Policy and Politics
tfk | November 15, 2010I travel a lot for work, and to see my family on the East Coast. As such, I keep a fairly close eye on changes in TSA screening, and have always been a bit squicked by the backscatter machines (or porno scanners, as I've seen them called). My issue is mostly discomfort with some random person looking at me naked; it's an invasion of privacy that I don't appreciate. The health arguments against them seem dubious, but then again, the security argument seems little better. No terrorist plot has been detected at the checkpoint. How large a risk of cancer should I tolerate for no obvious…
tfk | November 15, 2010Eric McGhee at The Monkey Cage – a real political scientist who does these sorts of statistical analyses for a living – has done a nice post looking at the 2010 election results, and the effects of the votes for TARP, healthcare, the stimulus, and climate change, on Democrat's electoral prospects.
McGhee correctly objects to analyses (like TfK's) which lump Republicans and Democrats together. Too few Republicans broke ranks on these issues to give statistical insight, and asking the statistical machinery to parse out the effects of four votes within that small group just asks too much of the…
tfk | November 9, 2010
Nothing should surprise me any more, but the video above (via Juan Cole) is just shocking. In it, Rep. John Shimkus, who wants to run the House Energy and Commerce Committee, explains his reasons for rejecting the existence of climate change. He starts by citing Genesis, in which a post-Flood God promises never again to "destroy all living creatures," then cites Matthew's claim that humanity's end will only come by God's hand, not by our own doing. He then argues, implausibly, that carbon dioxide was persistently around 4000 parts per million during the age of the dinosaurs. It's true…
tfk | November 5, 2010Since I posted my statistical analysis showing that voting for a climate bill didn't have a statistically significant effect on Democratic electoral success, two other independent analyses have come to roughly the same conclusion. My model found a statistically insignificant effect from climate legislation (half a point to a point, at best), and a significant effect from Affordable Care (on the order of 5-6 points).
RealClearPolitics, a politically conservative site with a solid reputation in terms of data analysis (e.g., their polling averages are widely cited and reliable) did an analysis…
tfk | November 5, 2010Franz De Waal wades into the science/religion fuss with a great post at the New York Times: The God-Science Shouting Match: A Response:
To have a productive debate, religion needs to recognize the power of the scientific method and the truths it has revealed, but its opponents need to recognize that one cannot simply dismiss a social phenomenon found in every major society. If humans are inherently religious, or at least show rituals related to the supernatural, there is a big question to be answered. The issue is not whether or not God exists — which I find to be a monumentally uninteresting…
tfk | November 5, 2010Yesterday I reported a statistical analysis which found that voting for ACES (the climate bill) had no ill effect on Democratic election outcomes.
Today, Brad Delong asks Blue Dogs: "How Is That Voting Against Health Care Reform Working for You?," noting (via TPM)
Of the 39 Dems who voted against Health Care Reform, 12 are going to be returning in the next Congress.
Which is a heavy toll, but the real question is, would even fewer Democrats in swing districts be returning to DC if they had voted for Affordable Care, or would we have more Democrats returning if fewer had supported the bill?…
tfk | November 3, 2010First, the good news for Kansas from Tuesday's election. Janet Waugh defeated a strong opponent in the Kansas Board of Education race, retaining her seat and protecting the pro-evolution majority.
That's it.
Sam Brownback is now the Governor. The theocratic, Jew-baiting, creationist, manimal-obsessed wingnut is in charge, and he's got bigger majorities in the legislature, so expect Kansas to go full teabag.
Dennis Moore decided not to run for re-election some time back, then his wife announced plans to run for his seat. She was beaten handily by state legislator Kevin Yoder, taking…
tfk | November 3, 2010Marshall Ganz is a legendary organizer, and one of the architects of President Obama's remarkable grassroots campaign of 2008. When I was doing Camp Obama, the trainers were rightly in awe of him. Which makes his diagnosis of where the President has gone astray especially important:
This dramatic reversal is not the result of bad policy as such; the president made some real policy gains. It is not a consequence of a president who is too liberal, too conservative or too centrist. And it is not the doing of an administration ignorant of Washington's ways. Nor can we honestly blame the system…
tfk | November 3, 2010There's been some debate among the climate hawks about last night's election returns. Politico posted a story suggesting that the toll was especially hard on Democrats who supported the landmark climate change legislation passed by the House last summer. Kate Sheppard observed that quite a few of the Democrats who opposed the bill also lost their seats, and Chris Mims (formerly of Scienceblogs, now at Grist) argues that the election wasn't a referendum on climate change, pointing to the significant numbers of bill supporters who survived last night. NRDC finds the same thing.
