The superforecasters rarely use sophisticated mathematical models to make their forecasts, but they are uniformly highly numerate. Comfort with numbers is a prerequisite for making good forecasts but fancy quantitative models are not.
Comfort with Numbers
Thursday, December 31st, 2015The Crisis in Social Psychology
Wednesday, December 30th, 2015Early in his career, social psychologist Lee Jussim faced a crisis:
An early mentor, Jacquelynne Eccles, handed him some large datasets gathered from school children and teachers in educational settings. He tried testing the social psychology theories he had studied, but consistently found that his data contradicted them.
Instead of finding that the teachers’ expectations influenced the students’ performances, he found that the students’ performances influenced the teachers’ expectations. This data “misbehaved”. It did not show that stereotypes created, or even had much influence on the real world. The data did not show that teachers’ expectations strongly limited students’ performances. It did not show that stereotypes became self-fulfilling prophecies. But instead of filing his results away into a desk drawer, Jussim kept investigating — for three more decades.
Some months after Jussim’s presentation at the 2015 Sydney Symposium, the results of the Reproducibility Project in psychology were announced. This project found that out of 100 psychological studies, only about 30–50% could be replicated.
[...]
When I went through University as a psychology undergraduate Jussim’s work was not on the curriculum. His studies were not to be found in my social psychology textbook. Nor was Jussim ever mentioned in the classroom. Yet the area of study Jussim has been a pioneer of — stereotype accuracy — is one of the most robust and replicable areas ever to emerge from the discipline.
To talk about stereotypes, one has to first define what they are. Stereotypes are simply beliefs about a group of people. They can be positive (children are playful) or they can be negative (bankers are selfish), or they can be somewhere in between (librarians are quiet). When stereotypes are defined as beliefs about groups of people (true or untrue), they correlate with real world criteria with effect sizes ranging from .4 to .9, with the average coming in somewhere around .8. (This is close to the highest effect size that a social science researcher can find, an effect size of 1.0 would mean that stereotypes correspond 100% to real world criteria. Many social psychological theories rest on studies which have effect sizes of around .2.)
Jussim and his co-authors have found that stereotypes accurately predict demographic criteria, academic achievement, personality and behaviour7. This picture becomes more complex, however, when considering nationality or political affiliation. One area of stereotyping which is consistently found to be inaccurate are the stereotypes concerning political affiliation; right-wingers and left wingers tend to caricature each others personalities, most often negatively so7.
Lest one thinks that these results paint a bleak picture of human nature, Jussim and his colleagues have also found that people tend to switch off some of their stereotypes — especially the descriptive ones — when they interact with individuals7. It appears that descriptive stereotypes are a crutch to lean on when we have no other information about a person. When we gain additional insights into people, these stereotypes are no longer useful. And there is now a body of evidence to suggest that stereotypes are not as fixed, unchangeable and inflexible as they’ve historically been portrayed to be8.
Whoever Controls Star Wars
Tuesday, December 29th, 2015Myths, not facts, rule mankind, John C. Wright says, and whoever controls Star Wars controls the window into the imagination of an entire generation:
In the decade before STAR WARS, flicks were a drag. They were filled with gloom, doom, grit, and anxiety, the kind of fretful worry-wart frenzies about non-issues in which Leftwingers love in indulge. It was the time of SOYLENT GREEN and EASY RIDER. They were made when America was at an apex of wealth and liberty. Meanwhile, back in the 1940s, we had polio, the Dustbowl, and Pearl Harbor, three of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, namely Plague, Famine, and War, were riding the land. And folks made Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials that were fun escapism telling simple stories about larger-than-life good underdogs fighting larger-than-life evil overlords like Killer Kane or Ming the Merciless. And so we were inspired to storm Normandy Beach and topple the Evil Empire of the Soviets.
So George Lucas, liberal extraordinaire, misled by his sheer love of nostalgic film, and without the least notion of what he was doing, decide to remake FLASH ROGERS CONQUERS MARS, and make a pure schoolboy action-adventure film supercharged with the sheer love of escapist film for the sake of film, with some chop-socky samurai sword-fighting thrown in for good measure.
And he accidently brought the whole 1940s back into the soul of the filmgoing public with him, complete with all its conservative values, can-do Yankee optimism, and sassy dames.
