So I listened to Vox’s The Weeds podcast on the relationship between public policy, public health, and eating yesterday. They are particularly interested in the use of nudges and nags to improve healthy eating and healthy outcomes. It made me think of a few things. There’s no grand point here, just some impressions. 1. Maybe […]
Continue reading →As someone with both a professional and amateur interest in how the public talks about education, and particularly educational assessment, I’m fascinated and disturbed by a trend that I’ve noticed in popular assumptions about educational performance. Though I can’t say this with great rigor, it seems to me that many people now talk about educational […]
Continue reading →Statistical significance is an essential but confusing concept. As I’ve discussed in this space before, statistical significance fundamentally concerns the chance that a given quantitative result is the product of random chance, of variability that’s inherent to real-world numbers. (Update: Better — the odds that we’d observe the given result, or a more extreme result, simply […]
Continue reading →I have just gotten my hands on a copy of Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom, the new book by Dr. Steven Salaita. Dr. Salaita is a Palestinian academic who had a tenured job at Virginia Tech, left that job to take a job at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that he had […]
Continue reading →In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere, thoughtful or humane. Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves […]
Continue reading →The purported job of journalists is to find out facts. You know, figure out true things about the world by investigating it, asking questions, picking up the phone once in awhile. One factual question is whether or not I am a Bernie Sanders supporter. The factual answer to that factual question is no. This is […]
Continue reading →Obviously, I have a bunch of complaints about professional politics and culture writing. But one complaint I see floating around just doesn’t jibe with my experience at all. I frequently read people saying (often on Facebook) that “nobody knows how to write these days,” that the web writing generation doesn’t have the prose chops that […]
Continue reading →You may remember a book called This Town that came out a couple years ago. Written by Mark Leibovich, it’s one of those DC-insider dealies that skewers Washington culture and yet was beloved by the people who make up that culture. One of the sturdier aspects of DC journalism is that nobody is more cynical about […]
Continue reading →“The meaning of findings in behavioral genetics for our understanding of human nature has to be worked out for each case. An aberrant gene that causes a disorder shows that the standard version of the gene is necessary to have a normal human mind. But what the standard version does is not immediately obvious. If […]
Continue reading →Erik Loomis has an excellent response to Vox and friend’s neoliberals-circle-the-wagons routine. As he and Jeff Spross point out, the “if you care about the American poor, you hate the Chinese poor” claims are bogus, eliminating other alternatives that would improve living conditions for both Chinese and American workers alike, playing both against our capitalist […]
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