Nate Silver has made a career out of predicting things
slate.com
slate.com
But I would like to know - is there a Republican analog to Nate Silver? Someone who predicts 90% of the races at the end, does the meta-math, and has a computer model?
If there is no Republican analog, can you possibly say Nate Silver is liberal or biased? Does using a computer model and math, and blogging about your results make you a Democrat?
Global warming, 2/3 Republican deny it, more than 3/4 Democrats believe it: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-30/global-warming-l...
Creationism is 38% for Democrats, 60% for Republicans: http://www.cultureofscience.com/2011/08/19/republicans-and-d...
I think Republicans are more likely not to want to mention or distribute condoms to teens in sex education, but I don't regard this as quite the same general disregard for science and math.
It's a fairly settled issue in social science, though, that abstinence-only sex ed doesn't work. Not a hard science, perhaps, but still a science in that it's data-driven and rejects hypotheses based on new data.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1097%2FGCO.0b013e3282efdc0b
http://journals.lww.com/co-obgyn/pages/articleviewer.aspx?ye...
So? The alternative to abstinence-only sex ed isn't perfection, it's a bunch of stuff that doesn't work all that well either.
Your links are all behind paywalls. That said, they're probably just like the other work on the subject. Their "measure of success" is curious at best. (No, reducing teen pregnancy isn't the only goal.)
As to "telling teaching inaccuracies", no other teaching is held to that standard, so why is abstinence-only sex ed held to that standard?
Note - I think that abstinence-only sex ed is a bad idea. My point is that the arguments are not "scientific" or fair. That said, they are doing a great job in discrediting science. If that's your goal....
Because kids going around with misconceptions about what really caused the American Revolution is less dangerous than kids going around with misconceptions about reproductive issues.
Umm, if it doesn't matter whether it is true, why are we teaching it?
And no, sex ed isn't the only dangerous thing that we mis-teach kids about.
But, thanks for demonstrating your priorities.
However, I'm still unclear on why I should be paying for them.
Reality is much more nuanced than "blue versus red".
With only two choices, people are roped into supporting all kinds of things that make no sense for them. But you get "My party believes in science!" and "My party believes in God!" and it becomes part of people's political identities. And then all sorts of other issues are piled on top of it and you find yourself wondering how we got here.
It's ludicrous, really.
Read Heinlein's "Revolt in 2100".
Is that intended as a recommendation of a scientific source about long-term trends cross-culturally? I got a big volume of the collected "future history" stories by Robert Heinlein out of the library a year ago, and I was disappointed by how poorly those stories have aged. I also figured out, by rereading Heinlein (a favorite author of mine when I was a kid) that he never informed any of his stories with much perspective from non-Western cultures (although I give him credit for being aware of that kind of issue). Since I spent three years in the 1980s and later another three years spanning the turn of the last century living in a non-Western country, I don't turn to Western science-fiction stories anymore for my social commentary. I like to read real science based on verifiable history to puzzle out social trends. I can recommend a source
http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/014312...
and invite other readers here to recommend other sources. I'm not worried about fundamentalist religion "getting control" of science.
The political parties themselves would very much like you to believe that you're along with them for the ride on all their issues, and this no doubt accounts for much of the strongly held beliefs of both Democrats and Republicans. Push comes to shove, most people have not given much thought to the issues that politics have the most control over.
You can vote a specific interest, you can vote a straight party line, you can vote out of ignorance. But one thing that makes zero sense is to vote party-line in 2012 to punish a party for what it did 60 years ago. Doing that has literally the opposite impact as you'd ostensibly intend.
What are you babbling about? Public employees weren't unionized in the 60s and early 70s.
And, the pension stuff started in the 90s.
Not extremely well. You've cherry-picked your data to support your theory.
Specifically, I notice you don't touch on those who reject vaccinations, practice homeopathy, or believe Feng shui goes beyond aesthetics.
As someone living in a very large, liberal city and hailing from a rural, conservative town, I can tell you the Republicans of the world are not the ones debating if vaccinations cause autism. The ones I know think it's moronic & hideously irresponsible not to vaccinate your child.
The correlation is with misunderstanding all three and coming to bogus conclusions.
