Brad DeLong

Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren

'"Well, is it art?" "I do not know," said Mordel. "It may be. Perhaps randomicity is the principle behind artistic technique. I cannot judge this work because I do not understand it. I must therefore go deeper, and inquire into what lies behind it, rather than merely considering the technique whereby it was produced. I know that human artists never set out to create art, as such," he said, "but rather to portray with their techniquest some features of objects and their functions which they deemed significant." "'Significant'? In what sense of the word?" "In the only sense of the word possible under the circumstances: significant in relation to the human condition, and worth of accentuation because of the manner in which they touched upon it." "In what manner?" "Obviously, it must be in a manner knowable only to one who has experience of the human condition." "There is a flaw somewhere in your logic, Mordel, and I shall find it." "I will wait." "If your major premise is correct," said Frost after awhile, "then I do not comprehend art."' -- Roger Zelazny, "For a Breath I Tarry"

Kevin Drum:

Why the Digital Revolution Won't be a Rerun of the Industrial Revolution: Whenever you talk about smart machines taking all our jobs, the usual pushback is that you're being a Luddite—an argument that's especially appropriate this year since it's the 200th anniversary of the end of the Luddite movement… all those skilled weavers in 1813 thought that power looms would put them out of jobs, but they were right only in the most limited way…. But the Digital Revolution won't be a rerun of the Industrial Revolution…. Karl Smith… [has a] take:

Creating things is a matter of rearranging atoms. Broadly speaking, you need two things to do this — a power system to overcome the gravitational and electromagnetic forces that tend to hold atoms in their relative positions and a control system to guarantee that atoms wind up in the right place. The industrial revolution was about one thing — more power! But, more power means the need for more control. Hence, the Industrial Revolution meant a rapid increase in the demand for human brains, not decrease. Smart machines provide both the power system and the control system in one convenient package. You can still argue that displaced humans will end up doing something else—we just don't know what yet—but it's a tough argument to win. If you agree that artificial intelligence will be real someday soon, then by definition smart machines will be able to do just about anything that humans can do. The answer to "Humans will do X," for any value of X, is "But robots can do that too." That wasn't true of the Industrial Revolution.

If you don't believe that AI is around the corner, then there's no argument to have here (aside from why you think AI is so far off). But if you do, then we have some serious questions to ponder about the future of work, the future of money, and the future of democracy. That's what my piece is mainly about.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Dark Art of Racecraft

Andrew Sullivan says, apropos of Jason Richwine, the cross-burning Charles Murray, and company, that the racists are the real victims here…

Twenty-eight hours before Sullivan posts--thus showing that Ta-Nehisi Coates's worldline is capable of following closed timeline paths--Ta Nehisi Coates delivers the smackdown. And in the process he says what Sandy Jencks, George Borjas, and Dick Zeckhauser really should have said to Jason Richwine when he first proposed his dissertation topic, and he lays out arguments that Richwine really should have been forced to acknowledge and grapple with before they signed off on his dissertation:

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Dark Art of Racecraft:

Dave Weigel is one of my favorite reporters, but I think this piece on Jason Richwine, intelligence research, and "race" deserves a closer look:

Academics aren't so concerned with the politics. But they know all too well the risks that come with research connecting IQ and race. At the start of his dissertation, Richwine thanked his three advisers -- George Borjas, Christopher Jenks, and Richard Zeckhauser -- for being so helpful and so bold. Borjas "helped me navigate the minefield of early graduate school," he wrote. "Richard Zeckhauser, never someone to shy away from controversial ideas, immediately embraced my work…." Anyone who works in Washington and wants to explore the dark arts of race and IQ research is in the right place. The city's a bit like a college campus, where investigating "taboo" topics is rewarded, especially on the right. A liberal squeals "racism," and they hear the political-correctness cops (most often, the Southern Poverty Law Center) reporting a thought crime.

It is almost as though the "dark arts of race and IQ" were an untapped field of potential knowledge, not one of the most discredited fields of study in modern history. We should first be clear that there is nothing mysterious or forbidden about purporting to study race and intelligence. Indeed, despite an inability to define "race" or "intelligence," such studies are one of the dominant intellectual strains in Western history. We forget this because its convient to believe that history begins with the Watts riots. But it's important to remember the particular tradition that Charles Murray and Jason Richwine are working in. A brief reminder seems in order. 

Naughty, Naughty, Jim Manzi!: Inappropriate Misunderstanding of the Neyman-Pearson Hypothesis Testing Framework Strikes Again!

Kevin Drum sends us to:

Jim Manzi: "When interpreting the physical health results of the Oregon Experiment, we either apply a cut-off of 95% significance to identify those effects which will treat as relevant for decision-making, or we do not. If we do apply this cut-off… then we should agree with the authors’ conclusion that the experiment “showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years.”

Nope.

The study did not show that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes.

The study failed to show that Medicaid generated [statistically] significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes.

The confusion of a failure to show statistical significance with a showing of a failure to have substantive significance is a basic, sophomoric error.

For it to "show that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements", the study would have had to have produced an 0.95 confidence interval that excludes significant improvements, wouldn't there? And there is no such interval.

So: Naughty, naughty, Jim Manzi!

Neyman-Pearson is not a trolley car. You cannot get off it where you want. You have to ride it to the end of the line.

Bernanke-Haters at the Sohn Conference

Stanley Druckenmiller:

Druckenmiller noted everyone is saying, "love the market long term, looking for a correction." He believes the opposite, loves market short-term, but hates it long term. Strongly disagrees with quantitative easing by Bernanke now. Only agreed with the first QE. "His bond buying is controlling the most important price in the US economy." Says it will end badly, despite money-printing being beneficial to financial assets currently. When Fed slightly tightens, that will hurt things he says. Bernanke completely ignored strong economic data in January and February, but with slightly soft data later, he printed even more money. Expects a "melt-up" in the short-term, due to Fed's current policy…. Bernanke is “running the most inappropriate monetary policy in history.”

