Pater Familias » Journalism

“A COMFORT BLANKET FOR THE SMUG”?

Philip — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:39:23 +0000

“A COMFORT BLANKET FOR THE SMUG”? The discussion in the Guardian reflects the controversy over Pinker’s book. Andrew Brown in his review calls the book a “comfort blanket for the smug”. I think the book is important for the big question it asks—are things getting worse?— whether or not you agree with Pinker’s conclusions. The answer each person gives to the big question forms part of everybody’s world view. David Runciman’s review is balanced. The comparison is between a violent past and a violent present. The stronger part of Pinker’s argument is his contention that, as Runciman says: “the past was a far nastier place than we might have imagined.” The second part of Pinker’s argument, as Runciman puts it, is that “the present is far nicer than we might have noticed.” The horrendous events of the 20th century make this argument controversial. One novel approach in support of his claim is that “Pinker argues that the violence of the 20th century is best understood as a series of random spasms rather than part of a trend.” Another argument is based on the increase in instances of humanity of the kind that Nick and Dick Weisfelder point out. Of course, we know even less about past instances of humanity than we do about past violence.

MORE LOOKING AT THE FUTURE IN TERMS OF PROBABILITIES.

Philip — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:26:03 +0000

MORE LOOKING AT THE FUTURE IN TERMS OF PROBABILITIES. I was of course pleased to see a report by a good journalist which expressed the opinions of informed professionals. The article gives a useful idea of the range of uncertainty about what will happen with the euro. The same week, as this article in the Economist reports, the Federal Reserve Bank began publishing the predictions of all the members of the Federal Open Market Committee (the main policy making body of the Fed). The accompanying chart shows the great divergence of the 17 policymakers. For 2014, 5 of them think the appropriate federal funds rate will be greater or equal to 2%; 9 think it will be less than 1%. In the context of extremely low interest rates, the predictions reflect considerable uncertainty as to the course of the next three years.

A 25 % CHANCE OF A EURO DEFAULT?

Philip — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:24:19 +0000

A 25% CHANCE OF A EURO DEFAULT? In the Financial Times for January 27, Gillian Tett had the kind of article that I would like to see more of. She apparently talked to a number of senior bankers in Davos Switzerland for the big meeting and asked for their probability estimates for the breakup of the euro. The estimates are in the 20% to 25% range. The chance of the eurozone “muddling through” is thought to be about 70%. Kids, when I posted here almost two years ago about the possibility of the euro being threatened, the idea was startling enough to me that I reminded you (and myself) that we had had euros in our wallets.

ARE THE IOWA CAUCUSES UNREPRESENTATIVE?

Philip — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:18:03 +0000

ARE THE IOWA CAUCUSES UNREPRESENTATIVE? Since the Iowa caucuses assumed enormous importance in 1972, they have been presented as examples of grassroots democracy and therefore worthy of their enormous importance. This interview with a “shrewdly cynical professional” presents a view of the caucuses that I have not seen before. Says the cynical professional: “You gotta have money to get the people out….It’s a muscle caucus, not a message place….You need money to hire the guys who are well connected to make sure the right people get to the caucus night. It’s not a vote; it’s a paid event.” John Batchelor, who posted about the interview, summarizes what he learned from the interview: “Iowa is not about polling, ads, or popularity; it’s about hiring agents for the long haul in order to corral caucus attenders for a bitter winter night.” In my post yesterday, I focused on some indications that a candidate could stay viable for a long time without a lot of money. The Iowa caucuses may be a reason that early money is needed to win a nomination.

WHY YOU CAN’T SEE THE WHOLE FOOTBALL GAME.

Philip — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:12:53 +0000

WHY YOU CAN’T SEE THE WHOLE FOOTBALL GAME. Reed Albergotti explains why the National Football League will not let fans see the All 22 version of the game, even after the game is over: they do not want to open players, teams and coaches up to more criticism. He also quotes a spokesman for the league to the effect that it will be a long time before the league changes its policy. There is already, of course, lots of criticism. Perhaps the league doesn’t mind that criticism as much because it is uninformed.

NOT SEEING WHAT HAPPENS IN A FOOTBALL GAME.

Philip — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:11:04 +0000

NOT SEEING WHAT HAPPENS IN A FOOTBALL GAME. I have wondered for over 30 years why television broadcasts of professional football games show only the part of the field near the line of scrimmage. The camera follows the ball, but on passing plays, which are more than half the plays, the camera shows mainly the pass blocking and not what the wide receivers and the defensive secondary are doing—about one third of the players on the field. For example, it is impossible to see any kind of zone defense. Reed Albergotti had an article in the Wall Street Journal (November 4) which explained that there is indeed a distant camera angle in the National Football League that shows all 22 players and is called the “All 22″. Bill Parcells is quoted as saying that what fans see on television is only a “fragment” of what happens in a game. However, the “All 22″ is kept strictly away from the fans.

ALBERT PUJOLS SHOWS LEADERSHIP.

