pieces.
McConnell was an obstructionist who got in Obama's way just to win political point. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi get somewhat more sympathetic treatment. But they’re sort of presented as fixed personalities as well. Pelosi is giving him grief from the left. Reid can’t get the Senate to be helpful with any reliability.
Obama as an intuitive reader of men doesn’t seem to come through at all. At least not to me when I listened to it.
Is it Michael Lewis fault?
So Moneyball was a best seller when it came out.
I remember seeing it on all sort of lists of books that smart people were supposed to read (I think I remember it being on a Harvard Business School reading list).
I think we might have learned the lessons from Moneyball too well.
There are certainly domains where the lessons are correct. Do you need to decide when to pull pitcher? Study it, count it up, do the science.
Lots of politics happens with a significant degree of statistical sophistication. Obama’s national campaigns should certainly be included in this.
Perhaps we’ve become so reliant on giving up out intuition that we’ve lost the ability where intuition does come in handy.
(Its worth keeping in mind, that for all LBJs gifts, he has a pretty checkered legacy of his own)
Ok, that's what I got, hopefully that was high enough effort to count as a high effort post and that gets us to 3 submissions.
(I love the concept of this competition, I hope we get more of this sort of thing, I wish I was a talented enough writer to contribute something better)
Thanks
Pitt19802
4mo ago
I would be interesting in a breakdown between what percentage of regulations are a situation where nothing happens prior to government approval, and where no new is good news from the government.
My dad is a nuclear engineer, I heard a ton of complaining about the NRC stood in the way of progress growing up. I wholeheartedly accept that story, that said, lawyers and financier aren't letting you proceed without government sign off.
My sense for it is that new drugs work the same way.
And on a smaller scale, getting the permits that you need to build any new building works the same way.
If you cut the people you need to give you the all-clear in half, you haven't improved the situation.
My go to parenting recommendation is the book 'How to Talk so Kids will Listen, and How to Listen so Kids will Talk"
Perhaps more in tune for once you've figured out how to keep them alive for a year or so ...
Beyond that, one of the things that make humans distinctive in the animal kingdom is how adaptable to different environments we are. Your kid is only here because their ancestors figured out how to adapt and survive famines, wars, ice ages, economic collapses (at least well enough to keep the line going) .... In the grand scheme of things any particular decision you make about a parenting gadgets or sleeping techniques, the kid will probably survive.
Try different stuff, figure out what works for your family.
One thing that worked for us, my wife breastfed for the better part of a year or so, about a month in, she read that if you give the baby a bottle of formula at bedtime, kid digests formula slower than breast milk, less likely to be hungry and wake up in the middle of the night.
Bedtime was the main time we gave the kid formula, but worked like a charm for getting the kid to sleep through the night, which put us in considerably saner moods.
lol, curious as to how far you are through the LBJ books.
Have you gotten to the point of Kennedy winning the 1960 Democratic nomination? I'm going trust that I don't need to give spoiler warnings for a historical event that happened 60 years ago.
An interesting take away, is that even by 1960, LBJ might have been someone who's gifts were past their time. At least in terms rising to the Presidency.
LBJ thought he could stay out of the primaries, and that all his backroom senate connections would get him the nomination at the convention. He thought Kennedy was a political lightweight who hadn't done anything of any real note during his time in the Senate.
But Kennedy was already the beneficiary of TV and 'big speeches', by then he was a staple of the Sunday morning political shows, for all LBJs Senate accomplishments, Kennedy was better known to the voters.
The comparison between Kennedy and Obama is an interesting one. I suspect you're right. By the time he arrived in Washington, he was already a possible Presidential nominee, 2 years later, he was literally running for the nomination. He never had time to build political alliances as anything other than a possible President.
One area I was trying to go in my post (not sure I got there, I was running out of steam by the end), is that might just be an odd product of our time. We don't reward that sort of political intuition, so we don't get leaders who have it.
To start with, its almost a dirty word to have been a DC politician for any stretch of time. Before Biden, between Bill Clinton, W, Obama, and Trump, we had 28 years of presidents with a total of 4 years of inside the beltway political experience before becoming President. Hillary had some line about "the most qualified candidate ever", but for the most part, deep Washington connections is almost never a selling point for Presidental candidate.
If anything, its almost the opposite.
You can market change, can you market the opposite?
Beyond that, I'm not sure we believe in that sort of intuition at all.
I singled out Lewis, but there's a large bookshelf of books about how our intuition sucks and we shouldn't trust it. I would put the Freakonomics, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, Cass Sustein's Nudge (who Obama worked with at U of Chicago and hired into the White House), most of the Less Wrong universe of stuff including SSC, all fit into that category.
I think that shelf has a lot of good insights, and its useful to sort of be careful about the limits of intuition, and where it can lead us astray.
I also think its somewhat antithetical to LBJs sort of intuition. The sort of leaders we aspire to be, and choose, after reading that stuff. Can't do the things that LBJ did.
Or at least that's 1 theory of the universe.
Thanks for the car adapter tip, not sure why it hadn't occurred to me that there might be a solution to my setup, but that's seems like something I should own. Purchased.
Pitt19802
8mo ago
In the week 7 version of this thread Rov_Scam had a long effort post about college football https://www.themotte.org/post/1209/weekly-nfl-thread-week-7/259169?context=8#context
Towards the end of his thread he made a prediction that at some point the traditional NCAA eligibility limits of playing 4 years out of 5 years at school would come into question.
Well, 4 weeks later, we have movement on that.
Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia has sued the NCAA over it’s eligibility limitations.
So, it appears the basis of the lawsuit centers around the distinction between how years at a prep school and years at a junior college are counted.
Prep school years are basically counted as extra high school years, and don’t count against eligibility, junior college years are counted as college years, and do count against eligibility.
Pavia spent 2 years at New Mexico Military Institute, a junior college.
(Oddly, NMMI occasionally has prep schools on the schedule in 2018 and 2019 they played against Air Force Prep https://www.nmmiathletics.com/sports/fball/2019-20/schedule though the years I checked they never had more than 1 game against a prep school)
Anyway, as it stands now, it appears that this represents a fairly limited challenge to the eligibility structure, he doesn’t appear to be arguing that he should have open ended eligibility.
That said, the language the espn article quoted from the lawsuit, it’s not obvious why any of those arguments shouldn’t apply to open ended eligibility.
I’ll quote at some length:
“ "The JUCO Eligibility Limitation Bylaws neither promote competition nor benefit college athletes with respect to their impact on persons who attend junior colleges before transferring to NCAA schools," the lawsuit says. "These rules stifle the competition in the labor market for NCAA Division I football players, harming college athletes and degrading the quality of Division I football consumed by the public.
"These harms are contrary to Defendant's stated mission of promoting the well-being of college athletes and are the very ills federal antitrust law seeks to remedy. Pavia, and other former JUCO football players who are harmed by this illegal restraint, have a small window of time to compete in Division I football."
The lawsuit argues that the NCAA and its member institutions "have entered an illegal agreement to restrain and suppress competition" and are violating the federal Sherman Act.
The lawsuit says junior college transfers face eligibility restrictions that "are not placed on athletes who choose to delay entry to a Division I NCAA college to attend prep school, serve in the military, or even to compete professionally in another sport."
…
"Because Pavia cannot relive his short college career, the harm inflicted by the JUCO Eligibility Limitations Bylaws is irreparable and ongoing, and temporary and preliminary injunctive relief is necessary," the lawsuit says. "Pavia brings this action to put a stop to the unjustified anticompetitive restriction on universities who seek to compete for college athletes, and to restore freedom of economic opportunity for himself and other college football players."
—————-
If you’ve watched Ted Lasso, Welcome to Wrexham makes for an interesting companion piece.
If you’re not familiar with the premise Hollywood actors buy a lower level soccer club. And then it follows their process of trying to get promoted up the various levels of UK soccer.
There are a lot of interesting things going on with the show, but of the things that stood lower level UK soccer is stand alone from the highest level of UK soccer in a way that struck me as unusual for American sports.
What I mean by that is the Wrexham is decidedly not a developmental set up. Of the players they follow, several of them are in their mid 30s, really good player in the lower levels is sort of where they’re going to top out in their careers, one goalie they follow was a prominent Premier League player, who they bring in for 1 last go around at the very end of his career.
We don’t really have that here, in baseball if you’re still hanging around the minors as a 30 year old, it’s a matter of time before you’re put out to pasture in order to open up a spot for a younger prospect, even if you’re on of the better players at that level. The lower level is subservient to the higher level (that’s basically the premise of Kevin Costner’s character in Bull Durham).
Anyway, it seems unlikely that Diego Pavia will ever be a great NFL prospect, he probably could be a quite good 32 year old college QB, he probably won’t get that opportunity.
The crumbling away of the NCAA institutional rule making ability seems likely to continue.
Yeah, I think I'll go strongly the other direction on this.
"Terry Bradshaw may predict the Browns to beat the Bengals, but at a certain time we'll know the winner and if the Bengals win the sun will rise the next morning and his being wrong about it will have no effect on anything."
The problem is, this isn't true at all. It's not true in football, it's not true politics, it's not true across many dimensions of life. And the world we live in is worse off for it.
Terry Bradshaw is one guy out of many many people giving opinions, I wouldn't say that his opinion alone is the basis that people's futures ride on, but when Brandon Staley goes for it on 4th down, and Terry Bradshaw says that he's the reason the Chargers lost (everytime that happens, a guys livelihood is on the line), when the Rams lose a game and Terry Bradshaw says the Jared Goff is the reason why they lost (a guys livelihood is on the line). (I don't know if Bradshaw actually had those particular take, I made them up as example, though I do remember various talking heads making them, just not which particular talking head).
Every little statement like this affects public perception, and public perception affects reality. We humans are highly susceptible to group think.
The presumption is that that the guy on TV knows what he's talking about, knows the factors that goes into whether the Browns have what it takes to beat the Bengals [1], I agree that for the most part no one really cares, I'm saying that we should, if in reality, these guys are actually just full of shit constantly. That's actually extremely useful information.
This obviously applies to politics as well, no matter what happens on Tues, the Wednesday morning QBs will come out, it's extremely useful to understand that most of them are full of shit.
[1] Somewhat hilariously, these picks typically aren't even against the spread, to the degree that these guys can't even figure out to just pick the obvious favorites... truly wasting all of our time.
Pitt19802
2yr ago
So, I don't think I'm appropriately positioned to explain the rationale for why anyone voted the way they did, I'm not going to try to do that.
I think I agree that my essay did less to develop a mechanical working model of intuition than other entries.
What I was trying to shoot for was a somewhat more meta approach, how our culture values intuition, and perhaps devalues it in certain areas to our determent.
If you're of the opinion that I missed the mark on what I was shooting for, or just didn't care for it, you're certainly entitled to that opinion.
If you're of the opinion that other entries were more deserving winners, idk, perhaps you're correct.
Fwiw, I liked the essay you submitted quite a bit.
Pitt19802
7mo ago
"Did prediction markets and other indicators that called the race correctly just get lucky?"
Is beyond the paywall, if anyone happens to have access beyond the paywall and is willing to C+P ....
(semi-relatedly, I would love a substack setup where you could buy say 10 (or whatever number) of general purpose credits and use them across any substack. I would absolutely sign up for something like that. Signing up for 10 different substacks for the sake of reading the 1 or 2 articles a month that interest me .... not so much).
The ability to make falsifiable predictions is how we know we understand things about the world we live in.
Not understanding the world we live in has real consequences.
I’m arguing for more discourse around predictions, in response to your argument for less discourse around predictions.
I suspect we agree that the discourse could be much better than it actually is.
TLDR, I actually like Nate Silver’s schtick quite a bit, and wish we had more people trying to do it across more areas of interest.
Pitt19802
1yr ago
Your responses in this thread have been better than I deserve, thank you.
You've quite perceptively picked up that we likely have vastly different filter bubbles. You're correct that I don't live in a large city (exurb of a medium size city probably most accurately describes it). My brother, sister, sister in law and her husband all live in places that would meet any definition of large multicultural cities, and I talk and visit them all fairly regularly, so I don't think I'm totally oblivious to what at least some people's lives are like in large multicultural cities.
My exposure to trans people mostly come through 2 sources.
First, when my sister got married, her husband already had an 8 year old daughter. My new niece had a variety mental health problems, many of which she might have inherited from her biological mother who also had a variety of mental health problems. At one put she started cutting herself, there were multiple episodes where she threatened to kill herself. These episodes predate her announcing that she was transgender when she was 12.
Zhe is 15 now, and has decided that zhe is non-binary now, so I'll try to switch over to those pronouns the rest of the way.
What to make of this episode? Quite frankly, I'm hesitant to make it too much about trans people.
Not sure if you've read Scott Alexander's review of Crazy Like Us https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-crazy-like-us
In the parlance of that review, zhe had a significant amount of psychic stress, it was going to find an outlet in some manner or another.
That said, I'm unimpressed with our culture that gender confusion has become the psychic stress release valve for people such as zer.
Fwiw, zhe growing up in a large multicultural city doesn't seem disconnected from this being the valve zer psychic stress went to. The large multicultural city zhe has grown up in has a political culture where identifying as trans changes how therapists and teacher treat you in relation to your parents.
Life is confusing and full of psychic distress, for all of us, we all want validation. If you give people validation for something, people desperate for validation will be attracted to it.
Second, while physically I might be a hobbit tucked away in the shire, I'm a citizen of the internet.
I realize this sounds ridiculous.
The internet is where we are all on our worst behavior, I know all sorts of seemingly normal irl people who seem nuts when they start outputting on a keyboard.
That said, in the sea of crazy that is norm of internet interactions.
It is a distinct impression that I have that the trans community interacts in a uniquely deranged manner.
I don't have any scientific cites for you, it's just an impression I have come to.
If you imagine a community as a giant bell curve, with their median members as the big middle, their most gracious members on one end of the spectrum, their least gracious members on the other end of the spectrum.
I hope we can agree, that while there might be some gracious Trump supporters online, as a giant bell curve, the fat part in the middle of their bell curve is at a different spot than Biden supporters online.
If we can imagine different communities like that, it's my impression that the trans community is distinct from nearly any other community.
Such that the assertion that your observable ratio of trans people enjoying their lives is 50-5 kind of blows my mind.
That said, that 'there are reports that the ratio of trans people enjoying their lives off the internet is 50-5', is probably a good update on my mental model of the universe.
Thank you, I appreciate your responses in this thread, they are a useful addition to my sense-making of the universe.
The year is 2003, the Redsox haven't won the World Series since 1918. Now they're in Game 7 of the America League Championship against the New York Yankee. Grady Little is their manager, he has a choice to make.
How long should he let Pedro Martinez pitch? This year Martinez has finished 3rd in the Cy Young voting, he's won 3 Cy Young awards in the previous 6 years. Without recapping his entire career, let just posit that he is really good. If you wanted to bet on 1 particular guy, with everything on the line, he is a guy you would want to bet on.
Through 7 innings, that works great, at the end of 7 innings Martinez has thrown 100 pitches and the Redsox led 4-2. Is 100 pitches enough? Should Little call it a night for Martinez and turn it over to the bullpen? Or should he keep rolling the dice with the 1 particular guy you want to bet on?
The Redsox score another run in the top of the 8th to make it 5-2. Little decides to bet on Martinez. That works out less great. 23 pitches later the game is tied and Martinez's night is over. In the 11th inning Aaron Boone homers to win the game 6-5 for the Yankees. The curse lives on. Who knows, maybe next year will be the year. It won't be this year.
The year is 2016, the Cubs haven't won the World Series since 1908. Now they're in Game 7 of the World Series. Joe Madden is their manager, he has a choice to make.
How long should he let Kyle Hendricks pitch? This year Kendricks has finished 3rd in the Cy Young voting. Let not recap his entire career either, but let posit that while he is not nearly as decorated a pitcher as Pedro Martinez was, he has been quite good this year, with everything on the line, he isn't a bad guy to bet on.
Through 4 innings that works great, when it's Hendricks time to pitch in the 5th inning the Cubs led 5-1, Hendricks gets the first 2 outs of the 5th, then he walks a batter. What to do?
For Maddon, that is enough, he pulls Hendricks at this point. That turns out to work, ehh, not exceptionally great. Before the inning is over the score is 5-3, at the end of the 9th inning the score is 6-6. The Cubs wind up scoring 2 runs in the 10th inning and win 8-7. Their curse is over.
Alright, anyway, intuition.
What exactly are we talking about?
Where these decision made on intuition? What does it even mean to make a decision on intuition?
To be straightforward, I'm almost certain that Maddon's decision wasn't made on intuition, its less clear to me whether Little decision was.
Moneyball was published in 2003. I'll probably butcher this synopsis, but roughly, it documents how the A's won a lot of games in the early 2000's by replacing the intuitive judgements of baseball scouts and managers with statistical analysis that didn't rely on human intuition.
For a few years after it was published, which method was better was a sports radio debate topic. Before long, it ceased being one, the teams that embraced the statistical method simply won too frequently. It is no long a question of whether you should rely on human intuition or statistical analysis, its how do you win the statistical analysis arms race.
Back to the pitching decision, by the time Maddon was making his decision, this was a studied question, Maddon was almost certainly aware of analysis that indicated that by the time pitcher see a batter for their 3rd time in a game, the pitcher's effectiveness drops considerably. Glossing over particular details of each situation, broadly speaking, the science was with Maddon.
Its hard to know exactly what the Redsox internal analytics department had produced by 2003. It seems likely to me that Little didn't have the benefit of this analysis in 2003. He may of had to rely on his intuition to make his decision in 2003.
Is this what we mean by intuition? This seems like a pretty crappy definition. Is every decision we make that hasn't been mathematically calculated an intuitive decision? I don't think that's what we mean.
Does it mean a decision we haven't thought out previously?
If Little sat in his hotel room the night before the game with his pitching coach, and spent several hours discussing exactly how long to keep Martinez in the game, and had agree that as long as they were winning he would go 8 innings, they were sticking with Martinez, would it have been an intuitive decision?
It seems like it would have been the opposite, it would have been a decision that they analyzed, and analyzed wrong. Nothing to do with intuition.
One of the suggested prompts to this question involved "how can we improve intuition."
Having read a few Malcolm Gladwell books in my life, my first instinct is "put in your 10,000 hours".
When to pull a pitcher isn't exactly a "haven't thought out previously" situation.
Complete games are quite rare, making this decision is actually something very close to an every game occurrence. Little should have had plenty of the practice needed for his intuition to be on-point.
(This is oversimplifying. While pulling pitchers in an every game occurrence, pulling pitchers in game 7s of playoff series is not. That comes with a set of end game considerations that the regular season decisions do not. For example, in the regular season you need to keep your pitchers well rested enough to pitch the rest of the season in a way that you don't at the end of the playoffs.) (But I think we're getting too far into the weeds here.)
Let's just posit that Little relied on his intuition, and his intuitions screwed the decision up. What should he have done to improve his intuition?
It seems really tempting to dismiss this as a totally idiotic framing of this question.
Baseball over the past 20 years is really clear about the answer to this. He should give up.
