Experts and their predictions

The New Neo Posted on by

From political science professor Jacqueline Stevens (via Volokh):

It’s an open secret in my discipline: in terms of accurate political predictions (the field’s benchmark for what counts as science), my colleagues have failed spectacularly and wasted colossal amounts of time and money. The most obvious example may be political scientists’ insistence, during the cold war, that the Soviet Union would persist as a nuclear threat to the United States. In 1993, in the journal International Security, for example, the cold war historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote that the demise of the Soviet Union was “of such importance that no approach to the study of international relations claiming both foresight and competence should have failed to see it coming.” And yet, he noted, “None actually did so.”…

in the 1980s, the political psychologist Philip E. Tetlock began systematically quizzing 284 political experts ”” most of whom were political science Ph.D.’s ”” on dozens of basic questions, like whether a country would go to war, leave NATO or change its boundaries or a political leader would remain in office. His book “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” won the A.P.S.A.’s prize for the best book published on government, politics or international affairs.

Professor Tetlock’s main finding? Chimps randomly throwing darts at the possible outcomes would have done almost as well as the experts.

Aha! In Part 5 of my change story, I wrote the following about the failure of experts to see the coming fall of the Soviet Union:

If the experts”“academic, governmental, and media”“had been unable to foresee this, then how could I trust them to guide me in the future? In retrospect, it was probably the first time I began to distrust my usual sources of information, although I certainly didn’t see them as lying”“I saw them as incompetent, really no better than bad fortunetellers.

What they seemed to lack was an overview, a sense of history and pattern. Newspapers could report on events, but those events seemed disconnected from each other: first this happened, then that happened, then the other thing happened, and then the next, and so on and so forth. In the titanic decades-long battle between the US and the USSR, there had been a certain underlying narrative (yes, sometimes that word is appropriate) that involved the threat of Armageddon, and the necessity to avoid it at almost all costs, while stopping the spread of Communism. Although T.S. Eliot had said the world would end “not with a bang but a whimper,” who ever thought the Soviet Union would end in such a whimpery way, and especially without much forewarning? It seemed preposterous, something like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy throws the bucket of water on the Wicked Witch, who dissolves into a steaming heap of clothing, crying “I’m melting, melting.”

Although these events predated my change by over a decade, they sounded an early warning bell about experts that said “beware.”

And yet I don’t especially fault them, except when they demonstrate the hubris of thinking they can predict the future at all: accurate predictions are just too hard to make, as this review of Tetlock’s book makes clear. There are just too many variables and too much complexity.

Does this begin to sound familiar? AGW, anyone? But that’s science, and the hallmark of science is the ability to predict outcomes. If you mix this and that in certain proportions and subject them to heat, for example, you will reliably get a chemical reaction that produces another substance in a certain quantity. If Einstein’s relativity theory was correct, its prediction that “massive, spinning objects like Earth should warp space and time around them, as well as drag space and time along as they rotate” would be able to be confirmed, and that’s the case. And so on and so forth.

But the problem with climate science is that it would be fiendishly difficult to design an experiment that would test its accuracy. Climate science bears little resemblance to the sciences such as chemistry and physics described in the previous paragraph, and seems more akin to the system of prognostication described by Tetlock. So it’s strange that people feel they can rely on its predictive abilities.

Is anyone really good at consistently making predictions about complex events? I don’t think so. I think that what tends to be happening is that the list of people making predictions is long, and so somebody is bound to be right each time. It’s just not usually the same person twice—or three or four or five times, which would be even more impressive.

Romney’s too nice—or maybe too mean

The New Neo Posted on by

Anyway, he’s too something.

Notice how the MSM is concentrating on Romney rather than Obama, the economy, or anything else that matters? Blogs on the right are, too, at least to a certain extent. There’s been quite a bit of Monday morning quarterbacking about Romney’s response to Obama’s Bain attacks. Why won’t he take the gloves off? Or why did he? Or whatever?

I’m with Jen Rubin at this point:

The divergence between what the Obama campaign and the media (I repeat myself) are talking about (Bain, Bain and Bain) and the most important economic (and hence political) news of the year is breathtaking. To put it bluntly, we are looking at economic contraction. In laymen’s terms, that is a recession…

For the left flogging the Bain story and the right bemoaning Mitt Romney’s response, stop. Just stop.

The left, of course, won’t obey that command. The right would do well to. Romney must continue to respond, and going on the offensive again in a bit would be good. I happen to think he will do so.

