Shageletic posted:

That's kind of tame by Cinemo Discusso standards.


The Reddit standard (oh god) considers injuries of three or more to count as a mass shooting. The FBI considers four or more KILLED to be a mass shooting. The former also disregards the intention behind the act, lumping in crime figures and crimes of familial passion and the like.

Here's the FBI's definition, according to their website.


This further separates the two figures, by focusing more on the intent of the perpetrator. I mean, that still means we're getting a shitload of mass shooting events, compared to other developed countries. 6 or more is crazy. But 355 is plainly not right, and contributes to a state of hysteria in our culture about the subject.

EDIT: The governmental standard has actually been reduced to THREE killed, not four.

Combed Thunderclap posted:

Honestly, you see this happen all the time in academia as well as the miscellaneous sphere of intelligensia that circles academe. Someone comes up with a single good idea or model (in Silver's case, a basic polling model that, shocker, actually controls for polling house accuracy), everyone sucks their dick for a few years and throws accolades and money at them, eventually their bubble bursts as people slowly realize that a single good model/idea is not intrinsically a predictor of future performance for, say, running a major media site that revolves around turning "data"/sports stats into "news" as fast as humanly possible. (Really good in-depth data analysis and research can take years.)

Then they hang around for a decade or so since their name still possesses sufficient amounts of intrinsic value that they can keep riding on that legacy. (Nate Silver will be called into CNN for every year leading up to the next two elections at the least.)

See also: Nassim Taleb, Jared Diamond, etc.

Ogmius815 posted:

Nate Silver is good at one thing: using polls to project presidential elections. Once he can start doing that again D&D will come crawling back.

Typical Pubbie posted:

Pictured below: Shocking image of the American government executing its citizens without due process.

joeburz posted:

state of hysteria being that some people find it odd that 30k+ a year are injured or killed by firearms without any change in sight?

edit: lmao thats not even correct, its 30k+ deaths a year, the injuries not resulting in death are 3-4 times that per year

joeburz posted:

Typical Pubbie posted:

Pictured below: Shocking image of the American government executing its citizens without due process.

joeburz posted:

you mean

joeburz posted:

you mean

Taerkar posted:

He was a hardened criminal and thus deserved it.

Fiction posted:

I think TDD is just angry that Obama will never have a catastrophic foreign policy fuckup that will temper the Democrats' election chances for decades to come.

Junkyard Poodle posted:

What's the deal with Jared Diamond. I thought Guns Steel and Germs was fascinating. Did he go dumb afterwards? I have Collapse collecting dust on my shelf, is it worth reading?

WhiskeyJuvenile posted:

Due process isn't a citizen-only thing.

Raskolnikov38 posted:

GG&S is a good introduction to the effect of geography on the rise and fall of civilizations but is hardly the end all-be all it was once touted as.

SSNeoman posted:

Never said it was.

The Iron Rose posted:

oh good we're talking about drones again I get to repost my standard "the extrajudicial argument is total bullshit"

fishmech posted:

It should be treated as like a 101-level book.

The Iron Rose posted:

oh good we're talking about drones again I get to repost my standard "the extrajudicial argument is total bullshit"

MaxxBot posted:

I have good news and bad news, the good news is that if you were curious about the inner working of the Kathryn Knott trial it's pretty much all out in the open now.

https://www.reddit.com/r/philadelphia/comments/3xdp7b/i_was_juror_4_on_the_kathryn_knott_trial_ama/

The bad news is that because of this she might get off. From what it sounds they thought she did it and wanted to convict on the more serious charges but one juror hosed everything up, in addition to this juror possibly further loving things up.

quote:

See I dont know her, never heard of her before this trial, and luckily for her I based all of my judgement on her from the trial alone. With only those few days, it seems like I drew the same opinion of her that everyone who follows the news did. When she took the stand, it was clear she was a liar.

