Re: Commenter Klatch: Light My Fire (Robert Wright & JimM47)
 

Evolutionary psychology. The reference has to do with an ongoing discussion in the Wright/Singer thread.

Ah, women always so forgiving!

Re: Commenter Klatch: Light My Fire (Robert Wright & JimM47)
 

Of course. Actually, the funniest thing is hearing some people go to the other extreme and over pronounce the Spanish place names in California. I was trying to link to SNL's 80s skit on "Nicaragua" - but it seems that's impossible, because NBC wants everyone to buy a DVD or whatever.

Re: Commenter Klatch: Light My Fire (Robert Wright & JimM47)
 

Ah, gotcha!

Re: Commenter Klatch: Light My Fire (Robert Wright & JimM47)
 

Let me add my voice to the chorus:

Thanks very much for that Messrs. Wright and Morrison. Excellent.

Re: Commenter Klatch: Light My Fire (Robert Wright & JimM47)
 

Your mom had good taste in ídolos mexicanos. I think I've seen every movie Pedro ever made (at least twice). Jorge Negrete may have had a better voice, at least according to Plácido Domingo who has acknowledged him as a big influence, but Pedro had the encanto. Here is your Friday night serenata.

Re: Commenter Klatch: Light My Fire (Robert Wright & JimM47)
 

Ay, qué romantico! :)

Victoria Jackson has a funny skit
 

Re: Commenter Klatch: Light My Fire (Robert Wright & JimM47)
 

So funny to hear people rip others' pronunciations of place names when just about every place name is a variation of something it was called in the past. I'm sure that Kumeyaays (if there are any left) have a hoot when they hear someone say "teh-hwana" for a place that used to be called "Ti-wan".


I had a chinese girlfriend years ago whose english pronunciations (and also that of my name) were pretty unique. I never once considered it a detriment to our relationship, much less a reason to assault her.


Good dialogue - nice job with the numbers.

Re: Commenter Klatch: Light My Fire (Robert Wright & JimM47)
 

Oh, c'mon, Harkin. Set free your inner language snob. You know you want to.

Re: Commenter Klatch: Light My Fire (Robert Wright & JimM47)
 

I'm pretty sure he did!

;-)

Re: Commenter Klatch: Light My Fire (Robert Wright & JimM47)
 

Something else I have been wondering: John McWhorter's main message seems to be one of personal responsibility. He makes the list as a liberal, but personal responsibility is something some conservatives like to accuse liberals of not believing in. Of course that's an exaggeration, but what makes John so clearly a liberal?

I'm not trying to nitpick Jim's data. I'm more thinking about how little these labels have to do with actual principles. Sometimes they are more tribal and tone-related.

Re: Commenter Klatch: Light My Fire (Robert Wright & JimM47)
 

My guess is his support for Obama.

But that's kind of tenuous. Ann Althouse also (theoretically) voted for Obama and most liberals wouldn't claim her at this point.

I think part of the problem is that political beliefs are kind of multidimensional. Poeple TEND to have views at line up in the same column, but I suspect that bloggingheads tends to attract participants who don't.

I suspect McWhorter is liberal in most areas, conservative with regard to race, education, and probably neither on foreign policy,\.

By definition, most of the participating libertarians (Welch and I think Wilkinson as well) are conservative on economics and liberal on social issues.

We're trying to impose a dichotomy on something that is a continuous variable in at least four dimensions.

Re: Commenter Klatch: Light My Fire (Robert Wright & JimM47)
 

I remember that! And NBC does make it impossible to find most SNL skits.

I also remember some of the national news people pronouncing Valdez, AK the Spanish way at the time of the oil spill. It's Val-dEEZ, damnit. What next, trying to correct the pronounciation of Cairo, IL?

I think my favorite US place name may be the many Versailles in the US. (Although Arab, AL -- that's Ayrab -- is pretty funny.) The most confusing "how do you pronounce that" I've come across in Chicago is Goethe Street (in other words, would I rather sound dumb or be misunderstood, especially since no one seems to agree on the correct way to say it).

Re: Commenter Klatch: Light My Fire (Robert Wright & JimM47)
 

Milan, MN, spelled like Milan, Italy, but pronounced like Myelin, the nerve insulator.

Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

Thanks for the kind words, everyone! I quite enjoyed diavlogging with the blogfather himself. In the future, I shall endeavor to pronounce the word 'kvetch' more authentically. (But just you wait until you know you are being recorded, the tendency to over-enunciate is difficult to resist!)

After rechecking my data and simplifying the spreadsheet a bit, I have posted a fully editable version of the spreadsheet as a Google Document here. The link posted to the side of the diavlog has the virtue of being readable without downloading, but it lost the formulas in the spreadsheet. This link will dynamically update, so if you change how people are classified, the numbers at the top will automagically change to reflect your labels. I've highlighted in red the diavloggers who I guessed at, or who probably should be labelled but aren't.

A note on how I categorized: I tried to rely as much as possible on a participant's self-identification, or on the self-identification of the publication he or she worked for. As others have noted, this sometimes leads to some over-simplification, especially for people who have complicated views, whose views have changed over time, or who strongly identify with one movement while mostly taking positions contrary to those of the majority of that movement. I did generally try to err on the side of categorizing someone as a libertarian, a conservative, or a non-partisan (in that order of precedence).

[Note: If you want to make all the percentages add up to 100%, you need to change Bob's label to either be blank (for unclassified) or to be one of the existing categories, like Liberal or World.]

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

Bob never comes out and says it explicitly, but is the suggestion here that Bloggingheads is "fair and balanced" if the ideological makeup of the heads matches that of the American public?

Because I personally don't find that to be a useful standard of success. As (among others) Jonathan Chait has suggested, the number of voters who are libertarians (economic conservative, social liberal) is most likely a good deal smaller than the number who are 'populist' (economic liberal, social conservative). Yet the latter has no real intellectual infrastructure. (Quick, name a couple of economic liberal / social conservative foundations and think tanks.)

Among elites, populists are sorely underrepresented and libertarians overrepresented, relative to their numbers in the general population. And so Bloggingheads inevitably has the same bias.

But that's fine with me. I don't see the problem. As long as Bloggingheads has an interesting mix of points of view being represented, I don't think it matters whether the ideological mix matches some particular formula.

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

I think the claim Bob is making, with which I would agree, is that the numbers reflect a balance of voices that is reasonable in light of bh.tv's mission. I don't purport to have a formula or objective criteria for evaluating these numbers, but I think they are interesting enough in their own right -- particularly with respect to who were the regulars on each side -- that people can judge them by their own criteria.

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

Good point. In fact, it so happens that appreciation for free markets is correlated with levels of education. Just because a majority of the electorate is keen to China bashing (for instance), it doesn't mean that BHTV should flatly represent such view-points. Especially since the content here is not for sale.

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

I came across this study that supports that people with higher levels of education support free markets. People with higher education also believe that corporations have too much influence over government.

But this study was conducted in 2005 and that was before the recession and some important events that made clear that inadequate regulation can be disastrous and of course, also before Greenspan acknowledged his free market blunder.

I wonder how a similar poll on free markets would be like today. Do you have any data?

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

I wonder how useful polls are when support for different parts of the "free market" is aggregated together. I imagine there is substantial variation in which how strongly various groups support trade policy vs. monetary policy vs. fiscal policy vs. etc.

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

I believe that corporations have too much influence over government and that this situation is antithetical to free markets.

Greenspan is not the only one who was taken by surprise, even though many people had criticized him at the time for keeping interest rates low for too long after the dot-com bubble. Some even point to this fact as one of the main factors driving the next bubble in housing. I'm not one of them, just because I'm skeptical of our ability to point to specific causal relationships in the economy. It sounds plausible that monetary policy could have had a hand, but it's also a bit implausible once you read a bit more into the several dozen facets, changes, facts, etc... that occurred in order for the crisis to unfold.
Anyways, going back to Greenspan's surprise: he was not the only one. The whole economic profession was talking about the Great Moderation, a 30 year period where basically we had solved the monetary conundrum. Central banks now knew what to do and would continue to keep a confident hand on the throttle. Greenspan was the hero, the Maestro. About regulation, everybody even at the SEC (aside for the occasional skeptic) was in agreement that diversified risk was a good thing. Yes the argument went, housing prices could fall in some parts of the country, but the genius of mortgage securities, supposedly, was that the effect would be dissipated across the globe. The ultimate stability dream. It turns out that there were many things people didn't know. In and out of govt. Everything was going well, until everybody freaked out at the same time and then, essentially there was a run on the bank, not in the usual sense, but higher up, in inter-banking lending. A posteriori you can look at what happen and decide that this or that regulation could have helped, maybe. The problem is that we've had banking crisis before and each time people think they've found the technocratic solution (after all central banking was supposed to fix whatever system came before, right?) and yet one can also trace each crisis to the very regulation that were put in place after the previous crisis. Therefore, it is not so clear that the solution is necessarily more regulation. In fact, deregulation could be exactly what we need. I happen to believe that the mortgage securities market is being currently propped up by the heavy regulatory hand of govt and that in the absence of such regulations that market would not be sustainable, would quickly disappear and we would get back to more traditional lending practices. But who knows, I can't prove I'm right because I'm just imagining an alternate universe, with no Fannie and Freddie, no Basel accords, etc...Would incremental deregulation work wonders? I don't know. But again, to me it's at least plausible.

Here is were I heard of the correlation between education levels and anti-market bias (I don't know the actual dates of the data discussed):

http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/p...ethinklike.pdf

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

This depends on the mission, of course. However, I don't think you can determine "reasonable balance of voices" merely by the broad categorizations. There's a tendency to ignore diversity within the broad groups and especially if the voices are coming disproportionately from one place (journalists of type employed by New Republic, on the one hand, journalists of the type employed by National Review/Reason on the other hand). I'm not claiming this is true across the board, but I think it gets at the criticisms more than the mere breakdown of voices from the right and voices from the left.

I appreciate your analysis, though, and am merely curious about supplementing it to see it the actual problem I think people are complaining about some can be supported.

I understand there are reasons why the situation I suggest might exist might in fact exist -- I think certain kinds of bloggers are easier for Bob to get and fit more into his desire to build page views and links. It is too bad that a lot of that mission (particularly links in the mainstream media) tends to come from the types of diavlogs I find most overdone and uninteresting (the typical horserace or issue of the day discussions from the usual people on each side that you see represented in the mainstream media), but if he believes that's important to his mission or the financial success thereof, I get it.

As an aside: It seems to me that Bob wants to use those kinds of things to support the place while his heart is in the foreign affairs diavlogs and some of the science/philosophy ones, which tend to be much more reflective of his own views. That I'd like the site to be used also to create diavlog on domestic politics and politics and some cultural issues (not just TV)generally just reflects how my interests vary from Bob's, as he has said he's not really that into politics. As it's his site, he should use it to further his interests, obviously.

I didn't find the discussion of why left-left or right-right diavlogs weren't possible particularly compelling. It seemed to focus on whether they could be added as additional diavlogs, but I am not convinced that they couldn't serve the same purpose as many of the left-right diavlogs, especially if the overall balance remained similar and they are issue specific and explore a real difference. That is, two from the right (inc. a libertarian, perhaps) debating immigration policy, interesting. Two from the right talking about some topic about which they agree for partisan reasons (i.e., why OWS is a communist front), not interesting. Same with the left-left diavlogs.

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

I read the paper. It seems to be based on data collected before 2005. Considering that it's a retrospective study from a sample of convenience, with many rough approximations, inferences and indirect assumptions (IQ is measured by a ten word vocabulary subtest!), the results are at best highly questionable.

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

QED!

