[kenberg]

I think that in the last couple of days before the election there was some really serious straw grasping. It's ok, I suppose, but it takes a toll. Michael Gerson quite sensibly did not make predictions, but he did go on a t some length about how wrong it was for Silver to be doing so. This disappointed me because I often find reading him quite satisfying. George Will is entertaining in his own way. He finds these various historical factoids to toss out. But I regard Gerson as a trustworthy representative of conservative views, whie I regard Will as a source of entertaining factoids. And, this time around, bizarre predictions.

[TimG]

It's funny that Silver takes criticism for what he does. He takes no polls of his own, he just interprets the polls that are conducted by others.

[cherdano]

 lalldonn, on 2012-November-08, 10:53, said:

So am I crazy to think that now all the cable news stations will get some kind of statistician for their talk shows and rely on models they create for election predictions, rather than talking heads? (Don't get me wrong, I still think the talking heads will remain on the stations anyway.)

That's exactly what I expect. Just like they have quantitative analysts on ESPN explaining that the Patriots have about a 65% chance of winning according to their model, and since their model doesn't take their 10-day break into account, one might well argue that 68-69% is more precise estimate.

[kenberg]

I was just speaking with a young person who has a different economic take on the election. He iss wondering what these docs in Colorado and Washington are going to do for money now that the market in prescriptions for medical marijuana is shutting down. I have to say this is a problem that never occurred to me.

[JLOGIC]

 cherdano, on 2012-November-08, 17:23, said:

That's exactly what I expect. Just like they have quantitative analysts on ESPN explaining that the Patriots have about a 65% chance of winning according to their model, and since their model doesn't take their 10-day break into account, one might well argue that 68-69% is more precise estimate.

Lol

[y66]

 JLOGIC, on 2012-November-08, 20:12, said:

Lol

Please don't encourage sarcasm in the water cooler.

[y66]

I understand why U.S. politicians say the kind of stuff Trinidad finds so cringe-worthy, which it is. Remember when Obama stopped wearing the American flag lapel pin?

As Scott Shane says in his article titled The Opiate of Exceptionalism, politicians say this stuff because it plays better with voters than talk about real problems.

Quote

American exceptionalism has recently been championed by conservatives, who accuse President Obama of paying the notion insufficient respect. But the self-censorship it produces in politicians is bipartisan, even if it is more pronounced on the left for some issues and the right for others.

FOR instance, Democrats are more loath than Republicans to look squarely at the government debt crisis indisputably looming with the aging of baby boomers and the ballooning cost of Medicare. Republicans are more reluctant than Democrats to acknowledge the rise of global temperatures and its causes and consequences. But both parties, it is fair to say, prefer not to consider either trend too deeply.

Both parties would rather avert their eyes from such difficult challenges — because we, the people, would rather avert our eyes. Talk to any political pro about this phenomenon and one name inevitably comes up: Jimmy Carter, who has become a sort of memento mori for American politicians, like the skulls in Renaissance paintings that reminded viewers of their mortality.

Mr. Carter, they will say, disastrously spoke of a national “crisis of confidence” and failed to project the optimism that Americans demand of their presidents. He lost his re-election bid to sunny Ronald Reagan, who promised “morning in America” and left an indelible lesson for candidates of both parties: that voters can be vindictive toward anyone who dares criticize the country and, implicitly, the people.

This is a peculiarly American brand of nationalism. “European politicians exercise much greater freedom to address bluntly the uglier social problems,” says Deborah Lea Madsen, professor of American studies at the University of Geneva. An American politician who speaks too candidly about the country’s faults, she went on to say, risks being labeled with that most devastating of epithets: un-American.

The roots of this American trait are often traced to the famous shipboard sermon the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop preached on his way to help found the Massachusetts Bay Colony nearly five centuries ago.

“We must consider,” he said, “that we shall be as a city upon a hill — the eyes of all people are upon us.” Winthrop’s metaphor has had a long life in American speechifying, prominently quoted by both President John F. Kennedy and Reagan. But if, for Winthrop, the image was something the colony should aspire to, for modern politicians it is often a boast of supposed accomplishment, a way of combating pessimists and asserting American greatness, whatever the facts.

[blackshoe]

 TimG, on 2012-November-08, 15:09, said:

There have been efforts to get creationism into public school curriculum based upon scientific principles, but upon examination, the "scientific" part wasn't scientific at all. I guess what I meant to say was something like "based upon real science rather than just a claim of science."

Ah. Okay, I can live with that.

[phil_20686]

 y66, on 2012-November-08, 21:34, said:

“We must consider,” he said, “that we shall be as a city upon a hill — the eyes of all people are upon us.” Winthrop’s metaphor has had a long life in American speechifying, prominently quoted by both President John F. Kennedy and Reagan. But if, for Winthrop, the image was something the colony should aspire to, for modern politicians it is often a boast of supposed accomplishment, a way of combating pessimists and asserting American greatness, whatever the facts.