Let's take evolution. There are lots of folks, typically Democrats, who insist that it is fundamental to all of science. (Hint - that's clearly false. Disagree? How does evolution matter outside biology? Too hard? Name three biology subfields that don't work without evolution? Too hard? Name three things in biology that were predicted using evolution?)
Democrats like to think that they're scientific, but ....
Let's take the suggestion that state of mind affects conception in humans. Clearly false when Akin said it, but what does everyone say to a couple trying to get pregnant? Yup - "you've got to maintain a positive mental attitude." (I don't know whether mental attitude matters - I'm just pointing out the double-standard.)
You can't, on the basis of zero real evidence, dismiss the theory that best fits the known facts, without causing harm to the understanding of the scientific method as a whole. So it is not that the one theory is so critical to all of science, but the act of throwing it out because it offends religious sensibilities is damaging.
Gish Galloping wins you no support. It's a dishonest tactic that attempts to flood the opposition with questions that require more time to answer than they do to ask. It's a Denial of Service attack, not an argument.
> Clearly false when Akin said it, but what does everyone say to a couple trying to get pregnant? Yup - "you've got to maintain a positive mental attitude." (I don't know whether mental attitude matters - I'm just pointing out the double-standard.)
Because Akin was minimizing rape. He was trying to de-legitimize the experiences of victims of a violent crime. Do you really not understand how people get upset over that?
No, he wasn't. He was trying to respond to the "what about rape" argument wrt abortion.
I'm pro-abortion, but he's correct in saying that only a small fraction of abortions have anything to do with rape. (That said, age of consent and under the influence rape don't involve "negative mental state" that his argument requires.) I don't think that that fact is relevant, but it's dishonest to say that it isn't true.
Of course evolution is not fundamental to ALL of science. For instance chemistry is based on current measurements, not what happened in prehistory. But you are overstating your position.
How does evolution matter outside biology?
Evolution matters to geology because specific fossils are often used as a cross-reference for the age of specific rocks. Indeed such "indicator fossils" are important economically because of how they are used in oil exploration.
There are also applications of fossils to astronomy, for instance fossil corals have been used to verify how the number of days in a year have changed over time.
Too hard? Name three biology subfields that don't work without evolution?
1. The study of evolution itself.
2. Ecology. A very large part of ecology is based on understanding the Evolutionarily Stable Strategies of living organisms. For everything from mating to parenting behaviors, what animals do is explained by how it is selected for evolutionarily.
3. Taxonomy. We classify living organisms based on the best guesses we can come up with for where their ancestors were in the evolutionary tree. We reconstruct those trees using everything from physical characteristics to molecular genetics. NONE of it makes any sense without common descent.
Too hard? Name three things in biology that were predicted using evolution?)
1. (Prediction made by Charles Darwin. Confirmed many decades later by Leakey's discovery of Lucy and other fossils.) Fossils for early humans would be localized to Africa. Based on homology, humans are clearly an ape. Since existing ape species are mostly found in Africa, our ancestors are likely to be found in Africa as well.
2. (Prediction made by Edmond O. Wilson, later confirmed by him) In slaver ants, male and female babies should be treated equally if there is a good supply of slaves, and should be treated unequally (as they are in most ants) if there aren't. The cause of the unequal treatment of males and females in an ant colony is that a quirk of genetics causes females to share 75% of genes with sisters, and only 50% with parents or brothers. Therefore female ants are willing to devote their lives to the production of more sisters. This causes preferential behavior for female larvae. In slaver ants this disappears because the slaves are controlled by the queen who is equally related to sons and daughters. Remove the slaves, and the daughters express their genetic preference.
3. (Made and confirmed many times by a variety of people.) Pylogenetic reconstructions of evolutionary tree are robust to the specific set of characteristics chosen for that reconstruction. The branching in characteristics reflects the actual ancestry of the animals, and so two sets characteristics will tend to reveal the same ancestral branching pattern. (There are exceptions where common evolutionary pressures cause disparate animals to have similar adaptations. But these are well-understood.)
Now let me guess. You don't believe in evolution, believe that you understand science, and it surprises you that I'd actually find your challenge easy. If so I would urge you to open up your mind, go to http://www.talkorigins.org/, and educate yourself.
Wrong.
> Evolution matters to geology because specific fossils are often used as a cross-reference for the age of specific rocks.
Evolution doesn't tell you how old a fossil is. Evolution says that there's a path, but doesn't say how long each step took.
