Some very smart people, and Harvard prawf Cass Sunstein, offer a counterpoint to our current obsession with bias, and tacitly with adoration of empiricism. They call it “noise.”

Society has devoted a lot of attention to the problem of bias — and rightly so. But when it comes to mistaken judgments and unfortunate decisions, there is another type of error that attracts far less attention: noise.

To see the difference between bias and noise, consider your bathroom scale. If on average the readings it gives are too high (or too low), the scale is biased. If it shows different readings when you step on it several times in quick succession, the scale is noisy. (Cheap scales are likely to be both biased and noisy.) While bias is the average of errors, noise is their variability.

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You’re probably a big fan of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, right? What, the name isn’t familiar? But its microchips are, without which a great many of your devices would cease to function. Sure, we have Intel, but TSMC makes smaller, more complex microchips, and far more of them. Maybe you’ve never heard of the name, but you can’t live without them.

The supply chain for cutting-edge chips like those made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is no better. Producing the newest five- or seven-nanometer chip requires billions of dollars in investment in specialized factories and a highly skilled labor force. As a result, there are relatively few facilities that make them. If one of these factories goes offline, as the Samsung operation in Austin, Texas, did for weeks after the Texas grid failure, there might be no other factory able to step in.

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It was soon after my son graduated from college and moved out west to work in a start-up where the second round before Y Combinator was mere months away, and they weren’t ready with a working prototype. It was exciting and heady to be involved in a start up, even if I thought the idea they were working on was dumb. After all, a lot of dumb ideas seemed to succeed, even if only for the purpose of being bought out later and killed.

Millions were being thrown at kids with dreams and no life or management skills. and my son was going to be Employee 1 at a start up run by and a tech-smart narcissistic child who was simultaneously unpleasant and irresponsible. But my son was excited at the prospect of creating something that never existed, and why not? That was when I read Antonio (@antoniogm) García Martínez’s book Chaos Monkeys. Continue reading →

Having been binge-watching a show on Hulu, a commercial for Lexus is played repeatedly. Every time I see it, I have the same thought. “So empathy is buying a Lexus?”

The commercial is idiotic. The dialogue is idiotic. I hope Emmanuel Acho got paid a fortune for the gig. Continue reading →

Remember the video of Antifa in Portland smashing the windows of the Democratic Party office? Well, it definitely happened, but you shouldn’t believe it happened because it was captured by video taken by the right wing #Riot Squad. It wasn’t fake video. It was absolutely real video. But it was bad video and the Intercept can prove it.

On the air, Ingraham attributed the destruction to “antifa thugs,” using the right-wing shorthand that lumps everyone with left-of-center politics into one undifferentiated mass. Rosas, who was standing in front of a Circle-A — a symbol for anarchism, not anti-fascism — that had been spray-painted beside the ruined front door of the Democratic Party office, made no effort to correct her. Continue reading →

Robert Long murdered eight people in Atlanta, six of whom were Asian women. If convicted, he will not be breathing free air ever again. But that wasn’t good enough for Fani Willis, District Attorney of Fulton County who ran for office as a progressive prosecutor against the death penalty.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis says she will seek death penalty for the Atlanta spa shootings suspect, despite campaigning on her opposition to it: "Unfortunately, a case has arisen in the first few months of my term that I believe warrants the ultimate penalty" pic.twitter.com/edvxmvcf4F

— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 11, 2021

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Among the great many flagrant failings of the woke is violence. It was once about punching Nazis, but has metastasized since into justified violence against anyone who doesn’t share their religion. But it’s unfair to chalk up the provocation faced by 27-year-old Corey Pujols, the manager of a Dunkin’ (formerly Donuts) when a 77-year-old angry customer pushed his button. Twice.

A Dunkin’ employee faces a manslaughter charge after punching a customer who then fell, hit his head and later died, police say.

The single punch that led to the arrest of 27-year-old Corey Pujols was thrown May 4 at the Dunkin’ store in the Marathon gas station at 410 S 50th St., just south of the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway, according to an arrest report. Pujols told police the man called him a racial slur.

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Gaming venue is a time-honored endeavor for lawyers. Who doesn’t try to find the most amenable court possible to pursue their claim? Of course, courts don’t always play along, sending you back to where you should have been in the first place, if not dismissing your case as a reminder that games have losers. And now Congress wants in on the action.

Court picking is when Congress uses its authority over federal-court jurisdiction to stuff politically sensitive cases from throughout the country into one court that leans its way, to be buried there for as long as possible. Court-picking’s evil genius is its stealth. Americans would notice four new justices, but not changes to technocratic statutes that excite only civil-procedure professors. Despite featuring in Congress’s most radioactive bill—the so-called For the People Act, or H.R.1, which would transform elections and limit Americans’ rights to speak about them—court-picking has escaped notice.

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Did you hear about the horrible racist stop of Juanisha Brooks? It was just a routine traffic stop in Virginia, with no one hurt, not even prosecuted, but still it made the New York Times because it proved systemic racism and people must know what happened.

Two troopers stopped Ms. Brooks, 34, around 2:21 a.m. after following her car past roughly two or three exits on the Capitol Beltway. According to a police report, her taillights were not turned on, she had twice followed “too close” to surrounding vehicles and she had failed to signal when changing lanes.

During the stop, Ms. Brooks said in an interview on Tuesday, the trooper who approached her did not tell her why she was being pulled over even though she asked repeatedly.

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In the early days of the pandemic, the conflicts quickly emerged. People were arrested but not arraigned because there were no judges sitting on benches to do so. They were detained but not indicted because there were no grand juries to hear the case. They remained in jail awaiting trial but not tried, because the courts were shut down and there were no juries. Bit by bit, adjustments were made, from conducting trials over Zoom to masked and socially distanced jurors.

On the one hand, having a defendant sit in jail because the system shut down was a disaster, particularly when the length of time awaiting the system to ramp up sufficiently to at least address the poor guy’s incarceration could easily exceed any punishment that might follow. On the other hand, the adjustments made were, to be blunt, inadequate. Zoom trials? Masked  witnesses and jurors? Was this good enough to satisfy due process? After all, we might be in the midst of a pandemic, but did that mean constitutional protections for defendants were suspended while the wheels of the system continued to grind? Continue reading →