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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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
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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
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.
1. (Not my focus here) Are we treating these conditions appropriately given their untreated prognosis is usually (though certainly not always!!) "goes away in a few months"?

2. Why are placebo effects so unusually large?
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Lyman Stone \u77f3\u4f86\u6c11
Lyman Stone 石來民...
@lymanstoneky
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
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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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