faulker020

"Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" - Mao Zedong I recently read a very good history of the Spanish Civil War, entitled -- appropriately enough -- "The Spanish Civil War," by Paul Preston. You should get it and read it , especially if you live in the U.S. Everyone talks about 1930s Germany as a parallel for what the U.S. is going through right now, but I'm pretty sure 1930s Spain is by far the better analogy. Although you should read the book, let me try to give a brief summary.  By the 1930s, Spain had been in decline for about three centuries. Its last imperial possessions had been lost in the Spanish-American War. It was economically backward and highly unequal. Big landowners controlled the economy, and the Catholic Church controlled the culture. Lots of people wanted this to change, and joined various leftist movements - communists, socialists, and anarchists. In response, lots of other people joined right-wing movements - fascists, religiou...

The Economist has an article about the booms in machine learning and randomized controlled trials (RCTs). The article is written in a snarky tone, and mostly talks around the question of whether these methodologies are overhyped, but overall it seems to be making a case that they are: [J]udging by the tendency of those writing economic papers to follow the latest fashion, a “herd” would be [the] best [collective noun to describe economists]. This year the hot technique is machine learning, using big data...  Economists are prone to methodological crazes...[N]ew methods also bring new dangers; rather than pushing economics forward, crazes can lead it astray, especially in their infancy...  A paper by Angus Deaton, a Nobel laureate and expert data digger, and Nancy Cartwright, an economist at Durham University, argues that randomised control trials, a current darling of the discipline, enjoy misplaced enthusiasm...  Machine learning is still new enough for the backlash to...

I heavily doubt Steve Bannon is the anti-Semite many on the left now claim he is. It's mostly based on one thing that his wife claimed that he said , about not wanting to send his kids to school with whiny Jewish girls. It's hearsay, about one thing he supposedly said in private years ago, which isn't even that anti-Semitic. Bannon has also publicly stated that he has "zero tolerance" for the anti-Semitic elements of the alt-right. ( This Breitbart article , by David Horowitz, is sometimes cited as evidence of anti-Semitism, but it's actually just criticizing Bill Kristol for not being sufficiently pro-Israel!) I also hear a lot of claims that Bannon is a white nationalist. Some are based on stuff he allowed to be published at Breitbart ( e.g., this ), but many seem to rely  on one thing he said while interviewing Donald Trump, in which he worried that too many immigrant CEOs would reduce "civic society." That's not something I agree with, sinc...

Right now, lots of people are afraid of the wave of racist and sexist harassment incidents that erupted in the wake of Trump's electoral victory. Lots of other people are thinking more long-term, worrying about policy changes (Roe v. Wade, deportations, restrictive immigration laws, health care). Relatively few, as yet, seem to be worried about the further long-term degradation of America's institutions (Daron Acemoglu has a great essay about this). But there's one danger that dwarfs all of these: the looming specter of great-power war . Here, via Matthew White , is a visual depiction of deaths from war and genocide during the 20th century. I've annotated it a bit (my explanations are in blue): As you can see, the vast majority of the war deaths happened as the result of two great-power wars, World War 1 and (especially) World War 2. Major democides during these periods - Stalin's purges and famines, the Nazi genocides, the Armenian genocide, etc. - were generally ...

Via Allison Schrager , Andy McAfee, and others, here comes a chart of the gender gap in upper-tail SAT scores: As you can see, the ratio has drifted downward at all levels, but at the 0.01% level (about 3.7 standard deviations of the combined score distribution, if you assume normality) it has fairly dramatically collapsed. When Ronald Reagan was elected, girls made up only 7% of the top performers. By the time Clinton took office, it was 20%. As of Obama's reelection, it was 28%. The key piece of information here isn't the current level of the gender gap, it's the recent rate of change . This sort of rapid shift implies that there's lots going on here that's not genetic - unless biological gender differences can change radically from decade to decade. It's highly unlikely to be a change in the SAT math section. The SAT math section is the same damn thing year after year after year. "Do you know the ratio of sides of a 30-60-90 triangle?" "Can you...