Neocons+Mosad+CIA are so bad that they might actually be good.

Their complete failure in recent past and present adventures such as 9-11 explosions, Iraq invasion, torture of Palestinians, Syria invasion, Afghanistan occupation, Nord stream explosions and above all SARS-Cov-2 bio weapon attacks / drills does indeed make future wars and further misadventures more unlikely.

Some adults will finally step in and take the balls away from the incompetent and stupid kids who keep breaking neighbors’ glass windows.

The district I attended was shifting from junior high to middle school while I was there. One benefit was having more kids in the high school, which made it feasible to offer more AP and honors classes. That alone made it worthwhile, in my view.

I'm not sure these data show quite what you'd like them to. They assume that the fan base was consistent from year to year, which I suspect it was not. That is to say, the people who were fans in the early years were probably also a large fraction of the fans in later years, too, only they were no longer twenty years old plus the joke had started to wear out.

For me, even if I watch a new episode and say, "objectively, that's just as funny as a season six episode," I still don't like it as much because nothing is quite as good as it was a) when I was young and bright-eyed or b) the second time around.

I'm surprised at Gelman's review. He's a pretty hard-core statistics guy, but the problems he has with the book seem all to do with whether "elites" are liberals or conservative. He has to keep stipulating that Murray isn't really talking about that, but since Murray doesn't say it, Gelman takes a stab at reading his mind. No problem since we all know every conservative thinks alike.

Pretty lame.

Steve may be sneaking an assumption into his interpretation of the data. If a lobbyist donates to a particular candidate that doesn't mean he thinks that guy will win. It means he thinks his "return on investment" is highest giving to that candidate.

So, for example, I might like to show support for Newt Gingrich, even if I thought his candidacy was a lost cause, because I think he'll be able to return the favor later even if he's not President.

Steve, what do you mean the steroid testing revelations have supported your theory over De Vany's? He doesn't dispute that steroids are prevalent, he disputes that they have a (statistically significant) affect on home run hitting. So the fact that steroids are common is, in itself, irrelevant.

What am I missing?

Art De Vany argues that steroids have had no statistically significant effect on home runs.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/03/de_vany_on_ster.html

This doesn't let Bill James off the hook, since he appears to believe that steroids have had an effect, but it still seems like a relevant point.

A few people danced around the simplest explanation, so I'll just state it explicitly, for the record.

Although both colleges have roughly the same average SAT math score, Coastal almost certainly has a much wider distribution of scores. Since it has a mix of men and women, Coastal's average comprises some women who scored below average and men who scored above. Also, men and whites tend to have wider distributions for things like IQ than women and blacks.

The result of this is that the class at Coastal probably comprised students with higher IQ generally and higher visual-spatial specifically than the class at Spellman. As such, you'd expect them to learn more of whatever they didn't know when they started.

Are you sure that "regression toward the mean" is really the phenomenon you're describing? I think of RTM as what happens when you randomly sample from a population – the more extreme a sample is, the less likely it is that the next sample will be more extreme.

What you're describing seems to be something like "decay toward the mean." Is this a distinction with a difference? Maybe. You're saying that although the students' test scores at the end of each year are an accurate measure of their actual ability, but that the gap between their actual ability and the mean shrinks with time. RTM could occur even if there were no shrinkage; but it would be caused by variations among the samples of students tested, not changes in their actual ability.

For some older cases of this phenomenon, check out the crime books of Colin Wilson.