[Free Beacon] Face it: Human beings are pretty stupid sometimes. We fall for astrology, vote for morons, buy into conspiracy theories, and send our money to obvious scammers. Today, all this seems to be getting worse as "fake news" and "disinformation" take root and the country fragments along partisan lines—not just when it comes to political beliefs but even when it comes to basic facts.
Oddly enough, though, we’re also stunningly brilliant. Not only have the brightest among us produced stunning feats of science and technology, but even normal people, working without modern tools, can use reason to improve their lives. The hunting-and-gathering that humans did long ago required extensive knowledge and careful thought about plants, seasons, animal behavior, and how humans might get what they want from the world around them.
That’s the tension animating Steven Pinker’s new book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. The tome celebrates reason, and it provides a digestible primer on the basics of logic, statistics, and other building blocks of rationality, illustrated with clever brain teasers and the occasional comic. Yet it also explains how the human mind can go wrong and asks why rationality seems to be in short supply these days.
This book does an excellent job explaining the basics of good thinking, though Pinker’s final musings about what ails the modern world are a bit unsatisfying.
Pinker’s thinking toolkit is laid out in a series of lucid chapters in the middle of the book. They explain the basics of formal logic: "If it rained, then the streets are wet" doesn’t imply "if the streets are wet, then it rained," for example, because something else might have made the streets wet. Pinker also goes through the core concepts of probability, explaining, for instance, why a 50 percent chance of rain on Saturday and a 50 percent chance of rain on Sunday don’t add up to a 100 percent chance of rain over the weekend.
He further introduces readers to "signal detection theory," the study of all the weird stuff that happens when we’re forced to grapple with false positives and false negatives. For instance, if a test for a disease is 95 percent accurate, but only 1 percent of people have the disease, a positive test will still suggest you probably don’t have the disease: In every 100 people tested, about one will correctly receive a positive result, but about five will receive false positives. Unless, that is, there are other reasons to think your risk might be higher than a random person’s—in which case we might use "Bayesian" reasoning to integrate the results of the test into everything else we know. Then it’s on to game theory, such as the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma, and social science’s never-ending quest to distinguish causation from mere correlation. In the latter, I was especially impressed by Pinker’s explanation of how regression analysis works, which manages to be simple and easy to follow while capturing some of the more technical details.
#1
Rationality also gave us marxism, hence communism hence 150+ million dead, eugenics, the Holocaust, euthanasia. It's not all upside by any means, especially in a moral vacuum.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
09/27/2021 8:05 Comments ||
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#2
/\ What is 'regression analysis' and what does it mean to perform a regression?
Regression analysis is a reliable method of identifying which variables have impact on a topic of interest. The process of performing a regression allows you to confidently determine which factors matter most, which factors can be ignored, and how these factors influence each other.
In order to understand regression analysis fully, it’s essential to comprehend the following terms:
Dependent Variable: This is the main factor that you’re trying to understand or predict.
Independent Variables: These are the factors that you hypothesize have an impact on your dependent variable.
In our application training example above, attendees’ satisfaction with the event is our dependent variable. The topics covered, length of sessions, food provided, and the cost of a ticket are our independent variables.
#3
I'm definitely not saying rationality is bad, it's quite the opposite, in fact. But, "when all you have is a hammer..."
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
09/27/2021 8:13 Comments ||
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#4
Marxism has nothing to do with rationality -- it's a faith-based cult, with predicted end times, demons, and a promised paradise. It's based on an idiotic idea that -- labor theory of value -- that collapses with the least reflection.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
09/27/2021 10:05 Comments ||
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#5
I took a semester of Bayesian statistics in college, and it was one of the best courses I ever took. It is VERY useful for breaking down events among several potential causes and analyzing each one. It's deceptively simple; but the applications can be devilishly complicated. Well worth the while, though.
Posted by: Tom ||
09/27/2021 11:33 Comments ||
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#6
"Don't knock rationalization. Where would we be without it? I don't know anyone who'd get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They're more important than sex. Have you ever gone a week without a rationalization?"
