We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
As Dr. Merc pointed out, precisely 50% of Americans are of below-average intelligence. Strange how it comes out to exactly half, isn't it? That's not fair.
Minority (ie black) shell companies profit by acting as contracting pass-throughs for service and manufacturing companies. Despite seeming fraudulent, it's entirely legal, encouraged in fact by the government. One easy way to profit from skin tone is to offer to be an intermediary conduit for white-owned businesses.
If we the people need coercive paternalism because we're too dumb to pick our own food, then surely we are too dumb to be allowed to select our governmental representation. Therefore, I propose myself as Philosopher King. Why not me? I did study Plato in college. He invented an ideal, all-wise and altruistic totalitarianism. First thing I would do in the job would be to eliminate the position and fire myself, which is what my philosophy would require.
Well, that's what I would do if I did not happen to enjoy the power and perqs too much...
Point is, I think Bowdoin Prof. Sarah Conly is insane in the (probably) non-clinical sense. After all, is she exempt from bad choices herself? Who are the ubermenschen? Professors? God forbid.
This simple problem, offered by a reader, doesn't (I think) require Bayesian methods:
Suppose some one person stole some money and there are a hundred possible suspects. You use a lie detector, which has a 99% chance of a positive if you are guilty, and a 99% chance of a negative if you are innocent. Someone tests positive. What are the chances the person is guilty?
As with medical tests, this deals with rates of false negatives and false positives. Please explain your answer in the comments.
By and large, my friends and my friends’ friends are all intelligent, educated, gregarious, and creative. They’re insightful and thoughtful. They’re critical and ambitious. So why do so many employers put them in positions that don’t take full advantage of what they’ve got to offer?
and
I’ve thought seriously about changing my LinkedIn profile blurb to something like, “My career goal is to gain a position that energizes, excites, challenges, and values me, so that I can continue to develop my skills and talents, and grow as a person.” I wonder if that would catch anyone’s eye?
Kate, we're all special, aren't we? But I think you're a little too special for my shop. Trust me, anybody who read that would gag.
The Luddite in me is inclined to think that the techno-dreamers are headed for another disappointment. But this time around, something does seem different—and it’s not just that the MOOCpioneers have an infectious excitement rarely found in a typical faculty meeting. They also have a striking public-spiritedness. Koller sees a future in which a math prodigy in a developing country might nurture his or her gifts online and then, having been identified by a leading university, enroll in person—on a scholarship, one might imagine, funded by income derived from Coursera. This idea of using online courses as a detection tool is a reprise (on a much larger scale) of the one that spurred the development of standardized tests in the mid-twentieth century, such as the SAT, which was originally envisioned as a means for finding gifted students outside the usual Ivy League “feeder” schools.
"The more expansive is the scope of government authority, the more my life is subject to commands issued in part under the influence of people who read Us magazine."
Conservatism never wins. It loses. It comes to be associated with slick empty men and women who smile a lot and lie a lot. And that in the long run is far more devastating than the occasional senate candidate who says something horrible or idiotic. Candidates like Mitt Romney are more damaging than a hundred Todd Akins because they fix the image of a soulless party that cares about nothing and no one.
It is better to have the public think that the Republican Party stands for horrible and divisive things than to think that it stands for nothing. There are people who will vote for horrible things... but who will vote for nothing except in opposition to the something that the other party is selling?
I found this piece, with this example with some good discussion:
10 out of 1000 women at age forty who participate in routine screening have breast cancer. 800 out of 1000 women with breast cancer will get positive mammographies. 96 out of 1000 women without breast cancer will also get positive mammographies. If 1000 women in this age group undergo a routine screening, about what fraction of women with positive mammographies will actually have breast cancer?
The answer is 7.8%. That's why needle biopsies are done, but they can be read wrong too. Some error is always unavoidable.
She says doctors themselves generally get such stats wrong. Here's another example:
Here is a simple example, based on Mike Shor's Java applet. Suppose you have been tested positive for a disease; what is the probability that you actually have the disease? It depends on the accuracy and sensitivity of the test, and on the background (prior) probability of the disease...
It's worth reading both brief presentations. The current thinking seems to be that Bayesian is the only reliable approach for data these days, and, if data has not been subject to it, it might not be worth much.
In my field of mental illness, the data is always so squishy to start out with that I am a skeptic about everything I read anyway. I have seen very few reports in Psychiatry which have been subject to Bayesian analysis and are thus probably not worth much.
My experience is a better teacher which is, I suppose, sort of Bayesian.
