On Being Drunk in a Foreign Country

Howard walked across the street and into the Windmill pub. Here he ordered and began drinking a perfectly reasonable bottle of red wine. His chosen seat was, he thought, in a neglected corner of the bar. But two minutes after he sat down, a huge flat screen that he had not noticed was lowered down near his head and switched on. A football game commenced between a white team and a blue team. Men gathered round. They seemed to accept and like Howard, mistaking him for one of those dedicated souls who come early to get the best seat. Howard allowed this misinterpretation and found himself taken up in the general fervour. Soon he was cheering and complaining with the rest. When a stranger, in his enthusiasm, tipped some beer down Howard’s shoulder, Howard smiled, shrugged and said nothing. A little while later this same fellow bought Howard a beer, saying nothing when he put it down in front of Howard and seeming to expect nothing in return. At the end of the first half another man beside him knocked glasses with Howardin a very jolly way, in approval of Howard’s random decision to cheer the blue team, although the game itself was still 0–0. This score never changed. And after the game finished nobody hit each other or got angry – it didn’t seem to be that kind of game. ‘Well, we got what we needed,’ said one man philosophically. Three other men smiled and nodded at the truth of this.

Zadie Smith, On Beauty, p. 305 (part 3, ch. 4)

There Is No Good Reason to . . .

"There is no good reason to" precedes all kinds of arguments for banning things I could well have good reason to want.

Eric Crampton, comment on his own post "Dog days of summer... this time with data"

Check for Inconsistencies

In general, people seem far more eager to collect respectable arguments for or against various specific regulations, than to consider the coherence of a pattern of regulations they endorse. They are satisfied to offer arguments for why janitors should have work hour limits, why musicians should not, why doctors should be highly regulated, and why car mechanics should not, all without much noticing or caring how much they treat similar cases differently.

This suggests that there is a lot of rationalization going on. That is, rather than choosing some principles and then consistently applying them, people instead pick various random policy positions and then search for justifications.

Robin Hanson, "Regulatory Differences"

Cocktail Party Bore

[S]tatistical and probabilistic thinking is a real damper on "intellectual" conversation. By this, I mean that there are many individuals who wish to make inferences about the world based on data which they observe, or offer up general typologies to frame a subsequent analysis. These individuals tend to be intelligent and have college degrees. Their discussion ranges over topics such as politics, culture and philosophy. But, introduction of questions about the moments about the distribution, or skepticism as to the representativeness of their sample, and so on, tends to have a chilling affect on the regular flow of discussion. While the average human being engages mostly in gossip and interpersonal conversation of some sort, the self-consciously intellectual interject a bit of data and abstraction (usually in the form of jargon or pithy quotations) into the mix. But the raison d'etre of the intellectual discussion is basically signaling and cuing; in other words, social display. No one really cares about the details and attempting to generate a rigorous model is really beside the point. Trying to push the N much beyond 2 or 3 (what you would see in a college essay format) will only elicit eye-rolling and irritation.

Razib Khan, "Why People Don't Care about Statistics" (emphases omitted)