-Jeff Goldblum
[American Thinker] Today’s news forcibly reminded me why our Second Amendment matters so much. The abstract principles behind it make eminent sense but two news stories really bring home how wise our Founders were to include the people’s right to bear arms in our Bill of Rights.
Although few people remember this fact, the first shots fired at Lexington and Concord in 1775 occurred because British troops were heading to Boston to seize arms and powder that the colonists had been gathering. That battle sparked an eight-year-long revolution against a tyrannical government that held that colonists were money-making machines for the British homeland while denying them their rights.
When the Americans secured their victory, they understood that it couldn’t have occurred without their access to arms—access long guaranteed to British Protestants under the Bill of Rights of 1689. It was therefore a "no brainer" for the Founders to remind the federal government, via the Second Amendment, that the people have an inherent right to keep and bear arms, one that is subject to only the lightest and most necessary infringement.
The Founders’ wisdom has been borne out by the history of the 20th and (to date) 21st centuries. Although the drive-by media loves to lead with stories about gun crimes, there are two data points even more significant than the fact that most seem to occur in Democrat-run, heavily gun-controlled regions.
The first is that, per a CDC study published under the Obama administration, having a gun is the safest self-defense strategy. Even more significantly, defensive use of guns occurred between 500,000 to 3 million times per year, far outweighing the annual 30,000-40,000 gun deaths in America (most of which are suicides).
When did we become a nation of socialist AOCs wearing "Tax the Rich" dresses to $35,000-a-ticket celebrity galas, without mandatory masks, while being served by masked servants—a now tired script from the Obama birthday bash crowd to the grandees at the Emmys?
When did we discover that we must listen to oppressed billionaire Oprah from her $90 million Montecito estate commiserating with a billionaire Lebron or royal Meghan Markle about the racist white establishment? Is there anyone in the recent Washington intelligence and investigatory hierarchy who has not lied or feigned loss of memory under oath—a low bar that nevertheless excludes, among others, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller, or Peter Strzok?
Did anyone just five years ago believe the following could possibly happen in America—and invoke almost no popular outrage from a somnolent public?
Item: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, does not deny that: 1) he deliberately aborted the legal chain of operational command—that is, violated the law—by recalibrating established protocols for using nuclear weapons in times of crisis. And he says his interventions were based on his own diagnoses (after prompting from opposition leader, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) that the commander-in-chief was crazy, and thus could be circumvented.
And 2), in freelancing style, Milley, on more than one occasion, called the top figure of the Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army, General Li Zuocheng. He reportedly announced that his own country was currently in crisis (experiencing "messy" democracy), reassuring the Chinese that if he, Milley, the newfound autokrator, sensed there was any chance of hostile and aggressive action on the part of his own country, then on his own initiative he would tip off the Chinese in advance. And far from resigning or being fired for his Strangelovian efforts, Milley would then be hailed as a hero by the popular media and progressive civil libertarians. In other words, for the Left, it is as if Burt Lancaster’s movie character, Air Force General James Mattoon Scott, was the real hero of Seven Days in May.
Milley has also become the Zelig or Forrest Gump of our times. He turns up at almost all our recent military melodramas and disasters. Milley appears variously in the photo-op/federal troops/tear-gas spoof, the virtue-signaled rumored resignation, the talking referent in anonymously sourced books, puff-piece op-eds, and backgrounder quotes, the Inspector Javert of "white rage," the student of How To Be An Antiracist, the Afghanistan progress reassurer, the "righteous" drone striker, the adjudicator between January 6 "coups" and 120 days of "penny packet protests" costing $2 billion-dollars in riot and arson destruction and 28 deaths, the Article 88 violator, the reductio ad Hitlerum promulgator, and the underappreciated but rumored polymath bibliophile.
[American Thinker] Loudoun County, Virginia, America’s richest county, is a Washington, D.C.’s bedroom community. That proximity to D.C. probably explains why Democrats hold seven out of the nine seats on the school board, leading the school district to embrace both Critical Race Theory and gender madness. Now that its leftist antics have gained it national attention, Loudoun’s school district is violating state rules—and engaging in conduct it would surely consider racist for elections—to shut down commentary. Its loudest critic, though, managed a perfect end-run around the rule.
