Intellectual culture, like most social phenomena, is subject to pendulum swings, to backlashes and overcorrections. Right now, I think we’re witnessing a pretty wild back and forth about statistical reasoning, under the (not entirely helpful) frame of Big Data. I recently expressed some reservations about how statistical significance testing can lead us astray, but I […]
Continue reading →This is me, studying from my rapidly approaching language exam. As I successfully (if not painlessly) passed my prospectus defense a couple weeks ago, it’s the last hurdle between me and my dissertation. Should I successfully complete the exam (two hours, 250 words, a text I won’t know about in advance), I will officially have […]
Continue reading →I should probably know enough to just leave it alone at this point. But look: I sometimes get the impression, from the emails that I get – which, let me say, I truly cherish – that what some (only some) people who disagree with me want is more acknowledgement that I might be wrong. Well, […]
Continue reading →Michelle Goldberg writes about the #CancelColbert fiasco and, naturally, uses it as an excuse to go after radicals, and does so, naturally, at The Nation, America’s preeminent source of bloodless, fretting progressivism. She blames the radical left for the rise of censoriousness and the focus on affective politics in the broadly defined left. It’s a classic liberal […]
Continue reading →Via Yasmin Nair, this piece on Quartz lends credence to a phenomenon I myself have observed very often: people who attack the value of a college degree a) all went to college themselves and b) don’t extend that thinking to their children. Now I happen to think that a healthy economy and social system will […]
Continue reading →I don’t want to bore you by adding too much to the #CancelColbert pile. I just want to ask this question: do intentions matter, when it comes to political speech? I ask because it seems like the current conventional wisdom on the question is schizophrenic. Many people have been arguing that intentions don’t matter, that […]
Continue reading →Some emailers to the Dish think that Ta-Nehisi Coates is too negative about all this race stuff. And I mean, really! What reason might we have to be pessimistic about race in America? I guess some people just have a bad attitude.
Continue reading →I thought this Tim Harford piece, on the seduction of so-called Big Data and the notion of post-theory, was really good. Harford makes several important points about the ways in which Big Data enthusiasts have underestimated or misunderstood long-term issues with analyzing statistical data. I want to expand a little bit on the question of […]
Continue reading →Today Brendan O’Connor at Gawker wrote something that was wrong and dumb. This is okay. When you write enough you sometimes write stuff that is wrong and dumb. But other people have to tell you when you’re wrong and dumb, otherwise the world gets dumber. So I told him it was wrong and dumb. After […]
Continue reading →Along with my petty obsession about the STEM shortage myth, I’m frequently puzzled by the common assertion that we need to send people into trade schools to solve our labor market woes. I find this to be a far less acute problem than STEM mythology, in part because it’s a less common of an argument, […]
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