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Book of the Week: Uncertainty

The following review appeared in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons:


This book has the potential to turn the world of evidence-based medicine upside down. It boldly asserts that with regard to everything having to do with evidence, we’re doing it all wrong: probability, statistics, causality, modeling, deciding, communicating—everything. The flavor is probably best conveyed by the title of one of my favorite sections: “Die, p-Value, Die, Die, Die.”


Nobody ever remembers the definition of a p-value, William Briggs points out. “Everybody translates it to the probability, or its complement, of the hypothesis at hand.” He shows that the arguments commonly used to justify p-values are fallacies. It is far past time for the “ineradicable Cult of Point-Oh-Five” to go, he states. He does not see confidence intervals as the alternative, noting that “nobody ever gets these curious creations correct.”


Briggs is neither a frequentist nor a Bayesian. Rather, he recommends a third way of modeling: using the model to predict something. “The true and only test of model goodness is how well that model predicts data, never before seen or used in any way. That means traditional tricks like cross validation, boot strapping, hind- or back-casting and the like all ‘cheat’ and re-use what is already known as if it were unknown; they repackage the old as new.”


Some of the book’s key insights are: Probability is always conditional. Chance never causes anything. Randomness is not a thing. Random, to us and to science, means unknown cause.


One fallacy that Briggs chooses for special mention, because it is so common and so harmful, is the epidemiologist fallacy. He prefers his neologism to the more well-known “ecological fallacy” because without this fallacy, “most epidemiologists, especially those employed by the government, would be out of a job.” It is also richer than the ecological fallacy because it occurs whenever an epidemiologist says “X causes Y” but never measures X. Causality is inferred from “wee p-values.” One especially egregious example is the assertion that small particulates in the air (PM 2.5s) cause excess mortality.

Quantifying the unquantifiable, which is the basis of so much sociological research, creates a “devastation to sound argument…[that] cannot be quantified.”

I could not agree more. As I have repeatedly observed, the only theories that are worthwhile are those that serve as the basis for successful predictive models. Or, as the ancients put it, let reason be silent when experience gainsays its conclusions. All the backtesting and p-values and statistical games are irrelevant if the predictive models fail.

All your rhetoric are belong to us

A GamerGate tactic goes mainstream and the mainstream media backs down fast.

When Jim DeMint wanted to dis a TV interviewer’s suggestion that Obamacare has merits as well as flaws, the former senator and tea partyer used a handy putdown: “You can put all that under the category of fake news.”

When conspiracy theorist Alex Jones wanted to deny a CNN report that Ivanka Trump would take over the East Wing offices traditionally occupied by the first lady, he used the same label.

And when a writer for an arch-conservative website needed a putdown for ABC’s chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl, he reached for the obvious: “fake-news propagandist.”

Fake news has a real meaning — deliberately constructed lies, in the form of news articles, meant to mislead the public. For example: The one falsely claiming that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump, or the one alleging without basis that Hillary Clinton would be indicted just before the election.

But though the term hasn’t been around long, its meaning already is lost. Faster than you could say “Pizzagate,” the label has been co-opted to mean any number of completely different things: Liberal claptrap. Or opinion from left-of-center. Or simply anything in the realm of news that the observer doesn’t like to hear.

“The speed with which the term became polarized and in fact a rhetorical weapon illustrates how efficient the conservative media machine has become,” said George Washington University professor Nikki Usher.

As Jeremy Peters wrote in the New York Times: “Conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself . . . have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their agenda.”

So, here’s a modest proposal for the truth-based community.

Let’s get out the hook and pull that baby off stage. Yes: Simply stop using it.

The Alt-Right and conservatives managed to jujitsu the rhetorical term “fake news” so easily because the best rhetoric is rooted in truth. And because it is readily observable that no one reports more false information than the mainstream media, there were far more examples that could be reasonably described as “fake news” to be found in the mainstream media than were being spread around social media by the Right. Ergo, it stuck to them rather than to their targets, and blew up in their faces.

That doesn’t mean the tactic will work every time, only when the truth is more in line with the Right’s use of the rhetorical term than the Left’s. Of course, that will be most of the time, as the shameless dishonesty in this piece demonstrates:

“the label has been co-opted to mean any number of completely different things: Liberal claptrap. Or opinion from left-of-center. Or simply anything in the realm of news that the observer doesn’t like to hear.”

No, it hasn’t, as it was instead applied to mean false information presented as accurate news by the mainstream media. Notice that Left can’t afford to be completely honest even when they are affecting to do so, which is why they will always be vulnerable to rhetorical jujitsu of this sort. And on a tangential note, observe that this is why larping and “mocking” the media by playing along with its narrative is always a mistake, as doing so strengthens their rhetoric and eliminates the possibility of turning it around on them.

If you don’t understand the tactic’s connection to #GamerGate, it is an application of the frequently used GG tactic of taking over enemy hashtags, also known as “all ur hashtag are belong to us”. I even described this specific tactic in modest detail in SJWs Always Lie.

German father rescues daughter from immigrant

I’m astonished that he was content to turn the “suspect” over to the police.

A German father has been hailed as a hero after rescuing his daughter from an attacker
The 57-year-old man raced to the crime scene in the town of Kleve after his daughter telephoned him to say; “There’s a man following me home dad…..”

When he got there the man had punched his daughter almost unconscious, was on top of her and tearing at her clothes after dragging her from the side of the road into undergrowth.

The 57-year-old raced to save his daughter after she called him to say she was being followed
Her dad, who arrived at the scene on a push-scooter, leaped off screaming, hauled the drunken attacker off his daughter and punched him several times.

He then held him down with his body while calling police and an ambulance on his mobile phone.

What is the point of calling the police? When the authorities aren’t even jailing, let alone executing, immigrants for raping five-year-olds, they can’t be expected to even slap this guy on the wrist. The Czechs have the right of it.

On the other hand, at least he didn’t invite the guy into his home. So, there is that.

PUTIN HACKED THE SUPER BOWL!

The Russians are taking over the NFL and the Super Bowl through the Seattle Seahawks. It’s true! THE EVIDENCE IS RIGHT THERE ON PROFOOTBALLTALK!

The hat actually carries his number 29 and an inscription in Cyrillic letters which reads: “Restricted Air Space. No fly zone. Restricted by Earl Thomas.”


The hat was sent to him by Boris Khodok and the Russian Sea Hawkers, a group of fans scattered across the former Soviet republics and Eastern Europe. Saddened by their favorite players broken leg, they wanted to send him a gift, and found a Russian Navy hat worn by the pilots on the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, who fly MiG-29s.

The 16 Points of the Cuckservative

Ilsepher posted them on Gab. I took the liberty of adding a few refinements here and there. I just wish we’d had this to include in Cuckservative. We may have to add another appendix to the ebook.

  1. The Cuckservative recognizes that it is an imperative, and the chief solemn duty of all American men and women, to fight for the rights, welfare, security, happiness, justice, and well-being of the entire third world and its posterity, and provide them with free access to the fruits of our land, our people, and our welfare system.
  2. The Cuckservative realizes there is something magical about the American geography that instills a predilection and reverence for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideals, small government, and the American way of life, in anyone who resides there.
  3. The Cuckservative recognizes that it is always better to adhere to one’s principles and lose than risk betraying those principles by winning.
  4. The Cuckservative disavows every form of religious or ethnic state and recognizes that we must all strive towards a more inclusive United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
  5. The religious ethnostate of Israel, and its right to remain exclusively Jewish, are intrinsically legitimate and must never be questioned or criticized.
  6. The U.S. Constitution is a sacred and inspired document, and the historical American nation as envisioned by the Founding Fathers must be carefully conserved.
  7. The United States of America is a proposition nation, unique from all other nations, due to its Magic Dirt.
  8. Rigorous adherence to the scientific method, including the social sciences, is vital in order to create policies based on reason, evidence, and statistics to better address, and understand, serious societal problems such as crime, poverty, inequality, and racism. Unlike liberals, the Cuckservative reasons on the basis of facts and does not allow emotions or societal norms to dictate his views, regardless of how controversial.
  9. Race does not exist, and even if it did, this uninclusive hatefact would not be relevant to the Cuckservative or his wife’s black son. PLEASE DON’T CALL ME RACIST!
  10. The Cuckservative exhibits dutiful and unquestioning faith in the teachings of the Judeo-Christian Church, and strives to instill subsequent generations with the Judeo-Christian values of inclusiveness, tolerance, self-love, and the revelation of the inherently good nature of man as embodied by Churchian teachings.
  11. The Cuckservative understands that diversity and multiculturalism are our greatest strengths, and that discrimination and intolerance of other lifestyles or people are evil, as was taught by Judeo-Christ himself.
  12. The Cuckservative must always stand like a rock in a stream of policies for muh principles.
  13. The Cuckservative understands he must change with the times lest he risk irrelevance in the face of the progressive evolution of society, by periodically questioning and amending his principles. 
  14. The Cuckservative knows moderacy is a virtue and it is his solemn duty to hold his nominal allies to a higher standard than liberals. A Cuckservative should not hesitate to take the side of a liberal if a fellow conservative gets unruly in debate and betrays the conservative principles of Decency, Tolerance, and Inclusiveness.
  15. The Cuckservative cares what you think about him. Especially if you are a liberal, socialist, communist. That goes double if you are black or gay, triple if you are a woman or Jewish.
  16. The Cuckservative pledges allegiance, to the Dirt, of the United States of America, and to the Equality for which it stands, One World, under the deity or abstract ideal of your current preference, with Tolerance and Inclusion for All.
But I think the cuckservative philosophy is can be summed up thusly: the best Americans are foreigners born abroad.