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

Whether more education is correlated with an appreciation for free-markets could very well be independent of 2005. If a new event affects everyone in the same direction, that does not change the correlation. The paper confirms this correlation in two independent large data sets (what samples of convenience?): the General Social Survey and the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy. Pro-market attitudes correlate with many things, but education is by far the largest factor, e.g. from the paper: "an additional standard deviation of education nearly doubles the probability that a respondent opposes protectionism". The paper also tries to disentangle education from intelligence, but that was not my point. In any case 10 words can very well separate people along the IQ scale when looking at such large data-sets.

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

Yes, it may, but not necessarily. Perhaps people with higher education are able to access better information regarding the event, and the overall effect is greater in that group compared to the less educated group who doesn't understand exactly what happened.


Convenience sample in the sense that this was a retrospective study, examining data that had been collected for other purposes and was conveniently available.

Did you read the questions that had been asked in the original survey? Those were interpreted as proxy for concepts such as "free market" or "protectionism". But, think about how people with less education, who usually tend to absorb less information including general knowledge about economics, would interpret and respond to those questions.

Here is the proxy for "protectionism":

Yes, disentangling education from intelligence based on vocabulary (10 words) is arguable. Vocabulary can give a very rough idea of intelligence, but when you add up all the "rough" measures and the assumptions made while interpreting the data, you end up with something that is amorphous and at best you can say something so general that lacks much meaning.

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

Right so the gut response could be a lot worse than a reasoned and balanced one.


The GSS is one of the main tools of the social sciences.


"The GSS contains a standard 'core' of demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal questions, plus topics of special interest. Many of the core questions have remained unchanged since 1972 to facilitate time-trend studies as well as replication of earlier findings. The GSS takes the pulse of America, and is a unique and valuable resource. It has tracked the opinions of Americans over the last four decades."

By the way, using data that was collected for other purposes is a good way to control for one's own biases.

Yes I read the questions. I don't see what the problem is? Every question you might come up with will bring its own set of problems. These seem to be pretty straightforward and do get at the essential basic reactions, "attitudes".

It's evidence in the direction of a link to ability instead of just education level. Do you have studies that indicate no relation?

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

Huh?

What I'm saying is that you can't speculate. We can come up with a number of possible changes but unless we test our hypothesis that's what they are untested hypothesis (your guess is as good as mine).

I'm not making any statement about the GSS. I only made observations and expressed my opinion on the methodology and conclusions from the paper you cited.

If you know what hypothesis you'll be testing, you'll design a study that allows for cleaner data, with appropriate controls.

It's all about how those questions are being used as proxy for something else.

No, unit, that's not the way it works. You're supposed to provide the supporting evidence. But, I'll help you, that particular set of 10 words has been studied and its correlation with IQ is 0.71 in some study that I found in the internet. Charles Murray seems to be very interested in using it.

I've got to go now.

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

Ok so I have provided some evidence for my claim.

What? You said that he used convenient data when in fact he's using GSS...my mind is spinning.

Ok and part of that is to check your results against an alternative source that was produced for other purposes.



I have provided evidence. You don't seem to have noticed.

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

No, you didn't. You only provided your guess about what could have happened, unsupported by evidence.


If you want to know whether there's any association between IQ and whatever economic or political theories, I would suggest to do a study that is designed for that purpose. Mining data from previous studies may give some hints but doesn't tell you anything firm. You need more specific paramaters and better constructed instruments.

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

One more time. My claim was that education levels are correlated with pro-market attitudes. To support that claim I linked to a paper that finds a strong correlation, stronger than with other parameters. As an aside, the paper also tries to refine the notion of education level by more explicitly pinpointing levels of ability. Clearly the number of vocabulary words that one knows from a given list is a way to measure a certain aspect of "education".

Re: Editable Spreadsheet of the Labels
 

I don't think it's worth continuing the discussion because we've already communicated what each had to say and we've been a bit side tracked.

But, just for accuracy, in the study that you linked to, the authors used the 10 vocabulary words test as a proxy for intelligence. They already had demographic data about education.