Ted-talk attitudes reach New Mexico county commission

Paul Alper points to this horrifying quote from a political official:

“My vote to remain a no isn’t based on any evidence, it’s not based on any facts, it’s only based on my gut feeling and my own intuition, and that’s all I need.”

Sounds like a more honest version of a Ted talk, no? Unfortunately, this guy is an elected official.

21 thoughts on “Ted-talk attitudes reach New Mexico county commission

  1. It would be straight forward, for example, to work with a local police department to determine whether policies were effective (reduction in crime, desired outcomes of interest), with simple models. Could throw policies away that don’t reduce crime and cost the department more money, increase racial inequity (consider stop and frisk NYC, which increased stops of Black and Latin Americans). This would remove a lot of guess work-based and emotion/opinion-based from policy making. I’m wondering why we don’t do this more often.

    Quantitative and evidence-based policy making should be the norm.

    • While I share your views that evidence based policy should be the norm in many, many fields. There are a lot of problems with measuring outcomes. Take for example, “2014 California Proposition 47” (aka prop 47, “Criminal Sentences. Misdemeanor Penalties. Initiative Statute”) has been in effect for a couple of years now and many people still debate the effect on crime it has. I suspect that at the end of the day, people will vote based on their gut and anecdotal evidence a lot more than one imagines.

    • “Quantitative and evidence-based policy making should be the norm.”

      What would Progressives do? Their entire platform is in opposition to evidence, from minimum wage to “defund the police”. Not to mention their belief in “quality pre-K” and CRT. Wow. Should we bar them from politics?

        • How so?

          Evidence-based” policy making would disqualify all of these policies, wouldn’t it?

          In my city, “quality pre-K” is sold with the very carefully crafted claim that it gives everyone an “equal start” – avoiding the reality that in the long run it doesn’t have any effect. Minimum wage is sold on the claim that it helps people who get it (duh), ignoring the fact that it hurts people who are subsequently excluded from the job market (e.g., the thousands of people living in RVs and tents around the city); again CRT isn’t even a theory in any scientific sense; and even a rock can see from the quantitative evidence that the “Defund” movement has resulted in a crime wave.

          We’re speaking here of quantitative evidence right? No? Did I miss something?

          I’d say all these claims are driven by “merchants of doubt”. Education advocates want you to doubt the claims that pre-K doesn’t work. Min wage advocates want you to doubt the claim that min wage reduces employment; CRT advocates want you to doubt that, despite some discrimination, overall, society is fair – even though other once-discriminated-against-groups have become so successful that they are now discriminated against for being too successful!; and academics who have long attributed crime to “root causes” despite the lack of evidence for the claim are busily resurrecting this claim even though the crime spike is strongly associated iwth the “defund” movement.

          ?? what do you d

        • Chipmunk –

          > How so?

          When you first wrote about people at this blog “worshiping polls” I responded by asking – if you weren’t trolling – to give evidence for what you’re talking about.

          You didn’t respond, but then later said (to the effect) “ha, ha, I was only exaggerating for effect.” That’s trolling.

          This has been a pattern with you, where you drop deliberately provocative statements, often conflating opinion and fact, and then often don’t even respond when challenged.

          That’s trolling.

          As to the specifics of your inane statement about “progressives.” Obviously, there are people of all political stripes who advocate politically without integrating quantitative and evidence-based reasoning. And there are people of all political stripes who do. Pointing to one group in an unfalsifiable conflation of opinion and fact – to disproportionately characterize that group with your pejorative framing – is banal and particularly unintentionally ironically in this case (given the topic was people lacking quantitative reasoning and evidence for their opinions).

          And it’s trolling.

          You’re entitled to your opinion and I’m not going to bother arguing with you about it as you’ve merely argued by assertion.

          Come to the table with quantitative reasoning and evidence, and I’d be happy to explore that with you.

        • “even a rock can see from the quantitative evidence that the “Defund” movement has resulted in a crime wave”

          There is a temporal correlation between the Defund movement and the crime spike. That’s what you mean by “quantitative evidence” and that is all you mean. You are basically implying that because Bob and Carol were on 3rd and Main carrying “Defund the Police” signs, Ted and Alice got robbed over on 8th and Union. And no, the evidence shows that the police were not busy attending the protest march, they were nowhere to be found (check the donut shops though). Meanwhile, there has been very little defunding, basically none when the crime spike began.

