This thread is worth reading, the epistemic criss on the right is real, and yes, the mainstream media, by freaking out about Trump and abandoning normal standards, made that epistemic crisis much worse.

That said, I have some quibbles ...
Fundamentally, I agree that this is the story many Trump supporters/apologists tell themselves, and that too much of it is true for comfort.

But my personal experience is that at the end of the day, the story is irrelevant; they side with Trump because they hate/fear his enemies
Back them off any particular truth claim, force them to confront the inescapable evidence that it's false, and they retreat almost instantly to some total irrelevancy about how progressives are nasty and dangerous.

They may be right, but that doesn't make Trump's lies any truer.
Now, if you are a Trump opponent, you're nodding along and saying "Preach, sister". Here's the bad news: fundamentally, this is how almost everyone reasons, almost all of the time. They start from what they want to do and work backwards to the principals that will support it.
We are tribal creatures, and our reasoning skills are optimized for getting other people in our tribe to like/respect/go along with us, not for discovering what is true about the world.
We have some institutions that mildly correct for this tendency, but the more they are captured by one side of a bitter ideological divide, the less well they will perform those corrections, and indeed, that is where we are with media, academia, etc.

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More from @asymmetricinfo

9 Jul
Mystified that anyone thinks "It's not nearly as bad as the worst period of criminal violence in US history" is a compelling rejoinder to fears about crime.

Rather than reassuring, it suggests you think we should wait until murders reach their old level before taking action.
I realize, of course, that this is not what people are *trying* to say, but it's what they're implying, and they should stop! It is a total political own-goal.
If you want to allay media-driven crime anxiety, ask folks if anyone they know has been victimized recently. In my experience, answer's usually "No", which often gives worriers pause--if cities are really descending into dystopia, how come no one they know has been mugged lately?
Read 7 tweets
7 Jul
Once education became the entry requirement for a decent, stable job it was 100% predictable that affluent parents would move heaven and earth to ensure their child's education, and to hell with what that does to anyone else. It's not socially optimal, but neither is it malleable
No combination of policies will induce middle class parents to sacrifice their childrens' opportunities to even out things for the children of other parents who aren't as engaged/adept. Any policy that starts from the premise of redistributing educational opportunity is doomed.
Megan's three iron laws of politics:

1) You cannot get away with messing up someone's pension
2) You cannot get away with messing up the futures of middle class kids
3) You cannot get away with messing up someone's healthcare plan.
Read 5 tweets
22 Jun
A bunch of things well established in the literature, and ferociously disputed by many in the public health community:

1) Obesity kills but not as many as you've heard
2) "Overweight" = lower mortality than "normal" weight
3) No one knows how to make people permanently thinner.
The wrath-of-a-thousand-suns reaction to point two, in particular, seems completely bizarre; the only way I can explain it is a kind of puritanism that wants being plump to be bad for you because it's fun getting that way.
To be sure, it may be confounding--lots of illnesses make you lose weight, though researchers do try to control for it. But no one has correctly identified the confounder yet, as far as I am aware.
Read 7 tweets
8 Jun
I thought the ProPublica analysis of billionaire taxes was going to be exciting. Instead, it told me things I already knew: that the US tax code offers deductions for charitable donations, loan interest, and business operating expenses, and only taxes capital gains when you sell.
The most exciting thing is wondering who gave them the information, and how long that person will spend in jail when they're caught, as I suspect they will be.
This isn't a case where you could have gotten one person's partial records from an accountant or a disgruntled ex-spouse. Practically speaking, unless all the billionaires have the same tax attorney, I suspect the only place the data could have come from is the IRS itself.
Read 6 tweets
7 Jun
This sounds extremely compelling and also, for all I know, might be pseudo-scientific gibberish. This is a broad problem with technical arguments.
After a public argument with a left-wing economist, one of his fans tried to shame me for fooling people--"You make these complicated, impressive sounding technical arguments I can't follow, and you'd probably fool people if we didn't have Professor X to tell us why you're wrong"
I gently pointed out that what she was actually saying was that she had no idea whether I was right or wrong, because if she couldn't follow my argument, she couldn't follow Professor X's argument either. She was just picking the gibberish that agreed with her priors.
Read 4 tweets
1 Jun
I don't doubt there's a lot of worry, but I'm also watching people who don't want to return to the office (because they moved to Idaho or whatever) generate things to worry about which explain their desire to stay home in more socially acceptable terms than "personal convenience"
Me, I've been working mostly from home since 2006, I like working mostly from home, & I think most firms should go hybrid to leverages the social-capital-building benefits of in-person *plus* the convenience and low distraction of at-home. But not b/c I'm afraid of covid-19.
Also, workers who think all firms should offer 100% work-from-home should consider that if your job can be done 100% from your house, it can also probably be done 100% from Bangalore, so you actually have a personal stake in preserving the office.
Read 4 tweets

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