The Farm boy is from Tantooine, but could be from Kansas, the lovable rogue could be a hot rodder from Route 66, or any number of other cowboys, rumrunners, or tough guys, and the Princess is a sassy but straight-shooting dame straight out of any number of 1940s adventure serials, comedies, or action flicks.
We have seen so many sassy heroines made directly in the mold of Leia that we tend to forget what decade she is from: she is more like Ginger Rogers or Virginia Mayo playing a gun moll or a girl reporter with moxie than she is like any 1970s actress. What she was not was an icon of feminism, or an ad for female equality with men: she was a princess, that is, she outranked all the male characters.
Leia spoke not just with sass, but with authority, and the script did not have, nor did it need, any embarrassingly unrealistic scenes of her wrestling apes or using wire-fu on hulking thugees twice her size. American gals from the 1940s did not need to wear men’s clothing and false moustaches and speak in a forced low pitched voice to be strong: they were strong and female, not weakminded females playacting at being strong men.
Above all, STAR WARS was pure Americana, as immediately part of our American cult and culture as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer or the Lone Ranger.
Long, Long ago was 1940. The Galaxy Far, Far Away was the USA.
STAR WARS was us.
You Need to Compare
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2015A recent debate revolved around ISIS, but ISIS is not the point, Spandrell reminds us:
The point is that you have a bunch of men in that room, and you’re supposed to make a judgment about them. You need to compare. And comparisons require a yardstick. What do we compare about them?
How tall and handsome they are? Well that works in some places. How well they dance or sing? That happens in many places too. How strong and brave they are in single combat? Lots of cultures did that too. But we don’t. We resent tall and handsome men are privileged enough in the sexual marketplace, so fuck that. Fuck dancers too, those get women also. And fuck single combat, the average voter isn’t a good fighter. We don’t want to give high status to tall, strong men with good dancing feet. That would make us feel inadequate. And with good reason, in Africa they give high status to all those men and it sucks.
Our culture gives high status to men with ideas. Everybody can claim to have good ideas. It doesn’t take good genes, nor dancing or fighting skills. Everybody can learn to parrot bullshit after a little practice. Bullshit is the most egalitarian arena, so all status contests are done in the realm of bullshit. Now bullshit requires a topic too. Remember in middle school, when a bunch of friends got together and stared asking: “What would you do if you were invisible?” Or “Batman or Spiderman?” What’s the point of those questions? Nobody’s gonna become invisible. But by asking stupid questions you get people to talk, and through their answers you get to know their character. The question doesn’t matter. The more outlandish the better. You can’t get to know people by asking them a factual question. It has to be bullshit.
And adults do the same thing. In the Cultural Revolution people liked to discuss materialist dialectics. The Republican party likes to talk National Security. Why? Did peasants in Jingzhou give a shit about Hegel? Of course not. Does anybody in the USA really care about Raqqa? No. So why won’t people shut up about it?
“You gotta talk about something!”. That’s what my mother tells me when I ask her why does she like discussing the news about stuff she absolutely has no clue about. And… that’s all there is to it. There’s a bunch of old dudes on TV, and you gotta choose one. Experience says they’re all lying their asses anyway. But you gotta choose one. And how do you choose one? You throw some bullshit topic at them and look at how they respond. Then you have something to make judgment about. How they talk. Tone of voice, body language. Logic. This guy sounds smart. Oh this guy’s a doofus. Hey this guys sounds like fun to have a beer with.
You then choose a guy who you like, or more accurately, you choose the guy because saying that you like that guy makes you look good with your friends. And you made that decision after seeing him speak about ISIS. What’s ISIS? I don’t know. Who gives a shit. I just kinda like the guy who said we should bomb them. So yeah, let’s bomb them. What, we just spent 2 trillion bombing some other guy? Who gives a shit, it’s not like I know the difference. They’re not gonna lower my taxes if I choose not to bomb someone, right? So anyway, yeah I like that bomb-ISIS guy.
Why Trump Leads
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2015Dan McLaughlin grudgingly admires Trump’s ability to disrupt, unsettle, and exploit the primary system:
Let’s start with ambiguity. Trump has been flirting with electoral politics so long, he was asked in an interview with Rona Barrett in 1980 about his possible interest in running for president someday, and Larry King asked him at the 1988 GOP convention if he would have accepted an invitation to be George H.W. Bush’s running mate. He joined H. Ross Perot’s “Reform Party” in 1999 and even ran briefly in its primaries for the 2000 election before bowing out and watching the nomination go to Pat Buchanan.
