BBC News: Comedian Richard Pryor dead at 65
Groundbreaking black US comedian Richard Pryor has died after almost 20 years with multiple sclerosis.
He died at the age of 65 of a heart attack at Encino hospital near Los Angeles, his wife Jennifer Pryor said.
Goddam I fucking loved his shit. One of the greatest stand ups ever.
Just watched Sahara which I thought was a cracking movie despite the poor reviews it’s received.
Yeah so it’s got plotholes the size of craters from meteor strikes and it ain’t going to win any Oscars but it did exactly what it said on the tin in my opinion.
Just a very enjoyable action adventure.
The pairing of Matthew McConaughey and Steve Zahn works really well, totally believable as friends since being kids. Zahn was great not just a comedy sidekick but a balls to the wall action hero in his own right.
The New Yorker: Everybody’s an Expert
Putting predictions to the test. by LOUIS MENAND
It was no news to Tetlock, therefore, that experts got beaten by formulas. But he does believe that he discovered something about why some people make better forecasters than other people. It has to do not with what the experts believe but with the way they think. Tetlock uses Isaiah Berlin’s metaphor from Archilochus, from his essay on Tolstoy, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” to illustrate the difference. He says:
Low scorers look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.
A hedgehog is a person who sees international affairs to be ultimately determined by a single bottom-line force: balance-of-power considerations, or the clash of civilizations, or globalization and the spread of free markets. A hedgehog is the kind of person who holds a great-man theory of history, according to which the Cold War does not end if there is no Ronald Reagan. Or he or she might adhere to the “actor-dispensability thesis,” according to which Soviet Communism was doomed no matter what. Whatever it is, the big idea, and that idea alone, dictates the probable outcome of events. For the hedgehog, therefore, predictions that fail are only “off on timing,” or are “almost right,” derailed by an unforeseeable accident. There are always little swerves in the short run, but the long run irons them out.
Foxes, on the other hand, don’t see a single determining explanation in history. They tend, Tetlock says, “to see the world as a shifting mixture of self-fulfilling and self-negating prophecies: self-fulfilling ones in which success breeds success, and failure, failure but only up to a point, and then self-negating prophecies kick in as people recognize that things have gone too far.”
Is the debacle that is the aftermath of the Iraq War due to perhaps there being too many hedgehogs in the White House.
A free democratic Iraq is a good thing but those that believed that merely deposing Saddam Hussein and the Baathists making the Iraqi people free and then establishing democratic elections would bring that about were clearly wrong. The prediction based on the big idea of freedom and democracy failed to take into account that many Iraqis didn’t want freedom or democracy and many that did didn’t want an overseas power like the US imposing their idea of freedom and democracy upon them.
