Don't Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight

This YouTube video has been making the rounds, and it demonstrates a couple of propositions, tentatively:

1)  Congressman Trey Gowdy is a talented prosecutor,  a former position he held in Spartanburg, SC.
2)  Jonathan Gruber has been rendered toothless, for whatever reason.  He claims to have not understood what he was saying, nor does he understand it now, other than it was offensive to some political body out there.
3)  One can speculate as to why he didn't try to defend his newsworthy remarks, but to be fair: a congressional hearing is brutal and one-sided.  As the highest legislative body in the land, Congress has the power.  Gruber was in a no-win situation.

Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy has a good take on Gruber's "sin."  Money quote:

"Gruber did err in making the common mistake of conflating political ignorance with “stupidity.” In reality, even smart people are often ignorant about politics, in large part because such ignorance is perfectly rational behavior, given the low probability that your vote will make a difference in an election. The problem of ignorance is also exacerbated by the enormous size, scope, and complexity of modern government, which makes it difficult even for more attentive voters to keep track of more than a small fraction of it. By making government even larger and more complicated than it already was, the enactment of the Affordable Care Act helped exacerbate the very ignorance that helped make its passage possible."

Added Value of Philosophy

Jeffrey Dorman has an article on the Forbes website, in which he computes the added value of earning a Bachelor's degree in the humanities, as opposed to stopping with a high school degree.  Perhaps surprisingly,  the humanities do pretty well.  The extra value of a degree in philosophy, e.g., amounts to an average of over $600,000 over a lifetime.

One should, of course, take these correlations for what they are and hence not infer any causal connection.  But it's nice to know that the correlation is positive!   (h/t Daily Nous)

Changing Tides?

A friend of mind sent me this article from the Harvard Institute of Politics.    The interesting result:

While more 18- to 29- year-olds (50%-43%) surveyed in the IOP’s fall 2014 poll would prefer that Congress be controlled by Democrats instead of Republicans, the numbers improve dramatically for the GOP when only young people who say they will “definitely vote” are studied. Among these likely voters, the IOP’s latest poll shows the preference shifting, with slightly more than half (51%) preferring a Republican-run Congress and 47 percent wanting Democrats to be in charge – a significant change from the IOP’s last midterm election poll in the fall of 2010 when Democratic control was preferred among likely voters 55 percent to 43 percent.

I'm wondering if this is simply a result of young Democrats dropping out or instead a sign that the Millenials are changing their political preferences.  

Sex With 21 Women

Loyal readers (are any of you left?):   my significant other and I frequently debate causal reasoning, as she's more prone to jump from correlation to cause than am I.  Hence I was hopeful that this article would create opportunities.  However, she saw the flaw in my post hoc inference, and put the kabosh on any hopes in that direction.

On the plus side,  I will avoid brutal punishments!

How to Run a University

Megan McCardle in a recent blogpost reminds us about the importance of communication, especially from one's critics. A group is always wiser when it is open to the give-and-take of debate.  Large bureaucracies would do well to remember this.   I especially think this is true in universities, where we all think we know best, but we need people with bladders hitting us on the head to do our work effectively.

Government's Pernicious Effect on Culture

So now we know who's to blame!   (h/t Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution)

Get Konnected with The Kronies Action Figures

(h/t Popehat)

Why one should be a Pyrrhonist

A little dose of skepticism can be a good thing, as detailed here.

Bobcats

Say what you will about the Bobcats and their organization, but if the season ended today, Charlotte would be in the playoffs!  [the bar is pretty low in the Eastern Conference.]

The Brilliance of Plato

Plato always manages to surprise me.  Today I was preparing for class tomorrow, where we'll be discussing Plato's Crito.  In this dialogue, Crito tries to convince Socrates to break out of jail and run off to Thessaly.  Socrates refuses based on his duties to Athens. 

What I hadn't noticed until today:  at the beginning of the dialogue, Socrates talks about a dream in which the goddess tells him:  "The third day hence, to Phthia shalt thou go." (trans. by Jowett)  Both Socrates and Crito take this to mean that Socrates won't die until the next day (the third day from the dream).  I had never looked up "Phthia," assuming it's a mythical place where the dead go.  According to Wikipedia, Phthia is a town in Thessaly! Hence, Socrates has already committed to going to Thessaly.   The quote above is from the Iliad, where Achilles speaks the line; translated, Achilles says "I'm going home."  And as Plato indicates, so is Socrates, just in a different way than Crito imagines. 

What, Me Worry?

I've been thinking alot about the government's data mining program.  As some have argued, it takes public information and discovers suspicious correlations.  These are then investigated, but no wiretaps are done unless there is probable cause.

