Your 2016 Presidential Candidate Speculation Thread

i'm often curious how my upbringing in the 1980s (an era when fear of crime was nearly at its peak) affected my outlook/consciousness. vs. millennials (esp. later millennials) who grew up in an era when not only were rates of crime decreasing but people were starting to acknowledge the trend.

i mention that b/c the actual rate of violent crime and the perception of violent crime are somewhat independent variables.

what is the ideological bias of the abortion argument in yr eyes? to me it seems to support making abortion as legal + safe everywhere as possible to every citizen who needs it. it seems obvious to me that being forced to have an unwanted child (for whatever reason) is not going to produce good social results down the line.

lag00n i read the section of that link that dealt w/ the abortion link. it quotes a very irrefutable study (the Hott study) and basically makes the crack argument that the link i posted addresses - ie yes, there are other major factors. abortion isn't the only one. similarly the crack-theory proponents would probably have the same criticism of lead, how can you say it was mostly lead when etc etc

a very refutable i meant

not really interested in any of the other arguments in that link - i haven't investigated them at all and for all i know they're all terrible arguments.

(any of the other arguments that the paper tries to refute I should specify)

the abortion argument raises the spectre of the whole "pathology of poverty" question which is always a lightning rod

but aside from that the evidence seems very faulty to me!

mordy you have a funny way of insisting that people read the stuff you post and then blithely dismissing the stuff other people post w/o reading it!

of course, see also: almost every ILE poster.

sorry I was speaking generally there, not about that particular argument. I trust Freakonomics about as much as I trust Breitbart, albeit for different reasons which are not always mutually exclusive (the former is sloppy, the latter are just flat-out evil)

xp

amateurist - i read the section related to our argument! i'm not really interested in the "they've published other bad stuff so this is bad argument."

not really interested in any of the other arguments in that link - i haven't investigated them at all and for all i know they're all terrible arguments.

― Mordy, Thursday, May 14, 2015 2:43 PM (7 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol i will summarize 4 u, the technique freaknomics uses to reach their conclusion, multiple regression analysis, assumes that one knows all the factors involved in their study and can control for them (its a good tool for baseball), thats right freaknomics thinks they have identified and weighed every factor of society, and even then all their conclusions are based on mere coloration!

im sry yr blatantly garbage contrairian pop science book turned out to be garbage tho

man, eternal Mordy-Shakes-amat pingpong = my idea of purgatory

i guess what bugs me mordy is that you seem to assume (want to assume) that people's reasons for dismissing or being skeptical of abortion argument are more "this isn't politically correct" than "this isn't a very good bit of social research."

thanks morbs, i hope that post made you feel better about your life. :)

freaknomics conclusion re abortion abortion and crime is very appealing to supporters of legal abortion aka nearly everyone on this website! it also happens to be dumb and wrong

man, eternal Mordy-Shakes-amat pingpong = my idea of purgatory

I assume if we can rope Eric H in here we'll graduate to "hell"

i guess what bugs me mordy is that you seem to assume (want to assume) that people's reasons for dismissing or being skeptical of abortion argument are more "this isn't politically correct" than "this isn't a very good bit of social research."

you're right, maybe that's not fair. i've seen the criticism of the research (including criticism of the regression model, the alternate crack and lead arguments, the Hott study which seems even more flawed than the original study, etc) and none of it makes me feel like it's enough to completely dismiss the correlation they found. i especially find the differences in crime rates between states that legalized abortion to be particularly persuasive. nb I only took one semester of statistics in undergrad and though I've supplemented that a bit over the years I'm hardly an expert. I have read takedowns of other freakonomics things that seemed more persuasive and since I have no personal attachment to their identification with the theory I maybe jumped to the conclusion that other people were operating w/ an ideological bias against it bc of its authors.

as far as i understand it, lagoon, and please correct me if i'm wrong bc I am not an expert by any means, the problem w/ multiple regression theory analysis is that correlation is not causation, so even if you build a highly detailed model that is even predictive, if you're missing one key element (your black swan) and it appears the entire model is fucked. so fine, keep that in mind, but it still can be a persuasive model w/out going all in. ie all statistics involve some level of uncertainty, and if the policy being recommended by a study already fits yr preferred policy, so there's no objection there, there's no problem w/ finding a particular analysis persuasive.

thanks for that! seriously :)

i also find it persuasive that more liberal abortion policies might correlate to other good policies a state might pursue that could lead to decreases in crime, but i'm not sure off-hand what those other policies might be?

