Well, I guess we can close the thread, then.
Is no one going to point out that Sausagely just did a post about finding $5?
3: For obvious reasons, that's in the Hank Williams Jr. thread.
You clearly aren't reading all the comments. Three demerits.
Intrade says LB will probably point it out.
I suppose in trade could be interpreted as "what if everyone with money was allowed to weigh in with their blind guess?" there might be a consensus that the msm was getting something wrong.
Its not all bad. Intrade did an excellent job of forecasting President Kerry's victory on Election Day, 2004.
I'm too lazy to look it up, but there must be research out there on Intrade's predictive power. What's it say? Particularly this far out. I gather that Intrade is more effective than any one poll or pundit, but that's not saying much.
3: If you mean Yglesias, it popped up in comments.
Huh. I did not know this: "On the 24 May 2011, it was announced that the founder and CEO of Intrade, John Delaney, died while only 50 metres from the peak of Mount Everest. Delaney's body could not be recovered. He is survived by his wife, two sons, and a daughter who was born prematurely during the expedition."
How many bodies are there littering Everest now? Can it be climbed without stepping on one?
12 and 14 were my exact thoughts.
I'm likely to die 12,231,014 meters or more from the peak of Mt. Everest, so I won't be the way of future climbers.
And here I'd been under the impression that Into Thin Air had made the whole Everest thing unfashionable.
13: At least 150 unrecoverable bodies on Everest. (That link is fascinating, if a bit gruesome.)
17: Only to people among whom it had already been unfashionable.
If we can't avoid political prognostication already even though the 2012 election is too far away, an "it's too far out" disclaimer should appear in every single sentence about it. In October 2007 (a weird example because there was no incumbent or even VP on either ticket, but anyways), the Democratic primary field of serious contenders had been narrowed to Clinton, Obama and Edwards, and even at the end of 2007 Clinton had a substantial lead. In the Republican primaries at the time, I think Guiliani was still in the lead and Fred Thompson had just barely entered. In the fall of 2003, the Democratic primary was a tossup between Howard Dean and Wesley Clark.
Of course, being "in the lead" is a combination of polling and money and other stuff and different pundits handle different things differently. But anything anyone says about 2012 now should be checked against what they were saying in October of 2007 or 2003.
InTrade is a pseudo-scientific way to determine what the conventional wisdom is. That's what Nate Siver uses it for, and it has some usefulness for what he writes about. Without it, people would just argue about what the conventional wisdom is.
Of course, it's still easy to manipulate, prone to huge random fluctuations, etc.
18: Yeah, that link is amazing. A recent episode of The Good Wife was devoted to the crazy shit that goes down in "the dead zone" on Everest.
(I don't even have an off switch for my teevee.)
Well, if there really is widely distributed knowledge about something, prediction markets can work to average out all the little bits different people know - I think this has been demonstrated. Elections are something it doesn't work so well for.
14: what, because he died on Everest? Good grief.
Because he climbed Everest, a pointless activity with a serious risk of death, while his wife was pregnant, I'd think.
And presumably in her third trimester.
a serious risk of death
About 1 in 10, according to the article.
That's safer than Russian roulette or smoking in an oil refinery.
Widow defends husband's Everest climb
Huh. If she was all in, I'm less inclined to judge.
21.1 gets it right. To the extent that Nate Silver cites it for backup, it may be because he feels the need to preemptively answer a challenge to provide some evidence for his claims ("Cite?! Cite?!"). Intrade he can point to; the latest blah-blah from the talking heads on the Sunday shows and in major newspapers isn't quantifiable, see. Too vague.
It's a cheap move.
Also -- I'm not familiar with Intrade to speak of, but I'd had the idea that it was used mostly by people for short term betting / financial gains. i.e. This week we like Mitt Romney; last week we liked Rick Perry. That kind of activity doesn't reflect any real, sustained belief about eventual outcomes, does it? Do people keep their money on an Intrade longshot for any significant length of time? (n.b. I do not speak gambling language)
31: It's none of my business, so I don't really judge, but a recent widow saying "Don't call my recently dead husband an asshole, I'm proud of him," doesn't seem to me strong evidence that he wasn't an asshole for taking the risk, just that she cared enough about him not to want to hear him badmouthed after his death.