I expected Obama to be relentless, negative, nasty, and run a dirty campaign in 2012. He hasn’t disappointed me. If Romney’s smart (and I think he is), he knew it too. But knowing it intellectually and actually experiencing it are two different things. He’s straddling a delicate line in trying to be calm and collected and yet respond forcefully and counterpunch as well. Defense and offense simultaneously, and keep his cool while being lied about. Not the easiest thing on earth.

Will it work? Darned if I know. This election has made me very, very nervous from the start.

I’ll give the last word on the matter to commenter “lael” at Ace’s:

It’s so funny that people complain about Romney being “too nice” or not “tough enough” toward Obama precisely when Romney is basically calling Obama a Chicago thug. A lying, corrupt Chicago thug. Has this escaped your notice, people? Has any establishment Republican ever come close to calling Obama a lying, corrupt Chicago thug– someone whose campaign is “beneath the dignity of a POTUS”?

Just because Romney’s keeping cool calm and collected, just because Romney doesn’t look or sound angry, doesn’t mean he isn’t…sticking the stiletto in deep. The astuteness of Romney, the jujitsu of Romney, is that he sticks the stiletto in (hidden in his hand, so onlookers hardly notice) precisely when the other guy is angrily and conspicuously waving around a big knife and making exaggerated stabbing moves in the air. So the other guy looks to onlookers like the violent thug, but at the end of the fight it’s the other guy who’s bleeding more, from deeper wounds.

As Miss Marple noted this morning,

1. In response to the president’s refusal to apologize, he pointed out that the entire thing is an attempt to distract from Obama’s terrible record on jobs.
2. On Rahm saying he should quit whining, he said when someone falsely accuses you of a crime, you get a bit upset. He is proud of his ethical business record
3. On business in general, he pointed out the forgiveness of government loans to political donors (Solyndra, etc.) stinks to high heaven.
4. On transparency, he pointed out the executive orders regarding Fast and Furious, which he said was unprecedented and something else (maybe suspicious).

So, he used the openings Obama gave him to talk about Obama’s terrible jobs record, the fake accusations and his own excellent ethical record, the graft and corruption with companies like Solyndra, and the White House involvement in Fast and Furious.

Romney’s seized the opportunity– the wonderful opportunity presented when the Obama campaign called Romney a felon, a charge so ridiculously over-the-top and obviously false that it thereby discredits itself, weakening its own attempt to charge Romney with corruption and lack of transparency– to point out Obama’s own arrant crony capitalist corruption (Solyndra) and the suspicious, potentially criminal opacity surrounding Fast and Furious. Fast and Furious, people. Romney is talking about these things with the MSM spotlight helpfully on him– because of this seemingly silly (non)apology story.

Not that I think many people other than newshounds in the blogosphere are paying all that much attention right now.

Spambot of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Greetings from a fellow blog blogger:

Hmm it appears like your site ate my first comment (it was extremely long) so I guess I’ll just sum it up what I wrote and say, I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog. I too am an aspiring blog blogger but I’m still new to the whole thing.

So, what will the October surprise be?

The New Neo Posted on by

Ace speculates that Mediscare will come in September:

Bain is not Obama’s Big Attack.

Mediscare is his biggest attack — demolishing Romney among seniors over his support of the unpopular (and yet wise) Ryan plan.

He hasn’t played that card yet because he doesn’t want to waste it so far out from the election. That’s something we’ll be seeing in September.

I agree.

But what will come in October? Romney has no sealed divorce records, so it can’t be that. Could it be a sexual harassment charge, a la Herman Cain, or an alleged affair, a la John McCain? Or, because of Romney’s unfortunate (to Obama, that is) squeaky-clean history on those scores, will it be more allegations of nefarious business deals instead?

Then again, perhaps it will involve whomever Romney chooses for Veep, even though it won’t be Sarah Palin. Nobody’s perfect, right? Especially when challenging the very perfect Barack Obama.

Obama’s campaign m.o.

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I’ve been referring lately to Obama’s history of nasty and underhanded campaigning, but I thought it would be a good idea to recycle a portion of a post I wrote in October of 2008 that explains the phenomenon in greater detail. I think it takes on even greater significance now.]