          If you look at this trying to understand causality, rather than just running with the simplest of Fox News correlations, you would encounter evidence that would challenge your pre-conceptions. Police staffing rates plummeted during the pandemic because of anti-vaxxers, that is one piece of evidence. But there is evidence of something even more sinister: the cops decided to punish the public by slow-rolling their jobs. Since evidence is so important to you, you will no doubt want to read this:

          https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2021/may/11/seattle-911-response-times-climbed-in-summer-2020-/

        • There’s a very paradoxical phenomenon exhibited here, and in many claims by this commenter in the past, whereby one prefers to believe, against direct evidence, that others disagree with them, whereas in reality there is much less or no disagreement. I say paradoxical because intuitively, one would prefer that others agree with them! My interpretation is that in these situations, people prefer the feeling of intellectual superiority to the vindication of agreement and satisfaction of the victory of truth. The sorts of people who would prefer that the world get worse by their own standard so they can get angrier and more crotchety, than that the world get better.

        • The defund the police movement is not relevant anymore due to its massive failure, so invoking what Biden said less than two month ago is quite off the mark.

        • 1.

          No, I don‘t support defunding the police

          – Joe Biden, to CBS news, June 6th, 2020

          2. Completely irrelevant. The statement I’m responding to is that is talking about the Democratic party platform in the present tense, so even if Biden had changed his opinion in response to public pressure it would still bear correcting.

          See what I’m talking about? Reading comprehension.

  2. There are different ways this quote can be horrible:

    1. the possibility that voters accept the reasoning and it conforms the common sentiment.

    2. the possibility that it’s an honest description of decision-making from a politician who thinks he is right, or

    3. the possibility that it’s just a cynical utterance. Behind is just pure cynical self-interest and power-seeking. He knows the truth.

    Only options 2 & 3 are mutually exclusive.

    I think democracy is inherently scary system and there is no way around it.. It’s smooth and orderly only when there are no big problems. If people were more scared about democracy, they might participate more and be more sincere and rational. I say this in the context of the book “Politics is for Power” by Eitan Hersh (2020). https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Politics-Is-for-Power/Eitan-Hersh/9781982116798

  3. Reminds me of the Simpsons Movie: “I was elected to lead, not to read”.

    Without looking at the context, the optimistic interpretation of the statement is that the elected official has implicitly internalized facts and evidence that contribute to their “gut feeling and intuition” but doesn’t notice it or know how to express it. Maybe it’s a particularly thorny and uncertain issue where evidence is scant anyways.

    I wrote the above without clicking the link for context. Having clicked it…oof that’s bad. Just horrible.

  4. This is a textbook example of the “truthiness” concept Stephen Colbert coined on Colbert Report in 2005. art(https://www.cc.com/video/63ite2/the-colbert-report-the-word-truthiness).

    Speaking of textbook examples, the first slide in my stats course this semester is about truthiness, including Colbert’s quotes: “I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart” and “We are divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart.”

    Life imitating art right there. I am going to show this at our next class.

    • John:

      A president operating on the Ted-talk level is bad, but it’s something I’m used to. Presidents and Ted speakers are celebrities, and that’s how celebrities operate: they create their own realities, or at least they think they do. They’re surrounded by courtiers who agree with whatever foolish things they say. A county commissioner acting like this is more disappointing.

      • Andrew –

        >… but it’s something I’m used to.

        Maybe what’s different is having a president who proudly and explicitly proclaims that his gut makes him wiser than people with expertise,

        … and more troubling… who is viewed by a large % of the public as being better advised by his gut than people with expertise.

  5. Regarding the same NM election official, from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-mexico-couy-griffin-trump-removed_n_6317876fe4b0faa556c1912d:

    “[Couy]Griffin was filmed scaling the Capitol’s walls after seeing the mob of Trump supporters push past security barriers. Once he reached the inaugural stage, Griffin used a bullhorn to lead the group in prayer and give a speech promoting the attack.”

    Griffin’s gut-feeling assertion, as I like to point out to all and sundry, indicates that Bayesian Revision is aspirational rather than descriptive and really does not apply to the way many (most? all? me included?) humans recalculate probability based on new evidence. Griffin is, like Trump himself and other Trump advocates, a true and unshakeable believer that the election was stolen.

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