He should turn this question over to statistical analysis, and then listen to the analysis when it gives him an answer.
He should quit trying to get his intuition to tell him things that can be looked up.
Its sort of cold and windy outside right now, I just walked outside, here's guessing its 42 degrees.
Looking at my phone, my phone thinks it 40.
Not bad.
How good can I get at this game?
Can I develop my weather guessing intuition?
Every hour, I'll walk outside, make a guess, then check my phone.
I bet I could get pretty good and intuiting the weather.
What's the point though? I can just look at my phone, why develop weather intuition that's no better than taking 2 seconds to look at my phone?
I mean, I'm fairly certain my phone gets it from the National Weather Service or something. Are you afraid of BIG Weather Service?
It seems almost anti-science.
I recently listened to Robert Caro's books about LBJ.
One big theme of the books is the degree to which LBJ had a great intuitive sense for the one on one convincing part of politics.
There are several descriptions of LBJ abilities as "a reader of men". I'll quote one at some length -
From Master of the Senate, pg 136 -
"While Lyndon Johnson was not, as his two assistants knew, a reader of books, he was, they knew, a reader of men - a great reader of men. He had a genius for studying a man and learning his strengths and weaknesses and hopes and fears, his deepest strengths and weaknesses: what the man really wanted- not what he said he wanted but what he really wanted- and what it was that the man feared, really feared.
He tried to teach his young assistants to read men-"Watch their hands, watch their eyes," he told them. "Read eyes. No matter what a man is saying to you, it's not as important as what you can read in his eyes"-and to read between the line: more interested in men's weaknesses than in their strengths because it was weakness that could be exploited, he tried to teach his assistants how to learn a man's weakness. "The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he's not telling you," he said. "The most important thing he has to say is what he's trying not to say." For that reason he told them, it was important to keep the man talking; the longer he talked, the more likely he was to let slip a hint of that vulnerability he was so anxious to conceal. "That's why he wouldn't let a conversation end," Busby explains. "If he saw the other fellow was trying not to say something, he wouldn't let it [the conversation] end until he got it out of him." And Lyndon Johnson read with a genius that couldn't be taught, with a gift so instinctive that a close observer of his reading habits, Robert G. (Bobby) Baker, calls it a "sense"; "He seemed to sense each man's individual price and the commodity he preferred as coin." He read with a novelist's sensitivity, with an insight that was unerring, with an ability, shocking in the depth of its penetration and perception, to look into a man's heart and know his innermost worries and desires."
So my audiobook setup is a bit odd, I like to listen in my car, we have two cars, one new with an USB port where I can listen to Audible books through my phone, hence the LBJ books, an old older car without any of this new fangled technology like USB ports, so I have to go to the library and check out physical CDs.
Around the same time I was listening to the LBJ books. The physical CD book I was listening to was Barack Obama's memoir, A Promised Land.
This is almost certainly a fool's errand. But I would like to keep political nature of Obama's legacy out of this analysis.
Anyway, with that terrible set up. Listening to these two book side by side, it struck me that Obama didn't sound anything like LBJ.
I was struck by how in the Obama book, all the key players seemed like fixed political pi
Pitt19802
2yr ago
I suspect you're correct.
I've had a number of friends who have interned with congressmen and the like, and a common report of the experience is returning constituent mail, with the common theme being the general thanklessness of it, and how it was basically useless work pawned off on interns.
Earlier this year I read Path to Power, the first book in Robert Caro's series about LBJ.
I guess LBJ became a congressional staffer pretty shortly after college.
Apparently he attacked constituent mail with particularly uncommon zeal.
If you were writing your congressman about veteran's benefits, or something, and your letter happened to show up on LBJ's desk, you were in luck, he made a point to figure out who the best person to talk to cut through the government bureaucracy help you out.
The book is modestly handwavy about the exact mechanics of it, but I guess in the fanaticism he showed handling constituent mail, he was able to build a reputation as a helpful person in Washington to take your problems to, and various business people are always on the look out for people to take their problems to.
