Normie Distribution

 

I always used to be amused at the Twitter users paranoid about political poll results because they had themselves had never gotten the call from Emerson or Siena, and suspected that the polling outfits must be making the data up. As a New York City resident, a registered Democrat, and a certified Old Fool who kept a land line for a ridiculous amount of time and still today always picks up on a number I don't know on the possibility that the caller might be a long-lost relative or notice of a windfall from a class action I didn't know I was a party to (it's hard to scam me, I want to insist, but it's easy to get me to answer), I could assure them that it does happen, especially on questions of local politics. If the pollster never calls you, that's just a sign of how ordinary you are; there are so many millions of you that they're just never going to get around to your number. 

Sucks to be you! except when I'm trying to come up with an honest answer to whether allegation A makes me much less likely, somewhat less likely, somewhat more likely, or much more likely to vote for candidate C, or whether I don't know or don't care, in which group I increasingly fit, not because I'm any less partisan but either because I already know about the allegation and had already made my decision around it or I'm hearing it for the first time and have no idea whether it's even true or not (identifying it, in my understanding, as a "push poll", not meant to gather information but just to slime the accused candidate in some way that escapes overt publicity, and is probably false anyhow). Both of which happen all the time.

Today in Conservatives Are Too Emotional

 

Image by Ben Allan/Political Quarterly UK.

Listen, I know it's a huge challenge to ask a conservative to think mathematically, but just make an effort for once. The reason it's called "affirmative action" is that it's not negative. It doesn't take anything away from anybody. https://t.co/w4mRTykC7Q

— Per Yaspera ad Astra (@Yastreblyansky) March 8, 2023

Nailbiter

 

Apparently there's an actual reason for the deadline today on the infrastructure bill: I heard about it on the radio from Brooklyn Rep. and House Democratic Caucus chair Hakeem Jeffries, but the details came out in the Washington Post on Tuesday: it's the Federal Highway Administration, which funds road-building programs all over the country, and which isn't budgeted out of annual congressional appropriations but the Highway Trust Fund, usually from gas tax receipts, with an authorization from Congress for several years at a time that is running out, as it happens, tonight. The infrastructure bill, which the Senate passed back in August, reauthorizes the Highway Trust Fund (as well as adding many billions of dollars to the fund), and unless it's passed in the House and signed by the president by midnight, it shuts down, not exactly an emergency (projects have state funds that should generally keep them going) but inconvenient for some thousands of workers who could get furloughed. At the same time as the government itself would if they couldn't pass the continuing resolution today (but apparently that's now definitely happening).

Meanwhile, Manchin threw an interesting curveball yesterday, complaining that the Build Back Better plan is "fiscal insanity" and offering a somewhat more granular view of what he'd like to do instead:

Centrist Escapism

One good reason for being pleased you're not at the center of the universe, according to nautil.us, would be that means you're not "he filth and mire of the world, the worst, lowest, most lifeless part of the universe, the bottom story of the house". Illustration by Rauner Special Collections Library.

Dr. Krugman savages Andrew Yang, mayoral candidate ("Andrew Yang Hasn't Done the Math"), over his claim in the 2020 presidential campaign that America's big problem is job loss due to rapid automation, for which the only cure is giving everybody a "universal" "basic" "income" of $1000 a month:

But that’s not what we’re seeing. In fact, the lead article in the current issue of the Monthly Labor Review, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is an attempt to understand the productivity slowdown — the historically low growth in productivity since 2005. This slowdown has been especially pronounced in manufacturing, which has seen hardly any productivity rise over the past decade.

I made similar points back in 2019, eliciting a furious response from Yang, who decried “incomplete statistics” and declared that “I’ve done the math.” But if he had done the math, he didn’t share it with the rest of us; all he offered were anecdotes. Yes, at any given time there are always some workers being displaced by technology. The question is whether this is happening faster now than in the past. The numbers say that it isn’t.

Worser Angels

 

You probably thought we just went through a national election, but it turns out what really happened was Most Americans were sending a message in a bottle, and for some reason which will go unexplained they were addressing it to David Brooks's information bubble so he could get a better idea of what's going on in Most Americans' lives and share it with his readers ("What the Voters Are Trying to Tell Us"):

Yup, I wanted a grand rebuke, too. I wanted Trump demolished by 10 points. But elections are educational events. Voters are not always wise, but they are usually comprehensible. They know more about their own lives than we in our information bubbles do, and they almost always tell us something important.

The first thing we heard from most Americans — since Joe Biden’s popular vote victory seems all but certain — is that Donald Trump is unacceptable. We live in a divided, dug-in nation, but millions more white evangelicals voted Democratic in 2020 than in 2016. Many people voted against partisan predilections to remove a man who is a unique menace to the foundations of this country. That is no meager accomplishment.

