#swingingsoc (political movements):

Understandably Milton Friedman didn't do a lot of teaching. There's an urban legend that he would always initially return an assignment unread with the comment "You can do better than this". Now _that_ would be an interesting experiment.

@dave43law Rude:

@BruceEdmonds I think we need some way to stop the future nuclear power policy (for example) being a pat-a-cake for party rivalries. It is only "clean" if you ignore waste disposal and decommissioning. How _will_ we raise the level of public B. S. detection?

Anyone who says that grumbling about punctuation is anal or elitist should try reading a text that genuinely doesn't contain it ...

@mjfree Don't think he should be hanging round that creepy orange guy. He has sex offences written all over him.

Generally don't do anything that looks like "selling" but people so need to be reading this ...

@i_iratus It's not his activism they object to. It's the fact he is far too ignorant to take his "opinions" seriously.

@Ed_Miliband For example, was I asleep when they found a way to convert spent fuel waste and decommissioned plants into kittens?

@Ed_Miliband OK. Remind us again what a _full_ list of pros and cons are regarding nuclear ... rather than making it sound like its clearly a great idea except for a random Tory go slow ...

@mattyglesias That's why they didn't give you the grant ... ignorance and lack of imagination is not an argument for anything.

Really enjoying catching up with the X-Files several decades late. In the opening credits is the phrase "government denies knowledge". Well the current one _certainly_ does.

@kareem_carr One of the things that validates my social science training is talking to people who don't have one. It may not feel like we learned things like people who memorised a list of equations but oh boy did we ...

Wondering if it is possible to measure the "attention span" of an author from internal evidence in a text. Student specifically told to analyse "published" sources analyses a BA thesis and later criticises it for not being peer reviewed.

@BruceEdmonds I know what the belief system entails (and there is no empirical way to talk people out of it by definition) but you never hear the relevant people say "so I have decided to be useless to policy makers even when, by adopting a different view, I could potentially be of use".

You'd have be a pretty grumpy anarchist to say that management, for example, was intrinsically worthless. But it seems to be done so badly so much of the time that it is hard to take account of its potential in valuing it.

Researchers rush to preserve federal health databases before they disappear from government websites