Latvia should stand up to Russia too

Idiot Hollywood actress calls for the press “to stand up to” the God-Emperor Ascendant:

Donald Trump has slammed Meryl Streep as ‘one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood’ after she used her Golden Globes acceptance speech to publicly slam the President-elect.  The Cecil B. DeMille honoree took aim at Trump, without mentioning him by name, by calling the moment he mocked a disabled reporter the most stunning performance of the year.

But Trump has hit back on Twitter, dismissing the actress as a ‘Hillary flunky’. He tweeted: ‘Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a Hillary flunky who lost big.”

Trump came under fire in 2015 for mocking New York Times investigative reporter Serge Kovaleski by impersonating the journalist’s physical handicap. It was an incident replayed frequently in campaign advertising.  Streep, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention, also called for the press to stand up to Trump and hold him to account going forward.

What on Earth does she think the media was doing throughout the general campaign? The only way the press could have been more all-in for Hillary would have required a deathmatch with Huma first. The God-Emperor Ascendant knows the media are his avowed enemies, and he’s already informed them that they will henceforth be his bitches whether they play along or not, so one wonders what on Earth the washed-up old hag thinks the press is going to accomplish by failing harder.

By the way, it may interest some to note that Serge Kovaleski is not only the aforementioned handicapable journalist, he’s also the incompetent reporter who requested, and then promptly buried, my answers to his questions about the Alt-Right, because they did not suit his preconceived narrative.

The trough runs dry

The counterproductive drags on the economy are worried that their days of feeding at the federal rough are over:

Federal workers nationwide are bracing for reductions in head counts, civil service protections and salaries when President-elect Donald Trump and Congress turn their attention to government spending later this year.

Trump, who ran on a promise to “drain the swamp,” has identified hiring freezes at most federal agencies as a top priority for his early days in office. Republican lawmakers, many of whom have long advocated for reducing Washington’s workforce, are looking to cut benefits and make it easier to fire poor performers.

The threats and preliminary steps taken by Congress have created anxiety for many of the government’s 2.1 million employees.

“People don’t know what to believe, and they’re in a state of uneasiness,” said Witold Skwierczynski, a Catonsville, Md., who heads the American Federation of Government Employees council that oversees Social Security Administration field offices. “That’s the feeling I hear. People are unsettled.”

The God-Emperor Ascendant is coming and his axe is sharp indeed. For once, an increase in the number of unemployed Americans will be worth celebrating. But in the interest of fairness, every federal worker being put out to pasture should be offered an employment opportunity. After all, plenty of workers will be needed to BUILD THE WALL.

Anklebiters

You can always tell the gammas by their constant posturing. It’s not even remotely a surprise how they talk about people when they think no one will notice. Laguna Beach turns out to be every bit the phony many people here thought he was.

Laguna Beach Fogey
His supporters who call themselves The Dread Ilk are the biggest bunch of faggots on the Right today. Totally insufferable.

He was already banned from here, but he’s now banned from Alpha Game as well. He won’t be missed. As John Scalzi learned, you can insult me and I’ll often let it slide, but I will never ignore a slight directed at the Dread Ilk.

And after reading the various comments on Hunter Wallace’s site, I won’t bother responding to him either. I don’t engage in discourse with people who accuse me of lying. What is the point? And as I’ve said before, I’d much rather stand with dependable allies such as Mike, Milo, Stefan, and Roosh than with the sort of people I’ve come across who are in the Alt-White.

I’m going to expand my policy on drama to the Alt-White in general. There is clearly no benefit to paying any attention to them whatsoever. Let them keep the shekels and the audience that they keep claiming I, and others, want to steal. I simply don’t have the time or the patience for this never-ending nonsense.

Mailvox: the slow death of Mozilla

Brendan Eich is going to outlast the company that pushed him out.

Got
an email at work today saying that Arena the software we use for
document tracking is no longer supporting Firefox going forward due to a
lack of use by users. So it would seem the terminal deathside is beginning in earnest. 

No doubt it will be particularly satisfying for Mr. Eich when companies like this start adopting Brave as their browser of choice. 

That is not clarifying

Hunter Wallace doesn’t so much clear things up as add to the confusion by making similar mistakes about the Alt-Lite that many in the mainstream make about the the Alt-Right.