> There are also applications of fossils to astronomy, for instance fossil corals have been used to verify how the number of days in a year have changed over time.
You're confusing evolution with fossils.
Slaver ant behavior isn't dependent on evolution. (Also, everyone believes in selective breeding. Evolution is more.)
But if you want a prediction that applies to geology, evolution predicted - long before physical mechanisms were known for it - that specific land masses must have been connected in the distant past. And even put approximate dates on the connection. This lead to endless speculations of land bridges, etc - and also a crazy theory called continental drift. (Which was eventually proven correct.)
There you have it. Relevant predictions in the field of geology which depend in critical ways upon Darwin's theory of descent with modification.
As for slaver ant behavior, you asked for a prediction from evolution. The detailed study of ant behavior was undertaken exactly because evolutionary theory predicted specific behavior. Thus it is a prediction of evolution, regardless of the fact that you can try to explain it with selective breeding. But that said, the time it would take selective breeding to match the exact ratios predicted by theory is sufficiently long that you wind up with evidence of evolution. Evolution further predicts that the actual genetic mechanism by which this behavior is controlled is likely to be conserved across many ant species. I do not know whether this has been studied (it probably has, but I cannot confirm that), but there is another prediction for you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_drift puts it, Continental drift is the movement of the Earth's continents relative to each other by appearing to drift across the ocean bed. Note that "appearing to drift" and "floating on the ocean" are very, very different things. A trivial comparison of rocks and water demonstrates that "floating on the ocean" would be inconceivable for something natural that is as big as a continent.
That said, plate tectonics is a much better theory. But I would say that it has the same relation to continental drift that Newtonian mechanics has to Special Relativity. The theory is clearly wrong, but the succeeding theory explains why the less detailed theory appears to work.
Furthermore plate tectonics is itself a theory that in due course of time will be (and to some extent already has been) replaced by something more complete. For instance consider Hawaii. We have a chain of islands that is produced by the movement of the Pacific plate over a hot spot. What creates these hot spots? What role do they have in pushing plate tectonics? A theory that explains all of this will be undoubtably differ in detail from the original theory of plate tectonics, though it will have to explain why plate tectonics seemed to work.
Evolution did no such thing.
I can't tell if you're confusing fossils (same creature, same time, must have been same location) or thinking that land masses "evolve", but either way....
> The detailed study of ant behavior was undertaken exactly because evolutionary theory predicted specific behavior.
Actually, it doesn't (there are non-slaver ants, so if their behavior is also evolutionary, you have evolution predicting X and not-X).
> Thus it is a prediction of evolution, regardless of the fact that you can try to explain it with selective breeding.
The claim was that evolution was necessary to predict something. If said something can be predicted by other means, evolution is not necessary.
As I've written before, I believe in evolution, but most of the arm-chair supporters offer false arguments.
I can't tell if you're confusing fossils (same creature, same time, must have been same location) or thinking that land masses "evolve", but either way....
Actually evolution did predict that.
The earliest example is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Line which was named after Alfred Russel Wallace who independently discovered the theory of evolution.
This line indicates, based on the distribution of related species today, what islands were connected with Asia in the last versus which other nearby ones weren't. The line was drawn before fossil data or underwater topography could confirm or explain the past connection. Without the hypothesis that similar species are similar because they share a recent ancestor, this data on extant species would not have lead to any conclusions.
Moving forward, in decades after evolution and before plate tectonics, there were many examples of scientists drawing connections between once connected masses based on related species - but not the same species in both places. For instance both India and Madagascar contain rich lemur fossils that are different but clearly related. That relation was explained by a past land mass called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemuria_(continent). The conclusion was incorrect, but it is true that Indian and Madagascar once were connected and did exchange fauna, including lemurs.
Actually, it doesn't (there are non-slaver ants, so if their behavior is also evolutionary, you have evolution predicting X and not-X).
You clearly have failed to understand the example.
Ants generally feed female larvae something like 3x as much as they feed male larvae. (I think the ratio is 3 to 1, but this is pulled from a course 20 years ago, and I can't swear to that figure.) Wilson came up with an evolutionary explanation for this. Based on this explanation HE PREDICTED that if the queen was in control of the care of the young, this discrepancy would disappear. Slaver ants provide a test case, because (at least in some species) the queen does control the behavior of the slaves.
