Articles by David Roberts

Let’s go through this one more time.

A couple of enterprising students have uncovered a confidential brief (PDF) from the IPCC to George W. Bush.

It'll never work. Too many pages.

Rocío Romero and the L.V. prefab house

I missed this short New Yorker piece about architect Rocío Romero and her L.V. prefab house. It's probably been blogged a zillion times, but whatevs: it's interesting. My ears especially perked at this bit:

Romero originally thought that the primary market for the L.V. would be California, but most of her customers have turned out to be in the East or in the Midwest. The first kit Romero sold was to a couple in Virginia, Barry Bless and Jennifer Watson, who put it on a six-acre site in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Bless, a musician, and Watson, an architectural photographer, finished their house this past March. They did much of the construction work themselves, and it took about a year; the final cost was ninety-five thousand dollars. The couple christened their L.V. the Luminhaus. As soon as it was done, they put up a Web site filled with Watson’s photographs of the house amid fall foliage and winter snow, offering the house for rent at eight hundred dollars a week. In six weeks, it was booked for the rest of the year.

My lust for modernist prefab knows no bounds.

SUV sales are down

Pretty sharply:

Sales of all new vehicles in the United States were off 2.8 percent in November from a year ago, with Detroit automakers bearing the brunt of the industry slowdown, according to Autodata Corp. Sales of some SUVs were off more than 50 percent from last year. Meanwhile, U.S. sales by Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. continued to surge.

What can I do but refer back again to this post.

What’s a prediction worth?

A few days ago, Kevin Drum pointed to a Louis Menand review of a book called Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? by psychologist Philip Tetlock.

I haven't read the book, but the review is fascinating, and I highly recommend you read it before (or instead of) the rambling thoughts that follow.

Tetlock's basic thesis, based on a multi-decade study, is that expert predictions are no better -- and often worse -- than random chance or the predictions of casual news consumers. Just like everyone else, experts display confirmation bias, underestimate their past mistakes, and fall for basic probability errors.

Ah, fuel for anti-elitists everywhere ...

This is not a new psychological finding -- laymen often express surprise at it, but psychologists have known for years that experts are no more reliable than anyone else. But one new insight Tetlock brings to the table relates to Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction between hedgehogs (which know a lot about one thing) and foxes (which know a little about a lot of things). From the book: