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Currently at Toronto Pearson: -2. High today: 6.
Nice to finally see stuff in the night sky again Monday and today. Things are so different in the city sky--the brighter things, like Jupiter and Capella and Cassiopeia, stand out more in the city, despite obviously being dimmer, because you can't see much of anything around them ... although when I turn onto our little stub of a street off the main drag, the Pleiades smudge appears faintly above Jupiter and Aldebaran. I was thinking, walking home tonight, that Aldebaran looked like it was going nuts, flickering red, white, and blue, beside steady Jupiter.
Fun with exit polls: according to CNN's, Obama won the 18-29 age group 60% to 37%; among the white sub-group of the 18-29 group, he lost 51% to 44%. Obama won "moderates" 56% to 41%, but lost "independents" 50% to 45%. (You can infer from the results of those questions that quite a few people identify as conservative Democrats. And, uh, probably no one identifies as liberal Republicans. On the other hand, Romney won 11% of liberals and 7% of Democrats, which I'm going to guess indicates that people more reliably know what "Democrat" means than what "liberal" means. (But hey, maybe there are some Republican jokesters who mean classical liberals.)) The more education you have, the less likely you were to tell CNN you voted for Obama--until you have postgraduate education, which puts you into Obama's second-strongest group after people who didn't finish high school. (I wonder how this will work out if the trend toward more and more people getting postgraduate education keeps up.)
Last week, Angus Reid put out a poll showing that Canadians would vote for Obama over Romney 72% to 10% (and Britons would vote for Obama 62% to 6%). I would hazard a guess that that 10% is the ideological base of the Canadian Conservative party. (I'd also hazard a guess that, generally speaking, people change ideological affiliations more easily than they change various party-political prejudices along the lines of "the Liberals can go to hell because Trudeau stole our oil"--the latter being the real bases of party bases.) It's a shame the results aren't broken down by region; I would love to see by how much Obama would win Alberta.
And a final couple of things on thevoodoo science of polls: first, a blog post in The New Republic points out that the consistent pro-Romney bias in Gallup's polls relative to other polls--and, it turns out, reality--was (probably) because Gallup was seriously underestimating minority turnout; second, Colby Cosh in Maclean's brings to my attention that Nate Silver (who I think you just might suggest has become The Buzziest Man in America in the last few days; a guy who gave a talk I went to today said he knew Obama was going to win because Nate Silver said he would win (which, come to think of it, should've made me suspicious of this guy's confidence in his empirical results--I have no opinion one way or another on Nate Silver's methods, but hopefully Nate Silver himself would tell you that he didn't know Obama was going to win)) was the former stats wonk behind Baseball Prospectus who invented the PECOTA baseball forecasting system. (It would be easy to say that, so far, he's looking better at political forecasting than he was at baseball forecasting--but political forecasting is probably quite a lot easier. Given the small sample of elections, it's easier to "never be wrong", anyway. If you're in the ballpark 80% of the time in forecasting elections, you've got a better than even chance that everyone will think you're a genius for twelve years (but, of course, also a 20% chance that everyone will think you're an idiot right off the bat); if you're in the ballpark 80% of the time in forecasting baseball-player performance, you're going to make a lot of fantasy-baseball players think you're an idiot every year.)
The talk I went to today by the guy who said he knew Obama would win because Nate Silver said so--viz., Kang Lee--was about children and lying. The main point was something like that Chinese children are bigger fans of lying to help other people, and of not telling the truth where doing so would make yourself look good, than Canadian children are (but, interestingly, only after about the age of 6 or something; they start off as pretty equal fans of various kinds of lying and truth-telling--the speaker's explanation is that both Chinese and Canadian parents tell their kids that lying's bad and telling the truth is good, but then Chinese kids learn from experience that this is not always true, whereas Canadian kids don't). But my favourite thing from the talk was that, apparently, you can significantly improve your chances of getting kids not to lie by getting them to promise not to lie--but you need to get them to say "I promise not to lie" and not to just say "OK" when you ask them if they promise not to lie. (Also, this remains true for children who have no explicit understanding of what a promise is.) My second-favourite thing is that, apparently, children's understanding of honesty and lying has no predictive effect on their self-interested lying behaviour. (This was the second Asians-vs.-North-Americans psychology talk I went to this week--the first one was about how Asians are more influenced by background visual cues than North Americans (it apparently being a known fact already that Asians pay more attention to visual backgrounds than North Americans do, and North Americans pay more attention to visual foregrounds than Asians do).)
