;)
What if Nate Silver had accurately predicted a Romney victory?
Wednesday, November 7, 2012 at 01:15PM Many commentators on the blogs I usually read (centrist, maybe skewing left, self-defining as "smart" rather than overtly "partisan") are immensely pleased with the Nate Silver's accomplishment in calling the election results based on his number-crunching of the polls, rather than the "expert sense" of various right-tending commentators: this Language Log post contains probably the clearest summary of both the history, the pleased feeling, and a cute meme about Silver.
Look, I checked out Five Thirty Eight, Silver's NYT blog pretty much every day in the runup to the election. But that was that I pretty much liked what he was saying. It predicted a result I tended to favor.
Silver clearly has something, and it makes sense that we respect him for analyzing things correctly. It's just that we who liked the prediction he was making shouldn't congratulate ourselves too much for having the sense to see what a great analyst he was. If he'd been accurately predicting the same Romney victory that people like the normally sensible George Will were, how much honor would he have gotten from the left side of the commentariat? Would they have just accepted his results, or would they have devoted a huge amount of effort to poke holes in them?
Right now we'd see him front and center on Drudge, and he'd be getting interview requests from Fox News. The right would be congratulating itself on how devoted to honest statistics they were.
I like to think that the rationality-trending part of the left would still have respected him for his analysis, and that people wouldn't have made delusional predictions of an significant Obama victory in the same way that Barone, Will, Noonan, and others did.
But you don't cheer your team by yelling "The statistics show that our opponents will probably win!"
Reader Comments (10)
Who cares what the self-labeled pundits and prophets said, as long as the knuckledraggers lost?
Athena's response illustrates the most important element of American politics -- and, I expect, politics everywhere. It's not a rational process. Nobody has political views which they reached through pure cerebral analysis. Nobody chooses a political allegiance out of logical calculation. It's entirely based on emotion. Our primate brains want to belong, so we tend to pick the side that our parents (or our teenage peers) belong to. Then we defend that identity using the language of rationality to mask our pure primate troop loyalty.
When someone on our side says something stupid, it's a mistake, or taken out of context. When someone on their side says something stupid, it illustrates the fundamental corruption and wrongness of their whole party. A politician we like is "adaptable" and "open to new ideas"; one we don't like is a "flip-flopper" or a "hypocrite." A politician we like is "steadfast" and "committed" where one we don't like is "rigid" or "fanatical." People on our side are "honest working people" while those we dislike are "knuckledraggers" or "trailer trash." One could go on at length.
Political arguments aren't arguments at all. They are displays of tribal strength and identity. "I am one of My Group and My Group is strong!" Nobody in a political argument is really trying to persuade the other side to change their ideas by logical argument. They are making a display. That's why Facebook updates and Twitter tweets are full of cheap shots and insults during election season. Nobody in the history of the world has been convinced by a "zinger" or crude invective to change their ideas, yet that's what we see day in and day out for months. It's a slightly more high-tech version of howler monkeys screaming.
What's especially alarming about this is that in general the people who are most convinced that they are rational, well-informed, enlightened individuals whose political beliefs are entirely logical and benevolent -- are exactly the people who are likely to be most irrational and emotional in their actual practice. Because, of course, they can justify being filled with spite and hate for the other side because those stupid, easily-manipulated pawns deserve it.
To Cambias:
If you think that my response was based on "emotion" -- think again (or just think, period). There was not one iota of the Republican platform that did not adhere, literally, to baboon politics.
And if you're a Republican, live with the results of this democratic election -- as we had to live with Dubaya's chest beatings, which nevertheless translated to real wars, real suppression of civil rights, real inequities and real financial disasters.
To Cambias:
If you think that my response was based on "emotion" -- think again (or just think, period). There was not one iota of the Republican platform that did not adhere, literally, to baboon politics as practiced by cultural alpha white males.
And if you're a Republican, live with the results of this democratic election -- as we had to live with Dubaya's chest beatings, which nevertheless translated to real wars, real suppression of civil rights, real inequities and real financial disasters.
Athena: re-read what you just wrote. "Baboon politics" "chest beatings" "just think, period" -- those are not the words of someone making a logical argument.
On the contrary, it's using terms in their specific biological/anthropological meaning. You're the one that brought up howling monkeys, I believe, and tried to do the evo-psycho bit. Your bad luck that I'm a biologist.
On the contrary, it's using terms in their specific biological/anthropological meaning. You're the one that brought up howling monkeys, I believe, and tried to do the evo-psycho bit combined with pseudo-olympianism. Your bad luck that I'm a biologist.
Oh, I see. You're a biologist. Well, then. Biologists know everything. So, what's the specific biological/anthropological meaning of "knuckle-dragger"? I'm curious.
It is entirely possible to reach an emotional conclusion by way of logical analysis. When one sees the list of flawed policy positions build up over time and a concerted rejection of mitigation, compromise, and the ability to admit reality does not conform to the polemics of desire, frustration can build to a level where the only rational response is "They must be idiots." Or, in this case, that they indulged "Baboo politics."
That said, yes, politics is very emotional to people defending beliefs and cherished positions or perceiving disaster around the bend. There is nothing that says, on the individual level, these things are not amenable to reason---or even that they are the consequence of reasoned analysis.
I dunno. I was reading Silver obsessively even when he showed a relentless narrowing of the margin in the weeks following the first debate, and I was holding my breath, expecting the lines to cross.
I liked Silver's being right because I really, really like numbers, and I love the idea that someone may have worked out an algorithm that actually does something in politics. But I am in a very tiny minority, I think.