From the Titelbaum book on Bayesian epistemology I have mentioned here before. There is a nice explanation in a footnote near the end about "observation selection bias" as a ubiquitous problem in statistics and, really, in the understanding of probability. The explanation is illustrated with a World War II throwback. US War Department statisticians observed in 1943 that bombers returning to London from their flights over occupied Europe generally had more bullet holes in their fuselage than in their engine. Somebody drew the conclusion that the German fire tended to hit the fuselage, and that there should be extra plating there. Such a reinforcement of the fuselage was not a decision to be taken lightly. Reinforcement adds weight. Heavier aircraft are less maneuverable, have a lesser range, etc. So Abraham Wald, a Hungarian Jew known before the war for econometrics research, who at this point was working at Columbia with the Statistical Research Group, cons...
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Wow. I recently encountered on twitter an idiot who was trying to argue that Hitler had created the Berlin Wall. Actually, this was part of a broader discussion. Our idiot (OI for short) was trying to defend Trump's wall building. Somebody else had apparently mentioned the Berlin Wall as an example of the evils of building walls. OI apparently thought it important to make the point that Hitler had built a wall through the middle of his own capital, whereas Trump was dong things the right way, putting the wall on a border. Then some other genius popped up and explained (???) that Stalin had actually built the Berlin Wall. This was too much. Yours truly intervened and informed them that the Wall was constructed at the insistence of Nikita Khrushchev, isolating West Berlin from the eastern part of the city and the country of East Germany, when the latter was being run by a Khrushchev puppet, Walter Ulbricht. I'm such a spoilsport. But hey: if the Trumpets want to compa...
Both Sean Spicer and Marine Le Pen have in recent days uttered claims that might well fit under the capacious tent of "Holocaust revisionism." Spicer has walked it back, and one can generously attribute his comments to gross maladroitness in the performance of ... well ... his job. Still: such events do give us the opportunity to observe that much of the crap that passes itself off these days as "Holocaust revisionism" traces itself back to Harry Elmer Barnes, a paid apologist and propagandist for Nazi Germany in real time. Barnes may have been atoning for his own war guilt. During the "Great War," 1914-18, Barnes was an enthusiast for the crusade against the Huns. When peace came, Barnes (like many at the time) wondered what it all had been about. He concluded not just that he had been overly enthusiastic, not just that he had been wrong in seeing the war as a matter of white hats versus black hats, but that in fact he had had the 'hats' t...
Again I'm cribbing from something I wrote for Yahoo!Answers. The question was, "10 reasons why world war 2 started?" My answer, composed rather off the cuff, ran as follows: I'm glad you allow for causative pluralism. I'll get you half way there with five causes: 1. The inherent dynamism of fascistic nationalisms, which need to prove their superiority to other nations in order to secure their domestic support; 2. In Japan (which wasn't really fascistic in the same sense as its European allies) a collective inferiority complex, which left them wanting to prove themselves at least as powerful as the western imperialists operating in east Asia; 3. The widespread theories of Admiral Mahan on the centrality of naval power in history, and the superior position in which island-nations are placed for empire building. This, too, inspired Japan and helped guide other nations too in a disastrous direction; 4. The excesses of the Versailles Treaty that the ...
Random reading.... In the February issue of HARPER'S, Rebecca Solnit works to relate the Second World War to ... every environmental disaster since. The following may be the money quote. "In crucial, material ways, the technological modernization of World War II never ended. Pesticides, nuclear engineering, and plastics -- all developed during the militarization of industrial production -- are now part of a war by other means. All three industries sought profitable postwar applications and found them in agriculture, in energy production, and in the creation of untold disposable plastic items, the ubiquity of which was aided by he rise of advertising and marketing." The reference to pesticides there brought me up short. Are pesticides the consequence of that war in the same sense as nuclear engineering? Sulfur was used as a pesticide by the Chinese back around 1,000 BC. My understanding is that the modern and highly marketable nature of pesticides dates back to ...
The website of BBC recently ran a list of the ten greatest continuing controversies about Winston Churchill. Personally, I was a bit surprised to find nothing about Bretton Woods there. Certainly Churchill's relationship to the Bretton Woods conference, of '44, which formally gave the US dollar the central place as the western world's currency, has been a matter of considerable controversy. I refer the reader doubtful on that point to THE BATTLE OF BRETTON WOODS, a recent offering of the Princeton University Press, which paints the conference itself as a dollar-versus-pound tug-of-war. Churchill either acceded to the lessened significance of the pound, or simply wasn't paying attention, and either fact is an important one. It is hard to believe that he wasn't paying attention. He had been closely associated with a gold standard earlier in his political career (a fact which also doesn't get into the BBC list), so it is possible he acceded to the supremac...
So ... I was watching the ceremony on Sword Beach, Normandy, France last week. At one point, while a ballet was underway on a map of Europe laid down on the sand, the cameras caught Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin in the midst of an animated conversation. Hmmm. I wondered: what could they be saying to each other? My lip reading skills are so bad that they would be no help even if we could assume they were talking to one another in English, which seems unlikely. So I'm forced to fall back on sheer guesswork. PUTIN: "Our army would have crushed the Third Reich anyway, even if nothing had happened here." MERKEL: "You are wrong, Vodka breath! Without any enemies in our rear, we would have stopped you before you got to Konigsberg." PUTIN: "Kaliningrad, you mean." Or, it's possible it didn't go that way at all....
Greene still writes books, and he does so successfully, post-scandal. He wrote of the illness and death of a friend of his in And You Know You Should be Glad (2006). Publishers Weekly called this book a "dusty attic of lost Americana," because Greene uses it to re-visit the small town midWest USA milieu where he and Jack -- the fellow who is dying -- had first met (and they did so on their first day in kindergarten!) and become friends. Amazon.com's customer reviews are enthusiastic. A fellow named Peter Frost gives it five stars, saying "Yes, this book is sad in places, but it leaves you with a profound feeling of ... how important it is to have friends, and what they mean to us." It is easy to make fun of the sort of schmaltz that gets that sort of review, but pulling it off, at book length, an act that requires some variety and dramatic heft, is trickier than sophisticates imagine. Greene does have a gift. Here he is in the book's opening pass...