Chicken Sandwich

I wanted to try the new chicken sandwich from KFC. It has 2 pieces of chicken instead of a bun and looks disgusting.

But the Boston Globe ripped into it, calling it a 540-calorie pretender vis a vis true American indulgences: the 1000 calorie Double Gulp or a 1000+ quad-stacker. And I eat those as part of my pre-breakfast routine.

Get out of my face with that shit, KFC.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/04/kfc_needs_to_lay_off_the_weak.html

Quote of the Day

Today's quote of the day, from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity blog:

Sports was, is, and always will be a losing proposition for most schools. Why sell your soul and integrity to keep Bubba the Alum happy? Why? Because most typical university presidents lack certain intimate body parts needed to resist pressure, and they are whores. Plain and simple.

I think a lot of people are under the impression college sports make money. They don't for the vast majority of colleges.

Immigration Zeal

I read the St. Pete Times' editorial on Arizona's anti-illegal immigration bill. I wouldn't vote for it, but I think its worth noting that the pro-immigration side doesn't have the moral high ground here. Both illegal immigration opponents and proponents are zealots are motivated by bigotry.

Many people who think the illegal aliens should be deported don't think they deserve or have the same right as Americans. Non-citizens' well-being just isn't as important a consideration. That is a prejudiced attitude, no doubt about it, though it's not necessarily racially motivated.

But there is a flip side. Many proponents of illegal immigration (yes, there are many) aren't so gung-ho about increasing African immigration or ending forced repatriation of Haitians. These people show, with their actions, that they think Mexicans deserve special consideration over Haitians and Africans. Is that any less bigoted--esp. when you consider many of these "Mexicans-first" people are Mexican?

Suppose someone said only people from England and Spain should be allowed to come to the U.S. while Swedes and Italians should be blocked. Would anyone doubt--despite the pro-immigration credentials--that position is discriminatory?

Best Draft Picks

The NFL polled fans to find the consensus "Best NFL Draft Picks" of all time. The final list is dominated by recent players and 1st round picks. A few people were miffed about that--isn't making a "good draft pick" about getting good value for the pick? If a 1st overall pick turn out great isn't that what you expect, so why did Peyton Manning rank 3rd?

But the truth is that there isn't much difference between making a list of "best value" and "best players." You do expect a 1st overall pick to turn out to be a good player--but not a Hall of Famer. Few 1st overall picks go on to become legends. So the discount for being a 1st overall selection isn't large enough to knock a player like Manning off his perch at #1.

You can look at it this way. Would you rather have Peyton Manning and a 6th round pick or Tom Brady and Ndamukong Suh? The smart pick is Manning, who produced twice as much Win Probability Added (40 vs. 19.8) and twice as many Expected Points Added (1477 vs. 713) as Brady this past decade. Suh would have to outperform Brady for you to want them over Manning.

This probably seems counter-intuitive, but it makes sense if you consider that talent in the NFL probably has some type of Pareto distribution. The expected value for the best player in NFL history, the expectation of the 1st order statistic in a sample of thousands, is going to be massive vis a vis the expected value of the 50th best (an overestimate of what we expect a 1st overall pick to be worth).

Parker's Pulitzer

I will never understand why Kathleen Parker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary this year.

I only read one of her columns last year. The column is about how the largest political "party" today is independents. Polls show more than 40% of Americans claim to have no party affiliation. But, as political scientists have taken pains to point out, most independents are closet partisans. About 75% of "independents" vote either Democrats or Republican 70% of the time, more than many registered Democrats and Republicans.

You would think Parker would have revised her column--or better yet, already known this basic fact about our electoral--but she didn't. So it beats the hell out of me how she one the prize, esp. in a year David Leonhardt (a finalist) wrote a number of stellar columns on health care, the stimulus package, and assorted topics. (He also wrote two classics in 2008 that went unnoticed.)

The Humanities, Part I

Last semester a friend suggested I read the transcript from a great lecture he just heard. It was about the value of the humanities at universities and was given as part of a program that promotes the humanities at an otherwise science and engineering-focused school.

Back to the lecture. The argument was that we think we know more than we do and humanities can help us see this and adjust. The financial crisis was (according to the argument) a product of epistemic hubris--thinking risk (a known unknown) was understood (a known). The humanities teach that we don't know a lot of things. The lecturer illustrated this by giving an interpretation of two romantic poems.

This argument very unsatisfying. Can't we just study Godel's incompleteness theorems if we want to internalize the limits of knowledge? Or read up on the limits of various econometric techniques? Or just look at a list of provably unsolvable problems? These have the added benefit of teaching rigiourous thinking and employable skills.

This argument fits a broader pattern of argument that ends with the conclusion of "humanities make us better people." If you've read Bertrand Russell's "The Value of Philosophy" (from Problems of Philosophy) then you've read the most eloquent version of all these arguments. They're all bullshit, but I won't try to convince anyone of why since it's either obvious or near impossible to see.

I would like to just challenge the premise that the humanities are the best way to reaching an end though. If the humanities are for answering the important questions in life and making us better people, then why do we need humanities when we have religion? Religious people are happier than non-religious people. They have more of a sense of meaning and tend to behave more ethically (given their system of ethics). Religions do everything secular humanism does, just better. (I know you're thinking "but it's not about the end, it's about the journey" but that argument is bullshit.)

If you want to find the meaning of life then get a religion. If you want to change the world, you're not going to do it with a new interpretation of Roamntic poetry.

The article

Perhaps the best article I've ever read about politics in America:

A Triumph of Misinformation by James Fallows

I'm too young to remember what the health-care debate was like in 1994, but everything going wrong today is in here.

"The other purely political calculation concerned sales strategy. Throughout his campaign Bill Clinton had emphsized the overall cost of medical care as a central evil."

"polls showed . . . that most people supported the idea behind Clinton's plan. . . . [M]ost people also believed that the plan would drive costs up, not down. . . . [T]he more the administration emphasized its cost-control themes, the less believable it would become."

The administration even tried to ram the bill through as part of budget reconciliation, and made the misstep of letting the polarizing spending bill pass first setting the stage for partisan conflict.

The only thing missing is a personal blemish on the President like Whitewater and a task force writing the bill. Of course, Obama's choice to let congress write the bill may turn out worse because we still have no specific bill and it let legislators commit the mistake of a bill only slightly "'left of center' . . . [which] when Republicans lost interest became a liability."

Update: The Barack Obama edition even has Betsy McCaughey