I think this article misses that this is a biblical metaphor. The "New Jerusalem" is a "city on a hill" and a "light to the world" in the Bible. Oddly, to me at least, it was a common metaphor in the French revolution along with the "new man" metaphor. I am sure its history in political speeches long pre-dates the "founding" of the US. St Augustine of Hippo wrote a whole book about it in the fifth century, called "City of God".

If modern politicians really thing america is the "New Jerusalem" and the perfection of earthly society, then that is even worse. Perfect societies cannot be improved. Although, that does make some sense about Republicans going on about the "Real America", if they thought that was the perfect society, no wonder they want to go back.....

[phil_20686]

 TimG, on 2012-November-08, 15:09, said:

There have been efforts to get creationism into public school curriculum based upon scientific principles, but upon examination, the "scientific" part wasn't scientific at all. I guess what I meant to say was something like "based upon real science rather than just a claim of science."

So the intelligent design advocates are the scientific face of the creationist movement, and it is wrong to associate them with the Young Earth Creationists who are pretty much just crazy.

Natural selection, while observed in small doses, does not fit very well with the fossil records. It turned out that the ID people were right about that, and it now looks like epi-genetics (the control of gene expression) is the primary driver of evolution in the short to medium term. For example, in humans, it is now established that if the mother is hungry/starving at the time of birth, it will express genes in the child for greater propensity to save energy, lower basel metabolic rate and greater propensity to build fat, whereas a well fed mother will give gene expressions for greater physical size, etc

Epi genetics explains the existence of junk dna, and, particularly, the fact that RNA appears to copy mutated DNA strands into the junk sections deliberately as part of error correction. In a sense, we store up mutations for later, so that we can evolve rapidly when under stress.

Its easy to speculate how this better explains the fossil record (i.e., why evolution appears to have occurred in bursts following catastrophe, when selection pressure was at its lowest), perhaps when animals feel under less pressure there is less epi-genetic pressure to choose one expression over another, and so gene expression becomes more variable leading to greater diversity in gene expression.

Evolution has become a social construct. A necessary part of a "scientific" out look to the point where you are basically looked at as a pariah for even questioning it, which is annoying, as it still has lots of problems. As a theory it is still only about 6/10 (it got one point since last time I scored up since we have now seen the creation of drug resistance mutation in ecoli directly). When epi-genetics is better understood, it will probably get another point, but I doubt I will ever rate it in the 8-10 region without a scientific understanding of the foundations of consciousness. If one wants to seriously argue that evolution explains humanity, you need to talk about consciousness, and that is just hard.

[Trinidad]

I don't understand what you are saying. So the fact that evolution theory doesnot explain everything perfectly well means that there must be a scientific basis for the theory that "Something Intelligent" designed all this?

Rik

[Codo]

Maybe he was just saying that we should not be too sure about which current theory is as real as we want it to be? We may be wrong with some of our popular models to explain the world?
And this is not just (but most obvious) true for belivers in some bizarre theist theories but for scientific theories too?

[Zelandakh]

 Trinidad, on 2012-November-09, 04:05, said:

I don't understand what you are saying. So the fact that evolution theory doesnot explain everything perfectly well means that there must be a scientific basis for the theory that "Something Intelligent" designed all this?

Worse than this, Relativity and Quantum Physics do not explain everything 100% either - should we throw those out too? I doubt very much that this is what Phil meant, rather that it is important in science to point out where a theory explains observation correctly and where it does not. Non-scientists obviously want a black and white answer to these questions but real science tends not to work that way.

 lalldonn, on 2012-November-08, 10:53, said:

So am I crazy to think that now all the cable news stations will get some kind of statistician for their talk shows and rely on models they create for election predictions, rather than talking heads? (Don't get me wrong, I still think the talking heads will remain on the stations anyway.)

Talking Heads are an essential part of election coverage. These shows last many hours with lots of dead time and you need colourful personalities to fill in. That said, the BBC traditionally had a statistical "expert" to interpret the numbers. On the BBC International service that role was being filled by Katty Kay, who I have since found out is merely a journalist. Her summary of the election results (before FL) was that the result is "incredible and should not have been possible". Hopefully they will go back to providing a real statistician next year!

The one thing that I think this election may well change is the reliance on national polls and "swing" to relate to a picture of the results. Instead I expect to see more weight being given to local/statewide polls. Indeed, the pollsters seem to have come out of this election reasonably well too. I know that in at least 2 of the races where Nate predicted wrongly due to underlying indicators, the polls proved to be more reliable. I would be interested if this was also the case in the other races where the results fell outside of his confidence intervals.

