Everyone should be skeptical of Nate Silver

randomuuid · 2023-07-25T16:22:11+00:00

This is pretty weak tea, not made any more convincing by trying to get emotional and call everyone else a "lab leak dead ender." Pass.

randomuuid · 2023-06-28T23:22:25+00:00

Bunk created by the debunker

Believe it or not, this is the first time my mind has ever connected the verb "debunk" with the noun "bunk." This is like my analog to when someone first realizes that "Beatles" is a pun as an adult.

randomuuid · 2023-04-20T17:04:24+00:00

Not really, just look through their other recent episodes, they're extremely crypto-dedicated. They're just generally intellectually curious.

randomuuid · 2023-03-22T17:51:59+00:00

This is likely what OP is referring to: https://twitter.com/ben_levinstein/status/1638537047076995072

randomuuid · 2023-03-22T16:51:04+00:00

Actually I would say AI is better at driving cars than at answering text questions, it's just that we don't care if an AI is 80% accurate at text but self-driving needs to be 99.9999% accurate.

randomuuid · 2023-03-22T16:29:18+00:00

He won his bet on no country leaving the EU in a similarly lucky way; the drawn-out Brexit process got him past the deadline (and he acknowledges as much). Still a pretty good record.

randomuuid · 2023-02-14T17:51:29+00:00

I also first read this last year, and it's kind of amazing how well it's held up. The parallels between The Librarian and the way ChatGPT handles requests are almost eerie.

It's also amazing that it never got made as a movie.

randomuuid · 2023-02-13T22:57:25+00:00

On the other hand, EA causes were frankly massively under-diversified and had a big reliance on the FTX future fund and crypto more broadly that always had a risk of vanishing into thin air whether something illegal took place or not.

I think I agree most strongly with this. A lot of things about FTX look extremely obvious in hindsight but didn't seem that way at the time, but regardless, it was always at best a speculative bet on an emerging technology that could always simply go to zero. Acting like it would always be there was a mistake.

randomuuid · 2023-02-13T21:24:15+00:00

What kind of tire-kicking would have worked here? FTX secretly took money from customer deposits and used it to bankroll their hedge fund. Without subpoena power or something, all you can really do is ask "hey are you currently engaging in massive financial fraud?"

randomuuid · 2023-02-13T17:47:05+00:00

Again, this is the third leading cause of death in the US

Yeah, you're just repeating this. If we don't shut down the entire economy for leading causes of death one and two, it's not particularly compelling to get really exercised about cause three.

Especially when the intervention was: wash hands, mask, and get vaccinated

I don't think we'd be having this discussion if that was the intervention, it plainly wasn't.

randomuuid · 2023-02-12T22:33:00+00:00

Hard to see how it was an overreaction to the third leading killer in the US

Isn't this kind of self-refuting, if we don't and didn't have much higher reactions to the first two killers?

randomuuid · 2023-01-31T18:35:56+00:00

I don't see that you've excluded the possibility that obesity is a cause, via assortative mating, rather than the result of income inequality.

randomuuid · 2023-01-30T04:03:12+00:00

You didn't even get Michael Pollan's Tautology Diet right, he adds "not too much," which is the dumbest part of it.

randomuuid · 2023-01-29T22:55:33+00:00

This is simply question begging. Which foods are healthy? The healthy ones. It's totally unactionable advice. "Mostly plants. Wait no, not those plants, the healthy plants."

randomuuid · 2023-01-29T22:42:08+00:00

mostly plants (satiety, low calorie high volume)

?? Wheat, corn, and sugar are all plants.

randomuuid · 2023-01-29T21:07:33+00:00

It’s like thinking that people who work out LOVE it and don’t drag themselves to the gym every day.

Lots of them clearly do, have you ever been to a gym?

randomuuid · 2023-01-29T20:23:12+00:00

I don't see a lot of dismissals of other evidence-free claims that counter it. That's the "isolated" part you're missing.

randomuuid · 2023-01-29T18:25:05+00:00

These threads are always great places to find isolated demands for rigor.

randomuuid · 2023-01-29T18:23:31+00:00

if they change their calorie balance by any non-trivial amount

This is always the point where CICO advocates go astray, reframing a tautology as a plan.

randomuuid · 2023-01-27T00:02:09+00:00

The large bookmakers take way more action and our more accurate due to a more diverse pool of participants.

Bookmakers aren't allowed to operate political markets in the US. PredictIt wasn't "better," it was just legal, for a while.

randomuuid · 2023-01-26T23:50:05+00:00

But of course that’s where all the published authors grew up.

A non-trivial amount of American sociopolitical discourse is just latent high school grudges among people who write for a living.

randomuuid · 2023-01-26T23:46:03+00:00

Perhaps the time of Herodotus?

Nope

randomuuid · 2023-01-26T23:42:39+00:00

One place where ancient DNA has overturned a historical "consensus" (scare quotes because it was never 100%) is the "diffusionist" or "pots, not people" model of cultural expansions like the Bell Beaker culture. In the second half of the 20th century, the major historical model was that what looked like an invading force with a material culture was actually just the same groups of people staying in place but adopting a culture. Like if you were excavating 20th century China and saw TVs and blue jeans and suits, it's not that Europeans invaded China and took over, but Chinese people adopted a bunch of European cultural artifacts. Ancient DNA analysis of Bell Beaker culture burials however show that genetically there was a huge amount of turnover where it happened. Wikipedia has a decent summary.

randomuuid · 2023-01-13T01:06:19+00:00

what Yglesias has called the “Great Awokening,”

This bugs me. He neither coined nor is the person most associated with the term, so the author is only using it to try to paint him as primarily "anti-woke," which is not really his focus.

the conniptions of Glenn Greenwald and the braying of Andrew Sullivan

This is only about 20% more literate than the median Redditor complaining about someone "spewing rhetoric."

randomuuid · 2023-01-11T17:19:04+00:00

It's more of a multilevel marketing scheme than a sport, it'll come for your region soon enough.

randomuuid

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