Dana Golstein: ATTENTION JASON RICHWINE!!: You're Not the First Guy to (Wrongly) Believe Immigrants are Dumb

Dana Goldstein:

Att. Jason Richwine: You're Not the First Guy to (Wrongly) Believe Immigrants are Dumb: The human brain remains, in many crucial aspects, a mystery to science. So what is IQ? It is a measure of the capacity to learn in the linear fashion prized by Western culture, and we know that it is partially determined by genetics. Yet in the life of the average, individual human, those "innate" genes are vastly, vastly overpowered by the effects of environment: decent nutrition; an emotionally stable, vocabulary-rich home life; physically and emotionally attentive parents; good schools and teachers. All those factors are in shorter supply among high-poverty populations. Claiming that such populations are genetically inferior ignores about a century of research and writing on the malleability of IQ and the proper uses of intelligence assessments.

Austin Frakt: Power Calculations for Diabetes in the NEJM Oregon Medicaid Study

Austin Frakt:

Power calculations for the Oregon Medicaid study: Kevin Drum:

Let’s do the math. In the Oregon study, 5.1 percent of the people in the control group had elevated GH [glycated hemoglobin, aka A1C, or colloquially, blood sugar] levels. Now let’s take a look at the treatment group. It started out with about 6,000 people who were offered Medicaid. Of that, 1,500 actually signed up. If you figure that 5.1 percent of them started out with elevated GH levels, that’s about 80 people. A 20 percent reduction would be 16 people.

Josh Barro: What to Make of the Oregon Health Study

I would say that we already knew that the Medicaid model is not a terribly productive way to create chronic conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes, and that we need to find better condition-management models pronto. But I would also say that the depression and financial security findings are better news than I expected. About what I would have expected (but worse than I might have hoped) on some welfare indicators, better than expected (and as good as I might have hoped) on others--net-net, goods news for the efficacy of Medicaid expansion.

And people who say otherwise aren't reading the study…

Oregon Medicaid Lottery Says: "Medicaid Expansion Definitely Worth It": Hoisted from Incidental Economist Comments Weblogging

Matt:

Two thoughts:

1. On your point #1 on sample sizes, note that the study is effectively even smaller than you’re saying. Thinking of the high A1C sub-sample as containing 624 people is correct for the intent-to-treat analysis (i.e. for estimating the effect of offering insurance). But (net) take-up was only about 25 percent. Thus, for the IV analysis (which provide the estimates of the effect of insurance per se), the point estimates and variance are scaled up by a factor of 4=1/0.25. This means that the “RCT-equivalent” sample size is only 156=624/4. That’s really, really small, even before you get to the fact that insuring people does not automatically get them the appropriate care (your point about direct versus indirect interventions).

Noah Smith Sends Us to the 2500 Year Old Refutation of Thomas Nagel

Zhuangzi:

Happy fish: These Fish Are Happy (But How Do You Know That?): One day Zhuangzi and Huizi are strolling on Bridge Hao:

Zhuangzi: "Look how happy the fish are just swimming around in the river."

Huizi: "How do you know they are happy? You are not a fish."

Zhuangzi: "And you are not me. How do you know I don't know the fish are happy?"

Huizi: "Of course I'm not you, and I don't know what you think. But I do know that you're not a fish, and so you couldn't possibly know the fish are happy."

Zhuangzi: "Look, when you asked me how I knew the fish were happy, you already knew that I knew the fish were happy. I knew it from my feelings standing on this bridge."

tr. Brian Bruya

Psychological Roots of Political Austerity?

Paul Krugman: Psychological Roots of Austerity:

Simon Wren-Lewis has a thoughtful post on the reasons for austerity mania, in which he accepts the role of special interests but argues that there are also psychological roots. Specifically, he suggests that politicians know that they are often irresponsible, and:

when the market starts to punish fiscal profligacy, it is as if a parent has discovered the child’s guilty secret. (The market is seen by many as a mysterious deity.) The politician wants to repent (or at least be seen to repent), and atone for past sins. After eating too many pastries, we go on a crash diet. After deficit bias, we have austerity.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?: Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard Edition

Why do the Weekly Standard's writers work so hard to persuade me that they lack both intelligence and honor? I mean, they work really hard to do so--and they do so quite effectively.

Let's back up, and start with one of my favorite readings from Thomas Nagel (2012), Mind and Cosmos:

If I decide, when the sun rises on my right, that I must be driving north instead of south, it is because I recognize that my belief that I am driving south is inconsistent with that observation [that the sun is rising on my right], together with what I know about the direction of rotation of the earth. I abandon the belief because I recognize that it couldn’t be true…. If I oppose the abolition of the inheritance tax, it is because I recognize that the design of property rights should be sensitive not only to autonomy but also to fairness…. I operate in the space of reasons. The appearance of reason… seems… something radically emergent…. Like consciousness, reason is inseparable from the physical life of organisms that have it…. It was originally a biological evolutionary process…. This, then, is what a theory of everything has to explain… the emergence from a lifeless universe of reproducing organisms… greater and greater functional complexity… consciousness… [and] the development of consciousness into an instrument of transcendence that can grasp objective reality and objective value.

I claim that Thomas Nagel's mind is not an instrument of transcendence grasping objective reality and objective value. I claim that, as Thomas Nagel claims to transcendentally grasp objective value when he concludes that there should be an inheritance tax, he is wrong. I claim that, as Thomas Nagel claims to transcendentally grasp objective reality when he concludes that if he is facing south the rising sun must be on his left, he is wrong.

As evidence for his wrongness, I point out that I once was facing south and saw the sun rising in front of me: in the south. True story. During northern hemisphere winter, a plane flying over the pole from Europe to America can exit the earth's shadow at a point where the sun is due south, thus the sun can rise in the south, and it did.

Macro as I Saw It Back in 2003: Tuesday Ten Years Ago on the Internet Weblogging

Brad DeLong : Economics 236: Your Last Course in Macroeconomics

PART I: A QUICK OVERVIEW

January 22: Introduction

• Olivier Blanchard (2000), "What Do We Know About Macroeconomics that Fisher and Wicksell Did Not?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 115:4 (November), pp. 1375-1410.
• Olivier Blanchard (1990), "Why Does Money Affect Output? A Survey", in B.M. Friedman and F. Hahn eds, Handbook of Monetary Economics, 1990, Vol 2, 779-835.