The second thing voters told us is this: Separate church and state. We’ve long had political polarization in this country and we still will. But over the last few years polarization has transmogrified into something worse: a religious war.

Even the worser angels of David Brooks's nature are so much better than ours, it's no surprise that the better angels are totally insufferable.

We don't at the moment know by what percentage Biden has beaten Trump, other than that it wasn't by 10 points, as David Brooks would have wished, but we do know how to interpret it, in a way that David Brooks coincidentally might approve of. It's enough to prove that nobody wants Donald Trump to be president, but not enough to prove that those of us who wanted Donald Trump not to be president were right. I hope that's clear.

Literary Corner: Does That Make Sense Now?

Drawing by Mike Luckovitch, via Orlando Sun-Sentinel.

Death, Death—Cases, Cases

by Donald J. Trump

Now it used to be that if you had it, you were immune for life,

right? For life. With me, they say I’m immune for four months.

In other words, once I got it, the immunity went down from life to

four months. I don’t know. They don’t know either. Who the hell

knows? All I know is that for a little while, for at least four months,

I could run in there and kiss everyone, men and women. I’ll kiss

every one of them. I’ll kiss them. No, no. You get over it, then

you’re immune, for whatever period of time. No, it’s true,

though. You heard, for life, you’re immune. Right? That’d be it.

As soon as I got, I said I was immune, they said, “Only for four months.”

They brought it down to four months because that’s the fake news.

They’re fake. The cases are up, but listen to this, they’re all

talking about cases. You don’t see death, death—cases, cases.

You know why we have cases? Because we test so much. And in

many ways, it’s good. And in many ways, it’s foolish. In many ways,

it’s very foolish, because every time you test… Like, for instance,

Barron Trump. Did you ever hear of Barron Trump? He’s a rather

tall young man. He’s tall, and he’s a good kid, and he’s strong,

but he had it. They said, “Sir, Madam, I’m sorry to inform you

your son has tested positive, apparently.” I said, “Oh no.”

Fifteen seconds later, “Sir, your son no longer has it.” No,

it’s true. I said, “How’s Barron doing?” “Oh, he’s fine.

He’s fine.” I said, “What do you mean? You just don’t…”

No, he’s fine. They have a very strong immune system. Ninety-nine

point nine something, right? Ninety-nine point nine. Go back

to the school, North Carolina. Go back to the school. Barron Trump.

A legend. He’s a legend, he got rid of it so fast, but the kids get

rid of it fast. Strong immune systems. The mortality rate is down

eighty-five percent because of the therapeutics and all that they

learned. I mean, they know what to do. In other words, by doing

all of this testing, we’re the best in the world, the most…

I get calls all the time from leaders, “Your testing is the

best in the world.” I said, “Do you test?” “No.” I said,

“You don’t test?” “No.” “That’s why you have no cases.”

Well, very few cases. You know, the cases they have, when

somebody’s sick, they call it a case. I said to one gentleman

that’s very tough, very tough man, runs a tough country,

I said, “Do you test?” “Yes. When somebody comes into the

hospital and throws up all over the floor, we test, but we never

test other than that.” I said, “So you have cases.” “No, we show

very few cases.” So we show more cases because we test. So Barron

Trump, as an example, it’s a case. All the kids are a case. And by the way,

they’re very young now. They’re testing schools and high schools

and this and that and every… And what it does is it gives the

fake news media something to talk about. So they say,

“Cases are up in the United States.” That’s because we test.

India has one point five million people and they do testing. They

test a tiny fraction of the number of people that we test.

So the good is that we know where it is, et cetera, and we

have to protect our seniors, and that’s really the most

important thing. But when you see all this stuff, watch,

they’ll go home, “Cases are up, cases are up.” And I saw it

today, but that’s because of tests. Does that make sense now? If we

cut it in half… And by the way, wasting a lot of money on testing

too We're not allowed to say that. We’re not allowed to say,

“We’re spending millions of dollars on testing.” But if we tested,

half, cases would be half, and they’d have a headline, “Cases

drop magnificently,” but they want us to test, test, test.

(Rally, Lumberton, North Carolina, 24 October)

Do They Even Math, Bro?

