Conservatives love to complain about the media.

But there's an inside baseball media that reveals how destructive the conservative media criticism environment can be to the conservative movement.

Enter, Fox News:

The story is pretty simple.

On election night, Fox News called Arizona very early. This surprised pretty much everyone. The Fox News team had improved their election model in 2020, and was confident their call was correct, even if unconventional.

Controversially, however, they called it for Joe Biden. Arizona has historically been a red state, and the polls (and final result) were close there. Nobody had a really strong expectation it was gonna go for Biden until Fox News just.... called it.

This hurled Trump surrogates into a desperate place. If they lost *Arizona*, that was a bad sign for the night. More importantly, it happened before midnight: it humiliated the President while millions were still watching.

The Trump campaign immediately turned on a dime. They pivoted from "Look, we're crushing it with Hispanics! Massive turnout! Incredible performance!" to "The election was stolen."

Who stole the election changed over time. Fox News. Some rando in Atlanta. Poll workers. China.

the strange reality of strict calvinism is that it makes a mockery of God's claims to hate, abhort, or even be theoretically opposed to evil

the calvinist solution to the problem of evil, which I have *literally heard from the lips of a faithful well-catechized Presbyterian* is, "well, all that happens is God's will, and to do His will is to manifest goodness, and goodness gives God joy, so God must rejoice in evil"

The hypothetical I gave was, "Suppose that there was a city of Christians, and a bomber flew over the city, and the guy at the controls tripped and accidentally armed and dropped a bomb, and wiped out the city: is that God's will? What does God think of that?"

His answer in addition to the above cited the Flood, Soddom, and Nineveh.

Because we all know that God's response to the Flood was, "I REALLY liked that, it was AWESOME, it satisfied my will and purposes to obliterate my creation!"

Once you have drunk the "but muh sovrintee" Kool-Aid you cannot escape the argument that literally everything that happens is not just God's will in some philosophical sense, but His will in the sense of "things that bring him pleasure."

reading the self-important and vaguely-cultish textbooks by bayesians makes me want to go out and kill a sufficiently large number of bayesians that i can estimate the mean pitch of their screams

"when we have multiple models, we should choose one using Bayesian statistics"

no

you should do both and publish an appendix showing robustness tests, you cultist

"but my bayesian model takes 4 weeks to process i can't run 1,397 robustness tests"

yes

exactly

"it's #Actually impossible to use predictive accuracy to test model validity because we can't observe future values!!!"

omg

this is a real critically acclaimed textbook im barely even paraphrasing here

i don't trust quantitative methods where people say, "this method has been in use for centuries!"

that is a solid argument for perhaps a theological proposition

it is not highly compelling for code

After a couple years of ads telling men to do laundry turned out, weirdly, to not boost fertility, Korea is back to financial incentives, which prior research has shown do work but at a very high price.

Korea is adding a $275/month allowance for the first year of a baby's life, increasing the pregnancy medical benefit by $400 or so, and providing an $1800 baby bonus. There's also some unspecified benefits related to leave and high-parity families.

The thing to understand is that these efforts are not *actually* huge. Quoting things in won gives you big numbers so it's easy to lose sight of the fact that we're not talking about enough money to actually offset a large share of wages.

I'm a fan of baby bonuses and first-year benefits. They're probably the most bang for the buck.

But this isn't actually all that many bucks!

These benefits add up to about $5,500 in benefits. A similar program compared to average incomes in the US would be about $8,700.

Possibly the greatest NBER abstract ever written.

The Great Man theory of history.... turns out to have some pretty strong statistical support.

School closures had NO EFFECT (precise null!) on socioeconomic outcomes and future schooling behavior during the 1918 pandemic.

The authors note that school closures were not as long back then.

But also school calendars were far shorter. So idk how it shakes out.

Informing men about the odds their wife will die in childbirth reduces fertility, increases marital satisfaction, and reduces mismatch in fertility preferences within couples (in Zambia).