The Loudoun County Public Schools district ("LCPS") has spent tens of thousands of dollars training teachers to teach Critical Race Theory ("CRT"), which categorically derides all Whites as racists and all Blacks as victims and that attacked "heterosexism" and parental control. The result of this racist, zero-sum thinking was that the district become notorious for canceling several Dr. Seuss books, while teachers formed a cabal to attack any parents who objected to CRT.
LCPS has also embraced wholeheartedly the idea of the "transgender" fad, even though there’s no scientific support for this theory. This fad is as evil as witch-burning given the number of lives it destroys, whether it’s the deluded people who are chemically and surgically mutilated or the sane ones hounded out of the public square for trying to stop this madness. For example, the LCPS board fired a teacher who stated at a public board meeting that he cannot in good conscience use anti-science pronouns. The Virginia Supreme Court reversed that firing but it remains to be seen whether the teacher can be fired again for violating the policy in his classroom.
Of course, we know the hypocrisy behind all this virtue signaling. It’s one thing if parents vote to flood poor Hispanic and Black communities with potentially dangerous illegal aliens from Haiti and Afghanistan. It’s another thing entirely if schools in those same Blue communities say that it's systemically racist for your White son to attend an Ivy League college or that your daughter must share a locker room or compete in sports with a fully equipped male who insists he’s a girl. Still, the leftist hysteria endangers children and liberty, so it needs to be stopped.
Matt Walsh, a celebrated political commentator, is now making it his business to speak out against school board madness whenever school boards institute policies about makes, CRT, or transgenderism. And he’s very, very good, as a viral video of him at a Nashville school board meeting shows:
[Motley Fool] Major names in the U.S. firearms industry, including Smith & Wesson Brands (NASDAQ:SWBI) and Sturm, Ruger & Company (NYSE:RGR) could soon have significant new competition. Czech gun manufacturer Česká zbrojovka Group (OTC:CZGZ.F), or CZG, is gearing up for a strong push into the U.S. after acquiring Colt.
CZG is now much better positioned to compete for law enforcement and military firearms contracts in the U.S., along with expanded civilian firearm sales. Aiming to double its revenue to $1 billion or more, it looks like competition will be ramping up for this industry.
#1
CZ's been around half of forever, and been making quality stuff. A lot of Browning and Colt clones, ironically enough.
How far back? One their pre WW2 designs for a squad light machine gun (from the Brno plant) was taken up by Lee-Enfield and went into service as the Bren gun (BRno ENfield).
Posted by: ed in texas ||
09/27/2021 11:56 Comments ||
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[Hot Air] More on this article yesterday
Yesterday, we kicked around the question of whether or not Pakistan can truly be considered an ally of the United States and the rest of the western nations. My unfortunate conclusion was that the government of Pakistan hasn’t been a true ally for quite some time, but we’re sort of stuck with them in a dysfunctional relationship, for the time being, lacking many viable alternatives in the region. A bit of news that broke last night reminds us of another country that will likely fall into the same category. That would be Turkey. While I’ve covered the various sins of Recep Tayyip Erdogan here in the past on more occasions than I could count, he’s still making inflammatory moves to remind us that he is in bed with America’s adversaries far more so than he is with the west. Despite warnings from the United States and the rest of Turkey’s supposed NATO allies, Erdogan is seemingly planning to purchase another shipment of the Russian S-400 missile system.
Turkey’s president has said he would consider buying a second Russian missile system in defiance of strong objections by the United States.
Posted by: Frank G ||
09/27/2021 00:00 ||
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Link ||
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#1
Erdogan is an aspiring demogogue on the Benito Mussolini model, as seems to be trying many of the same options. He's caught between the foreign policy machines of Russia and the US, which are basically driven by the arms dealing corporations in each camp. He seems to be trying to make Turkey into a 'fulcrum' or balance point, when he actually has more of a pothole to work with.