Shorter Douthat: TBF, a merely mediocre president probably would have killed a lot of people too. https://t.co/jPbOrZXtOU

— It's Just Soup For My Family (@Yastreblyansky) September 8, 2020

Honest to god that's the column ("How Many Lives Would a More Normal President Have Saved?"). Maybe a great president would have been OK, the monsignor allows, but an ordinary president would have been more or less as bad as our psychopath, therefore maybe he's really not so bad, or so he implies (not saying, just saying).

the peer-country evidence suggests that to take the pre-emptive, creative and draconian steps that might have actually suppressed the virus, and in the process saved that hundred thousand or more extra lives, would have probably required presidential greatness, not merely replacement-level competence. We can say without a doubt that Trump whiffed when this call for greatness came. But distinguishing between Trump’s incompetence and what an average president might have managed is harder, so long as so many peer-country death tolls look like ours.

Really?

Conservatives don't know how to math, part 5,043:

You can't compare US cumulative deaths to Spain's or France's until they've stopped cumulating; we're still in the middle. pic.twitter.com/FkBsyrGBIm

— It's Just Soup For My Family (@Yastreblyansky) September 8, 2020

The column isn't worth fisking in detail, because this stupidity makes it nonsensical, but I had to say something. If US Covid-19 deaths per million in today's official figures are 571.61 and Italy's are 588.32, then Italy's numbers are not much worse, but Italy is basically at the end of its wave and has been for some time, since late May, while ours is continuing to climb and about to bypass theirs; that's a curve that hasn't flattened at all.

According to the projections of the so far pretty reliable Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), the US is on a path to add another 225,000 deaths between now and 1 January, for a cumulative total of 410,000 by then, or a rate of around 1,240 per million, more than twice as high as Italy's (which will be a bit higher by then, no doubt, but not a lot).

That's a slightly pessimistic projection, based on the assumption that vigilance will keep relaxing as it has been doing. It could be a lot worse, or a lot better, depending on what we choose to do:

• If a herd immunity strategy is pursued, namely no further government intervention is taken from now to January 1, then the death toll could increase to 620,000 by January 1. Compared to the reference scenario, this would be 210,000 more deaths from now to the end of the year.  

• Increasing mask use remains an extraordinary opportunity for the US. Increasing mask use to the levels seen in Singapore would decrease the cumulative death toll to 288,000, or 122,000 lives saved compared to the reference scenario. This would be a 30% reduction in the deaths expected from now until the end of the year.  

But even in that best-case Singapore-style scenario we'd be hitting about 873 deaths per million, or still a hell of a lot more than Italy will have by that point, to say nothing of France (currently 470.73 per million) or the deservedly maligned Sweden (577.96), and almost certainly beyond the horribly handled UK (612.11) too. And it still won't be over!

Douthat's transparent desire to make excuses for the president would be funny, but he's also such an idiot.

Hi It's Stupid: Preoperational

Illustration by Andrew Couts via Daily Dot.

.....Our massive testing capability, rather than being praised, is used by the Lamestream Media and their partner, the Do Nothing Radical Left Democrats, as a point of scorn. This testing, and what we have so quickly done, is used as a Fake News weapon. Sad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2020

We have more Cases because we do more Testing. It’s Lamestream Media Gold!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2020

Mr. Bret on the Plague

Drawing by Eli Valley, 2 September 2019.

Shorter Bret Stephens: How can we know if the virus is going to kill us all? Surely it's unwise to do anything rash until we're sure! https://t.co/cHk4lZFl5D

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) March 21, 2020

Stephens ("It's Dangerous to Be Ruled by Fear") needs a little fisking. Starting with the way he stakes out a moderate position by accusing both sides of doing it even inside Donald Trump's brain:

Donald Trump’s first instinct when it came to the coronavirus was to dismiss the threat as overblown, over there, and “totally under control.” His second was to use the pandemic as an opportunity to show off his world-historical leadership skills by treating the virus as a threat on par with World War II.

Both reactions were driven by politics, not evidence. The first was unquestionably wrong. The second needs to be questioned aggressively before we impose solutions possibly more destructive than the virus itself.

The World War II analogy has been raised by a bunch of figures, from Bernard Sanders to Joe Scarborough, who are not in fact strongly committed to giving Trump an opportunity to show off his world-historical leadership skills. Trump himself is interested in something like that when he happily agrees to be referred to as a "wartime president", but his ideas of leadership in  World War II are a little foggy:

Literary Corner: I Have Seen Numbers

Man Ray, Endgame, 1946, via Washington Post.

So the Emperor had a cabinet meeting yesterday morning, opened with a grace, though it wasn't a meal, from Secretary Carson, and a remarkable rant—somebody clocked it at 13,000 words, including the grace and the press questions—from his imperial loquacity, duly published online by the faithful whitehouse.gov. What you've mainly heard is how he revealed that he doesn't know what an "emoluments clause" is (it's one of article I, section 9, paragraph 8, or article II, section I, clause 7, of the United States Constitution) but suspects it's "phony", but the whole thing was really in top form from the bard-in-chief.