Philip — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 00:52:08 +0000

ALBERT PUJOLS SHOWS LEADERSHIP. Over the years, some of the most violent criticism I have read in a newspaper results from a failure by an athlete to give an interview. The latest example followed an error in the ninth inning of the second game of the World Series by Albert Pujols, the star of the Saint Louis Cardinals. The error cost the Cardinals the game. Pujols did not appear for questioning by the media after the game. This Yahoo article is typical of the reaction of sports writers to not getting an interview. Not doing so is often described by sports writers in terms more applicable to a serial killer. The article says that “Pujols is not accountable to the media. This is not about that.” The article then goes in for sports writer’s cliches about how errors are a result of moral failings. Pujols “spit the bit in a crucial game.” It was “bush league”. Pujols displayed “zero leadership.”

I have never been interested in postgame questioning of players. The questions are usually of the “How does it feel to lose this game [or win this game]. This yahoo article by a different writer notes the real problem: “leaving reporters to think up their own stuff.”

In the next game of the Series, Pujols hit 3 home runs and led his team to victory while setting a World Series record for most extra bases in a game.

APOPHENIA AND SPORTS JOURNALISM.

Philip — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 02:59:20 +0000

APOPHENIA AND SPORTS JOURNALISM. In yesterday’s cartoon, the first character says: “A weighted random number generator just produced a new batch of numbers.” The other character replies: “Let’s use them to build narratives.” The caption at the bottom says: “ALL SPORTS COMMENTARY”. Nate Silver linked to the cartoon in his discussion of the collapse of the Boston Red Sox at the end of the season. They had a large lead for making the playoffs at the beginning of September and then on the final day of the season, they were still in position to make the playoffs until last second heroics in two games made them lose out. There are narratives readily available for sports writers (and overused) which involve some kind of moral failing on the part of the Red Sox. You can also look at the baseball results as a series of random events. You can estimate the probability of the Red Sox winning a game on the basis of their winning percentage for the first five months of the season. There are baseball sites which will tell you what the probability of a team winning a game at any point in the game—given certain assumptions. FanGraphs will do it on a play by play basis. Nate Silver “just for fun” assumes that the events affecting the Red Sox were independent of each other (in a statistical sense) and on that assumption concludes that there was: “one chance in 278 million of all these events coming together in quite this way.”

APOPHENIA—THE CARTOON.

Philip — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 22:47:13 +0000

APOPHENIA—THE CARTOON. I posted here on September 25 about apophenia, and I have since been encountering discussions of the phenomenon although they don’t use the new word. Nate Silver even linked to this cartoon which dramatizes the phenomenon. The site has other insightful cartoons.

THE STORY OF A LONG SEASON.

Philip — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 23:57:49 +0000

THE STORY OF A LONG SEASON. The use of statistics represented by MONEYBALL changed sports journalism as much as it did baseball on the field. There was a flood of baseball writing by newcomers writing from a different point of view. Baseball writers had been beat writers, who turned a baseball game into a story. But there had always been people like me, who would read about a game by checking a box score, and the new writers wrote as if the box score was what was important. The story that the new journalists influenced by sabermetrics tell is not about individual games. The story is about average performances over 162 games. Ron Shelton wrote Bull Durham. In the Slate article, Allen Barra quotes Ron Shelton: “They always end these sports movies with a ‘big game’….. In real life, there is no big game. There’s always a game coming up after.”

MONEYBALL AND STORYTELLING.

Philip — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 23:56:35 +0000

MONEYBALL AND STORYTELLING. I have posted several times on MONEYBALL, the book by Michael Lewis. The movie of MONEYBALL has now opened to generally favorable reviews. The reviewers who seem to be the harshest critics are sportswriters, who point out inaccuracies and argue that the book overly simplifies the impact of sabermetrics (statistics) on baseball in the last few years. I think that the criticisms underrate the achievement of MONEYBALL in successfully dramatizing—by simplifying—an unusual subject. Fiction writers generally avoid dealing with the world of work and business. Lewis not only dramatizes the overall story, but he finds the stories in individual incidents (I posted here about his exaggerating the story of one baseball trade for dramatic effect). The screenwriters of Moneyball have evidently had the same success.

“EYEBALL TO EYEBALL”.

Philip — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 22:41:31 +0000

“EYEBALL TO EYEBALL”. Kids, Sandy Levinson’s phrase in his post that “it was ultimately Nikita Khrushchev… who ‘blinked’…” refers to a phrase that was characteristic of the reporting on the Crisis. This BBC article by Michael Dobbs in 2008 says: “The reported comment of Secretary of State Dean Rusk: ‘We were eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked’ – has become part of missile crisis mythology.” I am not familiar with what historians have now learned, but I do remember that at the time the imagery of a staredown was a dominant theme in writing about the Crisis. Sandy refers to “defense intellectuals.” One of the giants in the field was Thomas Schelling, whose great book THE STRATEGY OF CONFLICT, which applied game theory to negotiations, had recently been published. In one chapter, Schelling discussed the game of “chicken”. The winner was the one who convinced the other that he was not going to retreat. His telling example was that a pedestrian crossing Harvard Square should appear completely oblivious to the cars so that drivers would assume the pedestrian would never step back. Discussions of nuclear confrontations at the time talked a lot about the credibility of threats.