In slaver ants he found, AS PREDICTED BY THEORY, that when the queen was in charge (ie there were slaves), male larvae received as much food as female larvae. But when a slaver colony had no slaves, they revert to the typical 3 to 1 ratio that is common among ants.
There is no X and not-X. There is behavior when queen is in control versus behavior when workers are in control. Non-slaver ants differ from slavers in that the workers are always in control of care of the larvae.
> Thus it is a prediction of evolution, regardless of the fact that you can try to explain it with selective breeding.
The claim was that evolution was necessary to predict something. If said something can be predicted by other means, evolution is not necessary.
Scroll back. Your demand was, "Name three things in biology that were predicted using evolution?" This is, in fact, an example that was predicted using evolution. The existence of other possible explanations does not change the fact that evolution was, in fact, used to predict this particular thing.
As I've written before, I believe in evolution, but most of the arm-chair supporters offer false arguments.
This is true of most topics. A lot of armchair supporters know the orthodoxy, but do not understand it and cannot defend it. People believe in all sorts of alternative theories usually have an easy time dispatching these armchair supporters because while they are wrong in a big way, they actually know more than the armchair supporters do.
But I would like to believe that I know more about evolution than the average armchair supporter. After all your average armchair supporter hasn't done things like audit a graduate seminar about evolution theory. :-)
Anti-vaccination is a fringe movement, and party independent (Michelle Bachmann got on the anti-vax wagon). The democrats aren't putting anti-vaxxers on the house science committee.
I also don't know about anti-GMO idiocy, frankly.
http://www.gop.com/2012-republican-platform_America/
Rather, many of those associated with the party do it, which is congruent with what he said about anti-GMO & anti-vaccine idiocy.
If Republicans actually concede that Nate Silver's results are legitimate and unbiased (if they are), than the party would have a much harder time raising money and getting out the vote.
It's better to frame it as a conspiracy so less people take it seriously.
I like to tell myself that too, so I regard his work with at least a little skepticism, even though I gobble it up and bet on it.
One gets the impression that his professional reputation is more important than his ideological affiliation, and so I find him pretty credible.
"What is your political affiliation? My state has non-partisan registration, so I am not registered as anything. I vote for Democratic candidates the majority of the time (though by no means always). This year, I have been a supporter of Barack Obama."
And the next question -
"Are your results biased toward your preferred candidates? I hope not, but that is for you to decide. I have tried to disclose as much about my methodology as possible."
He'd have it changed.
It's not important either way.
(For what it's worth: I still support Obama).
Sometimes, facts favour liberals, sometimes they don't.
The overrating of objectivity has been a hobbyhorse of Jack Shafer's for awhile, and he can be fun to read; here, for instance:
http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2011/09/20/media-bias-gi...
However that doesn't mean his models are wrong. When they show that Republicans are going to win (or have improved), he states that just as clearly as when the same is true for Democrats.
Are we reading the same blog? I've never seen him take sides on any issue.
I know too much about human biases to even try to claim that his do not influence his interpretations and work at all – I just don't think that's possible – but that is general and in all likelihood inevitable problem. I think it's pretty clear, however, that it's in his best interest to make accurate predictions, not partisan predictions.
I do not think it's really helpful to start out with that question. It puts too much focus on what's actually important. Yeah, bias can be hard to detect, but a little bias does not make models useless and when there is a lot of bias you should actually be able to point at what's wrong with the model instead of having to resort to some diffuse claims of bias.
Writing this made me think of Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Noelle-Neumann). I disagree with many of her views and I think it would be fair to call her biased after reading her most famous work (The Spiral of Silence), but I do respect her work. There is a difference.
No, not directly. RealClearPoltics (http://www.realclearpolitics.com) aggregates polling data, but it doesn't analyze it. Sean Trende does some analysis of the polls, but he is a lawyer and political scientist, not a mathematician.
Other than that, pollster Scott Rasmussen (http://www.rasmussenreports.com/) has a solid track record forecasting outcomes and is the closest thing to a Nate Silver analog.
Edit: > does the meta-math
BTW, I think one of the most interesting things that will come out of this election is the impact of cell phones on polling data. The meta-math is based on the sampling models for each pollster, and the models have to take land line / cell phone demographics into consideration. Many pollsters only call land lines and try to accommodate for the demographics in their polling, but it's not certain how accurate their models are.