I am still entirely inclined to judge.
Christ, what an asshole.
I suppose it could have been planned way in advance; and even if not, we can't judge the expectations they had of each other.
'I packed his bags and left him go'
Is "leave" for "let" still current in Ireland, I wonder?
I am still entirely inclined to judge.
Surprise!
So if you have a super wealthy couple operating under the assumption that in order to be true to themselves, they've just got to take life-threatening risks, then they're being assholes? I suppose so, with the small children.
People who act under the assumption that they have to be "true to themselves" are often assholes.
Nah, I'd leave this one go. The couple had their own understanding, which was their own business.
Pointless life threatening risks. If he were doing anything even moderately useful but equally daredevil, like fighting wildfires, I'd keep my mouth shut.
Thanks, neb!
People who act under the assumption that they have to be "true to themselves" are often assholes.
Listen to the man in California.
At what age do your children have to be before you can resume life-threatening risks? 18? If he didn't do it then, he'd otherwise have to resign himself to possibly never climbing Everest.
(Which is fine with me. I'm just imagining how the conversation might have unfolded between them.)
People who act under the assumption that they have to be "true to themselves" are often assholes.
I dunno. I don't wear make-up, dress how I dress, and will myself to speak up, using this as a rationale, a lot.
Well, it's interesting to me that people would be less inclined to condemn a father of three very young children for climbing Everest than for shooting speedballs, when the latter is almost certainly an objectively less risky endeavor.
A man, a plan, a California, Ainrofila Canal, Panama.
11 et seq.: Relevant?
(My favorite cartoon.)
... in which Apo treads perilously close to violating the analogy ban ...
48: You don't know how happy I am to be reminded of that site.
23: I watched part of American Horror Story (brought to you by the people who brought you Glee? maybe?) last night. It was variously overwrought, overwritten, and filled with cheesy exploitation, but also maybe good enough to keep watching. My low standards: let me show you them.
48 is one of the funniest things I've seen a long time. Source?
51: Jessica Lange is well cast in that.
52: The source is, you know, there in the URL.
54: I thought maybe it had been compiled there but had originated elsewhere, Mr. Snippypants.
52: I saw it in a magazine, I think in college, and clipped it out because I loved it so much, but I can't remember what magazine.
Mr. Snippypants.
The vasectomy you can wear.
Okay, sorry. Random House says "[O'Donnell's] humor, cartoons, and poetry have appeared in The New Yorker, Spy, Atlantic Monthly, and the New York Times Magazine."
||
A friend's FB status: "Occupy Evanston is one guy, standing in front of the Chase bank in the rain."
|>
When Silver brings up InTrade, it's often to contrast his own view with the conventional wisdom.
Prediction markets have their uses. I don't think InTrade can be blamed for the Kerry debacle, because early, seemingly reliable reports on election day said that the exit polling put it in the bag for Kerry. Efficient markets hypothesis notwithstanding, it's well understood that false reports can move markets.
I was going to sign up for InTrade, but apparently they charge $5 a month rather than a sum for each trade, and I'm not interested in putting enough money into it to make the vig worthwhile.
But my theory (in case anyone wants to try it) is that Intrade has a systematic rightwing bias.
Efficient markets hypothesis notwithstanding being false and all...
I wonder how much a staffer could make insider trading on InTrade.
"Occupy Evanston is one guy, standing in front of the Chase bank in the rain."
The one in WY? I'm only a bit over an hour's drive from there. Maybe I should go picket with the dude for a bit. I could pick up some fireworks while I'm at it.
Everest is fatal not least because its renown attracts people with less technical skill and experience than really ought to be prerequisite, but I don't think doing dangerous things necessarily constitutes the unforgivable offense implied in all the "Christ, what an asshole" comments above.
OT: I find this quote from an Updike review of a novel by Alan Hollinghurst more provocative and interesting than offensive, but I suppose I'm biased in Updike's favor for all sorts of reasons (heterosexuality not least among them; there's also my default position that Slate sucks and its writers ought to get honest jobs).