January 29: Unemployment and Institutions

• Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides (1994), "Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment," Review of Economic Studies 61, pp 397-416.
• Olivier Blanchard and Justin Wolfers (2000) "The Role of Shocks and Institutions in the Rise of European Unemployment: The Aggregate Evidence," Economic Journal, 110 (March), pp. C 1 —33.
• Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Katz (1997), "What We Know and Do Not Know About the Natural Rate of Unemployment", Journal of Economic Perspectives 11-1 (Winter), pp. 51-73.
• Steven Nickell (1997), "Unemployment and Labor Market Rigidities: Europe versus North America", Journal of Economic Perspectives 11-3 (Summer), pp. 55-74.

February 5: Contracts and Aggregate Output

• Robert Townsend (1979) "Optimal Contracts and Competitive Markets with Costly State Verification", Journal of Economic Theory 21 (October), pp. 265-293.
• Benjamin Bernanke and Mark Gertler (1989), "Agency Costs, Net Worth, and Business Fluctuations," American Economic Review 79 (March), pp . 14-31.

Austrian Non-Economic Reasoning: Robert Murphy Rejects P(A|B) = [P(B|A)P(A)]/P(B)]: Thursday How Not to Mark Your Beliefs to Market Weblogging

Non-economic reasoning? Economic non-reasoning? Non-economic non-reasoning. I'm not sure what to call rejecting Bayes's Rule…

Suppose that for some reason--never mind why--you were back in 2009 confident--70% sure--that Bernanke's policies were inappropriate and disastrous, because if they were adopted they were near-certain--90%--to bring 10%/year if not 20%/year inflation soon--by 2012.

Then 2012 rolls around. No inflation. What, then, come 2013 is your subjective probability that Bernanke's policies are inappropriate and disastrous?

Your confidence that Bernanke's policies are inappropriate and disastrous should drop. According to Bayes’s Rule--which is a simple principle designed to guard yourself from being vulnerable to Dutch Book attacks--it should drop from 70% to 19%.

Not, however, if you are Robert Murphy.

Austrian economists, you see, don't need no stinking Bayes's Rule.

To suggest that they ought or might change their minds in response to evidence is, in some bizarre way, to impugn their character:

7 Tesla Model S Owners Set Out to Recreate New York Times Reporter John Broder's Road Trip to Groton

TeslaRoadTrip on Twitter:

7 Tesla Model S Owners Set out Saturday 2/16 to recreate the NY Times Reporter's uncommitted test drive from Maryland to Connecticut and prove it can be done.

I Want Cosma Shalizi to Write a Weblog Post About How Yesterday's Meteor Strike in Chelyabinsk Should Change How We Live...

The Opening of "The History of the Peloponnesian War" by Thoukydides the Athenian

Worth noting for two reasons:

First, Thoukydides takes it for granted that the coming of "civilization"--large-scale social organization in the form of states, etc.--produces a general pacification that allows for a large degree of mutual social disarmament: one has to worry less about pirates, brigands, and the possibility that the stranger one meets on the road will rob or kill you.

Second, of course, Thoukydides is writing about another thing produced by the coming of "civilization": the greatest war he and his kin have ever seen, stretching across 800 miles and over 30 years.

Deadly violence by humans against humans becomes much less an endemic fact of everyday life and much more something concentrated: committed by skilled professionals in concentrated bursts. Are your chances of being a killer less? Certainly. Are your chances of dying violently less? Probably…

Hosted from the Archives: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

Brad DeLong (2005) : The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences: Chad Orzel provides the pointer to Helge Kraghe, who writes in Physics Web http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/13/12/8 about how quantum theory existed in the equations of physics half a decade before the human brain of any physicist understood it….

Max Planck comes up with an equation that works. In order to do so he has to make a "purely formal assumption." And it is only half a decade later that Einstein realizes that the little h that appears in Max Planck's equation is not a "purely formal assumption" or an "artefact" but instead tells us what is perhaps the most important thing about the guts of the universe.

For half a decade the first equation of quantum theory was there. But nobody knew how to read it.

It is this "what if we took this equation seriously?" factor that is, to my mind at least, the spookiest thing about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics. Take the h in Max Planck's equation seriously, and you have the quantum principle--something that was not in Planck's brain when he wrote the equation down. Take seriously the symmetry in Maxwell's equations between the force generated when you move a magnet near a wire and the force and the force generated when you move a wire near a magnet, and you have Special Relativity--something that was not in Maxwell's brain when he wrote down the equation. Take Newton's gravitational force law's equivalence between inertial and gravitational mass seriously and you have General Relativity--something never in Newton's mind. And take the mathematical pathology at r = 2M in the Schwarzchild metric for the space-time metric around a point mass seriously, and you have black holes and event horizons.

Cosma Shalizi: Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View

Lectures:

1. Regression: Predicting and Relating Quantitative Features
2. The Truth About Linear Regression
3. Model Evaluation: Error and Inference
4. Smoothing Methods in Regression
5. The Bootstrap
6. Heteroskedasticity, Weighted Least Squares, and Variance Estimation
7. Splines
8. Additive Models
9. Writing R Code
10. Testing Regression Specifications
11. Hypothesis Testing and Statistical Evidence
12. Logistic Regression
13. Generalized Linear Models and Generalized Additive Models
14. GLM and GAM Examples
15. Multivariate Distributions
16. Density Estimation
17. Simulation
18. Relative Distributions and Smooth Tests
19. Principal Components Analysis
20. Factor Analysis
21. Mixture Models
22. Graphical Models
23. Graphical Causal Models
24. Identifying Causal Effects from Observations
25. Estimating Causal Effects from Observations
26. Time Series I, without latent variables
27. Time Series II, with latent variables

Homework:

1. What's That Got to Do with the Price of Condos in California?
2. Advantages of Backwardness
3. How the Hyracotherium Got Its Mass
4. It's Not the Heat that Gets to You, It's the Sustained Conjunction of Heat with Elevated Levels of Atmospheric Pollutants
5. How the North American Mammalian Paleofauna Got a Crook in Its Curve
6. What Makes the Union Strong?
7. Fun with Density Estimation
8. Red Brain, Blue Brain
9. How the Recent Mammals Got Their Size Distribution
10. Separated at Birth
11. Brought to You by the Letters D, A, and G

Invasive Species Are No Joke: 800 Floridians Go into the Everglades to Hunt Giant Pythons

I say blast off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure…

Cosma Shalizi vs. the Fen-Dwelling Bayesians

Cosma Shalizi: When Fen-Dwelling Bayesians Can't Handle the Truth:

Attention conservation notice: Self-promotion of an academic talk, based on a three-year-old paper, on the arcana of how Bayesian methods work from a frequentist perspective.