Trump zigged—he declared that he identified as a Democrat as recently as 2004, donated significant sums of money to Hillary Clinton and other Democrats despised by rank-and-file Republicans, and had glowing words for Hillary and President Obama. He zagged—he confronted Obama so directly over his birthplace in 2011 that Obama felt compelled to finally publicly release his Hawaiian birth certificate, and he endorsed Mitt Romney in the 2012 primaries, saying that if Romney were the nominee, Trump would not stage his own third-party bid in 2012.
Given his long and erratic history, loose party loyalty, and propensity to bluff, Trump’s competitors for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination were quite reasonably conditioned to view talk of a Trump 2016 campaign, and even his June 16 announcement, with uncertainty: was it another publicity stunt? A run-up to a Perot-style third party campaign? A stalking horse for some hidden agenda? A personal vendetta against Jeb Bush? Or a real effort to win the Republican nomination?
Unable to discern Trump’s intentions in May, June, and July, his opponents were tentative in reaching decisions and putting them into action. To the extent that he maintains the third-party threat to this day, it provides him a screen of ambiguity that protects him against attacks other candidates would have to face. Nobody worries that Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush will leave the party in a snit and launch a third-party bid; Trump’s credible threat of doing so makes primary opponents think twice about attacking him in ways they would not hesitate to attack loyal Republicans whose intent to abide by primary outcomes is clear.
There’s much more.
(Hat tip to T. Greer.)
The Point of Money
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2015Spandrell reminds us that the point of money is to be a cognitive aid for remembering favors:
I did something for you, if I am not to be a sucker I’ll want to get something back from you eventually. So grab me that shiny shell you use as a wristband, so I can remember. David Graeber made a similar point on his famous book about Debt, which is pretty good if you get the fact that Graeber is a lame communist and adjust your skimming accordingly.
The problem is that this tech we use to remember favors leads us to spent huge amount of valuable labor in manufacturing shell accessories, beads, mining metal and wasting it in making coins. Whole empires were built, entire nations killed and enslaved in the process of looking for mines where perfectly good metal could be extracted to waste in making little coins with the face of a king to distribute so people can remember who made a favor to whom. That’s how it works though.
I am endlessly fascinated by this kind of evolutionary process where everybody runs around doing completely pointless stuff which nobody benefits from.
People, not Commercial Organizations or Chains of Command
Monday, December 21st, 2015Some wisdom from Calvin & Muad’Dib:
People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces.
If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness — they cannot work and their civilization collapses.
The Machiavelli of Maryland
Saturday, December 19th, 2015
The prime minister of Kazakhstan wants to find a way to remove ethnic Russians from a city on his northern border; a major Asian government wants a plan to train its new intelligence services; an Italian chemical company wants help settling an asbestos lawsuit with a local commune; a citizens’ group in Tonga wants to scare away Japanese dolphin poachers from its shores; the London Review of Books wants a piece on the Armenian genocide; a woman is having a custody battle over her children in Washington DC — can Luttwak “reason” with her husband? And that is just in the last 12 months.
[...]
For the past 30 years, Luttwak has run his own strategic consultancy — a sort of one-man security firm — that provides bespoke “solutions” to some very intractable problems. In his long career, Luttwak has been asked by the president of Mexico to help eliminate a street gang that was burning tourist buses in the city of Mexicali; the Dalai Lama has consulted him about relations with China, European governments have hired him to root out al-Qaida operatives, and the US army has commissioned him to update its counterinsurgency manual. He earns around $1m a year from his “jobs”. “It’s always important to get paid,” he likes to insist. “It protects you from the liberal problem of good intentions and from being called an intriguer.”
It is tempting to imagine Luttwak as a man exiled to the wrong place and time, whose fate, like a character in Nabokov, has been reduced from old-world brilliance to something less grand in 21st-century America. It is not hard, after all, to picture him conniving at the Congress of Vienna, or plotting murders in the Medici court. He has the air of the seasoned counsellor to the prince who is dispatched to deal with the Mongols and returns alone, on horseback, clutching advantageous terms on parchment.