this isn't really a takedown of the freakonomics thing, which i think i only ever got as a memetic gloss by undergrad assholes a long long time ago, but: i am really fundamentally skeptical of these magic-bullet theories --- not only because their tidiness, in and of itself, seems dicey, but also because when someone finds a tidy theory that lines up with a hot-button issue that Sells Books anyway (obv. i am speaking here about abortion rather than leaded gas), it just seems way too fucking convenient and i feel that being additionally skeptical and requiring the highest burden of proof isn't really unfair or biased.

i also worry that, at least in the memetic form, the conclusion does profound ideological work: it's a libertarian's wet dream: enormous social problems actually just solve themselves by magic, unlikely, who'd-a-thunkit solutions. and "people who would have gotten lots of abortions otherwise" becomes a cipher for "people victimized by the economic order, by systemic racism, by a collapse of urban services, and indeed by violence, some of it criminal in nature." even if the study authors don't make that problematic equation, its tail sweeps away the footprints: the exact theory being competed with is one whereby crime is related to.... the economic order, systemic racism, the collapse of urban services, and violence. all of this, by the way, assumes certain ideas of how we measure crime. i could imagine someone arguing that the $18 billion Madoff fraud should be treated as one billion $18 pick-pocketings, or a hundred million grand larcenies or whatever. so it turns out the amount of crime in the country is still really fucking high. meanwhile the theory proclaims not only that crime is solved, but that it was out of our hands the whole time - any money or time spent on education, community organization, environmental improvements, cleaning up toxic waste dumps, fighting racism, investing in underfunded services or creating incentives for employers was all a big waste of time!

(btw just riffing here but hypothetically these are also things that might well lead a community or a government to perceive some of the awful consequences to women and families of criminalizing abortion. by the way, what ARE the legal-abortion states that loom large in this analysis? how much/what kind of access to abortion in these states, before and after it was legalized? does this by any chance relate to how urban that state's population is? are these things perchance relevant in a discussion of a largely urban street-crime problem?)

can we get back to whether lead poisoning contributed to the stupidity of Ben Carson and Ted Cruz

too many factors to determine conclusively

can we get back to whether lead poisoning contributed to the stupidity of Ben Carson and Ted Cruz

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, May 14, 2015 2:45 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think it's fair to posit that the stupidity of ben carson and ted cruz is multicausal.

sorry, but **I** have something to say about freakanomics too. i was ambivalent about the freakanomics dudes until they decided to write a chapter about something i knew a little about, and were so completely wrong that it made me doubt the credibility of everything else they'd ever written

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2009/10/superfreakonomics-freaky-science
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2009/10/12/204787/superfreakonomics-errors-levitt-caldeira-myhrvold/

that's all

As evidence for this argument, the authors cite Nathan Myhrvold, the co-founder of Intellectual Ventures, saying that solar panels contribute to global warming "because they're black"—and thus generate heat that contributes to rising temperatures.

ahahahahahahahahahahaaaa

was unaware of this particular buffoonery but ... oh man

is this still a thing? http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/smaller-cheaper-faster-does-moores-law-apply-to-solar-cells/

If it continues for another 8-10, which looks extremely likely, we’ll have a power source which is as cheap as coal for electricity, with virtually no carbon emissions. If it continues for 20 years, which is also well within the realm of scientific and technical possibility, then we’ll have a green power source which is half the price of coal for electricity.

this is an accurate assessment but can we plz not bring Moore's Law into it

lets get this thread back on track

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CFAv-cCUEAIWvc7.png

rubio and paul ryan should get together and apply to live in startup castle

lol otm

jeb likes apps too http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/14/politics/jeb-bush-apple-watch-obamacare-answer

i should get a doctrine

u cn make one on one of those image macro sites a doctrine is just like three short slogans i think

Aimless Doctrine:

• American Pulchritude
• Beatification of the American Economy
• Moral Bloviation Regarding America's Core Values

Rubio's poster looks like a gastropub sign.

http://i.imgur.com/xP0nbrV.jpg

Not to worry: Jeb's got advisers with splendid new ideas.

lol xp nice

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/opinion/paul-krugman-fraternity-of-failure.html

More on Jeb's advisors: Wolfowitz, Chertoff,etc

@ggreenwald
Whenever Marco Rubio speaks policy, seems like a 9th grader who read a biography of Reagan & is giving a book report

truuu

god why isn't Wolfowitz' corpse rotting in an unmarked grave yet

forthcoming 'announcements'

George Pataki - 5/28
Martin O'Malley - 5/30

GEORGE PATAKI??

haha waht

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/05/14/brace-yourself-the-2016-field-is-likely-to-increase-by-more-than-half-by-the-end-of-the-month/

when are you announcing

“'I make a joke that every four years, there’s the Olympics, there’s the World Cup and I come to New Hampshire thinking about running for president,' Pataki told a crowd of 15 people during a speech at a Sea-Doo and snowmobile dealership in Laconia, N.H"

yeah that was lol