This bit, with its florid repetitions, almost like an abstract arabesque pattern, and its fantastical segue from the poet's TV contemplation of pundits talking about the Middle East to a rhapsodic view of the median household income dissolving into a kind of arithmetical plasma, is extraordinary:

Nobody Has Ever Seen Numbers

by Donald J. Trump

But I sort of have to smile to myself. I was telling
a couple of people — I’m watching these people
that I’ve been watching for 20 years. I’ve been
watching the same faces; they’re just a little bit
older and a little bit grayer. I’ve been watching them
for 20 years, saying about the Middle East. And they’ve
been wrong on everything they’ve ever said. 

Annals of Derp: Our Terrifying Math

Golden Section gif by astrophysicsstudent.

RT comedian Lee Camp passing on a story from Forbes Retirement columnist Laurence Kotlikoff claiming Pentagon spent an unauthorized $21 trillion without noticing it from 1998 to 2015. (That's six times the amount printed by the Quantitative Easing program 2009-15). It's false. https://t.co/4VqdkBEIJg

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2018

What's going on was explained by Mick West of Metabunk in May https://t.co/Z2twroXaKQ The number totals all the accounting errors--not even errors, "unsubstantiated adjustments", in all the Pentagon's accounts--not only what they've spent, but what they owe and what they own.

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2018

But those numbers--"adjustments" in spending, AND debts and assets, repeated year after year for the same pension and the same ship--don't add up to anything real. The amount they spend in a given year is pretty much the $600 billion they say they spent.

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2018

If I owe you $10 and I mistakenly think it's $15 and write it down that way while my accountant has the right figure, that's going to be an unsubstantiated adjustment of $5 in the audit (in my favor: I'm in less debt than I thought I was). And if I don't pay you for 15 years, and keep getting it wrong, it's another $5 unsubstantiated adjustment every year. Then if somebody like Professor Kotlikoff comes around trying to figure out what I'm up to he's going to claim that I secretly spent $75, although in fact I merely saved $5 I thought I was going to have to spend.

Anyway I'm not defending military, I'm defending math. The $21 trillion figure is nuts, and the way it was calculated is worse. Attack the military all you want, they deserve it, but don't use bogus arguments like this, because they're making us stupid.

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2018

The Trump war on science is the Republican War on Science

Drawing by Gary Larson.

Something else to be paranoid about from the Trump White House, as if you didn't have enough already, in yesterday's Guardian:

US statisticians are concerned that Donald Trump’s administration might suppress or manipulate public statistics that don’t fit his narrative of the truth, the Guardian has learned. In a series of interviews, individuals who have recently left high-level positions at federal statistical agencies expressed worry that the administration may stop collecting and publishing data on subjects such as abortion, racial inequality and poverty.

“We should all be starting from the same numbers. I think that’s a fear that many of us have at this point – it’s that picking and choosing your numbers to suit your politics is not the way that we ought to be doing it,” said Katherine Wallman, chief statistician of the United States from 1992 to 3 January this year.

Trump himself doesn't really need statistics, as Sean Spicer explained:

“The president, he’s not focused on statistics as much as he is on whether or not the American people are doing better as a whole.”

I mean, how would a bunch of numbers help him understand something like that? (He probably suffers from math anxiety too, like David F. Brooks, which in turn threatens his masculinity because dudes are supposed to be good at that, and if there's anything that Donald J. Trump can really not get with, it's having his masculinity threatened.)

Or as Steve M puts it,

To conservatives, anecdotes are the news. At right-wing sites, it's impossible to escape the impression that statistics on crime by the undocumented or violence by Muslims are somehow elitist -- the real truth is in the anecdotes, and only effete bubble-dwelling liberals object that these anecdotes may be unrepresentative.

I just want to remind everybody that this is another one of these dreadful savage-Trump stories that turns out, if you think about it for 14 seconds, to be a story about the Republican party, as it is and as it has been for decades, since Ronald Reagan and his killer trees, the Congressional prohibition against research on gun violence (which I have written about fairly often), and much much more.

Enough for a book chiefly about the G.W. Bush administration entitled, The Republican War on Science, which you probably heard about at the time. Repeat after me:

TRUMP IS A TYPICAL REPUBLICAN.

I don't care if Reagan passed an amnesty for immigrants or Trump suggested (briefly) closing the carried-interest loophole or negotiating drug prices with Big Pharma (he's given that up too, after a chummy meeting with Pharma lobbyists). Trump and House Speaker Ryan are in perfect agreement about the handful of issues Ryan gives a shit about, which amount to making America safe for rent-seekers and sticking it to the rest of us. I know this makes David Brooks sad, but it can't be helped.