The tricky…
tfk | November 2, 2010Bellwether Democratic Representative Boucher has lost in Virginia. Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
tfk | November 1, 2010I guess I should've posted this a few days ago if I wanted to influence early voters, but here's my advice to California voters who still haven't figured out how to vote.
Propositions:
19: Yes. There's not really a good argument against this. There's no scientific reason to single out marijuana for stricter regulation than cigarettes or alcohol, indeed alcohol may be more dangerous. Legalization gets criminal gangs out of the system, clears non-violent drug offenders out of the courts and prisons, and moves our whole criminal justice system towards a more rational future. Yeah, the…
tfk | October 25, 2010I'm in DC doing meetings and stuff, so regular blogging will return later in the week. Meanwhile, via Ed Yong, a paper On Angry Leaders and Agreeable Followers, which finds:
[T]he two studies we conducted showed that agreeableness moderates the effects of a leaderâs emotional displays. In a scenario study, participants with lower levels of agreeableness responded more favorably to an angry leader, whereas participants with higher levels of agreeableness responded more favorably to a neutral leader. In an experiment involving four-person teams, teams composed of participants with lower…
tfk | October 18, 2010Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, considers the confrontationalist/accommodationalist disagreement:
Hereâs the difference between the two sides: You know that courtroom phrase, âtell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truthâ?
Both Mooney and PZ want to tell the truth about science and evolution.
Only PZ is willing to tell the whole truth â that the logical conclusion of accepting science fully is that you must dismiss any notion of gods, miracles, and the supernatural.
Mooney thinks itâs bad PR for us to admit that â and he may be right â but itâs wrong to let Christians keep…
tfk | October 14, 2010Attention conservation notice: 3200 words attempting to correct what may be a fatally flawed analogy between New Atheism and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s approach to the civil rights movement.
In replying to Jason's post the other day, I skipped over some important issues that were peripheral to my main point. But I want to double back on a comment he made that I've seen New/Affirmative/Extreme/gnu atheists toss out rather too often. The claim is that they are, in some sense, analogous to Martin Luther King, Jr. Jason, being sophisticated and smart, and knowing that using analogies on the…
tfk | October 14, 2010Shorter former Census Bureau director and current Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman (author of a book with this blog post's title) â The Futility of Polling:
Numbers are stupid.
Slightly longer:
It's better to predict the outcome of elections based on conversations with some guy on the street, rather than through statistically validated models parameterized with stratified random samples.
Actual concluding line:
Relying on polls is like an intelligence agency resting its judgment on data intercepts rather than "Humint", the human intelligence gathered by old fashioned spies. We don'…
tfk | October 13, 2010Jason Rosenhouse has a long post up claiming I missed the point in my post a few days ago about the lessons communication science can teach us about the accommodationism spat. The two things I came away from his post thinking were: 1) wow, did he miss my point! and 2) we're talking about very different things.
First, to the question of whether I "missed the point," the question posed by Jerry Coyne was not about how to promote atheism. The question I was answering was about whether emphasizing spirituality could help more people accept evolution. At least, that's what I take Coyne's "come…
tfk | October 12, 2010Disco. Inst head honcho Bruce Chapman is confused. "What is more powerful," he wonders, "altruism or the survival instinct?" The question, he explains, is raised because of Watergate felon Chuck Colson's ramblings about the trapped Chilean miners. Colson, in turn is confused and amazed by Chilean health minister Jaime Manalich's report that miners "were fighting with [authorities] yesterday because everyone wanted to be at the end of the line, not the beginning." Colson continues:
A news man from the scene choked up while reporting it. You know who else should be surprised: Darwinians.…
tfk | October 11, 2010Last weekend, Chris Mooney and Genie Scott squared off against PZ Myers and Vic Stenger at the Council for Secular Humanism's 30th anniversary bash. The question was something to do with whether accommodationism is teh awsum or teh lamez0rs. You know my opinion, and from what I saw of the discussion, I don't think anyone emerged the undisputed victor, and thus the internet will never run out of flamewars.
Anyway, in reading the L.A. Times report on the event, Jerry Coyne wonders:
How can Mooney, The Great Communicator, think that if atheist accommodationists and atheist non-accommodationists…
tfk | October 7, 2010Thanks to Razib, I've managed to separate out Hispanic graduation rates in our new favorite graph (cf. and also):
I didn't put this on the graph, but immigration history does make a difference here. Hispanics born in the US have essentially the same high school graduation rate as everyone else, go to college more often than those born elsewhere (somewhat higher than among African Americans), and have comparable rates of attending grad schools as foreign-born Hispanics, both slightly lower than African Americans.
And thanks to other suggestions in the comments, here're the same data…