Twitter Is Amazing



Category: Espresso

Andrew Gelman: Know-it-all neuroscientist explains Trump’s election victory to the rest of us


As a political scientist, though, what really irks me is the bit about “The pollsters got it wrong because . . .” Off by 2%, dude! I agree that this 2% was a problem—and it was more than 2% in some key states—but, shoot, man, what kind of accuracy are you expecting here? Suppose the polls had been off by 1%? Then would that be ok with you?

As a small-d democrat, I’m also repulsed by this guy’s characterization of Republican voters (yes, they voted approx 50% Republican for the House and Senate, not just for president, also they gave Mitt Romney 48% of the two-party vote in 2012, etc.) as “an appeal to the brain’s limbic system.” {…}

This particular Hari Seldon concludes with a statement about “the electorate has concluded.” Kind of amazing how the electoral college is part of neuroscience too.

What I’m wondering is, if this was all so damn obvious, why didn’t he publish it before the election? That would’ve been much cooler.

Source: Know-it-all neuroscientist explains Trump’s election victory to the rest of us – Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science


Category: Espresso

An Incident Involving Hamilton and a Vice President


So this happened:

President-elect Donald Trump accused the “Hamilton” cast Saturday of harassing Vice president-elect Mike Pence at a performance Friday evening after the actors called on Pence to “uphold our American values.”

“Our wonderful future V.P. Mike Pence was harassed last night at the theater by the cast of Hamilton, cameras blazing.This should not happen!” Trump tweeted Saturday morning.

I do not feel bad for Mike Pence.

The reasons I don’t feel bad for Pence is that he signed on with Trump and has some particularly bad views. I, like a lot of unclean folks, recognize that I have some “particularly bad views” as well and so there is a tendency to see ourselves in him even if we don’t like Trump. That being said, he signed on with Trump, so oh well.

Above comments refer to the booing. I think there’s a time/place argument where there’s a difference between booing at a show and booing at a rally, but it’s kind of murky. I thought the cast speech at the end was fine.

Notwithstanding the fineness of the cast speech, and my ambivalence on the booing, I believe that Donald Trump won the exchange for at least five reasons: (1) To the uncommitted, the hecklers do not come across as the good guys, (2) he wins any time the totalitarian card is pulled out on something people don’t care about, (3) Pence is not himself nationally unpopular, and (4) More important stories are being missed. Oh, and (5) increased tribal solidarity among Trump’s supporters and wobblers.

The only upshot I see is tribal solidarity among his opponents, which I don’t think was previously lacking. Maybe they helped get some of Pence’s past and/or present views on gay rights out there, though not in a way I think is especially helpful.

That being said, this is not a game-changer and is not huge. It’s indicative of potential problems, but right now it’s like a thirty yard kickoff return called back on a penalty. Not off to a good start, but life goes on.


Category: Newsroom

Trump and defensiveness


I don’t like Donald Trump. I hope he’ll be merely a bad president and not a disastrous one. I don’t like Trumpism, either. I hope (but am not optimistic) the anecdotes of racially and sexist motivated violence are either exaggerated, reported only because they’re topical, or at least don’t represent a new trend. The night of the election I was depressed and worried. You might not believe it, but I didn’t sleep at all. Not a wink. I just lay awake in bed thinking about the future.

And yet, when people in my life criticize Trump or his supporters, I get very defensive for some reason. By “people in my life” I mean family members, close friends, coworkers, and people on the blogosphere. Even my belief that we do indeed need to understand our opponents represents a certain defensiveness because my go-to (with some past exceptions) is usually to understand Trump supporters or non-liberals in general and not to understand the liberals who oppose Trump.

Perhaps some of this has to do with “flippism,” an idea I got from Jaybird, a commenter Over There. In relevant part,

It’s the basic idea that if you don’t know which of two choices are before you, you should flip a coin. Not because you should do what the coin says, mind, but because the moment the coin is in the air, you’re a lot more likely to say “OH I HOPE IT’S HEADS” at which point you’ll know which choice you actually prefer in your gut.

Then you just have to figure out how much weight to give your gut.

