“You frickin’ kidding me? He’s a Commie. Is that even legal, a Communist president?”
Tag: politics
The signal and the noise: why most predictions fail but some don’t
The Boston Red Sox failed to make the playoffs in 2011 despite having a 99.7 percent chance of doing so at one point27—although I wouldn’t question anyone who says the normal laws of probability don’t apply when it comes to the Red Sox or the Chicago Cubs.Silver
“When the facts change, I change my mind,†the economist John Maynard Keynes famously said. “What do you do, sir?â€
Chaos theory applies to systems in which each of two properties hold: The systems are dynamic, meaning that the behavior of the system at one point in time influences its behavior in the future; And they are nonlinear, meaning they abide by exponential rather than additive relationships.Silver
Successful gamblers—and successful forecasters of any kind—do not think of the future in terms of no-lose bets, unimpeachable theories, and infinitely precise measurements. These are the illusions of the sucker, the sirens of his overconfidence. Successful gamblers, instead, think of the future as speckles of probability, flickering upward and downward like a stock market ticker to every new jolt of information. When their estimates of these probabilities diverge by a sufficient margin from the odds on offer, they may place a bet.Silver
“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.â€Keynes
Bayes’s theorem begins and ends with a probabilistic expression of the likelihood of a real-world event. It does not require you to believe that the world is intrinsically uncertain. It was invented in the days when the regularity of Newton’s laws formed the dominant paradigm in science. It does require you to accept, however, that your subjective perceptions of the world are approximations of the truth.Silver
One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic
I aim to talk about the rules of the game, and not about which side should win.Lessig
We must remake a republic dependent not upon campaign funders, direct or indirect, but instead, as Federalist 52 puts it, “dependent upon the People alone.â€Lessig
As a Jesus-fearing moose-hunting hockey-mom mother of five who hunts moose for Jesus, Sarah Palin is kin to the wild outdoors and appreciates its bountiful splendor as she is gunning it down from her airplane. Sarah Palin understands that America is dangerously addicted to oil, and that the only cure is more oil. She also understands that nature is our natural enemy, created by a malevolent Satan to come between us and our God-given oil deposits with its hateful, clean water and its foul, pristine air.
Fafblog will redeem us all.
“CLINTON: That’s right, Fafnir. No one has more experience failing to fix health care than me. I worked in the White House for eight years failing to fix health care, and as president I’ll make failing to fix health care my number one priority.
FB: Well that sounds pretty good, Hillary Clinton, but what if I wanna vote for someone with even more experience, like John McCain or Zombie Strom Thurmond or Andrew Jackson’s collection of antique spittoons? Those spittoons have been in the White House for a long time an I hear they got a formidable command of foreign policy.â€