Because is snowing relentlessly and the occasional bout of merely freezing air is a blessed relief, I will be escaping to a balmier clime next week: Cambridgeshire.

"When Bayesians Can't Handle the Truth", statistics seminar, Cambridge University: Abstract: There are elegant results on the consistency of Bayesian updating for well-specified models facing IID or Markovian data, but both completely correct models and fully observed states are vanishingly rare. In this talk, I give conditions for posterior convergence that hold when the prior excludes the truth, which may have complex dependencies. The key dynamical assumption is the convergence of time-averaged log likelihoods (Shannon-McMillan-Breiman property). The main statistical assumption is a building into the prior a form of capacity control related to the method of sieves. With these, I derive posterior and predictive convergence, and a large deviations principle for the posterior, even in infinite-dimensional hypothesis spaces; and clarify role of the prior and of model averaging as regularization devices. (Paper)

Place and time: 1 February 2013, 4-5 pm in MR 12, CMS

And my views on all this hoisted from archives:

Randall Munroe Explains Why There Are No Rich Frequentist Statisticians: New Yorker #fail Vulnerable to a Dutch Book Weblogging

Randall Munroe:

Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis:

Bayesian Statistics and what Nate Silver Gets Wrong: The Bayesian approach is much less helpful when there is no consensus about what the prior probabilities should be…. In actual practice, the method of evaluation most scientists use most of the time is a variant of a technique proposed by the statistician Ronald Fisher in the early 1900s. Roughly speaking, in this approach, a hypothesis is considered validated by data only if the data pass a test that would be failed ninety-five or ninety-nine per cent of the time if the data were generated randomly. The advantage of Fisher’s approach (which is by no means perfect) is that to some degree it sidesteps the problem of estimating priors where no sufficient advance information exists. In the vast majority of scientific papers, Fisher’s statistics (and more sophisticated statistics in that tradition) are used.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Those of us economists who grumble about Bayesian statistics don't want us to move backward to Frequentism but forward to (prior probabilities) x (value of being right) -- the decision-theory counterparts of the so-called risk-neutral valuation method in finance...

Those of us economists who do use frequentist statistics know something very important that Marcus and Davis show no sign at all of knowing: that if you fail to reject the null hypothesis at 0.05, you do not conclude (even provisionally) that the null hypothesis is true--instead, you go gather more data and test again until you can either reject the null against the alternative or reject (the interesting) alternative(s) against the null.

That's science!!

The Number of Geese Makes Me Think There Is Definitely a Niche Open in Kansas City for the Giant Eagle of the Pleistocene...

Ramesh Ponnuru Denies Global Warming Thrice

Ramesh Ponnuru:

Obama's Bogus Journey: The world will little note nor long remember anything President Barack Obama said in his second inaugural…. Obama said that developing “sustainable-energy sources” is “what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.” Does anyone believe that in a week anyone will find that an arresting and compelling thought? Or credit it for being a thought at all?

And this is a person who is held up as an example of the "decent", "intellectual" right whom one can talk to…

Feh!

Since I Do Not Have a Treadmill Desk, the Quadruple Espresso Was a Mistake...

Is It Wrong to Contemplate Beginning the Workday with a Quadruple Espresso?

Niagara Falls Is 167 Feet High, Lake Erie Has an Average Depth of 64 Feet and a Maximum Depth of 210 Feet...

…and in 50,000 years erosion will have carried Niagara Falls all the way up to Lake Erie.

How fast will Lake Erie then empty? And what will the Great Lakes look like then?

Does Thomas Nagel Reject All of Quantum Mechanics as Well as Evolution and Cognitive Science?

Thomas Nagel: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Surely False:

• But it seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense…

• My skepticism is… just a belief that the available scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of scientific opinion, does not… rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense…

• Everything we believe, even the most far-reaching cosmological theories, has to be based ultimately on common sense, and on what is plainly undeniable…

• I have argued patiently against the prevailing form of naturalism, a reductive materialism that purports to capture life and mind through its neo-Darwinian extension…. I find this view antecedently unbelievable— a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense…

If you are going to reject scientific theories because they fail to match up to your "common sense"...

More Jumped-Up Monkeys Running Hume 3.0 on Their Wetware vs. the Hacks of Sol III Weblogging

Best comments on Brad DeLong: The Question Is Whether Our Minds Are too Powerful to Be the Result of Purely Darwinian Processes: Complete Self-Pwnage Weblogging:

J. Bradford DeLong said in reply to PaulC…:

Re: "'Brad Delong, to an incorrect conclusion about which direction he was facing, it follows that pure reason can never be a source of knowledge.' I missed the part where Brad DeLong claimed that reason could never be a source of knowledge."

So did I. But don't be too hard on Landsburg. He's just a jumped-up monkey...

kabosh said…:

Responder "Peter Parker" on Gene Callahan's blog provides the response to Callahan below (which Callahan replies to with either complete misunderstanding, or with some very heavy sarcasm-- hard to say which). I think this is the clearest statement yet, in this blog-vs-blog debate, on the distinction between Nagel's "a priori teleology" and the proposition that all of our reasoning faculties come from evolution, and accretions of social learning and structure laid atop evolution.

I understand your reading of Nagel to be the following: Nagel argues that he possesses an ability, Reason, which allows him to recognise truth directly - in this case, the truth he recognises ("grasps directly") is that two contradictory things cannot be true at the same time. Further, this ability to recognise a logical truth puts him in contact with "the rational order of the world".

I think the materialist counter-argument is that in recognising this truth what Nagel is doing is slightly re-purposing mental circuits that evolved to make logical deductions about the world (I thought that there was one lion in the cave, I just saw two lions come out, I now know I must be cautious since I was wrong about my first belief). This type of reasoning is commonly observed in animal experiments.

This reasoning has well defined failure modes (like our lack of understanding of probability, or the difficulty we have in reasoning about the properties of aggregates vs individual parts) that are consistent with the idea that our thinking is an extension of heuristics built around spatial and visual metaphors that evolved to help us survive, more than some privileged access to a world of pure reason.

