Mike the Mad Biologist noted this piece in his links today:
Good essay. Related reading/listening:
An investigative report in The Baltimore Sun, Undue force.
Violence cannot build a better society. Disruption and disorder nourish repression, not justice. They strike at the freedom of every citizen. The community cannot—it will not—tolerate coercion and mob rule. Violence and destruction must be ended—in the streets of the ghetto and in the lives of people. Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain, and white society condones it.
I went back to the Introduction to the Kerner Report as soon as the footage from Baltimore began to inundate all forms of media, old and new. I went back to the Kerner Report when Wolf Blitzer, on CNN, pronounced himself gobsmacked that something like this “could take place in an American city.” Jesus, Wolf, the Kerner Report was issued in 1968, after two years of serious rioting in places like Detroit, Newark, and Washington, D.C. It was issued in good faith. It was forgotten within a decade. It remained forgotten in Los Angeles in 1992, and in Ferguson last year. It was forgotten by both sides. It was forgotten by the criminals, on both sides, and it was forgotten by the victims, on both sides. No wonder Blitzer’s gob was so thoroughly smacked.
Opening Day is almost here.
Nothing is more common, or more useless, than a precisely accurate answer to the wrong question. Too much of what passes for policy analysis starts with finding available datasets and running them through a regression program, rather than asking “What is it we actually need to know to make this decision?”
A back-of-the-envelope calculation (BOTEC) starts with the question and then uses the best information available – even if that information is only approximate – to figure out the relevant answer. Sometimes that sort of rough calculation leaves the right course of action in doubt. That’s the time to roll up your sleeves and go collect some new data or do fancier analysis.
But, as often as not, the answer is clear once the key factors have been written down. Once you know that Option A is roughly 10 times as good as Option B, figuring out whether it’s actually 10.13926 times as good or only 9.81352 times as good is pretty much a waste of time compared to figuring out how to put Option A into practice.
From Samuel Florman’s “Nice Work”, originally published in the May 1976 issue of Harper’s:
What do people want out of life? That is one of those questions whose answer can be shaped by the way in which the question is posed. Straightforward statistical studies find that job discontent is not high on the list of American social problems. When the Gallup poll’s researchers ask, “Is your work interesting?” they get 80 to 90 percent positive responses. But when researchers begin to ask more sophisticated questions, such as “What type of work would you try to get into if you could start all over again?” complaints begin to pour forth. The probing question cannot help but elicit a plaintive answer. Which of us, confronted with a sympathetic organizational psychologist, or talking into Studs Terkel’s tape recorder, could resist tingeing our life’s story with lamentation, particularly if that was what the questioner was looking for? Compared to the “calling” that Terkel says we are all seeking, what job could measure up?
The National Weather Service throws in the towel:
.LONG TERM /MONDAY THROUGH SATURDAY/... */ HIGHLIGHTS... - POTENTIAL MIDWEEK STORM SYSTEM MAINLY IN THE FORM OF SNOW - CONTINUED BITTERLY COLD - NO BREAK IN THE WEATHER PATTERN - NEXT CHANCE OF WARMTH: SOMETIME SPRING INTO SUMMER */ OVERVIEW... ENSEMBLE-MEAN PREFERENCE FORECAST. POSITIVE TELECONNECTION PATTERNS. BROADER CYCLONIC FLOW CONTINUES THROUGH WHICH WE WILL SEE ADDITIONAL WEATHER SYSTEMS FOLLOWED BY SHOTS OF COLD ARCTIC AIR. IT APPEARS WE WILL NOT SEE A BREAK IN A PATTERN OVER THE NEXT WEEK. THE MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF SNOW WILL REMAIN TO REMIND US JUST HOW AWFUL WINTER HAS BEEN AND HOW WONDERFUL IT CAN BE LIVING IN NEW ENGLAND. HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN!
The NWS is predicting 10-14 8-10 10-14 inches tonight and tomorrow. Here’s the full forecast for the weekend (not from NWS):
