Conservatives love to complain about the media.

But there's an inside baseball media that reveals how destructive the conservative media criticism environment can be to the conservative movement.

Enter, Fox News:

The story is pretty simple.

On election night, Fox News called Arizona very early. This surprised pretty much everyone. The Fox News team had improved their election model in 2020, and was confident their call was correct, even if unconventional.
Controversially, however, they called it for Joe Biden. Arizona has historically been a red state, and the polls (and final result) were close there. Nobody had a really strong expectation it was gonna go for Biden until Fox News just.... called it.
This hurled Trump surrogates into a desperate place. If they lost *Arizona*, that was a bad sign for the night. More importantly, it happened before midnight: it humiliated the President while millions were still watching.
The Trump campaign immediately turned on a dime. They pivoted from "Look, we're crushing it with Hispanics! Massive turnout! Incredible performance!" to "The election was stolen."

Who stole the election changed over time. Fox News. Some rando in Atlanta. Poll workers. China.
The conspiratorial delusion of the stolen election grew, but it's rageful trigger came in that innocuous decision to call Arizona early. For Trump supporters, that call "changed the night." It was the turning point. It is somehow deeply significant.
So this week, Fox News fired all the people involved in that decision.
Now, let's look at this story from another angle.

There was less true uncertainty about who would win at 11:20 PM on election night than in any election ever, because sooooo many votes had been cast early.
While counts of these votes were not announced, early indicators based on turnout by voter registration and polls of who showed up, as well as differences in pre-election rhetoric, strongly suggested early voters would swing for Biden.
Meanwhile, for all that people like to crap on polling, the reality is that the predictive models for election night as returns come in really are getting quite good. They're imperfect of coruse, but they're improving all the time.
As a result, Fox News' team was very well positioned to have a good idea of what a "Trump win" would need to look like, in terms of how day-of results were going to need to look for Trump to offset the likely split in early and absentee votes.
So from this perspective, Fox News' call was a *triumph* of good analysis: they correctly called a close race even though the number of votes still not counted massively exceeded the expected margin of victory.

Analysts in finance get paid lots of money for that kind of call!
Having a rational, explainable, reproducible model which produces correct out-of-the-money calls is an extremely valuable thing. As a professional forecaster in a different business, this is a very exciting and valuable thing to see in a model.
Unfortunately, the model's call was politically inconvenient. Trump's team was counting on night-of calls swinging their way in order to make similar arguments as were made in 2000: inject enough uncertainty into the public discourse and they hoped to influence the outcome.
So the Trump team, and Trump supporters around the nation, threw a tantrum.
Ultimately, what happened was:
1) Fox News recruited high-quality analytic talent into the conservative movement
2) That talent delivered, providing accurate results faster than competitors
3) Those results didn't fit "The Narrative" that the Trumpist echo chamber wanted
4) Fired
Conservatives JUSTIFIABLY complain about mainstream media biases. Because they're real and influential.

But our media critics really need to pay attention to stuff like this. It's open hostility on even *irrelevant* truth claims.
Because guess what?

It didn't matter what Fox called! The results weren't influenced by that!

But in the media-and-commentary-addicted mind of politics-overdosed Trump supporters.... it really mattered what The Media said.
It was *deeply significant* to these folks that their false view of the world was not publicly ratified and legitimized, even though that view was *false*.
It was more important to these folks that the call made fit their narrative than that it in fact be true or honest.
Now, look. A few years back I was looking for funding for a project. I approached a funder for it. It was a data-intensive project, but with outcomes likely to be friendly to conservatives. The funder was conservative.
The funder said, wow, this proposal looks really interesting...

.... but we don't really fund "data stuff." We're more interested in commentary. Do you want to repackage this as some op-eds?
(same project was pitched to a second conservative funder who much more reasonably denied the funding pitch on the grounds their funding program had a specific mission related to talent development; that was fine)
Generally, I find that conservative publications are often confused when you ask, "So, how should I format my graphs for your publication?" because they just are totally unused to quantitative arguments being made in articles.
A serious problem in the conservative media system is that the only expertise that gets respected is legalese: rhetorical argument, appeal to precedent, citation of others, moral justification..... *evidence* is treated with hostility.
So this makes it even worse FWIW. They just decided to shoot the messengers apparently. https://t.co/hcjiHwwxAC

More from Lyman Stone 石來民

So a few days back I was tweeting about SSRIs. The big question with these drugs is: why do controlled trials routinely show such small effects when practitioners and patients report life-changingly-large effects?