More, our ability to press these mental models to alternative service has been greatly stretched by such things as quantum mechanics, where our intuition fails utterly. Our ability to progress here depends on slowly building tools (mathematics) over a long time to help compensate for the deficiencies in our raw thinking ability. This tool building is an essentially social enterprise much bigger than a single human brain."

The Question Is Whether Our Minds Are too Powerful to Be the Result of Purely Darwinian Processes: Complete Self-Pwnage Weblogging

Someone who claims to be a "friend" makes me aware that others are joining Alvin Plantzinga and Gene Callahan on the side of Thomas Nagel's creationists--those claiming that we reason and we know we reason like winged angelic reasoning beings with transcendent access to objective reality, rather than like jumped-up monkeys using error-prone Humean heuristics on brains evolved to improve our reproductive fitness, and hence we know that Darwin is wrong on the evolution of the human mind.

Steven Landsburg.

Steven Landsburg: Unreasonable: Brad DeLong appears to argue here that because pure reason once led him, Brad Delong, to an incorrect conclusion about which direction he was facing, it follows that pure reason can never be a source of knowledge. (If that’s not his point, then the only alternative reading I can find is that Thomas Nagel is guilty of choosing a poor example to illustrate a point that DeLong would rather ridicule than refute.) It would be too too easy to make a snarky comment about how we’ve known all along about Brad DeLong’s tenuous relationship with reason….

[H]ere, for the record… facts… none of them, as far as I can see, accessible to humans via anything but pure reason:

Michael Mann vs. Nate Silver on Global Warming

Ask Nate Silver about global warming skeptics, and he will say something like:

One type of skepticism flows from self-interest. In 2011 alone, the fossil fuel industry spent about $300 million on lobbying activities.... What they say should not be mistaken for an attempt to make accurate predictions.... A second type of skepticism falls into the category of contrarianism. In any contentious debate, some people will find it advantageous to align themselves with the crowd, while a smaller number will come to see themselves as persecuted outsiders.... “If you look at climate, if you look at ozone, if you look at cigarette smoking, there is always a community of people who are skeptical of the science-driven results,” Rood told me.

Karl Smith Sends Us to Simon Blackburn on Thomas Nagel on Materialism

http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2012/11/16/blackburn-on-nagel-on-materialism/

Simon Blackburn: Nagel’s central idea is that there are things that science, as it is presently conceived, cannot possibly explain. The current conception is that, given a purely physical beginning, everything else – chemistry, biology, life, mind, consciousness, intelligence, values, understandings, even science – follows on by natural processes. Particles beget atoms beget molecules beget enzymes beget proteins beget life begets Homo sapiens who begets the Royal Society and the rules of tennis. We do not understand every step in this process, naturally, but we can be reasonably confident of its overall shape and confident, too, that any remaining gaps that can be closed will be closed only by more understanding of the same broad kind that we already have….

And:

Karl Smith: I hesitate to contradict Simon Blackburn, but I am not sure his description of the “current conception” does it justice.

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Winged Angelic Reasoning Beings vs. Jumped-Up Monkeys with Evolved Humean Heuristics Weblogging: Lee Arnold Summons the Ghost of Kurt Gödel

Lee Arnold summons the ghost of Kurt Gödel to make the careful argument that are minds might not be "mechanical": after all

Lee Arnold: It could remain problematic. There is also the possibility that if reason is an evolutionary development, we still may not be able to describe how it happened, nor run a Turing machine to evolve it again in silico. Consider Kurt Gödel's remarks on several consequences of his own theorem, quoted in Hao Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy (MIT Press, 1996):

The human mind is incapable of formulating (or mechanizing) all its mathematical intuitions. That is, if it has succeeded in formulating some of them, this very fact yields new intuitive knowledge, for example the consistency of this formalism. This fact may be called the 'incompletability' of mathematics. On the other hand, on the basis of what has been proved so far [1972], it remains possible that there may exist (and even be empirically discoverable) a theorem-proving machine which in fact IS equivalent to mathematical intuition, but cannot be PROVED to be so, nor even be proved to yield only CORRECT theorems of finitary number theory. (pp.184-5)

Either the human mind surpasses all machines (to be more precise: it can decide more number-theoretical questions than any machine) or else there exist number-theoretical questions undecidable for the human mind. [It is not excluded that both alternatives may be true. -- Wang] (p.185)

My incompleteness theorem makes it likely that mind is not mechanical, or else mind cannot understand its own mechanism. If my result is taken together with the rationalistic attitude which Hilbert had and which was not refuted by my results, then [we can infer] the sharp result that mind is not mechanical. This is so, because, if the mind were a machine, there would, contrary to this rationalistic attitude, exist number-theoretic questions undecidable for the human mind. (p.186-7)

David Brin on Fermi's Paradox

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2012/11/are-we-alone-in-cosmos-cursed-by-fermis.html

Facts & other stubborn things: Brad DeLong is making a real monkey of himself

http://factsandotherstubbornthings.blogspot.com/2012/11/brad-delong-is-making-real-monkey-of.html

Jumped-Up Monkeys with Darwinian Heuristics vs. Angelic Reasoning Beings with Direct Unmediated Access to Objective Reality Sun-Sets-But-Sun-Also-Rises Cage Match Smackdown Weblogging

UPDATED: To keep commenters from going down blind bypaths due to my imprecision. Bear with me: I am just a jumped-up monkey, after all...

Thomas Nagel argued that his reason could not have been the result of blind Darwinian evolution. He said:

• My reason tells me that if the sun is rising on my right then I am going north then.
• I believe I am going south.
• I believe I see the sun rising on my right
• My reason tells me that I must reject one of these two beliefs because they are inconsistent--either I must conclude that I am hallucinating, or I must conclude that I am not going south.
• Et cetera…
• This kind of transcendent access to truths of objective reality is not something that a jumped-up monkey with Darwinian heuristics can have.
• Therefore I am more than a jumped-up monkey with Darwinian heuristics: I am angelic reasoning being with direct unmediated access to objective reality.

