BC POLITICS
Saved by @SteveeRogerr

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 conspiratorial delusion of the stolen election grew, but it's rageful trigger came in that innocuous decision to call Arizona early. For Trump supporters, that call "changed the night." It was the turning point. It is somehow deeply significant.
So this week, Fox News fired all the people involved in that decision.
Now, let's look at this story from another angle.

There was less true uncertainty about who would win at 11:20 PM on election night than in any election ever, because sooooo many votes had been cast early.
While counts of these votes were not announced, early indicators based on turnout by voter registration and polls of who showed up, as well as differences in pre-election rhetoric, strongly suggested early voters would swing for Biden.
Meanwhile, for all that people like to crap on polling, the reality is that the predictive models for election night as returns come in really are getting quite good. They're imperfect of coruse, but they're improving all the time.
As a result, Fox News' team was very well positioned to have a good idea of what a "Trump win" would need to look like, in terms of how day-of results were going to need to look for Trump to offset the likely split in early and absentee votes.
So from this perspective, Fox News' call was a *triumph* of good analysis: they correctly called a close race even though the number of votes still not counted massively exceeded the expected margin of victory.

Analysts in finance get paid lots of money for that kind of call!
Having a rational, explainable, reproducible model which produces correct out-of-the-money calls is an extremely valuable thing. As a professional forecaster in a different business, this is a very exciting and valuable thing to see in a model.
Unfortunately, the model's call was politically inconvenient. Trump's team was counting on night-of calls swinging their way in order to make similar arguments as were made in 2000: inject enough uncertainty into the public discourse and they hoped to influence the outcome.
So the Trump team, and Trump supporters around the nation, threw a tantrum.
Ultimately, what happened was:
1) Fox News recruited high-quality analytic talent into the conservative movement
2) That talent delivered, providing accurate results faster than competitors
3) Those results didn't fit "The Narrative" that the Trumpist echo chamber wanted
4) Fired
Conservatives JUSTIFIABLY complain about mainstream media biases. Because they're real and influential.

But our media critics really need to pay attention to stuff like this. It's open hostility on even *irrelevant* truth claims.
Because guess what?

It didn't matter what Fox called! The results weren't influenced by that!

But in the media-and-commentary-addicted mind of politics-overdosed Trump supporters.... it really mattered what The Media said.
It was *deeply significant* to these folks that their false view of the world was not publicly ratified and legitimized, even though that view was *false*.
It was more important to these folks that the call made fit their narrative than that it in fact be true or honest.
Now, look. A few years back I was looking for funding for a project. I approached a funder for it. It was a data-intensive project, but with outcomes likely to be friendly to conservatives. The funder was conservative.
The funder said, wow, this proposal looks really interesting...

.... but we don't really fund "data stuff." We're more interested in commentary. Do you want to repackage this as some op-eds?
(same project was pitched to a second conservative funder who much more reasonably denied the funding pitch on the grounds their funding program had a specific mission related to talent development; that was fine)
Generally, I find that conservative publications are often confused when you ask, "So, how should I format my graphs for your publication?" because they just are totally unused to quantitative arguments being made in articles.
A serious problem in the conservative media system is that the only expertise that gets respected is legalese: rhetorical argument, appeal to precedent, citation of others, moral justification..... *evidence* is treated with hostility.
So this makes it even worse FWIW. They just decided to shoot the messengers apparently. https://t.co/hcjiHwwxAC

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Lyman Stone \u77f3\u4f86\u6c11
Lyman Stone 石來民...
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Ulysses S. Grant would like a WORD


Or Teddy Roosevelt. Or Dwight Eisenhower. Or Andrew Jackson. Or Abraham Lincoln. Or George Washington. Or Zachary Taylor. Or any of numerous presidents who were honest-to-goodness battle-hardened warriors.

James Monroe fought the Hessians at Trenton and nearly died of wounds sustained there, then wintered in Valley Forge, then fought until Monmouth, then repeatedly tried to raise new regiments for the war until he went bankrupt doing it.

James Monroe, of the Era of Good Feelings, longest serving president of all time.... was in the boats crossing the icy Delaware.

Andrew Jackson was in a duel. He was shot in the chest right by his heart.

But he didn't go down. He stood there and, while bleeding out, steadily took aim and killed the dude who shot him.

