Paradigms and Risk Hustlers
What’s your paradigm? A paradigm is a lens on how you view the world. Virtually all of us are exposed to the political paradigm, although only some see everything through the political lens. It dominates much of the media, although a lot of it is boring. Wouldn’t it be better if it was like boxing. How about Friday night (political) fights between The Blond Bomber, Laura Ingraham versus the Queen of Snark, Rachel Maddow? At lower levels, we could have Phil Donahue or similar TV hosts showing, “You slept with my husband and now he believes government handouts keep people out of the workforce you B****.”
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Racism, Education and Monopolies
In an outstanding opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal last week, Harvard economist Roland Fryer discusses his research, and his own preconceptions, about racism in America. To his credit, his research was objective as he started trying to prove his theory that racial discrimination was the source of many problems such as wages and educational achievement in the U.S. After doing rigorous statistical analysis, he revised his conclusion finding instead that differences in skills were the most likely explanation.
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Turn It Off
Andy Kessler of the Wall Street Journal asks a question that many of us have asked ourselves, “How do you turn it all off? You know, thinking about work, the fire hose of newsfeeds, emails and texts, or constantly solving the never-ending puzzle of a job.”
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You May Be Entitled to Compensation
Back in the 1980s, for mailing in your information, you had a chance to win $10 million. The odds weren’t great, 1.2 billion to 1 against winning. Eventually, with confusion about whether you had to buy a magazine to win and people not understanding the odds, Congress passed a sweepstakes law and PCH got sued.
Today, with chemical tort trials, you just have to call a law firm to start the process to see if you are “entitled to compensation.”
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"Healthy"
FDA issued a proposed rule for foods that may be labeled as “healthy” if they are recommended by the “USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans” (DGA). Oddly, one of the things it doesn’t address is the total amount of food people are eating today.
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Weighing the Weight of Evidence
We burn witches, we also burn wood. Wood doesn’t sink in water, nor does a duck. If the woman weighs the same as a duck, then she is made of wood. The woman weighs the same as a duck. Therefore, the woman is a witch. Monty Python and the Holy Grail 1997
In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, this logic was used to determine that a woman was a witch after she sat on one side of the scale with a duck on the other side. Weighing the evidence was also used in the real world. In sixteenth-century Germany and Holland, suspected witches were weighed to determine if they were light enough to be able to fly on brooms.
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