For 30th Anniversary, Hubble Releases Images of 30 Celestial Gems NASA
THIS WILL GO SWIMMINGLY: Russians Are Being Told Not to Drink Before And After Their COVID-19 Vaccinations.
Snow Leopards Are the Latest Cats to Get the Coronavirus New York Times
U.S. Schools Are Buying Cellebrite Phone-Hacking Tech Gizmodo
Are the elites worse than you think?
Here is a new and important paper by Joshua D. Kertzer, noting that it mainly confirms what I observe every day (aren’t those the very best research studies?) Here is part of the abstract:
…political scientists both overstate the magnitude of elite-public gaps in decision-making, and misunderstand the determinants of elite-public gaps in political attitudes, many of which are due to basic compositional differences rather than to elites’ domain-specific expertise.
My rewrite of his sentence is that elites are arguing from their class and demographic biases (a bias can be positive, to be clear), not from their expertise. That lowers the marginal value of expertise, at least given how our world operates. I recall earlier research blogged by Alex showing that if you are a French economist, your views are more influenced by being a French person than by being an economist. And so on.
This is one of the very most fundamental facts about our world, and elites are among the people least likely to have internalized it.
Have a nice day.
Mass testing for COVID-19 The Lancet. Slovakia and the UK.
‘Influenza permitting’: What happened when Christmas went ahead during the Spanish Flu pandemic iNews
Trump Allies Eye Long-Shot Election Reversal in Congress, Testing Pence NYT
A Stunning Passage from the Latest Court Rejection of Team Trump Andrew McCarthy, National Review. Ludwig’s Wisconsin decision.
A Political Obituary for Donald Trump The Atlantic
Digital technology reveals secrets of UK’s earliest dinosaur Guardian (Kevin W)
today I learned that naked mole rats, the only eusocial mammal known, have their own class of expat fuckbois whose job is solely to avoid work and leave the colony to go impregnate queens elsewhere to avoid inbreeding
— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) December 14, 2020
Critical temperature for tropical tree lifespan revealed PhysOrg
Excellent year for ‘wild ice’ skating on northern Minnesota lakes MPR. Chuck L: “More re the unusual cold but snowless winter in northern MN. This piece includes some awesome photos.”
Solving a Long-Standing Mystery About the Sun: How Stored Magnetic Energy Heats Solar Atmosphere SciTechDaily
Don’t Use Or Buy Metal Grill Brushes The Worst Things for Sale. News you can use!
Tome raiders: solving the great book heist Guardian
Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs and other services go down in multiple countries TechCrunch
Powerhouse plants that bolster the food webPhysOrg