What kind of brain injury does Nate Silver have, exactly?

But the result was not some sort of massive outlier; on the contrary, the polls were pretty much as accurate as they’d been, on average, since 1968.

On average is worthless. Just worthless. This is simply the geek tendency to proclaim, “Even though I was wrong, I was actually right!”

The only value of site like 538 is that it’s supposed to have better predictive power than me engaging in some tasseography or haruspicy. If it doesn’t do better than that it’s simply pointless intellectual ostentation. As I pointed out a while ago, many of the polls where it was most important were drastically wrong no matter what Silver says, or even Andrew Gelman claims (whom I usually like).

Think about it this way. I’m playing Russian Roulette. One in the chamber; six chambers. On average, I am alive.

Now wouldn’t you like to know which chamber that fucking round is in before you pull the trigger?

The first 10 on today’s playlist:

Now I will address the moronic parts of Lance Mannion’s piece, specifically those about neoliberalism.

During the Clinton campaign because she was and is in fact a staunch neoliberal, it became fashionable among the really-Republican but nominally-Democratic set to claim that that neoliberalism doesn’t exist, and if it does exist, it’s used incorrectly by anyone who ever says it (no true Scotsman), and to the extent that it does exist, it’s actually good except when it isn’t.

Well, economists, sociologists and political scientists recognize that neoliberalism is a pretty defined and identifiable ideology, so what’s the deal with these assclowns?

“Go, team, go!” mainly is what’s wrong.

Anyway, it’d be really convenient if one of the dominant forces of our time that has caused such great harm had no appellation, no way to call it out, no entry on a dichotomous key, no method of pointing at it definitively. It’s an Orwellian move done for crass aims that was perpetuated mainly in support of a poor candidate in a terrible election.

As the Wikipedia article itself points out, the entire goal of delegitimizing the term “neoliberal” is to remove its power as an analytical frame. Effectively censoring the word is designed to prevent thought about it, thus strengthening it. Amazing how many people get cognitively conned and cheer it on as it’s happening.

Again: good job, folks. You really showed us all.

Mainly showed us how debilitatingly shit-for-brains you are.

This election will surely go down in history as the one where not only did we lose our democracy, but demonstrated that we didn’t deserve it in the first place.

About the Mannion piece I linked to earlier, I mostly agree that teaching most people math beyond fifth grade or so is a net loss to society. Wastes a lot of time that could be put to far better use. And it is a myth that it makes you a better thinker.

Math education is in other words a huge deadweight loss to society, that ends up making many people (who are otherwise intellectually capable) just utterly despise school.

My partner who is actually good at math (hell, she took and passed a general relativity class) absolutely loathed nearly all of her math classes.

So many better and more useful things that could be taught instead, and evidence also shows that it doesn’t take years of education for most people to catch up (since most math education is just re-hashing the same thing year after year). Those who are truly interested could catch up in a year or so if they want to do something math-heavy later on.

For the rest, it is worse than useless — it is actively harmful.

Have to get out of the mode of thinking about the abject stupidity enveloping both sides right now in the US. This will help.

And this is great. Miley’s voice is amazing without autotune. So much better.

The only thing worse than the ACA is no ACA.

Pitiful no matter how you look at it.

I don’t usually visit Amanda Marcotte’s Twitter feed as it causes my brain to glitch. But I made that mistake, so I will also inflict it on you. You know you love me. Here’s her “takeaway” about the Clinton campaign.

Yeah, it was the evil left that caused Clinton to lose. Sure. That’s exactly what happened. No other explanation.

Damn, the Democrats are so done. Why even bother to run anyone in 2020?

(I took screenshots because Marcotte tends to delete her tweets. What’s weird about her in a side note is that I read her nearly every day for years — really liked her writing, respected her lack of pulling punches. And then Something Happened around 2008 or 2009. Not sure what. And now she is like she is.)

During the Obama admininstration, the argument went that Obama basically had no power to do any differently than he did — he couldn’t possibly have achieved any more than the weak sauce that we all saw. That he was hamstrung. That the bully pulpit was useless, that he was as powerless as an infant in a tornado.

First, recognize that Trump has signed no new bills. Congress has not acted on anything.

Also recognize that for all the destruction Trump has already precipitated, Obama could have done just as much or nearly so in the opposite direction with the tip of his pen, just like Trumpty Dumpty.

You fucking idiot putzes, you froward flap-mouthed louts, you were Obama impotence apologists all — and now you’re seeing to all our regrets just how worthlessly wrong you all were.

Fuck each and every one of you.

If Obama had prosecuted any banksters in 2009 and later — those who were most responsible for the global financial crisis — there is a very good chance Trump would not be president right now.

Good job.

I may have been bagging on Lance Mannion a lot lately, but we have in common that we are basically incapable of math.

Personal prejudice: Most people can’t do math. What we call math is actually simple arithmetic. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Calculating. What Jethro Bodine in his pride at his sixth grade education called cipherin’. Nobody does math, and can do math, until they understand why multiplying two negative numbers together produces a positive number. I’ve never understood that one. So I can’t do math.

