Politics
Category archives for Politics
Financiers Still Aren’t Rocket Scientists
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 12, 2012 Over at Slate, John Dickerson has a piece expressing amazement that “numbers guy” Mitt Romney was so badly misinformed about the election. While I’ll admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude about the general bafflement of the Romney campaign and the Republicans generally, this particular slant (which Dickerson isn’t the only one to take, just…
Twilight of the Elites and the Rise of the Culture
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 9, 2012 In which I use my double license as a physicist and a science fiction fan to engage in some half-assed futurism spinning off Chris Hayes’s much-discussed book. ————- I don’t read a lot of political books, because I tend to find them frustrating. They’re usually surprisingly ephemeral, trying to spin Deep Meaning out of a…
What’s FiveThirtyEight Good For?: The Inevitable Nate Silver Backlash
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 8, 2012 
Now that we’ve apparently elected Nate Silver the President of Science, this is some predictable grumbling about whether he’s been overhyped. If you’ve somehow missed the whole thing, Jennifer Ouellette offers an excellent summary of the FiveThirtyEight saga, with lots of links, but the Inigo Montoya summing up is that Silver runs a blog predicting…
Get Out the Vote
Posted by Chad Orzel on November 6, 2012 If you’re in the US, it’s Election Day, so go vote. I’d like to say something here about how I don’t care who you actually vote for, but of course that’s not true– I would strongly prefer it if you were to vote for Barack Obama and other Democrats, and against Mitt Romney and a…
Twitter-Induced Degradation
Posted by Chad Orzel on October 26, 2012 In which I discuss the manner in which and the degree to which Twitter is ruining the media. ———— Yesterday, Kevin Drum posted saying that Twitter is ruining political journalism, calling out its role in solidifying media groupthink before events are even completed. That seemed like a pretty good criticism to me, but like a…
How Would You Do a Gender-Blind Faculty Search?
Posted by Chad Orzel on September 25, 2012 There’s been a lot of bloggage recently about a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicating bias toward male students on the part of faculty who thought they were evaluating an application for a laboratory manager. Half of the faculty in the study were given an application with “Jennifer” at…
What Does It Take to Evaluate Teaching?
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 30, 2012 In which we compare a couple of different systems for evaluating teachers, looking at what’s involved in doing a fair assessment of a teacher’s performance. ——– Another casualty of the great blog upgrade, in the sense of a post that was delayed until the inspiration for it has been forgotten by most of the people…
The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 17, 2012 This has been out for a little while now, and Chris has been promoting it very heavily, and it’s sort of interesting to see the reactions. It’s really something of a Rorschach blot of a book, with a lot of what’s been written about it telling you more about what the writer wants to be…
Genre Fiction and the Real Problem With Philosophy of Science
Posted by Chad Orzel on May 10, 2012 There’s been a bunch of discussion recently about philosophy of science and whether it adds anything to science. Most of this was prompted by Lawrence Krauss’s decision to become the Nth case study for “Why authors should never respond directly to bad reviews,” with some snide comments in an interview in response to a negative…