I responded that he knew nothing of the kind:

His Darwinian heuristics had made a Humean guess that because the sun had risen on his right if he was facing north every single previous day, that the same held true today. I pointed out that this might be wrong--that he did not know that because the sun was rising on his right he was facing north, and did not know that he knew that he was facing north, and did not know that he knew that he knew he was facing north, but that he was just guessing.

And, to underscore this, I pointed out that I had once seen the sun rise due south, in which case if I had put the sun on my right I would have been facing not north but east. (I did not point out--but could have--that the claim that if you are facing north east is on your right fails at the South Pole: at the South Pole east is not on your right, north is on your right.)

This seemed to me to be conclusive: what Thomas Nagel took as a canonical example of an angelic reasoning being with direct unmediated access to objective reality was, when examined, nothing of the kind--but rather merely another example of the sad delusions to which jumped-up monkeys operating on error-prone Darwinian heuristics are liable.

Now Gene Callahan enters the ring on the side of the angelic reasoning beings with direct unmediated access to objective reality. I don't think he does any better than Nagel.

David Hume vs. Thomas Nagel: Knowing a Hawk from a Handsaw But Mad South-Southwest Weblogging

Tyler Cowen writes:

The new Thomas Nagel book: The title is Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False…. My bottom lines on it: (1) He is good on attacking the hidden hypocrisies…. He fully recognizes the absurdities (my word, not his) of dualism, and thinks them through carefully and honestly.  Bryan Caplan should beware…. The most typical sentence I found in the book was: “We can continue to hope for a transcendent self-understanding that is neither theistic nor reductionist.”… He doesn’t take seriously enough the view: “The Nagel theory of mind is simply wrong.” People will dismiss his arguments to remain in their comfort zone, while temporarily forgetting he is smarter than they are and furthermore that many of their views do not make sense or cohere internally…

And here Tyler appears to me to have gone off the rails. Thomas Nagel is not smarter than we are--in fact, he seems to me to be distinctly dumber than anybody who is running even an eight-bit virtual David Hume on his wetware.

Nate Silver: The Pollsters Who Got It Wrong Were Those Who Did Not Take a Random Sample...

Nate Silver:

Silver said most of the major network polls — NBC/Wall Street Journal, ABC/Washington Post, CBS/New York Times — are “pretty good," while the polls that faltered made too many assumptions about the population.

"The poll-only forecasts [of the Senate] — especially the Wang, RCP and Pollster forecasts — perform better than Nate’s mélange of state polls and economic fundamentals"

http://marginoferror.org/2012/11/12/its-good-to-be-average/

War on Nate Silver: Final After-Action Report: The Flag of Reality Flies Uncontested Over Silvergrad Weblogging

Two criticisms of Nate Silver that may be valid:

1. Silver introduces noise into his estimates by placing weight on a not very well-founded model of fundamentals-- witness his failure to get the North Dakota Senate race right.

2. Silver's model on election eve did not say that Obama had a 90% chance, it said Obama has a 99% chance. But Silver introduced a fudge factor: a completely arbitrary 20% chance based on the scanty history of state-level polling that the state-level polls were all substantially wrong in the same direction, and hence a 10% chance of a Romney victory. He would have been better advised to say: "My model says Obama has it nailed, but my model might be wrong--pulling a number out of the air, if you think there's a 20% chance that I have my head completely up my #%$, you can assign Romney a 10% chance. That would have aided communication.

And, below the fold, a bunch of criticisms of Silver and hunch-based forecasts that are not valid:

Republicans vs. Reality: The Struggle for Silvergrad Continues: More War on Nate Silver Weblogging

Nelson, King, and Nicholas recall how much better Romney did than your average Republican senate candidate. And watch them give the "Stand fast! Not a step back!" order:

GOP Leaders' Debate: Change Message or Candidates?: "It is critically important we remain true to who we are," Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell said in an interview here at the meeting of the Republican Governors Association. "We have to figure out how to make our principles more attractive to emerging voters. But if we abdicate those, we become a very different entity."… "America doesn't need two liberal political parties," said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, incoming chairman of the Republican Governors Association. "I think we need to be true to our principles."… In Florida, the Romney state campaign manager, Brett Doster, blames Mr. Romney's loss there on the campaign missing its targets in just three key counties, thus losing the state by 70,000 or so votes. "We fell short on registering and rallying voters and really building up the party. That's where we need to turn now," Mr. Doster said…. Gary Bauer said Republicans would be drawing the wrong lessons if they scrap long-held positions. "Panic is always a bad idea in politics," he said. And providing citizenship to 10 million or more illegal immigrants, he said, would boost the vote count for the Democratic Party. Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad joined others in dismissing suggestions that Republicans lost on the issues on Nov. 6. But like many GOP leaders, he faulted some of the party's candidates for remarks that alienated women and other groups. "We need candidates that don't say dumb things," he said.

Views on Age of Planet Differ: No, Marco Rubio Would Not Be an Acceptable President Edition

Paul Krugman:

Views Differ on Age of Planet - NYTimes.com: Quite a few bloggers are having fun with Marco Rubio’s bobbing and weaving in response to a question from GQ: "How old do you think the Earth is?"… As I like to say, the GOP doesn’t just want to roll back the New Deal; it wants to roll back the Enlightenment. But here’s what you should realize: when Rubio says that the question of the Earth’s age “has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow”, he’s dead wrong. For one thing, science and technology education has a lot to do with our future productivity — and how are you going to have effective science education if schools have to give equal time to the views of fundamentalist Christians?More broadly, the attitude that discounts any amount of evidence — and boy, do we have lots of evidence on the age of the planet! — if it conflicts with prejudices is not an attitude consistent with effective policy. If you’re going to ignore what geologists say if you don’t like its implications, what are the chances that you’ll take sensible advice on monetary and fiscal policy? After all, we’ve just seen how Republicans deal with research reports that undermine their faith in the magic of tax cuts: they try to suppress the reports…. So don’t laugh over Rubio’s young-earth apologetics. If he, or anyone else from his party, wins in 2016, the joke will be on us.

