I am stoked because I just booked a trip to go down to LA for a week. I officially have something to look forward to besides work!
Showing up to work in my guest bedroom every day with no end in sight has been rough. At its best, its pretty dope wearing gym shorts around the office. At its worst, I am overcome with the feeling that work is an intricate social fiction where we show up and mutually pretend something matters to keep order in our society.
Many people seem to be feeling this way. The pandemic has acted as an accelerant in our collective conversion to nihilism.
Thankfully, we have really positive, constructive ways to channel our anxious energy. Like our country’s full court press to get people to care about politics…
The media has gladly shown us outage porn for the last 7 months. Preying on the amygdala of our ancient brains by alerting us to danger at all times. Both real and imaginary danger. Super healthy. Nothing could go wrong here.
But don’t fear, after Tuesday it’s all over!
There won’t be any drama afterwards. News outlets will return to actually reporting news and the loser will accept it graciously. No chance that either side claims there was malfeasance done by the other side and this drags on for the next two months. On to 4 years of a harmonious, virus-free America starting Wednesday.
The path ahead could not be more clear…
To the newsletter!
This edition of another krappy newsletter is going out to 106 homies. Which is 13 more homies than last week.
Sup, homies? Feel free to reply to this email to say what’s up. I will answer.
If you think someone else in your life would enjoy receiving a weekly email from me about nothing, feel free to forward this email to them and have them push the button below:
Twitter thread documenting the growth of this newsletter!
I wrote this lovely little Twitter thread on growing an email list for anyone interested in giving it a try.
TL;DR - To grow a newsletter, you should tell people you have a newsletter. My issue was psychological. I felt weird asking for people’s email addresses. I did not need “growth tactics.” I needed to get over myself.
Feel free to reach out if you are interested in learning how to get started or have any thoughts on how I can grow the newsletter larger!
WE ARE GOING TO BE OK
The real problem of humanity is the following:
We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.
– E.O. Wilson
It is hard to not feel like everything is on fire right now.
But allow me to be your tall, straight, white male sherpa to another view point.
Regardless of the outcome today, we are going to be OK.
We live in the best time ever. This is unequivocally true.
For example, you know this whole pandemic we are worried about? Not the first time the USA has dealt with a virus. In fact, the 1800s were a rolling pandemic.
It doesn’t feel like we live in a time of unprecedented prosperity because we like to focus on statistics and people that make us sad. But the technology around us has improved the world little by little without us even noticing.
No incompetent politician has been able to stop that so far.
Regardless of where you live, your average life expectancy has gone up. We expect this to continue to go up because of improvements in technology.
Global life expectancy is now 72.6 years old, compared to life expectancy just a century ago when most people didn’t make it to 40.
Less children die.
From 1990 to 2010, child mortality decreased by over 40%. And in the last decade, it fell a further 26%. We can expect this trend to continue due to advances in technology.
Everyone is coming online.
We passed the 50% milestone in 2018 and the trend is only accelerating. With such rapid progress, internet access may soon become a universal human right.
Extreme Poverty is Declining.
In the last ten years, we have reduced global extreme poverty by nearly half to 9.3% in 2020. The World Bank estimates that if the pandemic hadn’t ravaged the world economy, the global extreme poverty rate in 2020 would be 7.9%.
We are going to be OK.
Not even our archaic government structures can stop technology from continuing to take us to the promise land <3
POLLING INACCURACIES
Because I am a glutton for election anxiety, I have collected three threads that capture my concerns about the polls:
According to a study by UC Berkeley, most election polls report a 95% confidence level. Yet an analysis of 1,400 polls from 11 election cycles found that the outcome lands within the poll’s result just 60% of the time. And that’s for polls just one week before an election!!
Reasons:
*While polls have political bias (left/right leaning), trends matter
*Polls DON'T PREDICT VOTER TURNOUT & if Republicans more enthusiastic, polls don't equal VOTES
*Sampling bias in polls
*When polls occur (after debates tend to = debate not votes)
I looked at how 538 modeled COVID's impact on turnout. It appears they model COVID’s impact solely as higher uncertainty. But not as a partisan factor that favors Rs who will vote in-person more than Ds because they are less concerned about COVID.
In-person attendance at rallies seems to support this hypothesis. Both Biden and Trump agree that Trump rallies are much more heavily attended than Biden rallies. So, COVID may be a large partisan factor on in-person turnout.
The illusive shy Trump voter
It is difficult to quantify whether or not this group exists in a meaningful enough way to matter. But if the hypothesis is that you have a large group of people that are lying to pollsters, that means you cannot use pollster data to say they do not exist.
Lets start from the basics:
Does this group exist at all? As an existence proof, I know people who fit this category. So yes. They do exist.
Roughly how large is this group? To get more data points is hard because you have to scale trust. Where do we find people who do not trust pollsters, but share their opinion publicly? Best way I have found is to go to the comments section on Twitter accounts of well known Trump supporters.
On these accounts you find many accounts of people admitting to someone they trust (the famous conservative account) that they are not honest with the pollsters. They even supply the screenshots.
Here is one such interesting thread of a popular contrarian who supports Trump asking his followers how many of them have lied to pollsters.
It really pains me that the only way I can try to roughly quantify this is by trolling a controversial Twitter accounts comment section. This does not feel scientific. But I really don’t know another way to attack the lying hypothesis with other data sources.
The obvious issues with this approach:
Why do I trust that they now tell us their real opinion?
This exercise doesn’t answer my research question of “does this group exist in a large enough quantity to matter?” It is literally just me spinning myself up.
Let me know if you have a better way of thinking about this problem!
Either way, we will have much more data on the existence of this group by the end of the day tomorrow.
BBQ CHICKEN/ TRUFFLE MUSHROOM DEEP DISH PIZZA SO THAT YOU CAN WALK AWAY NOT FILLED WITH ANXIETY ABOUT THE ELECTION
Seamless transition into this absolutely bomb deep dish pizza.
As a New Yorker, I am supposed to be against deep dish pizza. Well. I am not. Ends up if you melt several blocks of mozzarella cheese on dough and add in BBQ chicken and truffle mushrooms, I am going to have a good time with it.
Yeah turns out deep dish pizza is just a distinct phylogenetic clade of pizza and fills its’ own evolutionary niche in the pizzasphere. I hypothesize that it is a descendent of the cold-cheese lineage due to homology in the cheese structure, though it is possible this could be a separate branch that exerted evolutionary pressure on traditional thin crust causing adaptive acquisition of enhanced cheesiness. Either way, the fact that it is disparaged by pizza experts (see: people who have lived in downstate New York) is most likely due to tribalism and cheese envy, and not because of there being anything inherently wrong with what is essentially a loaf of bread turned into a mozzarella fondue bowl.
Yeah turns out deep dish pizza is just a distinct phylogenetic clade of pizza and fills its’ own evolutionary niche in the pizzasphere. I hypothesize that it is a descendent of the cold-cheese lineage due to homology in the cheese structure, though it is possible this could be a separate branch that exerted evolutionary pressure on traditional thin crust causing adaptive acquisition of enhanced cheesiness. Either way, the fact that it is disparaged by pizza experts (see: people who have lived in downstate New York) is most likely due to tribalism and cheese envy, and not because of there being anything inherently wrong with what is essentially a loaf of bread turned into a mozzarella fondue bowl.