First and foremost, the Alt-Lite are marketers who are driven by the economics of viral clickbait media. The brands aren’t particularly philosophical about what they do. We’re the ones who think in terms of ideas. Case in point, we’re the ones who coined the term “Alt-Lite” in order to distinguish them from other conservatives. We’re the ones who call them “civic nationalists.” They still don’t even know what they believe.

If the Alt-Lite brands are civic nationalists, why is their hallmark the business of trafficking in polarizing racial clickbait on social media? What are they even doing in our neighborhood of the internet? Blacks and Muslims should be our fellow Americans because the country doesn’t have any ethnic, cultural, racial or religious foundation. Cernovich is a brand, Gorilla Mindset, so he casually dispenses with *tolerance* (whether of women, different religions, different races) in order to create engagement.

It’s funny to watch the Alt-Lite throw around terms like “Western civilization” or “populism” which quite obviously mean completely different things to them. When they say “Western civilization,” they mean liberalism like other mainstream conservatives. When they say “populism,” they think that means “supporting Trump” or like Bill Mitchell being vaguely against the Republican establishment.

These people are not great thinkers. What kind of populist demands $10,000 as a “prize” to debate someone? What kind of populist talks about purging gammas? What kind of populist talks about losers who are “too poor for my time?” What kind of populist talks about himself as a brand? The #Deploraball controversy, which has devolved into the question of who’s in and who’s out, has already exposed the faux populism of the Alt-Lite.

This is why the Alt-West is the future of the Alt-Right and not the Alt-White. The latter not only insists upon a one-size-fits-all tactical approach, but it refuses to be honest with itself about the observable realities of its potential adherents. It’s a bit ironic for Hunter Wallace to denigrate the thinking ability of the Alt-Lite opinion leaders considering how many obvious errors he commits here.

The Alt-Lite are not mere clickbait chasers. That’s a category error; the Alt-Lite isn’t just the PJWs, Mike Cernovichs, and MILOs, it’s the entire pool of their conservative and libertarian supporters who are inclined to sympathize to some extent with the Alt-Right. The Alt-Lite consists of those who agree with some of the 16 Points, but not enough to be genuinely characterized as Alt Right. There is no hard line, the distinction is a gradient. And it’s foolish to dismiss smart, popular, effective individuals such as PJW, Mike, and Milo as clickbait chasers anyhow, even if one disagrees with them.

Some Alt-Lite leaders are civic nationalists. Others are genuine nationalists. The same is true of those who follow them, but the contradiction Wallace sees is the result of everyone in the Alt-Lite being in transition from civic nationalism to nationalism as a result of current events. The Alt-West is absolutely NOT civic nationalist; I don’t know if anyone has done more to tear down the precepts of civic nationalism in the last 18 months than the brilliant and unquestionably handsome authors of Cuckservative. This ongoing transition is why the growth of the Alt-Right is inevitable, and the fact that the Alt-West welcomes newcomers while the Alt-White openly scorns them is another reason why the latter is likely to fade into irrelevance over time.

(It’s also rather funny to see the Alt-White ready to go to war with all and sundry to protect “their” brand while also denouncing an Alt-Liter who is considerably better at marketing for talking about himself as a brand. Of course, if marketing acument, or consistency, or even coherency, was in their wheelhouse, they wouldn’t call themselves white nationalist neo-Nazis in the first place.)

Nobody of whom I am aware conflates Western civilization with liberalism or even Western democracy. That’s not possible, as Western civilization obviously predates both. And populism is synonymous with the Trump campaign; Trump is himself a civic nationalist. And in answer to his questions:

  1. Mike is both popular and a populist. He has offered $10k to debate others on several occasions to demonstrate his seriousness, and the fact that the Alt-White can’t, or won’t, come up with such a relatively small sum to debate him about whatever it is they want to debate him about simply shows either a) how small their numbers are, or, b) that the challenge is not a serious one.
  2. I’m not Alt-Lite. And I’m not a populist. I am, and have always been, an elitist. That’s natural, of course, since I am, statistically speaking, more intelligent than something like 7.49 billion of the people on the planet. What sort of populist lives by the mantra MPAI? As for purging gammas, I was only referring to my blog; I don’t question the right of gammas to live as self-deluded secret kings in the privacy of their own homes, I just don’t want to listen to them.
  3. A populist who knows how to prioritize, presumably.
  4. I didn’t care about prom and I still don’t care about balls, so I can’t even begin to address this statement.
One should never describe things as one wishes them to be, but rather, as they are. To do otherwise is magical thinking, which tends to achieve results akin to those achieved by the famous cargo cults of yore. The Alt-Lite is not going away, as it, too, is growing, as whites in the mainstream continue to be driven rightward by the identity politics of the non-whites to their Left. This is all a good thing, and if the Alt-White were smart, it would be attempting to appeal to the Alt-West and the Alt-Lite alike, not alternating between denying their existence and attacking them.