…[A] pattern with Obama [is to use] the press…as surrogates to do his dirty work and allow him to maintain plausible deniability…I refer to how Obama got his start in national politics…[involving] his political rival Blair Hull…Obama’s campaign was directly involved in what the press did to torpedo Hull’s chances…[unfortunately the link, to a NY Times article that appeared in April of 2007, is broken]:

[Obama’s campaign manager] Axelrod is known for operating in this gray area, part idealist, part hired muscle. It is difficult to discuss Axelrod in certain circles in Chicago without the matter of the Blair Hull divorce papers coming up. As the 2004 Senate primary neared, it was clear that it was a contest between two people: the millionaire liberal, Hull, who was leading in the polls, and Obama, who had built an impressive grass-roots campaign. About a month before the vote, The Chicago Tribune revealed, near the bottom of a long profile of Hull, that during a divorce proceeding, Hull’s second wife filed for an order of protection. In the following few days, the matter erupted into a full-fledged scandal that ended up destroying the Hull campaign and handing Obama an easy primary victory. The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had “worked aggressively behind the scenes” to push the story. But there are those in Chicago who believe that Axelrod had an even more significant role ”” that he leaked the initial story.

And then there’s the matter of Obama’s next opponent, Jack Ryan, to whom the same thing happened. I must be careful here; there is documentation that Obama’s staff pushed and promoted the Hull revelations by the press, but there is no evidence so far of the same involvement occurring with the Ryan outing. However, unless it’s a strange coincidence…it is mighty suspicious; Obama’s staff certainly had the tools, the connections, the motivation, and the experience.

Here’s a discussion of Axelrod’s modus operandi, which may sound familiar:

What kind of campaign can we expect from Axelrod in the general election? Overtly positive themes and public posturing complemented by covertly delievered and mercilessly negative “stiletto” attacks against key people around John McCain that are not directly traceable to Axelrod. The model for this strategy is the previous Obama senatorial campaign in Illinois, where Obama’s two most formidible, centimillionaire, rivals, Democrat Blair Hull and Republican Jack Ryan were personally destroyed in the primaries when salacious details from their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked to the media, which then pressured for their full release, notably in the pages of the Chicago Tribune.

I wrote all of the above in 2008. But I would like to add that now, in 2012, Axelrod is still a top aide and strategist for Obama’s campaign. Axelrod has been one of the constants for Obama’s entire political life, having met him twenty years ago during Obama’s early post-Harvard days in Chicago:

Axelrod’s ties with Obama reach back more than a decade. Axelrod met Obama in 1992 when Obama so impressed Betty Lou Saltzmann, a woman from Chicago’s “lakefront liberal crowd,” during a black voter registration drive he ran that she then introduced the two. Obama also consulted Axelrod before he delivered an 2002 anti-war speech and asked him to read drafts of his book, The Audacity of Hope.

By the way, I want to make it crystal clear that this is not a case of “if only Stalin knew.” Whatever dirty tricks Axelrod’s up to are executed with the knowledge and approval of Obama, and represent a goodly part of the reason Axelrod is so invaluable to him.

One of the hallmarks of Obama’s presidency has been the persistence in his life of a small group of close and trusted advisers such as Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, who’ve both known him approximately the same amount of time. My impression is that Obama trusts almost no one else, except Eric Holder and Michelle Obama.

[NOTE: See also this.]

To spank or not to spank

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a Yahoo article that says some recent research indicates that spanking leads to increased mental illness. But this Slate piece says Yahoo’s wrong:

Despite the Yahoo headline, and many others like it, the study, published in Pediatrics in early July, does not actually link spanking to mental illness. In fact, the study has nothing to do with spanking at all. Canadian researchers asked 34,000 adults how often they had been pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped, or hit by their parents or other adults when they were children. The authors explain that they were trying to assess the long-term effects of regular harsh physical punishment, which, they write, “some may consider more severe than ”˜customary’ physical punishment (i.e., spanking).” Ultimately, the researchers reported that adults who have mental problems are more likely to say they were pushed, grabbed, shoved, slapped, or hit by their parents than healthy adults are.

And spanking itself? As the Slate article says, “the research on spanking is messy and controversial.” Read the whole thing; it contains a pretty good discussion of why spanking is inherently difficult to evaluate.

As for my opinion, here it is (and this was true even before I read the Slate article): I believe that a little mild spanking when a rule is violated and the nature of the infraction has been made clear to the child causes no lasting harm. But the problem is that spanking is a practice that can easily escalate. The temptation is great, and parenting is stressful, especially with a defiant child (the ones most likely to get spanked).

A good parent tends to spank in a manner that doesn’t hurt a child in any significant way, and it can help the child learn the rules, especially important ones (don’t run into the street!!). But a good parent doesn’t usually need that tool; he/she can almost always control a child well without it. Whereas an ineffective or abusive or bad parent is almost never able to spank that way and then spanking can easily segue into an angry show of arbitrary anger, raw power, or outright abuse.

Bastille Day…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is today.