I figured as much. The one is WY is a dusty border town of like 10k people.
I thought about making some money betting against Michelle Bachman, which seemed like the easiest free money in the world, but it turns out there's not a lot of liquidity and that if you bet at the reported prices you can make like a total o $1.80. You have to offer your own contracts in large volumes to even think about making money. This was all discussed on some past thread somewhere.
the easiest free money in the world
Speculating on bitcoin is pretty good, but the success of that is probably mildly correlated to the ongoing success of michelle bachmann, so maybe not after all.
58: you should be sorry. I was on my way to Occupy Evanston until you made me cry.
65: Srsly, this is not offensive?
"Novels about heterosexual partnering, however frivolous and reducible to increments of selfishness, social accident, foolish overestimations, and inflamed phsyical detail, do involve the perpetuation of the species and the ancient, sacralized structures of the family."?
Or "...after a while you begin to long for the chirp and swing and civilizing animation of a female character."?
That's what I love so much about females, how chirpy they are, how civilized in their animation. (I'm sorry, what?)
71: I read the first part as more a (harsh) challenge than a dismissal. The second part is kind of funny, nothing to dig up and torment the man's corpse for.
71: Seriously. Updike is an old man and times have changed, so ignorance on this level might be forgiven somewhat if you otherwise like his work and are charitably inclined, but how is it anything other than a grossly ignorant thing to say?
nothing to dig up and torment the man's corpse for
If you knew anything about the plight of indigenous North Americans, you'd understand just how racist this is.
72: Seems hard to sustain that view given Updike's own explanation:
Novels about heterosexual partnering, however frivolous and reducible to increments of selfishness, social accident, foolish overestimations, and inflamed phsyical detail, do involve the perpetuation of the species and the ancient, sacralized structures of the family.
I mean, come on.
65.2: As Juliet Lapidos writes in Slate today, many critics have mentioned the absence of explicit sex in Hollinghurst's new book, The Stranger's Child, and have suggested perhaps the author is kowtowing to critics. Yet the reviews she points to don't mention Updike
Maybe because it would be silly to kowtow to a dead critic. Maybe because he's written 3 sexually explicit novels since the Updike review.
74: Way to pop the racist flashbulb early, VW. Now I'm going to have to defend myself by accusing people of anti-semitism, and that's a pretty hard row to hoe w/r/t John Updike.
as more a (harsh) challenge than a dismissal
Go ahead, homos! Just try to have a babies by yourselves!
79: An artistic challenge, Blume.
there's also my default position that Slate sucks and its writers ought to get honest jobs
My friend who has written a few things for Slate now gets one of the largest chunks of her freelance work from the Ralph Lauren magazine. Does that better meet your approval?
81: I'd rather read Ralph Lauren's magazine than wear Slate's khaki pants.
80: What does that mean? (Serious question.)
83 to 82 as well, it probably goes without saying.
In the first one he's saying gay stories and straight stories may be equally uninteresting but at least the straight ones are about things as they always have been and should be. (WSPTOTC!)
I don't think he's history's worst monster or anything but really, this is from 1999. My grandmother, born about the same time as Updike, does better than this and she was not exactly a bohemian. If the quote were from thirty years earlier I'd say even novelists are subject to the zeitgeist but no, it's just assholery all around.
76: If you go to the original source, rather than the inflammatory, out of context quote, it doesn't seem to me that he's making an unreasonable point.
I don't think he's condemning gay sex - he seems to be saying the gay sex in this book didn't have any depth to it beyond being sex for pleasure.
Novels about heterosexual partnering, however frivolous and reducible to increments of selfishness, social accident, foolish overestimations, and inflamed phsyical detail, do involve the perpetuation of the species and the ancient, sacralized structures of the family
Isn't it transparent that Updike is trying to defend his own fiction against the critique he is making of Hollinghurst's novel?
89: Not horrible, but, according to Updike, boring.