Erdogan's kinda like Saddam Hussien: a medium capable leader on a very small platform. He only has two or three drums to hit, expect him to play them often.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
09/27/2021 11:48 Comments ||
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[NY Post] Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas is spinning as fast as he can. But no matter how he tries to wave away the crisis at the border, his appearance on "Fox News Sunday" illustrated how this administration is deceiving the American public. Here are some of Mayorkas’ biggest whoppers:
Lie 1: "Approximately, I think it’s about ten thousand or so, twelve thousand. It could be even higher."
For the last couple weeks, Mayorkas has bobbed and weaved whenever he was asked how many of the Haitians camping under the Del Rio, Texas bridge were being released into the United States and how many were being deported. At one point he blamed "18-hour days" for his lack of clarity. But it’s clear the administration always knew the numbers, they just didn’t want to reveal them. Now that it’s impossible to stop the process, he again lowballs the number at 12,000 — vaguely adding it could be more. He knows it’s more.
Lie 2: "What we do is we follow the law as Congress has passed it."
What bunk. First of all, the administration’s justification for deporting some people to Haiti was Title 42, which allows them to block entry due to the coronavirus health crisis. So what’s the difference between the 2,000 or so they flew to Haiti and the 12,000+ they let in? It seems completely arbitrary. Much more likely is that, faced with backlash from Democratic activists, they stopped using Title 42. Meanwhile, in August, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration must reinstitute President Trump’s "remain in Mexico" policy, which required asylum seekers to wait there until their cases are heard. Biden and Mayorkas are just ignoring it; Texas is going to court to force them to comply. That’s not following the law — that’s flouting it.
[Boston Herald] I saw a headline this week in The Wall Street Journal that made my day: "Abolish the FBI."
The reason I was so pleased was because above my column in this newspaper on Jan. 24, 2018, was this headline: "Scandal-ridden FBI must be abolished."
Is there an echo in here?
All I can say is, what took everybody else so long to realize how rotten to the core the Famous But Incompetent G-men have become, and actually have been for more than half a century now?
As the Journal noted, the FBI’s last sustained good "run of publicity ... came more than 50 years ago thanks to Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and his weekly show on ABC, "The FBI," which went off the air in 1974.
Even by dismal modern FBI standards, though, the news just keeps getting worse and worse.
Last week, one of Hillary Clinton’s lawyers was indicted by Russian collusion hoax Special Counsel John Durham. The Democrat operative was charged with lying to a James Comey briefer about one of the largely forgotten lies in the Russian hoax — Alfa Bank’s "secret servers," which of course didn’t exist except in the fevered imaginations of far-left Democrats and their stenographers in the media.
Durham has been taking his own sweet time bringing these corrupt Deep State bad actors to justice, but better late than never. He knows a lot about how deep the corruption runs. He first brought down Whitey’s FBI hitman, Zip Connolly.
This latest indictment came only days before the five-year statute of limitations ran out.
Five years! It took that long to bring a single one of these bent Democrats before the bar of justice. But then, in this case, as in so many others involving the FBI, the cops are the actual criminals.
The joke in this latest bust is that obviously the FBI knew that Hillary’s lawyer was lying when he told the agent that he was peddling his ludicrously false stories.
Maybe not, though. They’re not making special agents like Inspector Lew Erskine anymore.
[Gateway] Every week, the polling news for Joe Biden continues to get worse.
A new I&I/TIPP Poll shows that even people who voted for Biden are now deserting him in significant numbers.
Biden is a disaster and you don’t have to go looking to see the effect his presidency is having on the country.
I&I/TIPP Poll: Biden Voters Abandon Him In Droves
If an election were held today, a substantial number of those who voted President Joe Biden in November wouldn’t do so now, a new I&I/TIPP Poll shows. This comes after a spate of recent polls from TIPP and others suggesting Biden’s political support is in a freefall as Americans question his leadership on issues ranging from COVID-19 to the chaos on the U.S.’ southern border to the recent botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The I&I/TIPP Poll asked Americans: "If the presidential election were held today, and the following were the candidates, for whom would you vote?"
