Guns and abortion: Is compromise even possible?

Sat, 11 May 2013 10:30:00 +0000

Any serious talk of pragmatism and compromise in American politics usually ends with some nettlesome questions: What about the social issues? What about abortion? What about gun control? These are issues on which reasonable people disagree passionately. Anyone who tells you that there is a “right” answer on abortion has not spent much time thinking about the issue or lacks the empathy to appreciate how other people think about it. Americans’ views on these issues tend to be theological — literally in many cases. No amount of arguing or data gathering is going to change anyone’s core values; we’ve dug our intellectual trenches and hunkered down.

So how can a party built around the idea of pragmatism and compromise deal with issues whose defining feature is a deep and conflicting vision of what is right and wrong?

With pragmatism and compromise. Here is the fundamental insight: Reasonable people disagree about whether or not abortion should be illegal; but no reasonable person thinks that abortion is a good thing.

Reasonable people disagree about how readily guns should be available and what the requirements for purchase ought to be; but no reasonable person wants guns to fall into the hands of criminals or those who are dangerously mentally ill.

Help us, Nate Silver!

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 17:00:00 +0000

Statistics cannot be any smarter than the people who use them. And in some cases, they can make smart people do dumb things. One of the most irresponsible uses of statistics in recent memory involved the mechanism for gauging risk on Wall Street prior to the 2008 financial crisis. At that time, firms throughout the financial industry used a common barometer of risk, the Value at Risk model, or VaR. In theory, VaR combined the elegance of an indicator (collapsing lots of information into a single number) with the power of probability (attaching an expected gain or loss to each of the firm’s assets or trading positions). The model assumed that there is a range of possible outcomes for every one of the firm’s investments. For example, if the firm owns General Electric stock, the value of those shares can go up or down. When the VaR is being calculated for some short period of time, say, one week, the most likely outcome is that the shares will have roughly the same value at the end of that stretch as they had at the beginning. There is a smaller chance that the shares may rise or fall by 10 percent. And an even smaller chance that they may rise or fall 25 percent, and so on.

Salon.com > Charles Wheelan

Guns and abortion: Is compromise even possible?

Help us, Nate Silver!