This is all well and good, except if you combine two features:

    1)  There will be a lot of false positives. If the error rate for finding "suspicious correlations" is 1%,  meaning that out of 100 "hits", only 1 person is truly innocent, then 2,000,000 Americans will be picked out as suspicious.  (I am assuming that the base number for cell phone users is 200,000,000)
(tip of the hat to Zachary Ernst for reminding me of this)

    2)  As others have argued persuasively,  for example here, we are all criminals.  We break federal regulations all the time, mostly through ignorance.

Combining 1 & 2, we can come to the conclusion that the data mining program has the capabilities of being very intrusive to many people we'd argue shouldn't be the focus of government suspicion.  If I'm one of the false positives, it won't take long for an investigator to find evidence of my wrongdoing, which will provide enough evidence for a wiretap.

John Maynard Keynes and Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg

(thanks to Greg Mankiw) 

For some reason this reminds me of Zorg!

Beware the Internets!

Ken at Popehat describes an interesting set of cases undergoing review right now: allegedly, a company's business model is: 1) acquire a bunch of copyrights of worthless movies, 2) wait for someone to download one of these movies illegally, 3) bring suit against that person for violating copyright, and 4) settle for some amount.  As he notes, the tables may turn as a federal judge is inquiring into whether this is a case of extortion.  Stay tuned! 

Basketball Diplomacy, Moral Equivalence, and A Comparison of Two Tourists

George Stephanopolous interviewed Dennis Rodman on his visit to North Korea.  My impression: Dennis likes the attention but hasn't thought too deeply on either the political nature of North Korea nor the support he gives to its legitimacy.  Compare this to Sophie Schmidt's recent visit and her impressions posted here.  
Sophie is the daughter of Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google.  Sophie didn't quite get the attention Dennis received from Kim Jong Un, but she is much more perceptive in her judgments.

Kudos to Stephanopolous on his good interview, deftly exposing Rodman's inanities. Some paraphrases:  On what kind of guy Kim is: "He's very humble..he loves power; he loves control."  On the political camps: "It's politics.  Bill Clinton had sex with his secretary and he stayed in power."  On the comparison between Kim and Obama: "They both love basketball."

Come to think of it, perhaps that last line might lead to some profitable parleys and if Kim's favorite NBA player growing up was Dennis Rodman, perhaps he really is only interested in defense and has no predilection for offense.   The nuclear warheads he launches towards the US will miss and land in the Atlantic. 

Amore

Sorry for the light blogging.  I'll try to do better as I head into spring break.  Meanwhile, I give you a match made in heaven. 

Meritocracy

Megan McCardle on what she sees as the New Mandarins

Done Gone Broke?

Not that three individuals of different political stripes constitute a quorum, but an interesting essay in WSJ.

Angua, RIP

Today we laid our dog, Angua, to rest.  She has been with us for 14 years. We picked her up at the pound.  Angie, as we called her, was sitting patiently in a cage; the card in front said that she was impossible to restrain and was not housebroken. She was fully-grown, so she was at least 2 years old by then.    Perhaps because of her repose, my son Adam chose her.  She was named after Corporal Angua in the Discworld series,  a werewolf. 

We had an inauspicious beginning.  On the way home, she jumped out of an open window in the car.  We scrambled to catch her.  When we got her home, she immediately ran upstairs to hide.  However, once she became comfortable with us, we learned that she was in fact housebroken and really did like staying indoors.
We soon developed a routine, one that revolved around the afternoon walk in the park.  She was insistent that we take her there everyday, walking one to two miles each time.  We missed maybe a dozen days in those fourteen years, mostly because of my infirmities.  She would have been a good postman: she liked walking in all kinds of weather, although a heavy rain tended to cut the walk shorter.

She was a princess.  When we arrived at the lake in the park, she would gently enter the water and lay down.  I never did see her swim.  Perhaps she didn't know how, but I always imagined she felt the dog paddle was beneath her.

After Adam went to college, she became my constant companion and confidante.  She'd listen to my complaints and soothe my soul.  She never broke a confidence. She is my friend.  She has made me a better person.  I'm going to miss her.  
 

Super Bowl Trivia

I was traveling yesterday and hence listening to the Super Bowl, instead of watching.  Kevin Harlan and Boomer Esiason did a good job, although Kevin did say "one large pizza with special ties" during a Papa John's spot.

Quote of the Day

"Did you know that...…that the Internet was originally designed to make sure the Department of Defense had access to the national strategic stockpile of cat pictures even in the event of a nuclear war?"  Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine