P.O.S.S.E.
“Klein’s research concentrated quite a lot on fire chiefs and the decisions that they made on when to bring a crew out of a building. This is an unusual case – it’s a high-stakes decision that needs to be made under time pressure, by a single individual. It turned out that one of the most important inputs to that decision was whether the floor of the building was reported by experienced firefighters to be “spongy”
“The two games were a disappointment to EA, the studios that made them were closed, and Pick was shunted to another internal studio instead. A new studio EA had bought to embrace the zeitgeist of the time: Facebook games. Specifically, The Sims Social Facebook game. Pick didn’t care for it at all. “I hated every minute of it,” he says. All day long he’d stare at huge leaderboards showing which in-game pieces of furniture were making the most money. “I felt sick to my stomach working there,” he says. So he left.
This, really, is where the trail on Simon Pick starts to go cold, because it’s the point he turns away from the games industry”
“But frankly, none of it has ever remotely interested me, and not out of an indifference to science or sporting morality but because to reduce Pogacar to a soup of numbers and chemicals is really the narrowest and most boring way of appreciating him; the most boring way of appreciating sport”
“That’s another dimension of the problem. Some proportion of people who a decade or two ago might have written a substantial book are now instead dabbling in podcasts, newsletters, or YouTube channels. Some of them find the work as satisfying as writing—the feedback is instantaneous—although it’s equally unremunerative. The new platforms are as susceptible to blockbuster economics as the publishing world. They, too, lack a middle class”
“They really are angry that the Conservatives have the brass neck to attack them for the early release of prisoners, a decision whose alternatives were, broadly speaking, “invent a time machine” or “legalise crime”. They might be wrong. But they do mean it. The best – the true – answer to “why is your messaging so gloomy?” is “We really are gloomy”. Sometimes, it’s not about tactics at all.
Starmer’s genuine anger about the state of the nation was behind what was, for me, the most effective part of his Conference speech: a dividing line about populism as “the politics of easy answers” and the need to be honest about trade-offs: providing more prison places means building prisons, cheaper electricity means overground pylons, having more houses means putting them in actual places, processing asylum seekers means granting asylum, and so on”
“Or if you don’t like the Silver Bulletin or 538 or RealClearPolitics averages, I’ll offer another alternative. Make your own average. Seriously, it’s not that hard. But I do have one stipulation: you have to publicly specify the rules ahead of time. I think you’ll find that when you’re forced to be consistent, to set standards that aren’t governed by your ad hoc sense of the vibes or by your partisan preferences, you’ll have a lot more sympathy for the polling aggregators — and you won’t be as surprised when one of the outliers turns out to be right”
https://www.natesilver.net/p/trust-a-pollster-more-when-it-publishes
“The Constitution’s framers worried that individual states might try to grab too much power in the House by creating dozens and dozens of congressional districts, so they specified that a district could not be smaller than 30,000 people. But they put no upper limit on district sizes. After the 1920 census revealed that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans, the House in 1929 capped its numbers at 435 to keep power away from those urban dwellers, including immigrants, that lawmakers considered dangerous, thus skewing the Electoral College in favor of rural America. Today the average congressional district includes 761,169 individuals—more than the entire population of Wyoming, Vermont, or Alaska—which weakens the power of larger states”
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-20-2024
“On average, the public thinks asylum seekers make up a third of total immigration. The more sceptical about migration they are, the higher the percentage they think it is. People who hold liberal views on immigration think asylum seekers make up 19% of the total. People who hold critical views of immigration think they make up 47%. They’re all wrong, although needless to say the anti-immigration lot are most wrong of all. The actual figure is seven per cent.
More than five times as many people come to the UK to study each year than claim asylum. But the public thinks there are twice as many asylum seekers as international students.
Whichever way you look at it, that is a failure of journalism. Politicians must take some responsibility too, of course, but it’s basically their job to lie to the public”
https://iandunt.substack.com/p/farage-and-his-mortifying-dimwit
“Over the last 15 years, movies and television have been obsessed with moral ambiguity. Walter White was pushed to break bad because of an unjust system, everyone in Game of Thrones had their ideals compromised by the realities of the world, and you can’t throw a rock in the Marvel Cinematic Universe without hitting a villain that we’re supposed to believe made a few good points. There was a time when these blurry lines between right and wrong felt like a sign of maturity, an indicator that what we were watching was for adults rather than kids. But now that this has become the default state for most shows and movies, it’s too often hollow and obligatory. Moral ambiguity has become a cheap way to paper over a story that doesn’t have anything meaningful to say, and superficial flaws have become camouflage for characters too flat to make concepts like morality feel relevant at all”
https://www.polygon.com/lotr-rings-of-power/446640/rings-power-trop-morality-lord-rings
“It is my hypothesis that, back in the 2000s, everybody’s activation energy was a bit lower. More of us were bloggers, back then. Linking felt more natural, somehow. Now, in the 2020s, the algorithms do most of that work.
You must lower your activation energy again.
When a thoughtful reader shares a link, it’s not intrusive. It’s not annoying. You have to imagine the integral: all the readers, all the links. If the World Wide Web has any hope at all — and it might not — this is it”