The French rallying cry “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” sounds something like our “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but in actuality it was very different. Although originally the “equality” meant equality under the law, things soon changed [emphasis mine]:

This identification of liberty and equality became problematic during the Jacobin period, when equality was redefined (for instance by Frané§ois-Noé«l Babeuf) as equality of results, and not only judicial equality of rights. Thus, Marc Antoine Baudott considered that French temperament inclined rather to equality than liberty, a theme which would be re-used by Pierre Louis Roederer and Alexis de Tocqueville, while Jacques Necker considered that an equal society could only be found on coercion.

The third term, Fraternité, was the most problematic to insert in the triad, as it belonged to another sphere, that of moral obligations rather than rights, links rather than statutes, harmony rather than contract, and community rather than individuality.

It is no coincidence that the French Revolution was marked by the Reign of Terror, and inspired both the Soviet and Chinese communist revolutions.

I don’t think I’ll celebrate much.

Obama reforms welfare reform: because he can

The New Neo Posted on by

Mickey Kaus points out a recent action of Obama’s that’s been flying under the radar, and deserves a lot more attention:

Here are some quick initial reactions to the administration’s apparent surprising (and possibly illegal) attempt to grant waivers of the work requirements written, after great effort, into the 1996 welfare reform law…

The Democrat’s 2009 stimulus bill changed the incentives of the 1996 reform by once again rewarding states that expanded their welfare rolls…Rector and Bradley of Heritage (among the first to attack Obama’s action) make the case that the law’s work requirements were specifically designed to not be waivable, and that Obama is using HHS’s authority to waive state reporting requirements as a tricky way of voiding the underlying substantive requirements that are to be reported about. The Heritage argument”“that what HHS did was illegal”“seems powerful, but I haven’t read the other side’s brief. Perhaps Obama is invoking the long-lost “we can’t wait” clause to enact a change that would never pass a democratically elected Congress”“in this case not because Congress is “gridlocked” and and “dysfunctional” and “partisan” but because relaxing work requirements has never been popular with voters…

HHS’s rationale is not the recession, but the alleged need to find “new more effective ways to meet the goals of [the reformed welfare program], particularly helping parents successfully prepare for, find, and retain employment.” In short, job prep, counseling and training…Job training for welfare recipients always sounds good”“instead of making a single mom take a dead end $10/hr job, why not let her stay on the dole while she gets a degree that will let her land a higher paying position? The problem is that if you let single moms mix welfare and training that will encourage more single moms to go on welfare in the first place”“sign up, and we’ll pay you to go to community college! The rolls might grow, not shrink…

Read the whole thing.

Kaus wonders why Obama is doing this because, after all, it’s not a move designed to be popular with a lot of voters. I offer the following:

(1) The move may not be wildly popular, but it’s certainly popular among Obama’s base, for that all-important election turnout. And I don’t know why Kaus labels the move “surprising,” because Obama has long criticized the original law, and in the late 90s he vowed to “use all the resources at his disposal to undo it.”

(1) So now he’s got a lot more resources at his disposal; he’s doing this because he can. Obama has a history of going around Congress, though czars and agencies and executive decisions that bypass the stated will of the people and have so far been largely unchallenged. Here he’s experimenting with pushing the envelope even more, and if re-elected (and especially if Congress is Republican and refuses to go along with his wishes), expect to see a lot more of this.

(2) Obama’s general goal is always to foster greater government dependence for greater numbers of people.

(3) There may be a Cloward-Piven agenda here, as well. Recall that the original thrust of Cloward-Piven involved overburdening the welfare system, and have no doubt that Obama is very, very familiar with this sort of technique:

The [Cloward-Piven] strategy was formulated in a May 1966 article in left-wing magazine The Nation titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty”.

Cloward and Piven…were critical of the public welfare system, and their strategy called for overloading that system to force a different set of policies to address poverty. They stated that many Americans who were eligible for welfare were not receiving benefits, and that a welfare enrollment drive would strain local budgets, precipitating a crisis at the state and local levels that would be a wake-up call for the federal government, particularly the Democratic Party, thus forcing it to implement a national solution to poverty. Cloward and Piven wrote that “the ultimate objective of this strategy [would be] to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income…” There would also be side consequences of this strategy, according to Cloward and Piven. These would include: easing the plight of the poor in the short-term (through their participation in the welfare system); shoring up support for the national Democratic Party then-splintered by pluralist interests (through its cultivation of poor and minority constituencies by implementing a national solution to poverty); and relieving local governments of the financially and politically onerous burdens of public welfare (through a national solution to poverty)…

Michael Reisch and Janice Andrews wrote that Cloward and Piven “proposed to create a crisis in the current welfare system ”“ by exploiting the gap between welfare law and practice ”“ that would ultimately bring about its collapse and replace it with a system of guaranteed annual income. They hoped to accomplish this end by informing the poor of their rights to welfare assistance, encouraging them to apply for benefits and, in effect, overloading an already overburdened bureaucracy.