So first off, at this point the evidence is pretty clear that SSRIs and other anti-anxiety/anti-depression drugs truly don't do very much. Their average effects are beneath clinical significance, as I tweeted about here:


Basically, the problem these drugs face is that while they actually see relatively LARGE effects.... but that placebos in those trials ALSO see large effects (and most untreated depression improves within a year anyways).

So basically you have this problem where:
1. The condition tends to improve on its own in a majority of cases
2. Placebo effects for the condition are unusually large

Which means the large crude effects of SSRIs get swamped.

So that raises two new questions.
1. (Not my focus here) Are we treating these conditions appropriately given their untreated prognosis is usually (though certainly not always!!) "goes away in a few months"?

2. Why are placebo effects so unusually large?
Ulysses S. Grant would like a WORD


Or Teddy Roosevelt. Or Dwight Eisenhower. Or Andrew Jackson. Or Abraham Lincoln. Or George Washington. Or Zachary Taylor. Or any of numerous presidents who were honest-to-goodness battle-hardened warriors.

James Monroe fought the Hessians at Trenton and nearly died of wounds sustained there, then wintered in Valley Forge, then fought until Monmouth, then repeatedly tried to raise new regiments for the war until he went bankrupt doing it.

James Monroe, of the Era of Good Feelings, longest serving president of all time.... was in the boats crossing the icy Delaware.

Andrew Jackson was in a duel. He was shot in the chest right by his heart.

But he didn't go down. He stood there and, while bleeding out, steadily took aim and killed the dude who shot him.

Stone cold.

More from Politics

My piece in the NY Times today: "the Trump administration is denying applications submitted to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services at a rate 37 percent higher than the Obama administration did in 2016."

Based on this analysis: "Denials for immigration benefits—travel documents, work permits, green cards, worker petitions, etc.—increased 37 percent since FY 2016. On an absolute basis, FY 2018 will see more than about 155,000 more denials than FY 2016."
https://t.co/Bl0naOO0sh


"This increase in denials cannot be credited to an overall rise in applications. In fact, the total number of applications so far this year is 2 percent lower than in 2016. It could be that the higher denial rate is also discouraging some people from applying at all.."

Thanks to @gsiskind for his insightful comments. The increase in denials, he said, is “significant enough to make one think that Congress must have passed legislation changing the requirements. But we know they have not.”

My conclusion:
What does "patriots in control" mean?
What would that "look like" in reality?


So a massive adult film star in all his glory is included in an official FBI government filing


Hunter Biden's book is categorized as "Chinese


TIME admits to "conspiracy" to "not rig, rather


A "pillow guy" has military-grade intercepts detailing the IP addresses and device MAC IDs of EVERY incursion into every county in the

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The chorus of this song uses the shlokas taken from Sundarkand of Ramayana.

It is a series of Sanskrit shlokas recited by Jambavant to Hanuman to remind Him of his true potential.

1. धीवर प्रसार शौर्य भरा: The brave persevering one, your bravery is taking you forward.


2. उतसारा स्थिरा घम्भीरा: The one who is leaping higher and higher, who is firm and stable and seriously determined.

3. ुग्रामा असामा शौर्या भावा: He is strong, and without an equal in the ability/mentality to fight

4. रौद्रमा नवा भीतिर्मा: His anger will cause new fears in his foes.

5.विजिटरीपुरु धीरधारा, कलोथरा शिखरा कठोरा: This is a complex expression seen only in Indic language poetry. The poet is stating that Shivudu is experiencing the intensity of climbing a tough peak, and likening

it to the feeling in a hard battle, when you see your enemy defeated, and blood flowing like a rivulet. This is classical Veera rasa.

6.कुलकु थारथिलीथा गम्भीरा, जाया विराट वीरा: His rough body itself is like a sharp weapon (because he is determined to win). Hail this complete

hero of the world.

7.विलयगागनथाला भिकारा, गरज्जद्धरा गारा: The hero is destructive in the air/sky as well (because he can leap at an enemy from a great height). He can defeat the enemy (simply) with his fearsome roar of war.
THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)