Barack Obama's inauguration speech ... crafted by 27-year-old in Starbucks | World news | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/20/barack-obama-inauguration-us-speech

Must get interview

Jon Favreau

ジョン・ファブローとオバマの間でどのようなやりとりがあったか。

Guardian profile of Jon Favreau, head speechwriter for President Barack Obama.

eine art meta-"making of" mitsamt vorstellung eines engen mitarbeiter von barack obama

"It applies in all walks of life. Church services and prayer books are full of three-part lists. Research has shown that people know a prayer is finished when it ends with them praying for three things. They know to say 'Amen' and don't have to be prompted." Also, it is economical - a third word is the earliest point at which a possible connection, implied by the first two, is confirmed. If you carry on listing items, say speech-writing experts, you risk being criticised for "going on and on". It can be th

There can be more than one bad thing in the world

'what-aboutery'

So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.” If we don’t sometimes defer to the expert consensus, we’ll systematically tend to go wrong in the face of one-way-hash arguments, at least outside our own necessarily limited domains of knowledge. Indeed, in such cases, trying to evaluate the arguments on their merits will tend to lead to an erroneous conclusion more often than simply trying to gauge the credibility of the various disputants. The problem, of course, is gauging your own competence level well enough to know when to assess arguments and when to assess arguers. Thanks to the perverse phenomenon psychologists have dubbed the Dunning-Kruger effect, those who are least competent tend to have the most wildly inflated estimates of their own knowledge and competence. They don’t know enough to know that they don’t know, as it were.

Via Brad Plumer, I see Cato’s Jerry Taylor is riled at responses to an open letter ad the Institute published in which a group of scientists signed off on a statement questioning the strength of the case for catastrophic climate change. I’m broadly sympathetic with his irritation at the proportion of ad hominem attacks in debates like these, but I’m not sure I agree with his bottom line in context: An argument’s merit has nothing to do with the motives of the arguer, the credentials of the arguer, or the popularity of the argument. Full stop. No exceptions.

The one-way hash argument is an excellent illustration of why argument from authority is not always wrong.

I love that the Wall Street Journal writes this but never complained about Bush using fear mongering. Also I don't think he has fear mongered, I think Obama has presented evidence that backs up what he is saying.

the Great Depression are not only historically inaccurate, they're also dangerous. Repeated warnings from the White House about a coming economic apocalypse aren't likely to raise consumer and investor expectations for the future. In fact, they have contributed to the continuing decline in consumer confidence

Mr. Obama's analogies to the Great Depression are not only historically inaccurate, they're also dangerous. Repeated warnings from the White House about a coming economic apocalypse aren't likely to raise consumer and investor expectations for the future. In fact, they have contributed to the continuing decline in consumer confidence that is restraining a spending pickup.