But only in America was the career of Edward Luttwak possible. The perpetually renewable reservoir of naivety at the highest levels of the US government has been good for business. During the cold war, Luttwak was often identified as a peculiar American species known as the “defence intellectual”. These were academics who served power, who were often impatient with democratic procedure, and who enraptured audiences — from thinktanks to military academies — with their elaborate projector-slide frescoes of nuclear apocalypse.
Read the whole thing.
Libertarian Star Wars
Friday, December 18th, 2015The folks at Reason have some fun with their own libertarian Star Wars parody:
The Microcomplaint
Friday, December 18th, 2015It was once considered unbecoming to moan about trifling ordeals:
Now, in a seismic shift for the moral culture, abetted by technology, we tolerate and even encourage the “microcomplaint”: the petty, petulant kvetch about the quotidian.
Complaining has historically been deemed permissible when reserved for the ears of significant others, family members or close friends. A simple hypothesis, then, would be that those who gripe online are simply lonely in the physical world, lacking intimates with whom to vent, or are chronic malcontents. But lots of rich, popular celebrities also do it.
[...]
The smartphone in particular has facilitated extemporaneous caviling. Irritations that the passage of time may have soothed can, in the moment, be immediately expressed to an audience. Often these complaints take the form of a narrative developing in real time: the talkative taxi driver, the hostile airline ticket clerk, the interminable security line, the malodorous seatmate and crying baby. Such threads frequently pick up steam as the audience validates or shares the narrator’s posts; the nuisances others must contend with can make for excellent vicarious entertainment, and accreting Likes tend to fuel the microcomplainer.
[...]
In this way, the microcomplaint functions as a kind of reverse boast: You may be celebrating a new job or engagement with a Michelin-starred dinner, but look at how much I have suffered today — I’m deserving of more attention.
[...]
Those who were offended in an “honor culture,” where one’s reputation is paramount, once resorted to direct retaliation; think of duels or blood feuds. This vengeful climate eventually gave way in the West to a “dignity culture,” in which people consider themselves to have intrinsic worth that cannot be devalued by others (“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”).
When conflict cannot be brushed aside in a dignity culture, the affronted attempt to compromise or turn to the legal system rather than seek out violent recompense. (Long before ignoring personal attacks became the prevailing mode, Jesus had a few ideas about turning the other cheek, too.)
Gary Cooper, Tony Soprano would argue, combines the best of both worlds: He fights back when necessary — he is “strong” — yet never betrays any feelings of hurt — he remains “silent.”
The authors of the paper assert that we are now in a culture that valorizes victimhood. “The moral status of the victim, at its nadir in honor cultures, has risen to new heights,” they write, which “increases the incentive to publicize grievances.” Instead of pursuing violent or legal confrontation or letting the insult slide, the victim now appeals for support from third parties while “emphasizing one’s own oppression,” often through social media.
A Voter’s Guide to Thinking
Thursday, December 17th, 2015Scott Adams provides a voter’s guide to thinking:
1. If you are comparing Plan A to Plan B, you might be doing a good job of thinking. But if you are comparing Plan A to an imaginary situation in which there are no tradeoffs in life, you are not thinking.
2. If you see quotes taken out of context, and you form an opinion anyway, that’s probably not thinking. If you believe you need no further context because there is only one imaginable explanation for the meaning of the quotes, you might have a poor imagination. Sometimes a poor imagination feels a lot like knowledge, but it’s closer to the opposite.
3. If a debate lends itself to estimates of cost (in money or human suffering) and you aren’t willing to offer an estimate in support of your opinion, you don’t yet have an opinion.
4. If you are sure you know how a leader performed during his or her tenure, and you don’t know how someone else would have performed in the same situation, you don’t actually know anything. It just feels like you do.
5. If something reminds you of something else (such as Hitler, to pick one example) that doesn’t mean you are thinking. That just means something reminded you of something. A strong association of that type can prevent you from thinking, but it is not itself a component of reason.
6. Analogies are not an element of reason. Analogies are good for explaining things to people who are new to a topic. If I am busy as a beaver, that does not imply that I also build dams by gnawing on wood. It just means I’m busy.