I bring that up because hypocrisy can work that way for people who are on the fence. Let’s say that you’re torn on a particular policy. There’s this way, there’s that way… you don’t know which is the best one… then you encounter a hypocritical politician. Are you inclined to snort and reach conclusions about all those people? Are you inclined to get defensive and start defending the guy even before you read a single attack? Well, now you know what your gut thinks.

As upset as I was about Trump’s victory, I can’t deny that somewhere in my gut I wanted him to win, if not the presidency, then at least the GOP nomination, and not in the way that some liberals wanted him to win the nomination in order to ensure a Democratic victory. In the voting booth, even though I voted for Clinton, part of me wanted to vote for Trump just to be contrarian. In Sangamon that vote wouldn’t have affected the outcome, but it’s still something I might have done.

Some of this defensiveness and “gut support” is a luxury. I’m not among the demographics most likely to be hurt by Trumpism if the worst (or even just the “moderately bad”) predictions about what it means come true. Some of it is probably also due to what my co-blogger Oscar recently described as the “-ism-lite,” which is the type of racism (and other ism’s) that are not quite as nefarious or bad as the more obvious or open kinds, but are still wrong and withal easy for its practitioners to overlook. As he puts, it instead of rejecting out of hand, “I have to parse it, process it, and then I recognize it and decide it’s not OK.”

I realize that in this post, other than noting that I do get defensive, I haven’t really explained the defensiveness or even the types of situations that elicit that defensiveness. I’m simply noting that it’s there and I’m not sure what to do with it.


Category: Statehouse

The Plurality Problem


I plan to write more Over There about the Electoral College (I think), but I did want to touch on a Washington Post piece arguing that two arguments in favor of it are bunk. I believe he’s wrong on the second one:

Some critics say that allowing voters to directly elect the president would splinter the two-party system. It would encourage many candidates to contest the general election, thus producing a winner with only a small share of the vote.

This is also wrong. In a system of direct election, potential candidates risk their political futures by running against the official party nominees. And there is no compensation. You win nothing by coming in third. So there is little incentive to run.

By contrast, the electoral college encourages third parties, especially those with regional bases, because by winning a few states they may deny either major-party candidate a majority of the electoral vote. You can come in third and still win a prize. Such a result was certainly the goal of Strom Thurmond in 1948 and George Wallace in 1968. Imagine giving these racist candidates leverage to negotiate with the leading candidates before the electoral votes were officially cast.

Now, I would favor replacing the electoral college with a national popular vote (and yes, did so prior to this election). But a plurality-based national popular vote really is a problem, and precisely for the reason being “debunked.”

There are two kinds of third-party candidates. First, there is the regional third-party candidate and the national. He points out Strom Thurmond and George Wallace, but those are somewhat outdated exceptions. The closest we’ve had since is Evan McMullin, and he never got as much attention as Gary Johnson this cycle. McMullin did make the argument that if the election can be thrown to the House then he can win it in the House, but that was never a viable argument. Rather, winning Utah was mostly seen as a benchmark of success. There are other benchmarks for the other kind of candidate.

The second kind of candidate is the more common kind: The national third-party candidate. Gary Johnson, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, John Anderson, and more. All of these people are more recent than Edwards’s example. None of them had all that much success, but a part of that is attributable to the electoral college itself. At some point, though, it becomes apparent that the bar for winning is so high for them so as to be impossible. They could win the popular vote but still lose the election because how do they get to 270? Contrast this with governor races, where candidates can and do get a plurality and often get much larger chunks of the vote when they don’t. It’s easier to run for governor than president, of course, but the complete absence of a path to the White House scares off potential investorscontributors and volunteers that would make a national campaign possible.

A long time ago, conservatives and anti-Trump Republicans were looking for a candidate to run a third party candidate. None was found. I don’t know if it would have been any different under a national popular vote, but I do think it might have been. There would have been a clearer path to the White House that wouldn’t have relied on renegade electors. But as my mind drifted I thought of the potential challenges for a third party, and one of the biggest by far was the Electoral College. As Edwards points out, it’s not responsible for the two-party system, but it does provide yet another firewall.