I managed to also go to another talk today by another psychologist (or anthropologist or ecologist or something), about how the mechanisms behind a, probably, very large amount of complex behaviour among non-human animals (and presumably among human animals) don't involve mental representations (and so we shouldn't look down on things with small brains, or no brains, or, uh, something like that). This involved a lot of hand-waving and hand-wringing about what a complex behaviour is and what a representation is, but mostly just reminded me of sphexishness and prompted me to head off to the library and collect some more Annie Dillard. (The copy of The Writing Life I picked up wants to flip open to the page after the one where she tells the "do you like sentences?" story, so that was the second page I saw in the book. The story goes on like this: "The writer could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I liked the smell of paint.'" As they say on Drunk Jays Fans: um ... OK? Well, come to think of it, that initially irritating "quoteability" of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a product of liking sentences maybe a little too much. But then I do think now and then something to the effect that I used to like sentences a lot better before grad school beat that out of me.) Anyway, it has occurred to me lately that it may come to pass (if it is not already passing) that the only way I can stand to go on in philosophy, whatever that means, is by picking up "environmental philosophy", whatever that is. I'm not super-optimistic about that, but the first fifty pages of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature haven't made my face fall off, anyway.
Nice to finally see stuff in the night sky again Monday and today. Things are so different in the city sky--the brighter things, like Jupiter and Capella and Cassiopeia, stand out more in the city, despite obviously being dimmer, because you can't see much of anything around them ... although when I turn onto our little stub of a street off the main drag, the Pleiades smudge appears faintly above Jupiter and Aldebaran. I was thinking, walking home tonight, that Aldebaran looked like it was going nuts, flickering red, white, and blue, beside steady Jupiter.
Fun with exit polls: according to CNN's, Obama won the 18-29 age group 60% to 37%; among the white sub-group of the 18-29 group, he lost 51% to 44%. Obama won "moderates" 56% to 41%, but lost "independents" 50% to 45%. (You can infer from the results of those questions that quite a few people identify as conservative Democrats. And, uh, probably no one identifies as liberal Republicans. On the other hand, Romney won 11% of liberals and 7% of Democrats, which I'm going to guess indicates that people more reliably know what "Democrat" means than what "liberal" means. (But hey, maybe there are some Republican jokesters who mean classical liberals.)) The more education you have, the less likely you were to tell CNN you voted for Obama--until you have postgraduate education, which puts you into Obama's second-strongest group after people who didn't finish high school. (I wonder how this will work out if the trend toward more and more people getting postgraduate education keeps up.)
Last week, Angus Reid put out a poll showing that Canadians would vote for Obama over Romney 72% to 10% (and Britons would vote for Obama 62% to 6%). I would hazard a guess that that 10% is the ideological base of the Canadian Conservative party. (I'd also hazard a guess that, generally speaking, people change ideological affiliations more easily than they change various party-political prejudices along the lines of "the Liberals can go to hell because Trudeau stole our oil"--the latter being the real bases of party bases.) It's a shame the results aren't broken down by region; I would love to see by how much Obama would win Alberta.
And a final couple of things on the
The talk I went to today by the guy who said he knew Obama would win because Nate Silver said so--viz., Kang Lee--was about children and lying. The main point was something like that Chinese children are bigger fans of lying to help other people, and of not telling the truth where doing so would make yourself look good, than Canadian children are (but, interestingly, only after about the age of 6 or something; they start off as pretty equal fans of various kinds of lying and truth-telling--the speaker's explanation is that both Chinese and Canadian parents tell their kids that lying's bad and telling the truth is good, but then Chinese kids learn from experience that this is not always true, whereas Canadian kids don't). But my favourite thing from the talk was that, apparently, you can significantly improve your chances of getting kids not to lie by getting them to promise not to lie--but you need to get them to say "I promise not to lie" and not to just say "OK" when you ask them if they promise not to lie. (Also, this remains true for children who have no explicit understanding of what a promise is.) My second-favourite thing is that, apparently, children's understanding of honesty and lying has no predictive effect on their self-interested lying behaviour. (This was the second Asians-vs.-North-Americans psychology talk I went to this week--the first one was about how Asians are more influenced by background visual cues than North Americans (it apparently being a known fact already that Asians pay more attention to visual backgrounds than North Americans do, and North Americans pay more attention to visual foregrounds than Asians do).)
I managed to also go to another talk today by another psychologist (or anthropologist or ecologist or something), about how the mechanisms behind a, probably, very large amount of complex behaviour among non-human animals (and presumably among human animals) don't involve mental representations (and so we shouldn't look down on things with small brains, or no brains, or, uh, something like that). This involved a lot of hand-waving and hand-wringing about what a complex behaviour is and what a representation is, but mostly just reminded me of sphexishness and prompted me to head off to the library and collect some more Annie Dillard. (The copy of The Writing Life I picked up wants to flip open to the page after the one where she tells the "do you like sentences?" story, so that was the second page I saw in the book. The story goes on like this: "The writer could see the student's amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, 'I liked the smell of paint.'" As they say on Drunk Jays Fans: um ... OK? Well, come to think of it, that initially irritating "quoteability" of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a product of liking sentences maybe a little too much. But then I do think now and then something to the effect that I used to like sentences a lot better before grad school beat that out of me.) Anyway, it has occurred to me lately that it may come to pass (if it is not already passing) that the only way I can stand to go on in philosophy, whatever that means, is by picking up "environmental philosophy", whatever that is. I'm not super-optimistic about that, but the first fifty pages of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature haven't made my face fall off, anyway.
