JONAH ordered out of existence

And, possibly related, Ultra-Orthodox declaration on homosexuality disappears.

@DoubleAA I saw that last week and chuckled

From "Philip Tetlock on Superforecasting," EconTalk podcast, December 19, 2015, starting at 52:12:

> HOST: Give us a two-sentence description of "Precision Questioning." What is that?

> TETLOCK: When someone makes a claim like "Soccer is declining in popularity as the world's most popular pastime," you would want to find out what exactly they mean by key terms: things that are included in "pastimes," what do they mean by "decline." You want to get them to be more specific than people normally are. And when you start probing people, they're often unable to become more specific, and when they're being probed, they feel irritated, and they say "Quit bugging me about this." ...

> ... So, super-forecasting teams have learned to push the limits of precision and maintain reasonable etiquette inside the group.

@IsaacMoses I hadn't heard the term "precision questioning" before, but this also comes up when specifying systems (in my case software). And, of course, it's a mainstay of Jewish discourse. I'm curious what etiquette conventions they've developed.

A tangent: a long time ago I was sitting in a class about Shabbat with some beginners. (I tried to be good...) The teacher wrote on the board "you shall not work on Shabbat" and asked what needed to be further clarified. Somebody zoomed in on "work" and somebody else eventually said "you" and then they fell silent. So I said "on" and people stared at me. I then argued that every single word in that sentence needed to be defined. Turns out the teacher was only going for "you" and "work". :-)

(I was counting "shall not" as a single, compound word, in case you're wondering.)

@MonicaCellio there's probably more detail in the book this interview is promoting

@IsaacMoses oh, it's a book promotion? Ok, makes sense there'd be more there, then. (I haven't listened to the podcast, obviously.)

@MonicaCellio the interviewee recently put out a book. Presumably, he's doing the interview circuit to promote it.

@IsaacMoses presumably. The part I was missing was "the interviewee recently put out a book"; knowing that, the rest falls into place. :-)