The Duck of Minerva

Dan Nexon argues that efforts to have Ukraine join NATO could be self defeating: Moscow’s greatest fear is that Ukraine winds up a member of NATO. The more that NATO suggests it views Ukraine as worthy of military confrontation, the more Moscow will become convinced that an autonomous Ukraine — rump or otherwise — will someday become a member of the NATO alliance. The net result: escalating efforts by NATO at military deterrence actually increase the pressure on Moscow to take decisive action in the near term.The whole post is worth reading, and those few Duck readers who don't follow Dan's...

Tyler Cowen discovers John Mearsheimer's seminal 1993 Foreign Affairs article "The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent". Since I know I won't be alone in teaching this piece the next time I put together an Intro to IR reading list, let's take a moment to see whether, as Cowen wrote earlier, "the expected rate of return from denuclearization has fallen". International relations scholars disagree about a lot when it comes to nuclear weapons, and the belief, which I mostly share, that nuclear weapons mitigate the outbreak of interstate wars is not the only view. Even Mearsheimer in his...

I left academia because I wanted to make a difference. I went to graduate school for the normal reasons: I’d done well in school, I didn’t really want to get a job, and I needed to learn how to free my mother from the eternal torments of the demon Mephisto. For a while, everything was great. I slept in, worked late, and made excellent ramen. I loved being a part of the laboratory: running experiments, writing up results, and especially making charts. (Someone lent me a copy of Tufte’s book on data visualization--it changed my life!) I even liked teaching, unlike a lot of researchers. Part of...

How do you spell heteros*edasticity? Economist Alfredo R. Paloyo surveys the evidence and shows that the variant "heteroskedasticity" overtook its rival, "heteroscedasticity", several years ago. Oddly, "homoscedastic", "heteroscedastic", and "homoscedasticity" continue to trump their k-variants. (Clearly, I am in the copy-editing phase of revising a paper, and this blog post must be part of the revision process, since it would be procrastination otherwise.) Orthographic purists will insist on heteroskedastic because it is closer to the Greek root. Seizing on yet another opportunity to be...

Brief but important interview with Andrew Gelman. Here's one thing regarding "great applied work": Ask yourself the question: What makes a statistician look like a hero? You might think that the answer would be, Extracting a small faint signal from noise. But I don't think so. I think that a statistician looks like a hero by studying large effects. A history of the firebomb:The effects testing, done very carefully by both universities (Harvard again, along with the University of Chicago), corporations (Standard Oil, Texas Company), and the military (Ordnance Department) are also pretty grim....