Yeah, the article in 86, read as a whole, really does alter one's view of the quote in 76. The point seems to be that this particular chronicle of gay sex seems particularly lonely and bleak, and not in the good buttsex/compelling chronicle of social alienation way.
83: I think it can be read (perhaps only by me, of course) as at least two directions: first, to novelists of "heterosexual partnering," to exceed the unearned headstart of their majoritarian advantage and not to lapse into the "frivolous and reducible...," as Updike pretty much says many or most do; and, second, to novelists of non-heterosexual partnering, to write up to the level of their competition and its advantage, fair or not.
As I suggested, it amounts to a pretty harsh judgment of poor old Hollinghurst, and perhaps I give J.U. too much credit for saying something -- anything! please! -- interesting in a book review, the doldrums of the literary weather (at least these days).
I don't think he's condemning gay sex - he seems to be saying the gay sex in this book didn't have any depth to it beyond being sex for pleasure.
This is a weary canard about gay people. Ok, I didn't log in to read the whole thing but may I wager that he didn't contrast it with other descriptions of gay sex he found to be illustrative of love and commitment and an interest in child-rearing and other things to build a society on?
92: You'll be glad to know that Updike thinks you may "feel the lonely human condition with a special bleakness."
Sorry, thought it was something you had to be a subscriber to read. I clicked through and read it on google books and feel...about the same as I did before. I suppose it's interesting that there's so much praise for Hollinghurst in there, but the essential tone about homosexuality still seems patronizing and ahistorical and full of frustrating assumptions.
sex for pleasure
Horrible!
Not horrible, but, according to Updike, boring.
Boring if it's between homosexuals. Hetereosexual sexual encounters, however frivolous and reducible to increments of selfishness, social accident, foolish overestimations, and inflamed phsyical detail, do involve the perpetuation of the species and the ancient, sacralized structures of the family. Which make them inherently less boring. According to Updike.
It basically sounds like he's working very hard to find a way to say "I'm not interested in reading about gay sex."
94: How can you say this after reading Updike explain how Waugh and Proust were able to overcome their handicap?
92 --
The point seems to be that this particular novel by Alan Hollingsworth is less moving than it might be. The book gets boring because it's entirely about relationships, but nothing much seems at stake in whether or not the relationship succeeds or fails. I think Updike is saying that this is Hollingsworth's problem as a novelist, not a problem with gay relationships in general in the real world. Then, Updike suggests that novels about heterosexual relationships, while often suffering from the same structural artistic problem (that is, explaining to the reader why the relationship matters), have a kind of built-in easy resolution because the author can introduce children into the story.
Not having read the Hollingsworth book, I have no idea if this is a fair critique or not. Perhaps it's really not, and Updike is simply imposing a homophobic view about gay relationships on a novel that treats the relevant relationships with a lot of depth. But that's not at all apparent from the surface of the review, and I don't think it's fair to say that Updike is simply saying that, as a general rule, gay people only have sex for "mere" pleasure. There's not an implication that one couldn't write a different novel that actually explores the depth and meaning of homosexual relationships. That said, I don't think anyone in my generation would ever have written the sentence in 72, and that's probably a good thing.
I mean, I'm not particularly interested in defending Updike's view, especially without having read the novel in question. My only point is that things look better in context than they do when you excerpt the most condemning passage out of context.
I'm... interested in defending Updike. My... point is... condemning.
Well that's just awful, Halford.
97: Perhaps you're right. I was already pissed off by the excerpt so I don't know that I gave the whole thing a fair read.
It basically sounds like he's working very hard to find a way to say "I'm not interested in reading about gay sex."
Yeah, that's what I get out of it, too. And I don't think that not being interested in reading about gay sex is the same crime as homophobia, which is what Slate seems to be making it out to be.
Then, Updike suggests that novels about heterosexual relationships, while often suffering from the same structural artistic problem (that is, explaining to the reader why the relationship matters), have a kind of built-in easy resolution because the author can introduce children into the story.
Had this been what Updike was going for, he could have talked about the class of fiction that treats relationships superficially, and compared it to deeper treatments of relationships. If he was really interested in the point about children, he could have compared fiction involving relationships with children to fiction involving the childless.