Whatever Obama’s motives might be, Romney is not ignoring this, even thought the MSM may be. Here’s his response, which I hope will be followed by more:

Friday morning, with Obama’s action still largely unreported, Romney released a statement…

“President Obama now wants to strip the established work requirements from welfare,” Romney said. “The success of bipartisan welfare reform, passed under President Clinton, has rested on the obligation of work. The president’s action is completely misdirected. Work is a dignified endeavor, and the linkage of work and welfare is essential to prevent welfare from becoming a way of life.”

I hope it will be followed by more hard-hitting emphasis on what’s going on here by the Romney campaign.

[NOTE: Meanwhile, this new brouhaha is somewhat related.]

Team Romney responds

The New Neo Posted on by

I like this jujitsu response from Romney’s campaign communications director, Gail Gitcho, to the charges:

“The Obama campaign has issued these reckless and wild accusations that Mitt Romney is a criminal and a felon. That just simply doesn’t pass the laugh test,” she continued, “and frankly it just shows us signs of a desperate and unraveling campaign for them to continue along these lines when there have been independent fact-checkers from all over the country who are saying they are running a dishonest attack.”

Of course, I doubt whether enough people are paying attention to make it worthwhile. It’s July, after all. I also wonder why this attack on Romney was launched now instead of two days before the election. What are they saving for later?

[NOTE: Why do I use the term “jujitsu“?:

“JÅ«” can be translated to mean “gentle, supple, flexible, pliable, or yielding.” “Jutsu” can be translated to mean “art” or “technique” and represents manipulating the opponent’s force against himself rather than confronting it with one’s own force. Jujutsu developed among the samurai of feudal Japan as a method for defeating an armed and armored opponent in which one uses no weapon, or only a short weapon. Because striking against an armored opponent proved ineffective, practitioners learned that the most efficient methods for neutralizing an enemy took the form of pins, joint locks, and throws. These techniques were developed around the principle of using an attacker’s energy against him, rather than directly opposing it.]

The Bain barrage backlash brouhaha

The New Neo Posted on by

I was busy all day and evening yesterday, and so I didn’t have time to write about the brouhaha over the Boston Globe’s rehash of its 2002 charge (answered effectively by Romney at that time, but in the Globe’s estimation good for another go-round) that he was still influencing Bain after he said he’d left. The story was the talk of the MSM and the blogosphere yesterday and still is today, with the Obama-supportive press and the left (is that redundant?), including Obama’s deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, alleging that Romney is a liar and possible felon.

Just another class act on the part of the Obama campaign and its willing handmaidens. Follow the links and you’ll find the story of charge, reaction, and counter-reaction, if you’re not already familiar with it. One of the best summaries of the situation so far is by Sister Toldjah, who puts it succinctly in the subtitle of her post, “MSM, liberal blogs, Team Obama collude to paint Romney as a ‘felon'”:

The idea is classic “mud on the wall” gutter politics. See what all smears you can throw against a wall and make stick.

Why this, why now? A few thoughts of mine:

(1) Habit. It’s Obama’s tried-and-true m.o. to uncover dirt on opponents and destroy them, and he’s used to having the cooperation of the press, going way back to before he ran for president (note this October 2008 post of mine entitled “Obama’s campaign and the press: a long history of working hand-in-hand”). Obama’s usual method involves the press publicizing the previously-sealed records of unsavory divorces, but since Romney is still married to his high school sweetheart (seemingly happily), that avenue is closed to them this time. Pity.

(2) Fear. I think Romney has gotten under Obama’s skin. Obama probably thought he’d be an easier mark, but he’s proving a bit tougher than Obama thought.

(3) A disdain for truth, and a strategic relationship to it. The Globe and the Obama camp don’t seem to care whether their allegations can be rather easily disproved, because they assume that most of the public is never going to hear the truth and that the lies will work. That’s the “mud on the wall” ploy. Keep repeating “Romney liar” and “Romney felon” and it will seep into many people’s brains and be believed.

And no one should be surprised. Get ready for more.

And it wouldn’t have mattered one whit who had been the Republican nominee, if it were someone different; dirt would have been found or manufactured in due time—although if Obama were far ahead of the person in the polls it would not have been as necessary.

The funny thing (although not funny-ha-ha) is that with many people Obama retains his reputation as a high-handed gloves-on kind of guy. But that’s the way the Big Lie rolls.

[ADDENDUM: See also this.]