BTW – PhD Comics is awesome and great.
Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category
Children Bad for Research
Monday, October 18th, 2010Religion versus The Economy
Monday, September 20th, 2010I’m not sure what *precisely* should be understood after looking at this chart, recently published in Religious Outlier by Charles M. Blow. At the very least it suggests that there is an inverse relationship between Religion and Wealth, with the US being a potential outlier. There are a number of problems with assuming causation, either that wealth leads to decreased religion or that religion leads to poverty, but my gut suggests both could be true. I’d like to see a better statistical study of this, but in the meantime:
Ideologically Derived Facts
Friday, August 20th, 2010There’s a great post today on a statistics blog I read, entitled Some things are just really hard to believe: more on choosing your facts. You should read this for yourself, but from my preconceived anti-ideological worldview the truth of it is almost self-evident. Here’s an excerpt:
Of course, it makes sense that people with different judgment of the facts would have different views on policies: if you think carbon dioxide doesn’t cause substantial global warming, you’ll be on the opposite side of the global warming debate from someone who thinks it does. But often the causality runs the other way: instead of choosing a policy that matches the facts, people choose to believe the facts that back up their values-driven policies. The issue about Obama’s birth country is an extreme example: it’s clear that people did not first decide whether Obama was born in the U.S., and then decide whether to vote Republican or Democratic. They are choosing their fact based on their values, not the other way around. Perhaps it is helpful to think of people as having an inappropriate prior distribution that makes them more likely to believe things that are aligned with their desires.
Zombie Apocalypse or Recession?
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010I’ve been delayed posting the follow up to my previous post Network Virtual Appliances Are Silly, for reasons I’ll go into later. Sorry. But for now, I’ll continue to post other stuff as usual. For instance I came across this video, via Nebraska never looked so appealing: anatomy of a zombie attack. Oops, I mean a recession.
Ignore Everybody
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010Posted by @aneel this morning. Before I even knew the context, it seemed like good advice for many situations.
@aneel was kind enough to point me toward http://gapingvoid.com/books/ where I found out what he was talking about. The book is now in my Amazon shopping cart.