Partly, I suspect, he didn't make that latter choice because it would be a transparently silly comparison.
But he also didn't do it because that's not the subject that he was talking about. He was talking about the depth and gravity of heterosexual relationships vs. gay relationships. He was explaining why fiction that explores relationships is inherently better if it involves heterosexuals. He explicitly wasn't just talking about Hollinghurst, but about fiction that in some fashion evoked homosexuality.
I don't think that not being interested in reading about gay sex is the same crime as homophobia
Dismissing an otherwise excellent book about relationships and sex, simply because the relationships are between men and the sex is gay, does strike me as pretty much homophobia simpliciter. If I thought that's what Updike was doing, I would be pretty quick to condemn him.
And I don't think that not being interested in reading about gay sex is the same crime as homophobia, which is what Slate seems to be making it out to be.
I do think that writing a review about being uninterested in reading about gay sex is reasonably likely to be at least related to homophobia. Someone who reviewed Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's latest (she's a knitting writer) with an extended discussion of how uninterested they are in knitting, fiber arts, and crafts generally would either be doing something completely pointless, or implicitly advocating for the idea that there's something questionable about being interested in that kind of thing.
If Updike is so uninterested in reading about gay sex that it spoils a book for him, he's probably a bad reviewer of that book, and if he reviews it anyway he seems to me to be implying that gay relationships aren't a proper subject of literature.
And I don't think that not being interested in reading about gay sex is the same crime as homophobia, which is what Slate seems to be making it out to be.
Yeah, this identifies the exact nature of our disagreement. In the context of a book reviewer discussing a class of writers and fiction, I think it's basically the same thing as homophobia.
Yeah, I think 103.3 is a pretty clear misreading, but I can see how, if you're willing to be super-uncharitable to Updike, you can get there.
I haven't actually read Updike's full review, I should say, and I kind of hate him generally, so I'm happy to condemn him on too little data.
Or what Halford and LB said.
Well, clarity of thought and unambiguous prose are important to a writer and flowery embellishment is unnecessary in a book review, so if Updike was not unusually homophobic for his day, then clearly he was a shitty writer.
For full disclosure of bias, I will admit to a love of the Rabbit series, which I understand is highly uncool. Does anything capture the straight-up wacked-out-edness of the late 60s better than Rabbit Redux?
I like how this thread moved seamlessly from prediction markets to mountain climbing to perceived homophobia in Updike.
112: I remember picking one up as a very little kid and being like, "WTF? Where is the rabbit?!"
105: Books about knitting or other technical subjects are distinguishable from novels; it would be awkward to argue that Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's book ought to interest me in knitting, or knitting the particular n [sweater? scarf? socks? tea cozy? fire engine?] that is her subject, but one could argue that a novel about n that failed to win and/or hold John Updike's interest, and consequently got a review that said as much, failed both the theme of n and the reader John Updike, while John Updike failed nobody.*
* The foregoing not valid for readers other than the generally empathetic and sensitive John Updike with patently animating hostilities (e.g., some wanker at National Review and my latest collection of feminist short stories).
112 -- Hah!! I did the same thing, combing the book for pictures. Maybe this is like reading old Doonesburys, and we'll discover that 90% of the Unfogged commentariat did this.
Notwithstanding the unspeakable Lovecraftian horror of novels and short stories about people of one's parents' or grandparents' generation having any kind of sex, I really enjoyed and appreciated Updike's essays on art. I am probably defending him for that.
Wait, I'm supposed to be chirpy?!?
Well fuck that.
If Updike is so uninterested in reading about gay sex that it spoils a book for him, he's probably a bad reviewer of that book, and if he reviews it anyway he seems to me to be implying that gay relationships aren't a proper subject of literature.
I think that's being unfair to Updike. He seemed to like the author's previous novels, gay relationships notwithstanding.
Although I don't actually give a shit about Updike either way. Mostly I think Slate is crap.
120: I don't think he was suggesting simultaneous chirping and fucking.
"Wait. You made a woman chirp? You made a woman chirp!?"
