As the debate over how public policy should respond to mass shootings whips into a heated fury of facts, figures, statistics and memes, I can’t help but remember Mark Twain’s insight on the media: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” The last few days have seen a proliferation of examples […]
Book Review: “Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order” by Charles Hill
March 20, 2012 by
IIn Hill’s eye, fiction is more than just a story. In literature, we see the great ideas and forces that move history worked out, argued, and recorded. The “international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm,” he argues. “[I]t is where the greatest issues of the human condition are played out.” Nothing may come closer to a thesis for his opus. [cont…]
Random number generators and cable news commentators
May 27, 2011 by
The source of all those exit polls, hot air, statistics, and prognosticators fodder… xkcd: Sports. See also “Mark Twain.” (“There are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics.”)
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