from a serious research problem: Scientific journals are too focused on novel ideas. And replication studies were less appealing.
There have been hundreds of studies on the various genes that control the differences in disease risk between men and women. These findings have included everything from the mutations responsible for the increased risk of schizophrenia to the genes underlying hypertension. Ioannidis and his colleagues looked at four hundred and thirty-two of these claims. They quickly discovered that the vast majority had serious flaws. But the most troubling fact emerged when he looked at the test of replication: out of four hundred and thirty-two claims, only a single one was consistently replicable. “This doesn’t mean that none of these claims will turn out to be true,” he says. “But, given that most of them were done badly, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”According to Ioannidis, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls “significance chasing,” or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher. “The scientists are so eager to pass this magical test that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy,” Ioannidis says. In recent years, Ioannidis has become increasingly blunt about the pervasiveness of the problem. One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” (New Yorker)
Chris and I were too tired to go to Mineo's last night.
Good to see the Clarksons this weekend.
Beautiful sky.
My online course is over and good riddance. But I nonetheless plan another next month, this one from a guy I know.
I hope Ned and Caroline will help me with a Wordpress this week.
A business is rising: Repomen grabbing scooters. They contract with people who do not want scooters dropped on their property. "it’s a very simple concept,” a scooter repo guy says. “They have taken their stuff and placed it on someone else’s property without permission.”
“Now that’s them, and here’s us. We’re two guys who went to the property owners and got permission with that property owner to remove that stuff off their property. That’s all it is.”
Aristotle said it is unjust to treat equals as unequal (I.e. treating a man and women different in a divorce settlement) but equally unjust is treating unequals as equals (i.e. holding a child to a contract with adults).
President Bush, President Obama, and both parties in Congress deepened the red ink with the TARP bailouts, which were initially expected to cost $700 billion, as well as with President Obama’s nearly $1 trillion stimulus law, which failed to rescue the economy even by the White House’s own metrics. By 2009, the deficit had exceeded $1 trillion for the first time, reaching $1.4 trillion. Horrified by Washington spenders, CNBC’s Rick Santelli stood on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on February 19, 2009, and called for a “tea party” to end the bailouts, stimulus payments, and red ink. Grassroots tea-party groups formed — further enraged by the later enactment of an expensive new Obamacare entitlement — and helped Republicans capture the House in 2010 with a stunning 63-seat pickup and also pick up seven Senate seats. The result was the 2011 Budget Control Act which limited federal spending.
The current budget deal would essentially repeal the final two years of the 2011 Budget Control Act and raise the baseline for future discretionary spending by nearly $2 trillion over the decade.
Not at all sure where this thing on Rashida Tlaib came from but she seems nice: https://twitter.com/NewsChute/status/1152675252901752832
An Education Week article reported that in the 2015-16 school year, “5.8% of the nation’s 3.8 million teachers were physically attacked by a student.” The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics show that in the 2011-12 academic year, there were a record 209,800 primary- and secondary-school teachers who reported being physically attacked by a student. Nationally, an average of 1,175 teachers and staff were physically attacked, including being knocked out, each day of that school year.
On this day in 1958, the U.S. Congress passed legislation establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a civilian agency responsible for coordinating America’s activities in space.
Push Button Research
In 2008, Science, one of the top scientific journals, published a paper by a group of psychologists that claimed to find biological differences between liberals and conservatives. According to the paper, conservatives tended to react more to “sudden noises” and “threatening visual images.” This result, which suggests that political liberalism and conservatism spring from deep, indelible sources rather than reactions to the issues of the day, suggests that polarization will never end -- that the populace will always be divided into two camps, separated by a gulf of biology.
This raises an interesting point. Although early experimenters in physics and chemistry generally had to build one apparatus to test each hypothesis, modern researchers gather reams of data and run a large number of statistical tests on it. Many big institutions with good computer systems do this all the time. In this model the thesis emerges from the data, not the other way around. That increases the chance that the researchers will find spurious correlations, especially if they choose which tests to perform based on the results of previous tests. This problem is especially severe for fields like economics and biostatistics that rely on observational data not produced in a lab, since running test after test can be accomplished with the press of a button.
Fast forward to now. In a working paper published this month, another team of psychologists attempted to repeat the experiment, and also conducted other similar experiments. They failed to find any evidence linking physical-threat perception with political ideology. But when they tried to publish their paper, Science desk-rejected it -- that is, the editors refused to even send the paper out for peer review, claiming that the replication study simply wasn’t noteworthy enough to be published in a top journal. Meanwhile, another team of researchers also recently tried to replicate the original study, and failed. So even though at this point the evidence proving a biological basis for liberalism and conservatism seems to have been invalidated, it’s unclear whether this fact will make it into the public conversation.
A recent article in Bloomberg by Noah Smith concluded that science was suffering from a serious research problem: Scientific journals are too focused on novel ideas. And replication studies were less appealing.
There have been hundreds of studies on the various genes that control the differences in disease risk between men and women. These findings have included everything from the mutations responsible for the increased risk of schizophrenia to the genes underlying hypertension. Ioannidis and his colleagues looked at four hundred and thirty-two of these claims. They quickly discovered that the vast majority had serious flaws. But the most troubling fact emerged when he looked at the test of replication: out of four hundred and thirty-two claims, only a single one was consistently replicable. “This doesn’t mean that none of these claims will turn out to be true,” he says. “But, given that most of them were done badly, I wouldn’t hold my breath.”According to Ioannidis, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls “significance chasing,” or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher. “The scientists are so eager to pass this magical test that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy,” Ioannidis says. In recent years, Ioannidis has become increasingly blunt about the pervasiveness of the problem. One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” (New Yorker)
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