Respondents were given the following choices: "Donald Trump, the Republican," "Joe Biden, the Democrat," "Other," "Not sure," and "Prefer not to answer."
Just 46% of those who voted in the November 2020 election said they’d vote for Biden today, more than five full percentage points below his official total 51.3% share in the 2020 presidential election.
That doesn’t mean voters are wishing they’d instead picked Trump, who in recent weeks has hinted at a possible re-run in 2024. The poll found 42% said they’d pick Trump now, down from his actual 2020 election total of 46.9%...
Also interesting is where Biden lost the most support — among women, suburbanites, moderates, and the middle-class. In other words, the key groups that helped put him in the White House.
The questions that remain now are, whether Biden will even finish his first term and if he does, will he try to run again in 2024?
#8
Thought there was supposed to be an impeachment vote in the House for Squatter Joe. When will Pelosi schedule the votes. Several Congress members have introduced articles of impeachment. Pelosi sure did hussle her arse around trying to impeach Trump.
[Insider] Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida appeared to endorse a white nationalist conspiracy theory that Tucker Carlson promoted on his Fox News show last week.
".@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America," Gaetz, a Republican, wrote in a tweet Saturday.
Carlson embraced the "Great Replacement Theory" on his show Wednesday during a segment attacking President Joe Biden for the Haitian migrant crisis that played out on the southern border last week.
He accused Biden of intentionally bringing immigrants into the country for political purposes and falsely said Biden supports open borders. "Falsely said" - that's an editorial opinion pretending to be journolism
#1
A people was here, stable, had been occupying the same territory for fifteen or twenty centuries. And suddenly, very quickly, in one or two generations, one or several other peoples substitute themselves for him. He is replaced, it is not him anymore.
— Renaud Camus, 2013 interview for Action Française.[7]
#2
Whenever these so-called journalists say something is false, when there is no way for them to know any such thing, it's a dead giveaway that they are really not journalists but propagandists. From that moment on, you must never believe another word they say or write.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
09/27/2021 12:12 Comments ||
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[USSANews] Protests have finally erupted in Israel as it has slowly dawned on people there that the goalposts for vaccine passports keep being shifted by the government.
It is now expected to be announced that at least FOUR vaccinations will be needed to be considered ’fully vaccinated’ and able to engage in society.
Over the weekend marches took place in the streets of Tel Aviv against the so called ’Green Pass’:
#1
The problem for Israelis is that they are so late to the party. They have already accepted lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates, etc, so why now? Why the 4th jab and not the 17th?
[AmGreatness] The Physicians’ Declaration was first read at the Rome Covid Summit, catalyzing an explosion of active support from medical scientists and physicians around the globe. These professionals were not expecting career threats, character assassination, papers and research censored, social accounts blocked, search results manipulated, clinical trials and patient observations banned, and their professional history and accomplishments altered or omitted in academic and mainstream media.
Over the past 70 years the public health establishment in Anglophone countries has issued a number of diet rules, their common thread being that the natural ingredients populations all around the world have eaten for millennia — meat, dairy, eggs and more — and certain components of these foods, notably saturated fat, are dangerous for human health.
The consequences of these diet ordinances are all around us: 60% of Britons are now overweight or obese, and the country’s metabolic health has never been worse.
Government-led lack of trust in the healthfulness of whole foods in their natural forms encouraged us to buy foods that have been physically and chemically modified, such as salt-reduced cheese and skimmed milk, supposedly to make them healthier for us.
No wonder that more than 50% of the food we eat in the UK is now ultra-processed.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Free Beacon] Face it: Human beings are pretty stupid sometimes. We fall for astrology, vote for morons, buy into conspiracy theories, and send our money to obvious scammers. Today, all this seems to be getting worse as "fake news" and "disinformation" take root and the country fragments along partisan lines—not just when it comes to political beliefs but even when it comes to basic facts.
A people was here, stable, had been occupying the same territory for fifteen or twenty centuries. And suddenly, very quickly, in one or two generations, one or several other peoples substitute themselves for him. He is replaced, it is not him anymore.