It's been far too long since I studied, or used statistics other than to read medical journal articles. Everybody talks about Bayesian Statistics nowadays. They are the new old thing, almost 100 years older than Fisher Statistics (Fisher was an interesting fellow).
In my youth, I learned to be always skeptical about any research results, but I am told that running data through Bayesian methods is a good test of data.
Can somebody explain the concept to me in simple English? I don't intend to use it, just to get the ideas (I can do the math, but I want something conceptual for starters.) Most Liberal Arts students learned basic Stats in college, the p and the t-test, etc., but the Bayesian is new to me.
I think a more interesting question is why so many of the successful people in business are Obama people. Over half of the very wealthy people I know are ardent Democrats, and are people who understand how the real world works. Of course, I do inhabit New England where blue is the cultural color of choice.
More like the .00001% - how many of the 1% have two custom Boeing 747s, plus the Marine 1 chopper, on 24-hour call for work or pleasure? Did you know this:
As a security measure, Marine One always flies in a group with identical helicopters, sometimes as many as five. One helicopter carries the President, while the others serve as decoys. Upon take-off these helicopters begin to shift in formation to obscure the location of the President.
And this snippet from Andrew Sullivan, via Jacobson:
The Britain I grew up in was insane. The government owned almost all major manufacturing, from coal to steel to automobiles. Owned. It employed almost every doctor and owned almost every hospital. Almost every university and elementary and high school was government-run. And in the 1970s, you could not help but realize as a young Brit, that you were living in a decaying museum – some horrifying mixture of Eastern European grimness surrounded by the sculptured bric-a-brac of statues and buildings and edifices that spoke of an empire on which the sun had once never set. Now, in contrast, we lived on the dark side of the moon and it was made up of damp, slowly degrading concrete….
Perhaps in future years, her legacy might be better seen as a last, sane defense of the nation-state as the least worst political unit in human civilization. Her deep suspicion of the European project was rooted in memories of the Blitz, but it was also prescient and wise...
If you can’t handle the reality that academia is rife with politics, back-stabbing, and an operational Social Darwinism due to finite funds, then obviously it isn’t for you. Real jobs in the real world have many of the same issues, but are not burdened with the same idealistic presumptions. The academic pipeline is a difficult and brutal sieve.
Should the Modern Man Be Taking Testosterone? Testosterone deficiency is exceedingly less common than
marketing campaigns and "you only think you feel fine" culture would
have us believe.
We are, however, thrilled that we don’t have a Republican in the White House, because if we did, the press would be incessantly yammering about this bad news until we were all sick of it. As it is, they are likely to say as little as possible about what appears to be a massive failure of economic policy and go back to covering the really important issues, like gay marriage.
If a Republican president got very busy on social issues at a time of economic stagnation and disappointment, there would be earnest hand-wringing of the “What’s Wrong with Kansas” variety about how American rubes were being diverted from their true economic interests by the skillful manipulation of emotionally charged social issues and identity politics. This would be taken as a sign of the cynicism of the ruling party and the clueless credulity of the hypnotized voters.
I always thought the legal part was the least of it, but we all know well what can happen when government sticks its nose into things. This is pretty good:
If homosexuals and heterosexuals are really “equal” before the law, then logically heterosexual marriage must collapse into being little more than a legal construct as well. Indeed, marriage and family become mere adjuncts of the state after the removal of the de facto conditions that make the traditional family a pre-political institution in the first place. No longer is family something that, in the words of Douglas Farrow, “precedes and exceeds the state.” No longer is the family a hedge against the totalitarian aspirations of the state because no longer is the family prior to the state.
No surprise here. Poodles originated in Germany as duck retrievers for marshes, with the haircut designed to reduce ice build-up. In recent years, some breeders have been selecting them again for hunt instinct instead of show-dog features.
I always say about training poodles (as someone who has trained Labs and Standard Poodles) that the difficulty with Poodles is that they are smarter than people. Labs just want to please you, but Poodles are always looking to negotiate a compromise.
To stay healthy, breeders and vets say Standards need a one-hour off-leash run daily. So does the owner. Another interesting thing about Poodles: they are not into food. They just eat what they need and leave the rest. Nobody has ever seen a fat Poodle. Many humans could take a tip from that, too.
Remarkably Audubon-like photo of eagles sharing a meal from Smithsonian, via 
Image via 
The World-Changing Margaret Thatcher - 
Here.
Photo: Dunkin Donuts wedding cake (via