Mike Edwards's Blog, page 3

Stalin Didn’t Kill Socrates

Just because something is bad, doesn’t mean that all other bad things are associated with it. Or to put it another way, Hitler did not invent cancer. And yet when there is a bad thing, especially a bad thing we don’t fully understand, we have a tendency to associate all sorts of other bad things with it.

Take gerrymandering, for instance. Gerrymandering is the process by which state legislatures draw state and congressional district lines, in order to maximize partisan gain. It is commonly ass...

Rationality and Reason

Social scientists have demonstrated, repeatedly, that we all suffer from biases that make it almost impossible for us to make truly rational decisions. On the other hand, as an interesting essay on NYTimes.com demonstrates, those biases do not mean that our actions are completely devoid of reason; we do have a conscious mind capable of exerting a force of will on our thoughts and behaviors, and that conscious mind does respond to reason (or at least reasonable sounding arguments). But this be...

Would correlation by any other name smell like causation?

A recent Yahoo News article asks the creative question of whether your . It turns out, it can. On some level this isn’t terribly surprising – names vary based on gender, ethnicity, and region of the country, all of which predict electoral choices. On a different level, it is sort of cool that you can predict who a person is going to vote for based on the name. Regardless, I’d like to offer a word of praise, and a word of complaint about this article.

First, the...

The Subtlety of Bias

TheNew York Timesis reporting onan interesting studyabout the perniciousness of gender bias. The authors of the studycrafted a resume of an “above average but not spectacular” graduate student in the natural sciences, and then sent the resume to a number of different faculty who run labs at different top-notch research institutions. The faculty were asked to grade the resume on a 1-7 scale, and then were asked a number of questions about how much time they might be willing to put in to help m...

Terror, Conspiracy, and Protest in the Middle East

Last night’s Rachel Maddow Show was excellent for three reasons, and at least the first two segments are well worth watching. (I realize that she is often quite liberal and quite partisan, but these two segments are not about the election and are well worth your time, whatever your political alignment.)

1) In the first segment, she points to a lot of different news coming out of Libya from a variety of sources which give strong indication that the attacks on the Libyan consulate–the attacks th...

Extremists Need Each Other

If there is one lesson from the tragedy in Libya, it is that extremists need each other. Anger at terrorist attacks done in the name of Islam causes some extremist in the United States to post an extremely hateful anti-Muslim video, which then is promoted by anti-American extremists in the Arab world to whip up anti-American sentiment, and thereby cause another violent attack on an American embassy. Extremists feed off of each other to justify their own extremism. Racist Muslim Imams and raci...

Interpreting Election Results

I’m normally a big fan of Jeffrey Toobin. He’s a good writer, he has an excellent ability to explain complicated legal matters in everyday language, and he tends to avoid the hyper-partisanship that passes for analysis so often these days. But I have to say, he got one wrong today. Toobin has a piece on Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren in the New Yorker, in which he asserts the following:

“Warren is neither a Clintonesque triangulator nor an Obamaesque conciliator. She is a thro...

One Man’s Office

One of the points we try to make in the book is that governing is extremely complicated–to the point that no voter could possibly understand the nuance of every issue. Even issues that seem like they ought to be incredibly simple, can actually be extremely problematic in reality.

Take, for example, the location of an embassy in an ally’s country. In Great Britain, the main American embassy is in London; after all, London is the seat of British government, and it makes sense for an ambassador a...

Race, Culture, and Poverty

Sometimes interesting data can come from the strangest places.

The Washington Post published the results of a poll, in which 1020 people were asked, essentially, why they thought African-American voters were so much more likely to vote Democrat than Republican. The poll was a free-form answer, in which there was no multiple choice answer given; people could say whatever they wanted to. Here is their summary of the poll:

This isn’t the greatest poll in the world–or at least, based on this data,...

C-Students, Teleprompters, and the Queen of Sheba

Our biases and prejudices can cause us to believe some pretty absurd things.

I’ve been reminded of this most recently by a documentary I saw on Great Zimbabwe, a medieval stone city in southern Africathat in it’s day grew fabulously wealthy off of the gold trade. Great Zimbabwe had been long known to traders and merchants (goods originating there ended up in markets across the Middle East, India, and China), although the first Europeans didn’t visit there until somePortuguesetraders were taken...