Stone cold.
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Lyman Stone \u77f3\u4f86\u6c11
Lyman Stone 石來民...
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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."
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Lyman Stone \u77f3\u4f86\u6c11
Lyman Stone 石來民...
@lymanstoneky
So a few days back I was tweeting about SSRIs. The big question with these drugs is: why do controlled trials routinely show such small effects when practitioners and patients report life-changingly-large effects?

So first off, at this point the evidence is pretty clear that SSRIs and other anti-anxiety/anti-depression drugs truly don't do very much. Their average effects are beneath clinical significance, as I tweeted about here:


Basically, the problem these drugs face is that while they actually see relatively LARGE effects.... but that placebos in those trials ALSO see large effects (and most untreated depression improves within a year anyways).

So basically you have this problem where:
1. The condition tends to improve on its own in a majority of cases
2. Placebo effects for the condition are unusually large

Which means the large crude effects of SSRIs get swamped.

So that raises two new questions.
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Lyman Stone \u77f3\u4f86\u6c11
Lyman Stone 石來民...
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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.
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Lyman Stone \u77f3\u4f86\u6c11
Lyman Stone 石來民...
@lymanstoneky
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).
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https://t.co/vsTrS43Fft


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https://t.co/1r0MbPv8wG


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Propaganda, "harmless bombing" and a CIA terror campaign


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View the resolutions and voting results here:

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pre-TFA stuff is presented as a "cold war" between the New Republic and the remnants of the Empire that form the First Order, which 100% makes sense.

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V\u0936\u0941\u0926\u094d\u0927\u093f
Vशुद्धि...
@V_Shuddhi
क्या आप जानते हैं कि क्या है, पितृ पक्ष में कौवे को खाना देने के पीछे का वैज्ञानिक कारण!

श्राद्ध पक्ष में कौओं का बड़ा ही महत्व है। कहते है कौआ यम का प्रतीक है, यदि आपके हाथों दिया गया भोजन ग्रहण कर ले, तो ऐसा माना जाता है कि पितरों की कृपा आपके ऊपर है और वे आपसे ख़ुश है।


कुछ लोग कहते हैं की व्यक्ति मरकर सबसे पहले कौवे के रूप में जन्म लेता है और उसे खाना खिलाने से वह भोजन पितरों को मिलता है

शायद हम सबने अपने घर के किसी बड़े बुज़ुर्ग, किसी पंडित या ज्योतिषाचार्य से ये सुना होगा। वे अनगिनत किस्से सुनाएंगे, कहेंगे बड़े बुज़ुर्ग कह गए इसीलिए ऐसा करना

शायद ही हमें कोई इसके पीछे का वैज्ञानिक कारण बता सके।

हमारे ऋषि मुनि और पौराणिक काल में रहने वाले लोग मुर्ख नहीं थे! कभी सोचियेगा कौवों को पितृ पक्ष में खिलाई खीर हमारे पूर्वजों तक कैसे पहुंचेगी?

हमारे ऋषि मुनि विद्वान थे, वे जो बात करते या कहते थे उसके पीछे कोई न कोई वैज्ञानिक कारण छुपा होता था।

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एक बात जो कह सकते कि हम सब ने स्वतः उग आये पीपल या बरगद का पेड़/ पौधा किसी न किसी दीवार, पुरानी

इमारत, पर्वत या अट्टालिकाओं पर ज़रूर देखा होगा। देखा है न?

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Jaya_Upadhyaya
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SRI VARAHA NARSIMHA, SIMHACHALAM, VIZAG (AP)
#bharatmandir

One of the 32 Narsimha Kshetram of Andhra. It has a unique form of Narsimha, appearing like a shivlingam

It is said that Narsimha’s fierce nature is soothed by worshipping him with Varaha, considered a peaceful deity


The shrine is believed to have been constructed by Prahlada. With time, it crumbled.
In Treta yuga, King Pururava was passing from here in his vimana. The vimana was attracted to this place by a mystic power.
When the place was unearthed, the deity was found.
@GunduHuDuGa


Pururava’s wife, Urvashi, had a dream that the deity should remain covered in sandalwood paste for the whole year except on Akshaya Tritiya.
This practice has continued till date.
The mukhya mandap here, has a pillar kappam stambham believed to possess curative powers.


Chandanotsava/ Chandan Yatra is the most important festival celebrated on Akshaya Tritiya. The sandalwood paste is removed from the moolavar deity and nijarupa darshan (original form of deity) for twelve hours of the day are done by devotees.
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