Neil SInhababu: 2012 Presidential Prediction Rankings

http://www.voteseeing.com/2012/11/2012-presidential-prediction-rankings.html

War on Nate Silver: South of Silvergrad We Come Across the Shivering, Unarmed Remnants of Colonel Mustard's Forces Wandering the Kalmyk Steppe Begging to Be Fed:

Colonel Mustard--Professor William Jacobsen of Cornell--and his "troops":

» Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong says Romney ahead in Gallup because people don’t know where to vote - Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion: October 28:

Noted University of California – Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong has figured out why Mitt Romney is so far ahead in the Gallup tracking poll of likely voters. His theory  is that Obama supporters like him are only now figuring out where to vote, so they do not pass Gallup’s likely voter screen.  Apparently, when contacted by Gallup and asked whether he is likely to vote, DeLong responds “where?” Seriously.

MicahStone | October 28, 2012 at 7:23 pm What will be delong’s lame excuse AFTER Romney’s landslide win on Nov 6 ? (Yeah, we all know, it’s RACISM.)

sybilll | October 28, 2012 at 7:25 pm Excuse my language Professor, but Brad DeLong is a giant douchenozzle. I see his work at DU and on his blog, and bottom line, he is a pathetic fabricator that appears to be auditioning for a job at Media Matters.

SueAnne | October 28, 2012 at 7:27 pm Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “low information voter”. And, does his polling place change that much from one election to another, or has it been that long since he last voted?

katalyst42 | October 28, 2012 at 7:30 pm What this guy really couldn’t pass is the Gallup OUGHT-to-be-a-voter screen.

raven | October 28, 2012 at 8:36 pm I have family there and visit often enough. It’s another world. Ironically it boasts of dynamism and ferment but rather is like the bewitched province that never changes or accepts change. There is no drearier burg in America. My cheap fun while visiting is to wear patriotic hats and lapels and take in the scandalized and hostile glances. Believe me, these besotted souls have no idea what’s coming.

heimdall | October 28, 2012 at 7:34 pm This is the quintessential problem with many polls this election year. Polls are getting nearly 90-95% pass through the likely voter screens where only 60-70% registered voters actually vote in presidential election years. They are now even further skewed with the early voting crap, which favors democrats by a very large margin. Gallup is doing it right with their questioning for their likely voter poll because the net is much tighter, just look at some likely voter polls from MSM outfits that show their sampling get MORE Democrat after their questioning. The MSM questions to determine likely voters are usually enthusiasm based, which is WAAAY too loose. That is why you are seeing many polls the way they are now. They are too loose with likely voter screens, DRI sample is completely off with scales tipped in favor of the Democrats, and/ or adjusting samples to have more women/ minorities/ young voters than there will ever be. And STILL, Romney leads or ties Obama in many of these polls. The most egregious examples are coming out of Ohio right now. Bottom line is though, Mitt Romney is going to win if he wins the popular vote by 4-5% like current polling is showing. The left is going to go into serious shock on election night.

NeoConScum | October 28, 2012 at 7:36 pm Michael Barone, nobody’s dummy, is now saying that this may very well be a 1980 type, late in the cycle, ‘landslide’ of the Reagan-Carter kind. My-O-My, how nice it would be to take it so BIG that the expected whiners & shriekers have NO traction for their post-election lies….

Mary Sue | October 28, 2012 at 7:37 pm Watching on Twitter, libs are working overtime to build narrative Romney is not leading national polls and Ohio firewall is insurmountable. Sure they’ve been working this narrative for a while now but today it is just astounding how dedicated they are to resurrect the magical air of inevitability. I am fully convinced some pollsters will go down with the ship. PPP just dumped a load of manure to feed the narrative, good Soros soldiers to the end. This is going to be painful to watch….

delong | October 30, 2012 at 10:16 am Indeed we do get a sample ballot telling us where our polling place is this time in early October. I typically put it in one of the desk cubbyholes and pull it out and look at it the weekend before election day in early November. Do you have a point?Brad DeLong

JerryB | October 28, 2012 at 7:46 pm Rush has it right. The polls are converging on reality so that on Nov. 7 they can claim competence. This election has been Romney’s for more than 6 months. Now for the MSM. Will some start covering Libya now that the writing is on the wall?…

DINORightMarie | October 28, 2012 at 8:16 pm Is this man supposed to be a brilliant genius or something? Kinda reminds me of the deer crossing lady caller…. And these lefties think they are oh! so brilliant!

JD61 | October 28, 2012 at 8:18 pm I love that the Obots are so unaware of what’s about to happen to their criminal leader.

JD61 | October 28, 2012 at 8:21 pm Monday’s Politico/Battleground poll has R +5….

ConserveLiberty | October 28, 2012 at 8:46 pm At this point they’re looking ahead to 11/7. If their constituents are so shocked that Romney actually won they can claim fraud or stupidity among the flyovers and deny there was a ‘MANDATE” accorded to Romney to govern. They’re always setting up the next day’s talking points….

TheFineReport.com | October 28, 2012 at 9:09 pm I guess DeLong probably has trouble putting his underwear on so it’s facing front. But probably not. He’s just spitting out lies for consumption by the zombies and by people whose egos are too tender to admit they are fools for supporting a moron as a president, and aiding in the destruction of their country. The bad news for liberals in denial: YOU WERE AND STILL ARE FOOL. YOU TERRIBLY DAMAGED OUR COUNTRY AND YOU DAMAGED YOUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE AND CHANGED THEIR AND OUR WAY OF LIFE FOR THE WORSE. LASTLY, DON’T BE LIKE DeLONG: MAKE SURE YOUR UNDERWEAR IS NOT ON BACKWARDS….

delong | October 29, 2012 at 6:36 am Sigh Usually the polling place is the elementary school. Sometimes it’s the fire barn. Occasionally it is somebody’s garage. Right now I don’t know which it is–and, as I said, won’t until the weekend before election day. But I am a very likely voter indeed. That’s a problem with Gallup’s likely voter screen. This election, there are five interesting things about the polls that call for explanation:

• RAND has a huge pro-Obama house effect, and nobody knows why–but perhaps it is because RAND does reinterviews, and this is a treatment that transforms uninformed voters into informed voters over time.
• Ramussen has a smaller pro-Romney house effect relative to the average poll, and people think it may be because it doesn’t call cell phones.
• State-level polls have a small pro-Obama effect, and nobody knows why.
• Polls that are willing to interview in Spanish have a pro-Obama house effect.
• Gallup’s polls of registered voters are squarely in the middle of the distribution of national polls, but its gap between registered and likely voters is roughly twice that of any other national pollster.