Good, because that would really spoil the moment for me.
122: "chirp and swing" - are you sure, Flip?
Or are women part-chipmunk, part-monkey, and yet all-civilized?
125: I think friends and enemies alike would agree that Updike's female characters tend to be the most remote from civilization. He's pretty cruel about and to them.
"...and Helen was drawn up short by 'The more a lady has to say, the better,' administered waggishly.
'Oh yes,' she said.
'Ladies brighten--'
'Yes, I know. The darlings are regular sunbeams. Let me give you a plate.'
[Passage from Howards End that the chirpy thing reminded me of.]
I guess I'd always assumed Howard's End was about gay sex.
128: If 20th and 21st century movies and books have taught me anything, it is that everyone in Victorian and Edwardian Britain was having gay sex.
128:Goes to the Updike.
Interesting question the degree to which we can write, or read, about experiences or feelings alien or other to us, or patronizingly and in some kind of subset of "Orientalism", claim that such experiences are not really alien since "we're deep down all the same."
Was Forster (and Proust) writing about gay love and romance? Could they apprehend/comprehend hetero relationships?
Was The Wire largely bullshit? Or if not, should we still remember it was a white writer?
Doesn't feel right to say I can never "get it" about Japan or trans or gays or women. The opposite, that of course I can completely relate and understand, feels wrong. Could it be...a dialectic?
Updike is an ass. Best to keep shit like that to yourself.
I've mentioned before that a dear friend of mine married a guy who'd been up Mt Everest twice. I wouldn't have married him or anything, but he's a decent and interesting man. As for condemning people for wasting time, I'm not sure who can really cast the first stone. Certainly not anyone who reads Slate, Updike, or references to Intrade.
Who was condemning people for wasting time?
We think that people today are too advanced to say that "the female character" has "chirp and swing," yet movies keep coming out where manic pixie dream girls chirp away.
Maybe this could be the test of whether Husband X is right to say that Alameida is a manic pixie dream girl. The question is, does she chirp?
And does the smoke detector have batteries? That could confuse things.
Re Intrade, anyone tried the Iowa Electronic Markets? I made a whole $4 in 2008 ($20 on Obama, $5 for the administrative charge. Bought at ~60 cents a contract, paid $1)
There's something in the biography of Edmund ("Pat") Brown about election betting markets in the early 20th century. I can't remember if they specifically tied to predictions, or if (as is more likely) it was just plain gambling.
137 -- Before WWII, there was a huge semi-legal market for betting on political elections. Newspapers used to report on the betting odds in the years before good polling. The volume was way way larger than anything on InTrade, and, in some years (I think) roughly similar to the volume invested in major stock markets. Link here. Really interesting and forgotten part of political history.
You can scoff at Intrade all you want but I was a cowinner of a contest to predict the 2008 election results thanks to Intrade (I just went with the Intrade predictions). Looking something up on Intrade seems like a quick and simple way of getting a reasonably good idea of the odds.
10: There is indeed research on how good prediction markets actually are. Specifically, there's a very nice and well-known paper asking Are Political Markets Really Superior to Polls as Election Predictors?, which can be summed up as follows: No. (This is actually a little surprising, since presumably people playing in the markets can read the polls too, and any relevant non-poll information should help them predict at least a little better than just using polls. So it seems like either there isn't any such information to be had, or the markets actively wash it out.)
That's a lot of graphs for one paper. Very interesting though.
138: Huh. I didn't realize the markets were that big. I guess I thought it was just a slice of local/state history in the Brown bio. Thanks for the link to that paper.
140: which can be summed up as follows: No
Hmm, I think "No" may be glossing a bit that it is actually "an investor with a modest knowledge of how trial-heat polls translate into Election Day outcomes" (emphasis original) where "modest knowledge" means "using the results of our regression model* based on the prior 30 to 50 years of Presidential elections".
*It is a relatively straightforward model, so I will take it as likely that things proceeded strictly in their proper order as to hypothesis, model and results in obtaining the somewhat contrarian result. And for all I know there is a sensitivity analysis lying around somewhere.