7. If you think your well-informed and reasoned opinions as a voter are bringing up the average, let me introduce you to the 100% of other voters who believe they are bringing up the average as well.
8. If your opinion is based on your innate ability to predict the future, you might be employing more magical thinking than reason. The exceptions would be the people who use data to predict the future, such as Nate Silver. That stuff is credible albeit imperfect by nature. Your imagination is less reliable.
Bowden on Trump
Tuesday, December 15th, 2015Mark Bowden spent a long, awkward weekend with Donald Trump in November 1996:
He was like one of those characters in an 18th-century comedy meant to embody a particular flavor of human folly. Trump struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong. He remains the most vain man I have ever met. And he was trying to make a good impression. Who could have predicted that those very traits, now on prominent daily display, would turn him into the leading G.O.P. candidate for president of the United States?
His latest outrageous edict on banning all Muslims from entering the country comes as no surprise to me based on the man I met nearly 20 years ago. He has no coherent political philosophy, so comparisons with Fascist leaders miss the mark. He just reacts. Trump lives in a fantasy of perfection, with himself as its animating force.
[...]
I was prepared to like him as I boarded his black 727 at La Guardia for the flight to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home — prepared to discover that his over-the-top public persona was a clever pose. That underneath was an ironic wit, an ordinary but clever guy. But no. With Trump, what you see is what you get. His behavior was cringe-worthy. He showed off the gilded interior of his plane — calling me over to inspect a Renoir on its walls, beckoning me to lean in closely to see… what? The luminosity of the brush strokes? The masterly use of color? No. The signature. “Worth $10 million,” he told me. Time after time the stories he told me didn’t check out, from Michael Jackson’s romantic weekend at Mar-a-Lago with his then wife Lisa Marie Presley (they stayed at opposite ends of the estate) to the rug in one bedroom he said was designed by Walt Disney when he was 18 (it wasn’t) to the strength of his marriage to Maples (they would split months later).
Small-Game Fallacies
Friday, December 11th, 2015Game theorists study small games, with limited and precise rules, but applying their small-game conclusions to the “large games” of the real world can go terribly awry:
Most studies in experimental economics suffer from small-game/large-game effects. Unless these experiments are very securely anonymized, in a way the players actually trust, and in a way the players have learned to adapt to, overriding their moral instincts — an extremely rare circumstance, despite many efforts to achieve this — large-game effects quickly creep in, rendering the results often very misleading, sometimes practically the opposite of the actual behavior of people in analogous real-life situations. A common example: it may be narrowly rational and in accord with theory to “cheat”, “betray”, or otherwise play a narrowly selfish game, but if the players may be interacting with each other after the experimenters’ game is over, the perceived or actual reputational effects in the larger “games of life”, ongoing between the players in subsequent weeks or years, may easily exceed the meager rewards doled out by the experimenters to act selfishly in the small game. Even if the players can somehow be convinced that they will remain complete strangers to each other indefinitely into the future, our moral instincts generally evolved to play larger “games of life”, not one-off games, nor anonymous games, nor games with pseudonyms of strictly limited duration, with the result that behaving according to theory must be learned: our default behavior is very different. (This explains, why, for example, economics students typically play in a more narrowly self-interested way, i.e. more according to the simple theories of economics, than other kinds of students).
Small-game/large-game effects are not limited to reputational incentives to play nicer: moral instincts and motivations learned in larger games also include tribal unity against perceived opponents, revenge, implied or actual threats of future coercion, and other effects causing much behavior to be worse than selfish, and these too can spill over between the larger and smaller games (when, for example, teams from rival schools or nations are pitted against each other in economic experiments). Moral instincts, though quite real, should not be construed as necessarily or even usually being actually morally superior to various kinds of learned morals, whether learned in economics class or in the schools of religion or philosophy.
Small-game/large-game problems can also occur in auditing, when audits look at a particular system and fail to take into account interactions that can occur outside their system of financial controls, rendering the net interactions very different from what simply auditing the particular system would suggest. A common fraud is for trades to be made outside the scope of the audit, “off the books”, rendering the books themselves very misleading as to the overall net state of affairs.
[...]
