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PoIiMath Profile picture
PoIiMath
@politicalmath
Marginally compelling & occasionally accurate, sometime writer, engineer, cake-baker
12 subscribers
Jun 27 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Everyone who is into politics needs to think hard about what the Zohran Mamdani victory means for the future of American political alignment One thing that occurred to me this week is that young people on the left have been told by their intellectual elders (professors, older statesman) that far left-wing policies are obviously workable and good and beneficial but that Americans just won't vote for them
Jun 19 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I really cannot emphasize to the left how much they have over-played their hand on the "trans kids" stuff When I was living in Seattle, a mom in my small group found out that her 1st grade daughter was being fed trans propaganda at the public school

She very politely asked that her daughter be excused for this. Not that they stop doing it, just that her daughter not be a part of it
Jun 4 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The renaming of the USNS Harvey Milk is such a perfect example of a smarter right-wing that has learned how to set a narrative trap

The Navy "leaks" that they are going to rename the ship, leveraging the volume and scale of the media to spread wide this info /1 The predictable outrage ensues. Nancy Pelosi calls it "shameful, vindictive erasure", which is not a thing she said about people tearing down statues of the founding fathers

The governor of Maryland says this name change is "lying about history" /2

Jun 2 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
In the last 5 years, there are 3 big narratives that everyone will eventually agree the libs got 100% wrong

1) Covid school closings
2) Biden's decline
3) m2f transgender athletes Image Just keep this in mind b/c the defense against the first two is "oh how could we have known?"

You could have known if you had just listened to the people talking sense. Your bubble is too perfect and it is self-destructive. You need to listen to more people.
May 31 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It is incredibly damning that a Harvard statistics PhD student is so socially isolated from the larger nerd and tech scene that he felt comfortable making this statement Let me give an example of how I use AI that is transformative

So I've got this project that is scraping out data and putting it haphazardly into a DynamoDb table. I want to screw around with this data in Excel, so I want to export the data as a csv.

None of Amazon's tools are good for this, I google it, stack overflow, probably about an hour of looking for solutions

I ask Claude how to export a DynamoDb table as a csv file. 10 minutes later I have the data loaded into Excel and I'm running various analysis on it
May 26 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I don't know how to solve this problem in a free market but when I signed up for gmail, it was advertised as "free unlimited email forever". That's what I signed up for

Now I have to pay Google or get rid of half my email. I feel tricked. I can't give up my gmail account, there's 20 years of emails in there!

And Google's interface for clearing up space is intentionally bad. It's intentionally painful so that you will just give up and pay the money.
May 20 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Let's talk about this. "Show me the legislation" is a head-fake. We aren't in the legislation phase of this project

But every lab meat company markets itself as the future of meat and calls for an end to natural meat. Every single one. Biocraft: "Farmed animals live shorter and more brutal lives today than ever before. In the USA, 25 million of them are killed every single day. We say enough is enough"

Enough is enough, huh? Oh that's probably just harmless rhetoric.
Apr 24 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Every time a conservative brings up the Obama IRS scandal people are like "actually that was fake"

But the IRS paid $3.5 million to these groups and publicly admitted that it illegally targeted conservative groups

But maybe the IRS lied when they apologized, who knows "But they also targeted liberal groups"

Yes, that was certainly the talking point that was used in their defense. It's a bummer that you only know the talking point you were fed and never actually read about the end result

metrovoicenews.com/irs-admits-it-…
Apr 23 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
There comes a point where you just can't talk your way out of it any more

At that point, even attempting to talk your way out of is rightly viewed with suspicion

Tyler's argument is basically No True Scotsman for intellectual elites

No true intellectual elite would act this way. Sure, most of our elites did act that way, but that just shows that they weren't true intellectual elites, who would never act that way Image
Mar 16 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I got lots of stuff wrong during Covid, but the thing that I got right (and that I'm most proud of) was a pattern of researching source materials, finding and promoting large-scale studies, and letting that information drive my thinking My best piece during Covid was against mask mandates in schools. I did a systematic review of large scale studies which all pointed the same direction:

1) Covid is not a big danger for kids
2) student masking is not an effective mitigation

marginallycompelling.com/p/the-case-aga…
Mar 16 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The difficulty here is that, if we are going to blame the US for not spending 12 cents to save a baby girl, we also have to ask why the organization that literally hands the medication to people can't spend 12 cents

Do they not have 12 cents? No one in that org had 12 cents? If the left had spent the last decade telling us that America was good b/c we are saving thousands of lives every day, there would be little appetite to cut this funding

But they didn't. They told us America was shit and we're all awful people who make the world worse
Feb 28 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I don't have strong thoughts on Ukraine so I'm going to watch this thing with zero wisdom and just say what I see

OK, Trump is saying he can't shit on Putin and then expect him to make a deal. But then he immediately shits on Zelensky saying "he's got a lot of hatred" (implying very strongly that this hatred means Z can't cut a deal). That's... crass.
Feb 23 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
My 9yo son loves sharks. You cannot understand how much a person can love sharks until you have met my son.

We watched Sharknado. He did not just love it. He wants to live in this world. He believes a Sharknado is possible. He is on the sharks' side. 🧵 This morning, he woke up early and asked if we could watch a shark show together.

Of course. Nothing would make me happier. He went to Disney+ and they have about 800 shark shows including (I'm not making this up)

- Shark side of the Moon
- Game of Sharks
- 50 Shades of Shark
Feb 5 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I'm not sure what is going on, a 🧵

Is USAID little more than a grift org? I'm skeptical mainly because that's a really comfortable narrative to get people to be ok with nuking it from orbit.

This seems like a reasonable explanation of the Musk strategy for clearing out the corruption brush in the government.

BUT I'm very skeptical of reasonable explanations like this because they are often used to persuade people like me

Jan 6 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This reminded me that Reading Recovery is quite possibly the most damaging program implemented in American schools

It teaches children not to sound out words but to guess at the word based on the first few letters, surrounding context, and visual cues

It has caused massive permanent damage to millions of children My son was taught using this method for one year when he was in public school and I am still trying to teach him to sound out words

His inability to read long words correctly has shattered his confidence and has made him despise reading that doesn't have pictures
Dec 26, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
"We can't find any 'native' Americans to fill these jobs" is the kind of thing a tech executive will say when they have no idea what their own company's hiring process looks like "We can't find anyone to fill these jobs" but when I talk to my friend inside the company, it turns out they have a hiring freeze
Dec 17, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
It's impossible to have a conversation around this but, if I were to try, it would be this:

People (esp young people) are furious at the diffusion of responsibility that our modern world represents. Bureaucracies, public & private, can do anything and no one is held responsible You can see this on almost every level of life. A pharm company can roll out policies that kill thousands.

McKesson Corp was ordered to pay billions for killing thousands of people in Jan 2022. Since then their stock price has doubled. No one truly held accountable.
Dec 10, 2024 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
10 years ago, I identified as a libertarian

Today I do not. Most of this has been because I've lost 2 family members and almost a dozen friends to fentanyl.

I'm sorry, libertarian friends. The drug problem is fucked and your solution is to just let everyone die There are two libertarian answers to this

1) of course people are dying, that's b/c the gov't doesn't allow safe legal drugs

2) letting the weak die is best for the survival of the species
Nov 14, 2024 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
This is, indeed, an interesting clip. But I want to focus on a throw-away comment in here.

Ezra says that Greg Abbott bussing migrants was obviously "cruel" and I just want to know...

Cruel to whom? Was bussing migrants cruel to the migrants?

How so? Is New York City a crueler place than Texas? Is it dirtier or uglier? Does it have fewer resources?

Is NYC more racist than Texas that it would be kinder to keep the migrants in the warm embrace of Texas?
Nov 8, 2024 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
I don't know how to say this gently, but young men don't want control over women's bodies

They want to be this guy

Image young men want to be brave in the face of danger. They want challenge and glory and a culture that will respect them for sacrifice, a culture that treats them with dignity for their risk taking or protective instincts
Nov 7, 2024 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
I'm incredibly sympathetic to this argument

I don't think Dem primary voters have been given a real choice to have their voices heard in the selection of a presidential candidate since 2008 Image link archive.is/DefM6