Well they were mostly obstructing justice because of their personal feelings and bias. We even reported them to the official and we basically just got a talk from the judge about working together, but nothing really changed. The charges you see are a huge compromise because of 1 juror

At one point, one of the jurors said "I don't care if she did it I don't feel right sending her to jail." And they kept comparing it to the case to things that had happened to their family, or get emotional about their own lives, but it had nothing to do with evidence. They kept ignoring evidence, that was the biggest struggle.

We were all extremely upset about it, and this one woman in particular was just so stupid. You could read her the same law over and over again, and she'd say "I just don't see it that way."

Actually quite the opposite, she was this 46 year old lady from the 5th and lehigh area. She was so wrapped up in parts of the trial that made no difference to the law. Like the fact that Andrew's bag was stolen at the scene of the incident. It had ZERO bearing on any charge but she kept saying things like "I just can't get past this bag being stolen". We'd say things like "That has nothing to do with anything!" and then she'd yell and accuse us of trying to bully her into a different opinion. We left the deliberation room with the opinion that She hosed this thing up majorly, and there was nothing we could do about it.

Joementum posted:

It'll be pretty fun to watch the ol' goon consensus swing back to Silver being right and good after July.

TheDisreputableDog posted:

*checks congressional, state legislative, gubernatorial elections since 2009*

*silently mouths "wow"*

Junkyard Poodle posted:

What's the deal with Jared Diamond. I thought Guns Steel and Germs was fascinating. Did he go dumb afterwards? I have Collapse collecting dust on my shelf, is it worth reading?

berzerker posted:

Guns Germs and Steel was garbage as far as academic history is concerned, in that it takes a strawman of what historians believed 60 years ago, exaggerates it further, and then goes too far and too simplistically against it. That's fine insofar as it's pop history, but not easy to reproduce.

Kilroy posted:

Even if you're right, and "The Party Decides" hypothesis wins the day, the certainty with which you guys speak is grating as gently caress, and not remotely justified. Trump's been leading nationally in the polls since summer, has had a solid lead for that long in NH as well, leads in SC, has a lock on poor Republicans with no degree, ties among Republican degree-holders, etc etc.

I don't doubt that the GOP establishment will do everything it can to screw him (or schlong him, rather) out of the nomination. I also realize that earlier polls are not terribly predictive. But the GOPe is not all-powerful, and the "too early to poll" excuse is wearing thin - we're 5 1/2 weeks from IA and 6 1/2 weeks from NH. Your obstinance here (and Nate's) is starting to look less like a rational certainty in your belief, and more like a commitment to a narrative that you have, or that you think you have, staked your ego and your reputation on.

If you end up right, great. FWIW, personally I reckon the odds of that at greater than half. But especially in 538's case they are staking out a position that's going to make them look pretty stupid if they're wrong - and not because they were wrong but because they were so sure they were right.

MaxxBot posted:

Are there any more academic books that try to cover the same subject matter? I really enjoyed the book but I know that it has a lot of flaws.

Joementum posted:

I spent most of 2012 telling people that Nate's proprietary polling model was needlessly complex and overstated Obama's lead.

MaxxBot posted:

Are there any more academic books that try to cover the same subject matter? I really enjoyed the book but I know that it has a lot of flaws.

Rappaport posted:

I thought you spent most of 2012 deleting anime bestiality posts? Or was that not the time you were a mod?

Joementum posted:

That happened in 2013 and they were ponies not animes you Philistine!

ComradeCosmobot posted:

Pacific Standard has a summary of a series of ProPublica and NPR articles this year, detailing the dismantling of worker's comp. Some of this has been discussed in passing already.

DemeaninDemon posted:

poo poo like this pisses me off. Party of fiscal responsibility strikes again by ignoring a root cause, letting it blow up into a nasty mess, causing people suffer, and lastly giving tax payers the outrageous bill.

PS I'm extra sensitive to this since my dad was nearly killed on the job a few days before Christmas when I was a kid.

The Iron Rose posted:

oh good we're talking about drones again I get to repost my standard "the extrajudicial argument is total bullshit"