Comments on: Empty Questions

By: penalcolony

penalcolony — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Where have you been? Post-Lewinsky, they’ve moved on to “Will the Left Ever Stop Beating Its Wife?” Next? “The Bell Curve II: Why the Left Will Never Stop Beating Its Wife”

By: Jane

Jane — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I read this via CalPundit, who has an unerring eye for both the ridiculous (Drezner’s post) and the hilarious (yours).

By: John Isbell

John Isbell — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I loved “I just made up two possible explanations”. How I’d love to hear that said in the news, or out of George Bush’s mouth, for that matter.

By: Drapetomaniac

Drapetomaniac — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Conservatives have yet to adjust to the fact that they’ve graduated from high-school.

Actually, just today I was reading John McWhorter, an African-American conservative who bangs on about black people not caring about the life of the mind—a man in dire need of a copy of Richard Hofstatder’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and a google for the concept of secular drift—and it occurred to me that his problem was really that he had had a lonely, nerdy adolescence.

By: detroitred

detroitred — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Hey, I thought it was because they can’t sustain their positions with facts. Thus the need for platitudes! — DR

By: Bill Crutcher

Bill Crutcher — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

You’re obviously aware of the writing of Malcolm Gladwell on the subject of creeping determinism. What you refer to here as “tendentious dichotomies” may have to do more with another concept Gladwell has written about, namely “channel capacity”. (The idea is not Gladwell’s—I first heard about it in Psychology 201 25 years ago—but I ran across it again in Gladwell’s book “The Tipping Point”.) It has to do with the upper limit on our capacity for processing information via multiple channels. It also shows up in the famous “7 plus or minus 2” limits on short term memory.

But here’s the thing—this phenomenon is not characteristic of either the Left or the Right. It’s not a characteristic of either the Rich or the Poor. It’s inherent in the species. Anyone who thinks it doesn’t apply to them is a big, fat stinkin’, self-deluded tub of lard, like Al Franken and Bill O’Reilly combined.

By: markus

markus — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

@ Bill Crutcher: OT, but the channel capacity goes back to Shannon’s 1948 paper “A mathematical theory of communication”, which you can download here. The magical number seven goes back to this George Miller 1956 article, which is worth the read (a) for the opening line My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. and (b) because it shows the picture is more complicated than “7 plus/minus 2”.
That aside, information theory sensu Shannon has not been particularly useful in psychology, since we quickly found out we can’t properly quantify information in most cases of interest to psychology.

On topic: the tendency to resort to black-white dichotomies is distributed in the population and obviously a group of people can be more prone to it than others. AFAIK this is however not true of conservatives in general.

By: markus

markus — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

oops, links don’t work:
Shannon: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/paper.html
Miller: http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html

By: Joey Giraud

Joey Giraud — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I think the crux of the biscuit is that conservatives feel fear more acutely then liberals. Everything else is mere correlation.

By: anna

anna — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

re conservatives and fear -remember The Strange Politics Of Dreaming?
at
http://www.kellybulkeley.com/articles/article_the_strange_politics_of_dreaming.htm