My favorite story when I hear someone dismiss an argument saying 'that is obvious':
Lazarsfeld was writing about “The American Soldier”, a recently published study of over 600,000 servicemen, conducted by the research branch of the war department during and immediately after the second world war. To make his point, Lazarsfeld listed six findings that he claimed were representative of the report. Take number two: '“Men from rural backgrounds were usually in better spirits during their Army life than soldiers from city backgrounds.”
“Aha,” says Lazarsfeld’s imagined reader, “that makes perfect sense. Rural men in the 1940s were accustomed to harsher living standards and more physical labour than city men, so naturally they had an easier time adjusting. Why did we need such a vast and expensive study to tell me what I already knew?” Why indeed.
But Lazarsfeld then reveals the truth: all six of the “findings” were in fact the exact opposite of what the study found. It was city men, not rural men, who were happier during their army life. Of course, had the reader been told the real answers in the first place, they could just as easily have reconciled them with other things they already thought they knew: “City men are more used to working in crowded conditions and in corporations, with chains of command, strict standards of clothing, etiquette, and so on. That’s obvious!” But this is exactly the point Lazarsfeld was making. When every answer and its opposite appears equally obvious then, as he put it, “something is wrong with the entire argument of ‘obviousness'”
Edward says that Nate's prediction should be interpreted as:
“If nothing else changes between now and the election, Joe Biden has a 85% chance of winning.” (Silver’s argument)
But the problem is this prediction is not testable as election only occurs once at the end. Thus, one should use Nate's early predictions as pure entertainment.
Nate's final predictions show that they are well-calibrated across all of his political predictions but it is hard to estimate how accurate his model predictions are just for presidential elections given he has predicted only a few so far (unless one assumes all elections have similar uncertainty, which is clearly not true).
Greenwald was not claiming he is breaking the story. He was trying to shed light into the media blacklisting of the story. It is indeed Ironic that his story got blacklisted as well!
I think some editors are perhaps trying to avoid a repeat of the 'Hillary email/Comey announcement of 2016' scenario but didn't anticipate the Streisand effect.
In hindsight, best approach may have been to cover the story, get a sound bite from Biden denying that he benefitted, say there is no evidence he benefitted and leave it at that.
I don't get this obsession with comparing Sweden, a remote, sparsely-populated country, to more dense, well-connected, large population centers. If you really want to compare Sweden, please restrict your comparisons to its closely similar, equally remote and sparsely populated neighbors, namely, Norway and Finland. The 10X difference between them will be immediately obvious.
Yes, I agree. This issue is super-nuanced and I believe Mark has spent years (since the 2016 election fiasco) looking into this as well as being advised by top minds to arrive at his current position. These employees are acting emotionally now but will realize the value of Mark's position over time (in my opinion).
> I'll go out on a limb, and say that the existence of police unions is not the most important factor behind police brutality, and the killing of people of colour by police, in the US.
Hard to say if it is the most important but it is a pretty important factor. See https://www.joincampaignzero.org/ for all research that indicates the unions are a key stumbling block.
Classics have a way to taking things to extreme to illustrate various points. The Gulag example highlights that when a person had a choice to take the road to the left (selfish) or the right (selfless), they took the right road and gave up their self/happiness but ended up achieving meaning. Frankl's book on search for meaning also talks about meaning being more desirable than happiness.
The point is not that suffering makes ones life meaningful but the struggle or striving or the road seems to be preferred by the wise than an end state like happiness.