Pitt19802
6mo ago
How is this different from "You’ve put yourself in a dangerous situation because you’ve done a foolish thing by flirting with that guy wearing that dress"?
It's not especially different, that's it hypocritical though, doesn't make it bad advice.
Is it prudish? Yeah, it probably is.
We (both sexes) desperately need to rediscover our prudence though.
Pitt19802
7mo ago
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.
Pitt19802
9mo 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.
Pitt19802
9mo ago
Which groups do you have in mind here? Tammany Hall era Irish immigrants? That process took the better part of 100 years.
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.
Pitt19802
10mo ago
I'm not of the belief that support for abnormal people is the motivation for liberal promotion of transgender issues.
I'm of the belief that liberal's motivation is status competition with conservatives, transgendered people are just a prop liberals use towards that ends.
I'm also not of the belief that the promotion liberals engage in should count as support.
I'm largely of the belief that transgenderism is self-destruction, similar to cutting, or suicide attempts.
People who are attracted to it need empathetic treatment, not celebration.
In large part I'm quite unimpressed with the approach that most conservatives take, their approach is genuinely unhelpful. But I largely perceive them as flailing wildly at a response to a game that liberals largely initiated.
Pitt19802
10mo ago
My uncharitable mental model of it is that liberals ran out of ways to paint conservatives as bigots.
Its important to the liberal worldview that they're the tolerant ones, and conservatives are the intolerant ones.
For a long time this was not a problem, because conservative had fairly negative views around gays, and to a lesser but still real extent non-martial sex.
Liberals won around those topics, the standard issue conservative now knows they're supposed to be respectful toward gays, and for the most part, they publicly at least, largely are.
They can be a little freer about complaining about non-martial sex, but they're very little they can actually do.
Liberals can't declare victory and go home though, its a forever culture war, so they need to find something that conservatives aren't yet tolerant of, so trans issues it is.
Pitt19802
11mo 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
11mo ago
I hope EY lurks here, or maybe someone close to him does.
I don't know EY at all, but if you actually want to impute some knowledge to him, posting it on a forum he may or may not read, or possibly an associate may or may not read ....
Probably isn't an effective strategy.
While he has some notoriety, he doesn't seem like a particularly difficult person to reach.
That said, "hey, in this interview, you sucked", probably won't get you the desired effect you're hoping for.
Some sort of non-public communication - "hey, I watched this interview you did, its seemed like a succinct 'elevator pitch' of your position might have helped it go better, I've watched/listened/read alot of your (material/stuff/whatever), here is an elevator pitch that I think communicates your position, if it would be helpful, you're free to use it, riff off of it, and change it how you see fit. It meant to help, be well"
might get you closer to the desired effect you're hoping for.
Being good at media appearances is a tough deal, some people spend a lot of money on media training, and still aren't very good at it.
Pitt19802
1yr ago
Funny thing, before that pattern occurred to me as spam, I'd only get a DM maybe 1/4th of the time, 0/x of the time was it something worth the engagement
Pitt19802
1yr ago
Seconded, love a list of Twitter accounts you think would be good to follow (or I guess Discords)
Seems like my Twitter feed has been overtaken w/ "Everyone is using GPT wrong! I've put together how to use it right! Retweet and I'll DM you! (Must be following)"
Guess I must have fallen for it enough that I got sucked into this particular version of Twitter hell
Pitt19802
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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.
I don't think leaping the pile is the way to stop that play.
Chris Jones did that last night, had Hurt behind the line of scrimmage, then got pushed over the first down.
You don't have any power once you've left your feet.
I think you need to meet force with force, I would line your two biggest defensive tackle over the ball, then your next two biggest tackles behind them to push on their back. And try to get your 4 biggest guys trying to push the center back into Hurts' lap. (I would put an Offensive Lineman out there if I thought they were 1 of my top 4 force generators)
Maybe put 2 more guys behind them, but at some point you have to guard against them pitching the ball wide.
At one point the Arena League had a rule where the clock would stop in the last minute if the ball didn't cross the line of scrimmage, to eliminate end game kneel downs.
"For most of the league's history, any play that did not advance the ball across the line of scrimmage also stopped the clock; this prevented teams from kneeling to run out the clock. (This rule was repealed in 2018.) It also rewards defensive play, as a tackle for loss automatically stops the clock."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-minute_warning
Obviously wouldn't have affected the play last night as the runner was past the line of scrimmage (but I guess would have affected Mahomes subsequent kneel downs).
