Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Blocking European integration, thereby also assisting Russian's strategy" - Fidesz actively promotes EU accession for Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro.

"the Árpád flag with its five red and five white stripes" - four of each actually, this comes hot of the tail of the namecheck of the 'Momento' opposition group.

No discussion in this chapter of the amaxing turnaround in Orbáns relationship with multinationals (esp German car manufacturers) and their enormous contribution to the Hungarian political economy.

"Most of all, corruption paralyses the performance of our entrepreneurs, for wherever cronyism or bribery and not entrepreneurship are rewarded, there is no incentive to work harder and at the same time there is no trust" - no discussion of 'administrative violence' here, which may be the most important factor.

"One in seven [of the richest people in Hungary] is associated with the Fidesz regime." - interesting, I would have pit it much higher.

"yet, how vulnerable and how unsuccessful he is in daily events, in the minutiae of government, in his selection of his staff, in the motivation of an efficient and well cooperating team, in assigning tasks" - substantiation of this is sadly lacking.

"Yet despite this loss of 8 percentage points (in an election where 40 per cent abstained) Fidesz was still able to...retain...a two thirds majority." - It's hard to imagine that some change in voting system could alter this, some countries geographically and culturally tend towards a one party state.

"The response of the Hungarian public was silence and apathy. From this Orbán could draw but one conclusion: if such a drastic step [the confiscation of private pension funds] is possible without any counter reaction, then in such a society almost anything can be done." - it was an amazing moment, but what actually happened needs to be thoroughly analyzed, no cash changed hands.

"The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple, are concrete rather than abstract, assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen." - doesn't this bring our criminal justice system into disrepute?

"Causal explanations will be evoked when regression is detected, but they will be wrong because the truth is that regression to the mean has an explanation but does not have a cause" - move along now, nothing to see here.

"You are more likely to learn something by surprises in your own behaviour than by hearing surprising facts about people in general" - didn't Socrates imply as much?

Not sure I understand the difference between 'statistical base rates' and 'causal base rates'.

"Charles McBeth, whose prodigious memory had already disposed of ten languages and was prepared to entomb ten more" - glad to see Nabokov shares my suspicion of polyglots, this barb is even better in context.

'Linda: Less is More' has been the most challenging chapter so far, and I can now see the impact of people using stories rather than probabilities to make economic decisions. Wow! Only having the right narrative will enable people to beat machines in financial trading.

"The two questions have the same logical structure as the Linda problem, but they cause no fallacy, because the more detailed outcome is only more detailed - it is not more plausible, or more coherent, or a better story". - Kahneman needs to consider how language presents stories, particularly the arrangement of given and new information in a series of clauses. 'Given' information is not probable it is 'actual'.

"...in the case of constitutional amendments, the figure is more startling: nine out of twelve ... were fast tracked through parliament without any genuine debate or scrutiny." - one of surprising things for me about living in Hungary is how quickly and how completely the law can change. Changing the law is simply not taken as seriously as it is in the UK or the US.

"In the epilogue of his second book on Orbán, published in 2009, he wrote "Once he is in possession of a constitutional majority, he will this into an impregnable fortress of power..." - as discussed in the Economist this week https://www.economist.com/node/217706...

"There is one thing you can do when you have doubts about the quality of the evidence: let your judgements of probability stay close to the base rate. Don't expect this exercise of discipline to be easy..." - and where do you find the 'base rates' to begin with?

"Poor regulation is wasteful of lives and money, both of which can be measured objectivity." - this misses the depth of Slovic's point, which is that the value of lives and money varies between people. A psychopath puts a very low value on a human life, a devout catholic a very high one. This is an argument about values not quantities.

"Indeed, the professionals were almost as susceptible to anchoring effects as business school students with no real estate experience...the only difference between the two groups conceded that they were influenced by the anchor, while the professionals denied that influence" - could this be repeated for say test scores and teachers?

"To be consistently successful in politics, a party leader requires not only a certain degree of luck and high intelligence but also a character that, without a hint of scruple, will pursue the stated goals of retaining power and excluding all possible rivals" - which is why politicians need to be restrained by constitutional law.

"Finally, a deep rooted mixture of frustration at the consequences of the system change of 1989 and nostalgia for the apparent stability of the Kádár era moulded not the virtues, but the disappointments, of Hungary's citizens" - what does it take to 'mould the virtues' of a state's citizens?

"this curious interview indicates that the thirty-nine year old Orbán was not disheartened in the slightest by the shock of the defeat" - I've read elsewhere that he had a complete breakdown.

"the media contributed to the creation of a scathing image of the government ministers of the Smallholders' Party" - another Orbán biography that avoids discussing Torgyán.

During cabinet meerings of Orban's first government no minutes were taken.

"...the disaster of Trianon, defeat in war, the fate of Hungarians living abroad and the psychosis of the nation in peril...have for generations been part and parcel of the tradition of Christian middle classes...especially...in rural areas" - a rural middle class, how does that work?

"In [Antal's] view, business had no part in politics although it is the very substance of politics" - Viktor Orbán says all you need to know about his politics.

"A machine for jumping to conclusions will act as if it beleived in the law of small numbers. More generally, it will produce a representation of reality that makes too much sense" - it's not the quantum world that's wierd, it's the classical one.

"If this is the case, the differences between dense and rural counties do not really count as facts: they are what scientists call artefacts, observations that are produced entirely by some method of research - in this case, by differences in sample size." - they're not really 'observations' but calculations, I have doubts that any statistic should be regarded as a 'fact'.

"Self-criticism is one of the functions of System 2. In the context of attitudes, however, System 2 is more of an apologist for the emotions of System 1 than a critic of those emotions - an endorser rather than an enforcer" - we're doomed.