[Trinidad]

 Zelandakh, on 2012-November-09, 04:29, said:

Worse than this, Relativity and Quantum Physics do not explain everything 100% either - should we throw those out too? I doubt very much that this is what Phil meant, rather that it is important in science to point out where a theory explains observation correctly and where it does not. Non-scientists obviously want a black and white answer to these questions but real science tends not to work that way.

Got it. Thanks. Scientists tend to take it as a given fact that we do not know everything (actually that we are closer to knowing nothing). The public tends to look at the scientists and expects them to have all the answers. Scientist think in terms of "our current best answer is X and we know it is not Y".

A bizarre example of this difference between scientists and non-scientists is the recent case in Italy where scientists were convicted for up to 6 years (IIRC) in jail, because they failed to predict an earth quake (with many casualties).

Rik

[ArtK78]

Headline on Yahoo Finance Page today:

Reuters: "Consumer sentiment rose to its highest level in more than five years in November as consumers felt more optimistic about employment prospects and the outlook for the overall economy, a survey released on Friday showed."

No doubt the Romney camp and Fox News will call this "cooking the books" again, or the liberal media providing favorable reporting for Obama.

Oh, wait. The election is over.

[PassedOut]

No teleprompter

[barmar]

 phil_20686, on 2012-November-08, 10:52, said:

Re National Pride, I don't think it is the rhetoric so much as the fact that american's seem to genuinely believe the rhetoric.

It's easy to fall into that trap when one of the big problems the country faces is too many people trying to get in. The "American Dream" is a concept created by non-Americans, although we obviously don't do anything to disavow it.

There's also a long history of other nations adopting ideas and institutions created in America. We're the birthplace of modern democracy (unfortunately, it has degraded into partisan bickering), and much of the high technology that powers the 21st century lifestyle was invented in the US and exported to the world.

When the UN or NATO needs a military force to step in, we're the backbone of that effort. Do we have a superior military because we're especially beligerant?

[ArtK78]

 barmar, on 2012-November-09, 11:47, said:

We're the birthplace of modern democracy (unfortunately, it has degraded into partisan bickering), and much of the high technology that powers the 21st century lifestyle was invented in the US and exported to the world.

"Partisan bickering" is an institution with deep roots in America and elsewhere. In this election season, there have been a number of presentations in the media of the history of partisan bickering and mud-slinging campaigns. With the exception of George Washington, it seems that every presidential election (and, no doubt, most, if not all, lower offices) have been noted for withering attacks by each side against the other. In many instances, the attacks by candidates for president and other high offices leveled against their opponents were far more vicious in the 18th century than they are now.

And, as for the wonderful debates on the floors of Congress, well, lets just say that it is good that C-Span is a relatively new phenomenon.

Of course, we have all been treated to scenes of fistfights and chair throwing in some of the world's great parlimentary houses.

So, while I would certainly like to see more constructive discussions between our elected representatives and the executive branch, we should not let ourselves be deluded into thinking that this is something new.

EDIT: One more thought - don't forget that, in that great democracy that was Rome, Julius Caesar was assassinated in the Senate.

[ggwhiz]

Every time I think it couldn't possibly get worse I see an appearance by James Carville followed at some point by Mary Matlan, equally passionate/partisan/vicious.

There is always hope if those two can stay married

[mikeh]

 barmar, on 2012-November-09, 11:47, said:

There's also a long history of other nations adopting ideas and institutions created in America. We're the birthplace of modern democracy (unfortunately, it has degraded into partisan bickering), and much of the high technology that powers the 21st century lifestyle was invented in the US and exported to the world.

What a wonderful concoction of american chauvism and ignorance!

IRC, one of the rallying cries of the American Revolution was 'no taxation without representation'.

Where do you think the requested representation was to be? Let's see if we can help. Which still-existing country fought a civil war, and killed a King, in order to establish the paramountcy of an elected representative government, in the 1600's?

We can quibble about suffrage and the breadth of the electorate, but the US doesn't stack up particularly well there, either. Even a parochial American can find out these things online these days. Take a look at when blacks could participate, or when women gained suffrage, etc. and maybe you'll realize that the US wasn't actually the birthplace of modern democracy.

Yes, it took the idea further than it had been taken before. Some would argue it took it too far (the notion of electing Judges, for example, seems to me to strike at the independence of the judiciary, a principle without which the rich, powerful and vocal can pressure judges to bend the law or risk losing the election), but on the whole it seems like a noble experiment.

The US has done so much (and deserves so much praise and respect) that it is a shame that american exceptionalists can't just accept that other nations have also contributed and continue to contribute to the development of fairness. A country that ranks as poorly as the US does in education, in life expectancy, in infant mortality, in violent crime, in the incarceration of its citizens, and in social/economic stratification might well want to spend less time boasting about being the envy of the world (which it used to be) and more time trying to make its citizens as happy and healthy as most Western European nations have done.