I can explain that, but I still am utter shit at math. I can spend 100 times as long as someone who is capable in this field studying, learn far less, and then forget it all irretrievably in a week like I’d never studied it even once. It’s not because I don’t like it or that I don’t try, or that I have a block. Blocks are easy for me to overcome; I just do it. Always have, always will.

It’s just not a block, as much as math people like to believe that for some reason. I guess it makes them feel better. I don’t know.

As the son of a physicist and computer scientist who, hard as he tried, never could get me to follow his math when he helped me with my homework, and as someone who was an A student in math in grade school but was stymied by ninth grade algebra and defeated in eleventh grade by calculus, and as the father of someone who has struggled with a severe math learning disability—dyscalculia they’re calling it these days—and is two daunting math courses shy of completing his degree, I’m here to tell you…

Math ain’t natural.

Yep! Math people just have no idea how hard it is — how impenetrable — to those not so inclined. It’s like someone who when encountering another person who doesn’t speak their language, they just talk progressively louder until they are nearly screaming.

Yeah, that does a lot of good.

I think math people are so very delusional about this because it is easy for them. They just get it, even if they have to work at a little. Like me reading Nietzsche or Wittgenstein or Schopenhauer, even if I don’t understand it right away (which I often do not), I can tell that there is something there, and that if I just keep thinking about it, I will eventually comprehend it fully. I imagine that is what math is like for those who can grasp it, because that it what reading something very hard is like for me. No matter how difficult, I know I will eventually parse it out (and probably explain it to the math person who won’t be able to understand it).

With math, I start out confused, and it never gets better — in fact, it gets worse, more tangled, less comprehensible as I go along. It never makes any more sense, but rather less sense over time. In that realm, it’s obvious that there is nothing I can do or try to get closer to any sort of answer or even basic comprehension. There is no path forward.

It’s strange that these delusional people are so talented at math, but so bad at understanding that for some people, this mathematical implement that they were born with is just not in the math-deficient person’s toolbox.

I wish math people weren’t so smug in their beliefs about this. We who’ve struggled with this for years know our own minds pretty well, and often have spent more hours than the math-talented people for no results at all.

Believe me, if it were a block, most of us would’ve overcome it pretty effortlessly when we were 10.

If as most mathematicians and scientists do, you accept mathematics as based on some Platonic ideals located…somewhere, then you also implicitly subscribe to Cartesian dualism — and if you claim that you don’t, your views are logically inconsistent and irreconcilable.

I’ll leave the exposition of these thoughts to the reader, in his or her own mind.

Don’t you love when people do that?

While Trump deserves criticism for the hiring freeze of federal workers, don’t forget this:

Obama announces pay freeze for federal workers.

Barack Obama has shrunk the US federal workforce more than Ronald Reagan.

Where was ya’ll’s “resist” then?

Wankers and hypocrites.

No matter what other harm Trump does, withdrawing from the TPP will be a very good thing for the US.

It was already unofficially dead, but this puts the spike in its heart.

On balance, I think relatively-open trade is a good thing; however, the TPP was a deal negotiated in secret by large corporations, with overreaching and onerous copyright restrictions, little to no protection of worker rights, and was mostly a racket to protect corporations from competition and lawsuits, even above the power of sovereign nations.

It is a very, very good thing that it is dead.

When I was in school, there was some space shuttle simulator computer game we used to play.

I don’t recall its name, but I do remember that there was a bug that if you crashed the shuttle calamitously enough while attempting landing, it’d say something like: “11 out of 7 astronauts on board died.”

Of course for us the game became all about how we could for example orbitally slingshot the shuttle around the moon to slam it into the earth at 60,000mph or any other method we could discover to arrange for the most fiery, disastrous crash.

My speculation is that the designers and coders didn’t consider that anyone would devise ways to crash the space shuttle as devastatingly as possible to cause the most fatalities, so they coded nothing to check if someone went beyond whatever bound they’d established for a “normal” crash.

My memories are hazy as I was 10 or so at the time, but I think one of us eventually got it to say, “20 out of 7 astronauts on board died.”

And that my coders is why you test your software for scenarios that you think surely no one will ever try.

Pondering why Bernie was and is so hated by the so many on the left. There were many reasons of course, but it wasn’t just I think that he deigned to oppose Clinton, but rather it’s about classism.

Not classism directly against Bernie (mostly, though he is one of the least wealthy people in the Senate), but rather indirectly as he appealed to the “deplorables” so despised by the Clinton coalition.

Classism is the prejudice we daren’t name and aren’t allowed to speak about. And no, I am not just talking about against poor whites, but rather that the Democrats would like to pretend that class just doesn’t exist — mostly because if they discuss it, it could lead to poor whites, poor blacks and other non-college-educated undesirables colluding and seizing some measure of power and thus inconveniencing the rich.

In that way, the Democrat coalition of affluent professionals, the college educated and the Wall Street mandarins are just as racist and desirous of enforcing racial ineqity as the neo-nazis in Trump’s creaky confederation.