Collected links

1. Interesting thoughts by Chris Blattman:

   But as I read the story, I couldn’t help but think that it’s that smugness that makes half the country hate the Times audience and want to vote for a man like Trump.

   The so-called liberals of New York (like me) who push for equal rights with one hand while pushing their kids to private schools with the other. Or support more open borders on principle, failing to mention that it lowers the cost of their house help without threatening their own jobs.

2. Philip Tetlock, the author of “Superforecasting”, has lunch with the FT [source: MR]:

   Tetlock sees a division of intellectual labour, where Martin Ford and his ilk shape interesting hypotheses and more cautious and statistically minded people break them into smaller, testable pieces.

   His politically mild background is important, as it turns out. His work has taught him that everyone takes a heavy ideological endowment from their environment.

   But Tetlock’s belief in the possibility of a more rational world seems, happily, to be the only one that is not open to revision in the face of contrary evidence.

3. Nathan Lane points to this history by Richard Becker of the S programming language which then became R. See 28:12 for the history of the assignment operator <- in R over = in other languages. Spoiler: their keyboard had a button with an arrow.

4. Sci-hub is back up:

   “The ethics are quite clear…”

5. Andrew Gelman and David Rothschild on why political prediction markets are performing worse than expected:

   But more recently, prediction markets have developed an odd sort of problem. There seems to be a feedback mechanism now whereby the betting-market odds reify themselves.