Consider Dan Koh, a candidate for U.S. Congress in Maskachusetts, the Smart State (TM). Wokipedia says that he/she/ze/they is a Harvard graduate, has a Harvard MBA, and was a senior official in the Cognitive Excellence Administration:
In 2021, Koh was named Chief of Staff to the United States Secretary of Labor, Marty Walsh. Later, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Cabinet Secretary at the White House. He concluded his service as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs
Here’s his/her/zir/their own tweet where he/she/ze/they attempts to do some budget arithmetic:
The first number in the tweet, “$30 billion for 10k more ICE agents”, caught my eye because it is only about one day of spending for our government (federal+state+local). The $30 billion figure turns out to be inaccurate/misleading as well. Brennan Center:
The budget also gives approximately $30 billion over four years to ICE to track down, arrest, and deport immigrants, allowing it to hire 10,000 new officers.
So it’s $7.5 billion per year, not $30 billion per year, and it covers all ICE agents, not just 10,000 new ones.
How far is $7.5 billion from covering the three items that this Harvard graduate imagines it will cover? ChatGPT to the rescue!
Prompt: On a nationwide basis, how much would it cost to – Cover all ACA subsidies for a year – End all Rx copays – Eliminate all medical debt. ?
Answer:
The Harvard MBA is off by a factor of about 30X, according to ChatGPT. The ICE funding, even if it were $30 billion per year, wouldn’t begin to cover just the first item on Koh’s list (ACA subsidies).
What’s interesting to me: (1) that this level of innumeracy isn’t a liability in American politics, and (2) that someone suffering from innumeracy to this degree wouldn’t check tweets with ChatGPT before posting. Let’s keep in mind that this person is a rising star among Democrats and is purportedly qualified to run a company (the Harvard MBA) where misunderestimating costs by 30X could lead to serious financial distress.
In case the above tweet is memory-holed:
He’s likely afflicted by innumeracy AND Dunning-Kruger effect (ie: he’s so clueless, that he doesn’t know he’s clueless).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
I don’t want to be “that guy” (you seem to have many on this blog), Phil, but your hatchet job posting here is appalling. Señor Koh overcame an elite, privileged background and ADHD to make something of himself, just like mommy and daddy paid for. He said mommy’s TV used to bother him when he was forced to sit at the $50,000 walnut formal dining-room table to study math — advanced math that they didn’t teach you at MIT, bro. He’s not even on Adderall anymore, for your information, speaking of overcoming cognitive disorders. His wife works in A.I., so uh, I think he knows how to run a claim on Twitter through LLM (or she could do it for him).
Dan seems to have done perfectly well acquiring the “New Math of Political Science”, suitable for use on Twitter. I guess you just don’t understand (or accept) that the ruling class can have members who are 3rd generation Americans of mixed race (Korean/Lebanese). Did you intern for Ted Kennedy? I didn’t think so. Teddy had a little something to teach us about government math too (and what to do after driving off a bridge). $30B/4 = $30B, got it?
(As for Señor Koh’s user name, “dank” doesn’t mean what it used to, as in “I Bogart-smoked a bowl of hardcore dank, I be trippin, yo. [was ‘I didn’t inhale.’]” And yeah, Phil, weed is medicine.)
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2018/03/06/dan-koh-congress/
This commenter is obviously high on something, but interestingly he/she/not-otherwise-specified might have made a discovery: “unimaginary numbers”. To the average person, $30B is unimaginably large (≈ ∞), more money than all their descendants will ever make (now that Biden is out of office). To polyticians, $30B of other people’s money is ≈ 0. So isn’t ∞ ÷ 4 = ∞? And isn’t 0 ÷ 4 = 0? Proof by sarcasm. QED
If someone loudly proclaims “The Sky is Green!” does that mean they don’t understand physics?
Or does it mean they have chosen to lie for a living?
Did you reply to Dan Koh on X?
This has been going on forever. Have you not seen the documentary “A Private Universe”? They open by grabbing students out of a Harvard commencement in the 80’s and ask them some some basic stuff like “Why are there seasons?” and proceed to film them totally whiffing it like the future lawyers and real estate professionals they are going to become.
I don’t know what they teach there, but it’s not STEM. (All of these people would have gotten better grades than I for almost all of their academic careers)
https://www.learner.org/series/a-private-universe/1-a-private-universe/
A great watch if you ever want to feel smarter than some pretty smart people.
> I don’t know what they teach there, but it’s not STEM.
One explanation is that most weed dispensaries remove stems, so students aren’t necessarily aware of them.