Some places on the internet and elsewhere are places where people bring information about these (and other questions) and try to figure out what is going on. Other places on the internet are like this.

Yours,

J. Bradford DeLong….

Henry Hawkins | October 29, 2012 at 10:29 am In defense of DeLong, I would point out that not only do Democrats vote, many of them vote several times in any given election, often post-mortem. It doesn’t do well to vote multiple times at the same polling place, so they have to move around to various precincts. There are logistics!

delong | November 5, 2012 at 11:50 am And Gallup is now 48-48… Strikes me as a substantial win for the proposition that their likely voter screen is not very good until the week before the election, no? Mark your beliefs to market, people! Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life!

delong | November 7, 2012 at 5:35 pm And now we know. A week out from the election, Colonel Mustard’s second favorite pollster misses a presidential election by 8%–and 3/4 of the error is in the likely voter screen… Come back to reality, people! You can mark your beliefs to market if you try!

[crickets]

Gallup's Frank Newport, Out of Ammunition and Beseiged in Silvergrad, Refuses to Surrender: War on Nate Silver Weblogging

Sam Wang turns up the pressure:

Gallup’s man misses the point: Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport appears to be on a campaign against poll aggregation…. Oh, please. Considering Gallup’s performance in estimating the national race, this could be interpreted as a defensive move by this year’s equivalent of the Literary Digest poll (‘Landon by a landslide,’ George Mason University). Newport misses the positive value that we bring to his activity. It is too bad, because what we do can ultimately increase the relevance of his organization. Here’s why.

War on Nate Silver: The Noonan Forces Collapse, and Other Bulletins

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga's experimental mechanized corps overruns the Noonan forces:

Daily Kos: Peggy Noonan mocked data nerds who won the presidency: Peggy Noonan, as wrong as the rest of her ilk, on how President Barack Obama didn't seem "genuine" back in July:

Maybe Mr. Obama is living proof of the political maxim that they don't care what you know unless they know that you care. But the idea that he is aloof and so inspires aloofness may be too pat…. Mr. Obama... isn't really very good at politics, and he isn't good at politics because he doesn't really get people. The other day a Republican political veteran forwarded me a hiring notice from the Obama 2012 campaign. It read like politics as done by Martians. The "Analytics Department" is looking for "predictive Modeling/Data Mining" specialists to join the campaign's "multi-disciplinary team of statisticians," which will use "predictive modeling" to anticipate the behavior of the electorate. "We will analyze millions of interactions a day, learning from terabytes of historical data, running thousands of experiments, to inform campaign strategy and critical decisions."

This wasn't the passionate, take-no-prisoners Clinton War Room of '92, it was high-tech and bloodless. Is that what politics is now? Or does the Obama re-election effort reflect the candidate and his flaws?

Of course, this was a calculated effort to combat the notion that Mitt Romney was cold and aloof and didn't give a shit about people who weren't members of his country club (and maybe not even them). You think Romney is aloof, well what about Obama? He hired statisticians to employ gay math!

Skew Yourselves: Nate Silver Is Here To Answer Your Questions

http://deadspin.com/5960364/skew-yourselves-nate-silver-is-here-to-answer-your-questions:

We got a modest amount of this in 2010, where I'd get Tweets saying things like "When did Nate become a Republican?" But I don't want to make it sound as though the two sides are equal. It seems as though a higher percentage of conservatives are more inclined to question empirical methods, to put it diplomatically….

It's MUCH worse in politics, I think: (1) People in sports will make lots of silly refutations of your arguments. But they do tend to deal with your arguments, rather than attack your character or your integrity. (2) A lot of people in politics operate in a "post-truth" worldview, whether they realize it or not. Less of that in sports. (3) In sports, scouts actually contribute a lot of value, even though statistics are highly useful as well. In politics, the pundits are completely useless at best, and probably harm democracy in their own small way….

War on Nate Silver Update: November 13, 2012: Gallup Forces Dissolve in Panic

Nate Silver himself @fivethirtyeight launches an overwhelming assault on the unarmed Gallup troops on the twitterfront. Gallup forces completely dissolve. There is now nothing between the armies of reality and the Dneipr River:

@fivethirtyeight: Polls shouldn't bounce around as much as Gallup's, given their large sample sizes. Something is designed badly and introducing noise.

@fivethirtyeight: Gallup's demographic weighting algorithms probably contain a few bugs. They need to hire better statisticians.

@jayrosen_nyu: Gallup: we did good, we're satisfied! http://bit.ly/RRUH2o

@jayrosen_nyu: Nate Silver: Gallup the least accurate of the major polls: http://nyti.ms/TBvisg

@fivethirtyeight>: [new article] Which Polls Fared Best (and Worst) in the 2012 Presidential Race http://nyti.ms/Z6kbM7 

@jayrosen_NYU: According to @fivethirtyeight, Gallup did the worst among the major polling firms in predicting the final results. http://nyti.ms/TBvisg

538's State Presidential Vote Estimates Are As Good As They Can Get

Robert Waldmann sends me to A.C. Thomas, who demonstrates that Nate Silver absolutely nailed it this election. 84% of the time the state presidential vote result was in what Nate Silver thought the central 80% of the distribution would be. You don't get better than that. By contrast, A.C. Thomas says that the outcomes were in what Drew Linzer thought would be the central 80% of the distribution only 56% of the time. Linzer--like Silver--got the point estimates right, but he got his confidence intervals too tight.

War on Nate Silver Daily Update: Heeresgruppe B Commander Josh Jordan Is Cut Off in Silvergrad, Still with No Radio Communication...

... but Rich Lowry awards him the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds:

Congratulations Josh Jordan: Paul Krugman has made an over-the-top utterly content-less attack on you. In the absence of Keith Olbermann, this is perhaps the best badge of honor that can be bestowed on a conservative writer.

Because being called out by Paul Krugman for stupidity beyond mortal imagination is, in the eyes of Rich Lowry, so much greater an accomplishment than accurately forecasting an election!

Nate Silver: Pollster Accuracy and Bias in 2012: IBD-Google-Mellman vs. Gallup-ARG-Rasmussen-Mason-Dixon