Pitt19802
1yr ago
Wanted to start off by saying I really enjoyed your submission. I think the model of intuition you laid out is largely one I agree with.
Yeah, I found it to be a difficult topic, which is ok.
I was mostly motivated to submit something because I really like the competition model.
I find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Prize_Foundation pretty fascinating.
I really like the idea of scaling it down, both to try and shape a nascent internet community (does this internet community still count as nascent???) you're part of, and even just to generate insights into something that's just bothering you.
I really like it conceptually, so I felt like I should submit something, if nothing else, to support it as a model of something I think we should get more of.
I'm not sure I had any particularly fantastic insight into the topic, certainly none I would have thought to share if FiveHourMarathon had posted 'hey, how do you think intuition works?' in a Small-Scale question thread or something. (Reading over the posts, I think this is somewhat reflected in that my submission seems to do the worst job of staying on the topic).
I think that's sort of what makes the competition model cool though. If nothing else, its a way to break people out of their shells. If there's a particular topic you want to mine the board expertise about, this seems like a good model.
I like it enough that I think I might found a 2nd competition on a different question.
If people have any thoughts about shaping the competition in a way that works well, I'd be interested in that. This topic was pretty broad, would a narrower topic work better?
"I think people judging our essays might be very quick to criticize and say: why didn't the writer mention X? how didn't the writer connect Y with Z? (it's obvious)"
Again, I enjoyed yours quite a bit.
Not sure writing generates these sorts of responses unless its good enough to be engaged with. I would take any such response as a perverse form of flattery.
"then of course the time limit doesn't help (although without it I probably would have delayed the work even more than I did)."
I'll just speak for myself as someone who submitted the final, without the deadline, I wouldn't have gotten around to generating a submission.
"the end result might not necessarily be a reflection of your thoughts on the subject, which are probably evolving as we speak (the very next day I had yet another insight that I feel should be worthy of writing about)."
fwiw, I had the same experience, if anything, I think that's one of the real values of getting it out of my head and into the real world, thoughts that are sort of 80% formed, you can keep 80% formed for a long time in your head, exposing them to light forces them to evolve.
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.
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
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
1yr ago
Do we have 2 submissions right now? Do we need a third by the end of the day to trigger the competition? I tried to outline a submission last week, and hated what I put together.
If we need another just to trigger the competition, I let the fingers fly and submit something.
Pitt19802
1yr 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
1yr ago
So now that the Eagles have made the Super Bowl,
Any thoughts on how this post played out?
Good job predicting 13-14 wins!
From this vantage point they seemed to have gotten pretty good luck with their playoff draw, between a Giants team that seemed like a good matchup, then a 49ers team that promptly ran out of QBs.
I guess the Eagles were a 2.5 point favorite going into the 49ers game, were you motivated to short them on that line? (fwiw, I was somewhat favoring the 49ers going into that game, not a sports bettor generally though, so my wallet wasn't behind my thought processes).
Looks like the Super Bowl opened as a pick 'em, and moved to Eagles by 1.5.
You motivated to short the Eagles now? Have they converted you?
This is the wrong way to figure this out, but....
On August 30, 2016, Gaetz won the Republican primary with 35.7 percent of the vote to Greg Evers's 21.5 percent and Cris Dosev's 20.6 percent, along with five other candidates.[37] This virtually assured Gaetz of victory in the general election; with a Cook Partisan Voting Index of R+22, the 1st is Florida's most Republican district, and one of the most Republican in the nation.
In the November 8 general election, Gaetz defeated Democratic nominee Steven Specht with 69 percent of the vote.[38] He is only the seventh person to represent this district since 1933 (the district was numbered the 3rd before 1963).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Gaetz#U.S._House_of_Representatives
Just for spit balling, let say he keeps 35.7 % of the republican vote as a 3rd party candidate
.357 x .69 = .246 for Gaetz .643 x .69 = .444 for Republican Gaetz replacement 1 - .69 = .31 for Democratic Replacement
That looks like they should threaten to kick him out
running the numbers if he keeps 50% of the Republican vote
.5 x .69 = .345 for Gaetz and his Republican replacement .31 for his Democratic replacement
That looks like risking turning a safe district blue
I suspect the people whose careers are riding on these decisions, can get better data to run the math on if they want it
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