the Prince Consort is dead, long live DMX at fiddy, and 1,2,3…many Tucker Carlsons

We’re now at that strange nexus where Brian Kilmeade’s attempt to pin Prince Phil’s death on the granddaughter-in-law fits other anti-semitic and racist tropes fronted by Fox News. This because of counting artifacts in threes.
“The New York Time’s (NYT) Upshot examined the statistical prevalence of celebrity deaths in threesomes. How did they do this? They started by defining a “celebrity” as anyone with an obituary running at least 2,000 words or longer.”
The "replacement theory" isn't just Tucker's usual racism. It is different. The theory — that space is limited b/c displacement is occurring — is used as justification for violence to protect a limited resource. It is a promotion and defense of violence. 1/ https://t.co/iCngAfyf0f
— Juliette Kayyem (@juliettekayyem) April 9, 2021
Also known as “the great replacement,” the ideology was first introduced in France about fears of Arab and Muslim immigrants who were allegedly overwhelming the “elite.” But Tucker clearly is focused on Hispanics, Jewish Americans and other minorities here. 2/
Tucker is coy because he is also correct in one sense. Replacement is occurring. Young white men today are the last generation of Americans born when Caucasian births outnumbered those of nonwhites. This trend will continue and it animates the racist violence. 3/
In 2012, the Census Bureau reported that minorities, particularly Hispanics, were the majority of newborns in the United States. It just is. This strain of white supremacy doesn’t simply dislike the “other”; it views the other’s very existence as part of a zero-sum game. 4/
Tucker knows this. You can’t encounter the theory without knowing it. And other Republicans have flirted with it. 5/
Similarly, Josh Hawley takes the opportunity to draw attention away from his role in the 1/6 insurrection to operationalize the “fear of replacement” as voter suppression.
What's galling is Hawley is using the rhetoric of empowerment (protecting conservative voters' agency from woke elites) to defend actual efforts to disempower people via voter suppression.
This has a long historical pedigree:
(w/@mkazin & @DamonLinker)https://t.co/0TvaCon1ik pic.twitter.com/G6Ha9HCCp1
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) April 9, 2021
But it’s hard to take this notion seriously, given the lead role Sen. Josh Hawley is playing in this farce. As a rising GOP intellectual star and proponent of an idea-driven conservative populism, the Missouri Republican’s handling of this merits attention, and should ideally challenge us.
Because who wants to be near “inner-city crimes”.
A NYPD cop who allegedly gouged out the eyes of a Capitol police on officer on 1/6 is letting his racist flag fly free. https://t.co/U7VNRbkqUG
— Barbara Malmet (@B52Malmet) April 9, 2021
An attorney representing a MAGA rioter who infamously gouged a Metropolitan Police officer’s eyes argued on Friday that his client doesn’t deserve to be held in a cell with people who have committed “inner-city crimes.”
The Washington Post’s Rachel Weiner reports that an attorney representing retired New York City Police officer Thomas Webster argued to the United States District Court for the District of Columbia that his client should not be detained in his current conditions, which he described as a “dormitory setting.”
The attorney went on to say that his client was not used to living in conditions that are usually reserved for people who commit “inner-city crimes.”

Our perceptions of some of the things we experience are deeply inaccurate. 🧵
Case 1: The vast majority of restaurants get few visits and go out of business quickly. This seems surprising because the typical restaurant you experience is busy and long-lived.
1/
— Ben Golub 🇺🇦 (@ben_golub) April 8, 2021
Case 2: music. Restaurants, like animals, have a natural maximum scale: one can only get so big, limiting the effects above. Not so with music.The typical song you hear has tens of millions of listens. The typical song made has hundreds of listeners at most.7/
, who just happened to run a record label, also points out, if you make an effort to sample SHOWS you find many with a dozen or two listeners. That shows just how popularity (and quality) biased our sampling processes are.8/
One amusing corollary is that if you ever hear “this is a world premiere” for a piece of classical music and don’t have very strong reasons to expect something amazing, you should immediately run the other way.9/Most classical pieces that are ever performed are performed ONCE and are not very good.Our usual sampling process usually protects us from experiencing this part of the distribution. But if you’re told that this protection is somehow off, a Bayesian updates a lot!10/(This makes for a good little problem with Bayes’ rule.)The fact that many of us find implications of sampling biases surprising and counterintiutive suggests there’s important behavioral economics to be done about them: even professionals find it hard to adjust for them.11/Who knows, though. Most sampling biases you hear about are much more interesting than the typical sampling bias.12/For what it’s worth, though, I’d never thought properly about either the restaurant or music examples until‘s and
‘s comments – right-tail gems hidden in comment threads.13/13
The restaurant example you cite is more urban legend than reality. Does this tell us something about perceptions of perceptions? or k-level perceptions? https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.8603nuances that point relative to an often-heard factoid.
Thx but more importantly it looks like @ben_golub & @CFCamerer may not be aware of the literature (Feld & colleagues) on the class size paradox. See forward & backwards citations from here. pic.twitter.com/k2hHmS3p3k
— Ezra Zuckerman Sivan (@ewzucker) April 8, 2021
A richly insightful thread! Many important behaviors are shaped by neglect of selection bias in social observation. Some further ideas on this:https://t.co/p3mPQs95T3 https://t.co/m2IokyAZni
— Social Finance, David Hirshleifer (@4misceldah) April 9, 2021
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon or Bacon’s Law is a parlor game where players challenge each other to arbitrarily choose an actor and then connect them to another actor via a film that both actors have appeared in together, repeating this process to try and find the shortest path that ultimately leads to prolific American actor Kevin Bacon.
How desperate are the Mail on Sunday to attack #MeghanMarkle?
A “Special Investigation” links lattes to oat milk to China to the persecution of Muslims.
All of this in a newspaper that regularly persecutes Muslims.
Now let’s see her 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon. pic.twitter.com/rgsLpKiqyX— Sophie Cook (@sophiecooktalks) April 5, 2021