Archive for 2017

March 12, 2017

NATE SILVER: You Know, There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble.

It’s hard to reread this coverage without recalling Sean Trende’s essay on “unthinkability bias,” which he wrote in the wake of the Brexit vote. Just as was the case in the U.S. presidential election, voting on the referendum had split strongly along class, education and regional lines, with voters outside of London and without advanced degrees being much more likely to vote to leave the EU. The reporters covering the Brexit campaign, on the other hand, were disproportionately well-educated and principally based in London. They tended to read ambiguous signs — anything from polls to the musings of taxi drivers — as portending a Remain win, and many of them never really processed the idea that Britain could vote to leave the EU until it actually happened.

So did journalists in Washington and London make the apocryphal Pauline Kael mistake, refusing to believe that Trump or Brexit could win because nobody they knew was voting for them? That’s not quite what Trende was arguing. Instead, it’s that political experts aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself until and unless there’s very compelling evidence for the contrary position. Social media, especially Twitter, can amplify the groupthink further. It can be an echo chamber.

Can be, and is.

Posted at 10:30 am by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 12th, 2017

DEEP STATE UPDATE: Former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell: CIA leak ‘absolutely’ an ‘inside job.’

Former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell said on Saturday that the WikiLeaks’ dump of documents it claims are from the top-secret CIA hacking program is “absolutely” an “inside job.”

Speaking with “CBS This Morning,” Morell said the spy agency should be asking itself whether the leaker was a staff employee or a contractor, and whether there were any “red flags” that were missed.

When asked whether its clear to him that this could have been an inside job, Morell answered, “Absolutely.”

More of the politicization of the bureaucracy that is Obama’s toxic legacy.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 12th, 2017

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Want to Raise Successful Boys? Science Says Do This (but Their Schools Probably Won’t).

News flash: Most boys are rambunctious. Often they seem like they’re in a constant state of motion: running, jumping, fighting, playing, getting hurt–maybe getting upset–and getting right back into the physical action.

Except at school, where they’re required to sit still for long periods of time. (And when they fail to stay still, how are they punished? Often by being forced to skip recess–and thus they sit still longer.)

It’s not just an American issue. Researchers at the University of Eastern Finland recently tried to document whether boys actually achieve less in school when they’re restricted from running around and being physically active.

They studied 153 kids, aged 6 to 8, and tracked how much physical activity and sedentary time they had during the day. Sure enough, according to a report by Belinda Luscombe in Time, the less “moderate to vigorous physical activity” the boys had each day, the harder it was for them to develop good reading skills.

But schools don’t care about raising successful boys. It’s all about grrl power now.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 12th, 2017

March 11, 2017

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Your brain fills gaps in your hearing without you realising. But note this: “The brain doesn’t seem to use the context of a conversation to improve the accuracy of its guesses.” That actually makes sense, as context-sensitive fill-ins would be much more computationally expensive, with recent words held in a rolling buffer and linked to likely accompanying words and phrases.

Posted at 10:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds on Mar 11th, 2017