A related error is the pure-information fallacy: treating an economic institution purely as an information system, accounting only for market-proximate incentives to contribute information via trading decisions, while neglecting how that market necessarily also changes players’ incentives to act outside of that market. For example, a currently popular view of proposition bets, the “prediction markets” view, often treats prop bets or idea futures as purely information-distribution mechanisms, with the only incentives supposed as the benign incentive to profit by adding useful information to the market. This fails to take into account the incentives such markets create to act differently outside the market. A “prediction market” is always also one that changes incentives outside that market: a prediction market automatically creates parallel incentives to bring about the predicted event. For example a prediction market on a certain person’s death is also an assassination market. Which is why a pre-Gulf-War-II DARPA-sponsored experimental “prediction market” included a prop bet on Saddam Hussein’s death, but excluded such trading on any other, more politically correct world leaders. A sufficiently large market predicting an individual’s death is also, necessarily, an assassination market, and similarly other “prediction” markets are also act markets, changing incentives to act outside that market to bring about the predicted events.
How the Media Inspires Mass Shooters
Thursday, December 10th, 2015Mother Jones investigates how the Media inspires mass shooters:
As part of our investigation into threat assessment, Mother Jones documented the chilling scope of the “Columbine effect”: We found at least 74 plots and attacks across 30 states in which suspects and perpetrators claimed to have been inspired by the nation’s worst high school massacre. Their goals ranged from attacking on the anniversary of Columbine to outdoing the original body count. Law enforcement stopped 53 of these plots before anyone was harmed. Twenty-one of them evolved into attacks, with a total of 89 victims killed, 126 injured, and nine perpetrators committing suicide. (See more about this data here.)
Sam Harris’s Salon Interview
Tuesday, December 8th, 2015Sam Harris shares the excised portion of his recent Salon interview:
[Note: Salon deleted the following section from the interview.]
As long as we’re talking about the regressive Left, it would be remiss of me not to point out how culpable Salon is for giving it a voice. The problem is not limited to the political correctness and masochism I’ve been speaking about — it’s also the practice of outright deception to defame Islam’s critics. To give you one example, I once wrote an article about Islamist violence in which I spoke in glowing terms about Malala Yousafzai. I literally said nothing but good things about her. I claimed that she is the best thing to come out of the Muslim world in a thousand years. I said she is extraordinarily brave and eloquent and doing what millions of Muslim men and women are too terrified to do, which is to stand up to forces of theocracy in her own society. I also said that though she hadn’t won the Nobel Prize that year, she absolutely deserved it — and deserved it far more than some of its recent recipients had. And in response to this encomium, Salon published a piece by the lunatic Murtaza Hussain entitled, “Sam Harris Slurs Malala,” which subjected my views to the same defamatory and dishonest treatment that I’ve come to expect from him. And this sort of thing has been done to me a dozen times on your website. And yet Salon purports to be a forum for the civil discussion of important ideas.
Most readers simply don’t understand how this game is played. If they read an article which states that Sam Harris is a racist, genocidal, xenophobic, pro-torture goon who supported the Iraq war — all of which has been alleged about me in Salon — well, then, it’s assumed that some journalists who work for the website under proper editorial control have actually looked into the matter and feel that they are on firm enough ground to legally say such things. There’s a real confusion about what journalism has become, and I can assure you that very few people realize that much of what appears on your website is produced by malicious freaks who are just blogging in their underpants.
I’m not saying that everything that Salon publishes is on the same level, and I have nothing bad to say about what you’ve written, Sean. But there is an enormous difference between honest criticism and defamatory lies. If I say that Malala is a total hero who deserves a Nobel Prize, and Salon titles its article “Sam Harris Slurs Malala,” that’s tabloid-level dishonesty. It’s worse, in fact, because when one reads about what a nanny said about Brad and Angelina in a tabloid, one knows that such gossip stands a good chance of not being true. Salon purports to be representing consequential ideas fairly, and yet it does this sort of thing more often than any website I can think of. The latest piece on me was titled “Sam Harris’ dangerous new idiocy: Incoherent, Islamophobic and simply immoral.” I don’t think I’m being thin-skinned in detecting an uncharitable editorial position being taken there. Salon is telling the world that I’m a dangerous, immoral, Islamophobic idiot. And worse, the contents of these articles invariably misrepresent my actual views. This problem isn’t remedied by merely publishing this conversation.
[Of course, Salon didn’t actually publish that part of the conversation.]