Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
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A Field Guide to Lies - A lot of the stuff in here as stuff I was already aware of but it’s always good be reminded to step back and think things through before accepting a claim as true, especially if it confirms your prior belief.
- “But it’s important to remember that people gather statistics. People choose what to count, how to go about counting, which of the resulting numbers they will share with us, and which words they will use to describe and interpret those numbers. Statistics are not facts. They are interpretations.”
- “We also have a tendency to apply critical thinking only to things we disagree with. In the current information age, pseudofacts masquerade as facts, misinformation can be indistinguishable from true information, and numbers are often at the heart of any important claim or decision.”
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The Case for Being a Medical Conservative - “This desire for better decision quality drives the medical conservative to care about the growing commercialization of medicine. When money is at stake, the risk of hype increases. Not only does hype propagate low-value care, but it also erodes the public’s trust in medical science. Medical conservatives vigorously oppose hype in all its forms.”
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The Fifth Risk - An alarming look at the potential risks of having so many incompetent people in major government positions under the Trump administration, whether it be at the Department of Energy or the Department of Agriculture. People with detailed knowledge on how programs at these places work got replaced by people who couldn’t even meet the most basic requirements for entry level positions. The general consensus on the most worrying thing for the former employees is the potential disasters that could stem from the commitment to scientific ignorance from people in positions of power. Things like scaling back environmental and food safety regulations, giving research money to those who will produce the political results you want and restricting access to data from government funded sources.
- “At any rate, the serious risk in Iran wasn’t that the Iranians would secretly acquire a weapon. It was that the president of the United States would not understand his nuclear scientists’ reasoning about the unlikelihood of the Iranians obtaining a weapon, and that he would have the United States back away foolishly from the deal. Released from the complicated set of restrictions on its nuclear-power program, Iran would then build its bomb. It wasn’t enough to have the world’s finest forensic nuclear physicists. Our political leaders needed to be predisposed to listen to them and equipped to understand what they said.”
- A Department of Energy loan program for early-stage businesses that was criticized as wasteful spending due to one big failure. “No one had paid attention to it successes, and its one failure - Solyndra - had allowed right-wide friends of Big oil to bang on relentlessly about government waste and fraud and stupidity.” After some digging it was discovered that they weren’t taking enough risk and “the fear of losses that might in turn be twisted into antigovernment propaganda was threatening its mission.” This program was canceled under Trump.
- “Early-stage innovation in most industries would not have been possible without government support in a variety of ways, and it’s especially true in energy. So the notion that we are just going to privatize early-stage innovation is ridiculous Other countries are outspending us in R&D, and we are going to pay a price.”
- “Here is where the Trump administration’s willful ignorance plays a role. If your ambition is to maximize the short-term gain without regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it’s better to never really understand the problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge.”
- “Junk science will be used to muddy issues like childhood nutrition. Maybe sodium isn’t as bad for kids as people say! There’s no such thing as too much sugar! The science will suddenly be ‘unclear’. There will no longer be truth and falsehood. There will just be stories with tow sides to them.”
- “In the red southern states the mayor sometimes would say, ‘Can you not mention that the government gave this?’ Even when it was saving lives, or preserving communities, the government remained oddly invisible… We don’t teach people what the government actually does.”
- “Without weather satellites, weather radar, weather buoys, and weather balloons, there would be no weather forecasting worth listening to, much less paying for. Whatever AccuWeather - and any other private weather forecaster - might be doing to refine the National Weather Service’s forecast also depended on having those forecasts in the first place.”
- “That was the sad truth - the public servants couldn’t or wouldn’t defend themselves, and few outside the US government had a deep interest in sticking up for them.”
- “Pause a moment to consider that audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the US taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the US taxpayer, and on international data sharing treaties made on behalf of the US taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the US taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.” That is what AccuWeather wants, and their CEO, Barry Myers, was Trump’s nomination to run the NOAA. Fortunately he has withdrawn. Essentially trying to take a public good, paid for with taxpayer dollars and restrict it to the few who profit off that data by privatizing weather forecasts.
- “Virtually all the satellite data that came into NOAA wound up in places where no one could ever see it again. The Weather Company simply sought to render it accessible to the public. Myers threatened to sue the Weather Service if they did it.”
- “The private weather industry, unlike the National Weather Service, has a financial interest in catastrophe. The more spectacular and expensive the disasters, the more the people will pay for the warning of them… The more they pay, the more the weather industry can afford to donate to elected officials, and the more influence it will gain on the political process… You know Hurricane Harvey is going to do to Houston before Houston knows: Do you help Houston? Or do you find clever ways to make money off Houston’s destructions.”
- “While the tornado was touching down in Moore, AccuWeather’s network channel was broadcasting videos of … hippos, swimming.” This is after they sent out an alert to their paying customers 12 minutes before the tornado touched down.
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An elegy for cash: the technology we might never replace - “This is a feature of physical cash that payment cards and apps do not have: freedom. Called “bearer instruments,” banknotes and coins are presumed to be owned by whoever holds them. We can use them to transact with another person without a third party getting in the way. Companies cannot build advertising profiles or credit ratings out of our data, and governments cannot track our spending or our movements. And while a credit card can be declined and a check mislaid, handing over money works every time, instantly.”