There has been a shift in land line demographics in the last four years. Lower income people used to have land lines only and mid to upper income people had land lines plus cell. land line usage has dropped a lot. In recent years, lower income people tend to have cell phones only. It will be interesting to see how the the election results compare to the polling data.
Are they short-sighted or lacking compassion?
I think this kind of binary political thinking is the most insidious thought virus we face. Far more dangerous than whether or not someone believes in evolution, because it separates us and makes us believe that the "others" have traits that they really don't have. It's awful.
But I do understand the idea that religious people can be compassionate and give money away. So can atheists. So can intelligent people. So can both more and less educated people. It's orthogonal. And I never cited religion. And I was speaking in general terms based on direct, personal observation. Also I for one do not engage in "binary" political thinking -- not when I'm actually thinking internally -- though it's often useful when speaking in order to average out details and identify patterns and then express them concisely in public conversation.
And as an additional point, if by 'mission' you mean a religious mission, then I'd say that I don't consider that to be a good thing. It's a bad thing. It spreads superstition, fear, make believe, childish mental states, obedience to arbitrary authority, silly rituals and fuzzy irrational thinking. Yes it also teaches relaxing and addictive chants and tunes, and feel good phrases. And the good parts, anything dealing with peace, compassion, charity, with community interaction, can all be done without the negative that comes from the religious baggage attached to it. Also, like your complaint about binary thinking being a bad thing. I don't think education is a binary quality. You're not either educated or not. There are many intermediate degrees and shades of grey, and types. So while I do think someone can be somewhat educated and religious, I don't think they're extremely well educated or intelligent. At least not both. Otherwise one would see that that particular emperor wears no clothes. But of course this is just the conclusion reached by many of us, not all of us. To each his own.
I meant mission more in the sense of centers intended to relieve poverty, hunger, etc, but it is a word with different meanings, so I see your take on it as well.
I do think, though, that if you think belief in religion is a matter of whether the emperor has any clothes that you're looking at it wrong. There are deeper meanings and purposes to faith that many intelligent and well-educated people choose to pursue. They aren't doing it blindly, they know what they're doing, and they have their reasons.
I'm strongly agnostic (to the point of being ridiculous about it), but I've encountered a wide enough variety of religious people to respect their views.
Silver is politically liberal but he's a stats guy at heart.
The republican equivalent would be Unskewed Polls http://unskewedpolls.com/ which re-weights partisan affiliation of polls to match Rasmussen (The result: Romney is WAY ahead). It's author isn't a big stats guy and goes more off gut. This comparison isn't entirely fair though. Republican polsters and aggregators are probably private, working inside campaigns and not for a public news organization.
You can be politically liberal or conservative and not have it directly spill into your work.
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/author/nate_silver/
His big contribution was a model used to predict player statistics. When he first started writing about politics, I assumed the name was a coincidence.
He gravitated to Sabermetrics from there.
I'm curious about the methodology as well. Why didn't you choose more standard gaussian statistics for the differences, instead of the combination linear/step model? How much difference would it make?
I prefer to have the flat region of 50% probability when the state poll difference is small, which the gaussian model doesn't have, to take into account (a) the various errors in the polling data and (b) the likelihood that people's minds can change by the time the election comes.
As to how much difference it would make, with the current model, Obama's probability is now at 81%, whereas with the Gaussian model it would be around 95%.
but he's popular mainly because he can communicate so well. doing the maths right is not that hard.
It's true he's a good writer, but the proof is in the pudding. He could be foaming at the mouth, but if he's predicting the outcomes, people will tune in.
> Silver's final 2008 presidential election forecast accurately predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states as well as the District of Columbia (missing only the prediction for Indiana). As his model predicted, the races in Missouri and North Carolina were particularly close. He also correctly predicted the winners of every U.S. Senate race. The accuracy of his predictions won him further acclaim, including abroad,[49] and added to his reputation as a leading political prognosticator.[50]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nate_Silver#2008_U.S._elections
Also, "You're only as good as your last envelope."
And here I was under the impression that ALL predictions are about the future.
Actually, I saw this one assigned to Neil Bohr. Sounds like a Yogi-ism though.