The murder of Charlie Kirk

you guys should keep in mind that the absolute super majority of harvard med school participants, have no basic clue of probability and statistics, that's for reference.

https://www.bmj.com/content/349/bmj.g561...

Even though you and I have substantially differing worldviews, I find you to be consistently level-headed in an environment where most folks are losing their heads.

I think people like rococo will breath again when after midterms, democrats gain back the house with 20 or more seats flipping to them and trump power gets massively reduced because of that.

Kimmel used to be funny and make money for his network.

He can start a podcast like everybody else and not have to bow-the-knee to any network.

To be fair, Bayesian statistics is quite a bit more difficult than 5th grade math, and probably over 95% of the general American public would get it wrong.

Trump would likely say they had a 5000% chance of having the disease.

Every day it's getting less and less likely that there will be fair elections in 2026.

yes and "reduction of relative risk" is a fairly non intuitive topic as well ( i mean for normies) and way above 5th grade ( i think, that's why i asked rococo)

I don't think that's true, i can see why a lot of people on the left will try to claim that (maybe as part of the effort to bring out the vote). Not saying you aren't genuinely preoccupied with that, i think you are (but i think your fears are way overblown).

It’s okay, folks. A guy in Italy doesn’t think it will be an issue. You can all rest easy.

Yeah, the problem with this kind of study is the information is presented in a way that introduces more confusion than is necessary. Gerd Gigerenzer has a large body of work demonstrating that if you frame the problem differently, then most people are able to solve it correctly.

Natural frequencies improve Bayesian rea...

I just want to say it’s really annoying that we have yet again swept American gun culture under the rug. It’s right there staring us in the face.

The information is presented as it would have been presented to people that have knowledge of statistics, combinatorics and probability theory.

If you make it even simpler and do the step to normalize them in "natural" numbers (1 in 1000 instead of 0.1%) people get it significantly better yes, especially if they have been trained in representing the values as actual cases and so on.

But not having an automatic mechanism in your brain that treats 1 in 1000 and 0.1% identically and effortlessy since you are 10 years old (at most) is ALREADY a serious indictment of your brain capacity.

It's incredible that there are even students in any top tier institution for which that isn't automatic, obvious, effortless and that they can't do that while being drunk at a party ok? because most people who farmed items in a farming game with known drop rates DO UNDERSTAND THAT INTUITIVELY.

And that's physicians who i suppose are at least vaguely more interested and wired about hard data than lawyers tend to be (outside corporate/fiscal ofc).

It's actually impossible to have factual medical knowledge if you can't digest statistics on efficacy of treatment intuitively right? while you can be a very fine jurist with almost 0 numeracy.

So if physicians are so terrible at statistics , why would our prior be that lawyers, even when coming from the best institutions, are instead decent with numbers?

Correct.

You shouldn't assume that I am sitting around hyperventilating all day. I'm not, especially about my day-to-day comfort. A lot of people can live very comfortable lives under deeply ****ed political systems. I'm giving you what I believe to be a coolheaded reaction to the overall direction of the country. I obviously would prefer that Democrats win the midterms, but a shift in power in the House will not resolve my core concerns, most of which run much deeper than year-to-year party politics.

That isn't the point. I wasn't suggesting that KBJ, or lawyers generally, top out at 5th grade math. I was noting the absurdity of assuming that they can't even manage that level of math.

I obviously don't have access to KBJ's college transcripts, but it is overwhelmingly likely that, even as a social sciences major, she at least took math through calculus, either in high school or in college. She would be a very rare bird if she graduated from Harvard undergrad without ever having taken calculus. And if she took any math class in college, it is overwhelmingly likely that she did well in the class, even in relation to what many apparently believe were her naturally superior white and Asian classmates. If you graduated magna, you pretty much ran the table in terms of grades.

I might be much more optimist than most people in this forum (and maybe outside?) but i don't see the sort of erosion of the political system / society that a lot of people on both sides perceive.

I mean just in living memory stuff happened in the USA which is probably not going to happen again and which was worse than even bad looking future scenarios should imply.

For example something as disastrous as ruining a whole generation of young men with the draft for Vietnam isn't probably going to happen ever again. And the political system that created that absurd disastrous policy isn't there anymore , which is an improvement in my eyes.

I know it's more controversial to criticize lockdowns and in general the policy reaction to covid (in the sense that some people actually thought it was reasonable to react in that way while i don't) but anyway the political system broadly moving toward the acceptance that it was a mistake is good as well.

The appetite in general for ruinous interventions outside american borders is lower both politically and with americans in general, that's a good development as well.

There are problems of course, the aging of the population, lower fertility rates and the entitlement situation will require painful fixing , but the same problems are worse in basically all other first world countries.

The polarization in society looks far more "verbal" and innocuous than in various other instances of american history. Even the people calling for "civil war" from the right have beers with people on the left the following days basically. Not to say it's perfect, because it isn't, but i think it's really overblown as a problem.

The generational economic warfare exists (boomers vs the rest basically), wrt entitlements but also housing and asset prices in general, but again the same problem exists and is worse in italy, germany, france and so on.

Anyway i know you disagree but i don't think we can list many moments in the past where things were actually better, even in the recent past. I think we can literally only find exactly 1, the 90s, with the massive dividend of peace (reduction of defense expenses after the end of the cold war) good economic growth and an incredibly well position demographic pyramid that allowed for lowish taxes for not-too-many elders and with housing still cheap compared to wages and so on. And less political polarization.

But from 9 11 on things weren't better than today imo. The Bush years had the patriot act fascism, the absurd iraq war, and the build up of the disastrous housing debt catastrophe. The great financial crisis was actually an existential threat to our way of living, which caused permanent economic scars (growth moved out of trend since that and never regained the trend) , and it was followed by the slowest and most painful recovery in american history. like 9 years to get back to something close to full employment, an entire generation scarred economically and financially. Then the covid disasters.

It's very interesting how you seem somewhat intelligent and then you say unhinged **** like this.

That's fine as for all the whites and Asians. But if a black women med student doesn't know the Jacobian for integrating the error function in polar coordinates they'll "here" the mocking of a 1000 rural community college dropouts who'S sPoT hAZ beeN tAkIN!

Counterpoint: it is not a requirement that a SCOTUS justice ever have been a lawyer.

there are no educational requirements at all for all article 3 federal judges. They don't even need to have completed high school

On top of an increasing number of lower level judges who were never lawyers; law schools, especially high end law schools, are increasingly permitting enrollees who never even took the LSAT. I presume this is to make it easier to meet desired racial/gender quotas.

Here's a probability question for you: what are the chances that anytime you got on a school bus, from K-12, the bus only held a maximum of eight kids?

Flagrant gutter racism aside (i.e., "content"), does Kelhus think that Affirmative Action applies to 6th-graders?

This is true, but what is your point?

People seem to be insinuating that there are Article 3 judges without law degrees. That is not the case.

If you are simply highlighting another norm that theoretically be abused by people who don't care about competence, the rule of law, or good government, then fair enough, I suppose.