And those people wound up being the key supporters LBJ needed for his rise...
Anyway, I guess that's one of the big themes of Caro's book, that LBJ had something of a gift for see the potential for power, where other people didn't.
Pitt19802
2yr ago
Despite the 5% chance of 5,000 deaths, I would say if you squint - "If they are, it will be because somebody did something incredibly stupid or awful with infectious diseases. Even a small scare with this will provoke a massive response, which will be implemented in a panic and with all the finesse of post-9/11 America determining airport security. Along with the obvious ramifications, there will be weird consequences for censorship and the media, with some outlets discussing other kinds of biorisks and the government wanting them to stop giving people ideas. The world in which this becomes an issue before 2023 is not a very good world for very many reasons." - holds up pretty well.
Good reminder that these sorts of prediction are really hard, perhaps impossible. All in all, I would consider this to be a pretty reasonable effort at a nearly impossible thing.
Pitt19802
2yr ago
I want to take the opportunity to publicly thank @FiveHourMarathon for creating and running this competition.
In our era of user generated social media content, I think it's really easy to complain that what the internet strangers have put together isn't to your precise taste.
I think it's quite impressive to put your money where your mouth is and say, 'I'd like to see this space explore this particular topic, let's make it happen'.
I think this competition was very cool.
Thank you.
Pitt19802
2yr ago
I suspect he hasn't, if the hat was passed around, are you putting money into it?
I don't think most people who haven't been exposed to public criticism have a good sense for how they would respond to it if they were.
I suspect most people would react in 1 of 2 ways.
-
Find it extremely unpleasant and basically avoid any exposure to it again, ie shut up and go away (to some degree, this is how SA has handled it)
-
Find it extremely unpleasant and dismiss as invalid out of hand, in a way that makes it difficult to make any improvement, (I suspect this is how EY has largely handled it).
The people who can expose themselves to it, keep coming back for more, but stay open to improvement.
That's actually a pretty rare psychological skill set.
Pitt19802
4mo ago
Not sure that's how that works.
Many things are bottlenecked around getting the 'ok to proceed' from regulators.
If you cut half of them, you just doubled the backlog for the half still around, you haven't saved compliance costs then, you've made them worse.
I'm not especially convinced that there's that much of a shortage of Americans who want to work dogmatically hard.
I'm just not sure American culture filters those people to glass factories in Dayton, OH.
In America those people tend to get filtered into industries like Tech, Finance, Medicine, Law, Entertainment, Sports.
Comparative advantage being what it is, glass manufacturing appears to be something to aspire to a bit more in China than it is in America, shrug, so it goes.
Within a couple days of watching American Factory I watched a short 20 or so minute documentary about various supply chains in China, after failing to find it in half hour or so of internet searching I've given up, but most of the factories were of cheap plastic trinkets, the pace of work seemed pretty comparable to the Americans in Dayton.
Even in China, I imagine there are hierarchies of where people are motivated to work, and which places attract the motivated workers, they're just different than they are here.
Pitt19802
2yr ago
"Amusingly, this used to come largely from the right-wing, who kept making fun of his model for giving Trump a roughly 30% chance to win the 2016 election, because apparently grasping that 2:1 underdogs win pretty often is basically impossible for some people."
I'm going to push back on this as a mis-recollection of the actual facts.
Trump's rise badly damaged Silver's credibility, but its wasn't Trump's general election win, it was his GOP nomination.
Examples that aged poorly:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-is-winning-the-polls-and-losing-the-nomination/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trumps-six-stages-of-doom/
To his credit, Silver has largely fessed up to screwing this up:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundit-and-screwed-up-on-donald-trump/
Another article delving into the details of this:
All in all, I'm a Silver fan, in the grand scheme of things, I think he does a pretty good job, but the Trump nomination screw up showed that he's not immune to certain biases.
Which groups do you have in mind here? Tammany Hall era Irish immigrants? That process took the better part of 100 years.
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