Which is, incidentally, a reason not to like the Electoral College. I support a two-party system but want the parties to be able to challenge it. The Electoral College makes that so daunting that it’s unlikely any serious effort will be made (at least at the presidential level. A First-Past-The-Post system makes it easier. Which is good! Except that it would encourage outcome distortions, which is bad!

So, contra Edwards, we actually do need some manner of dealing the plurality problem. That can be done with a separate runoff or ordered ballots or something else. Maine, which elects its governor the same way Edwards wants to elect our president, just voted to implement ordered ballots (IRV) precisely to deal with the problem he says plurality victors don’t cause.


Category: Elsewhere

Weird.


Jim Webb says U.S. didn’t have income taxes until 1913

Our ruling

Webb said “we did not even have a federal income tax in this country until 1913.”The modern income tax structure, complete with Form 1040, was born in 1913. But in the interest of history, it should be noted that Lincoln ushered in an income tax in 1862 and it lasted 10 years.So we rate the statement of Webb — a historian himself — Mostly True.

Ron Paul says federal income tax rate was 0 percent until 1913

Our ruling

Paul’s statement that the federal income tax rate was zero until 1913 reflects the timing of the constitutional change enabling the current tax. But his claim disregards two pre-1913 efforts to impose an income tax — one of which was in place for a decade. This debate claim rates Half True.


Category: Espresso

Laughter Is The Same In Any Language



Category: Espresso

On Bill Clinton


One of the things that seemed crazy at the time was Donald Trump’s bringing out the women who made accusations of sexual assault against Bill Clinton. The polls bore it out, in that nobody especially held that against Hillary. On another level, though, maybe it did work with swing voters. Not (just) that Bill Clinton did Bad Things, but he did Bad Things and people voted for him anyway. Ergo, you can vote for Donald Trump even if he did Bad Things. Or is, in general, not a good person. Democrats spent eight years talking about compartmentalization and how you don’t have to like the person to support them for president. I voted for Bill Clinton in 1996 and came to regret that for multiple reasons, one of which is that character does count. So ironically, the reason I regret voting for Bill contributed to my voting for Hillary. But personal scoundrelry really did become normalized during his era, even if there are clear distinctions to be drawn between their behaviors. Less than 40% of Americans approved of Donald Trump, but 47% of him voted anyway. His voters tended older (old enough to remember Bill), and it’s not unreasonable to believe that it’s not that they didn’t care about Trump’s misbehavior, but that they had compartmentalized it in a way they were trained to a couple decades ago.


Category: Espresso

The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect


“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.”

Source: Quote by Michael Crichton: “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is…”


Category: Espresso

Overlooking Racism


This is rough.  Very rough, kinda stream of consciousness, so keep that in mind.

I was looking at this map, and I had something of an epiphany regarding how so many voters could be OK with Trumps pretty naked racism & sexism.  I’m sure some percentage of his voters just blew it off as un-serious, but the evidence of his attitudes was stark enough I figure a person would have to be working that lie pretty hard.  So why did so many find it OK enough to vote for him?  I think the answer lies in the demographics.

I grew up in the late 70’s/80’s, in very rural WI.  While I did witness some hardcore racism & sexism, for the most part, everyone was pretty tolerant.  But there was a lot of low level racism & sexism; call it ‘-ism-light’.  Enough that I was steeped in that undercurrent as I grew up.  It’s surprising how deeply it embeds, and sticks with you.

I left rural WI, joined the Navy, got educated in Madison, and live near Seattle, so I’ve had time & experience to work past the -isms, but even now, seeing ‘-ism-light’ doesn’t cause a reaction.  I have to parse it, process it, and then I recognize it and decide it’s not OK.  That filter I grew up with isn’t gone, I’ve just got a second filter on top of it, courtesy of diverse exposure & experience.

But if you never left those places, even if the environment is not so steeped in -isms anymore, people my age, who don’t have that second filter, they will have a strong tolerance for such things.  They probably wouldn’t accept it in themselves, or their immediate family and friends, but the more removed an offensive person is, the better the ability to tolerate it to a degree.

So Uncle Ned who can’t stop making racist & sexist jokes, he doesn’t get invited to family gatherings very often.  But Trump?  He’s so far removed…


Category: Elsewhere

Please ignore anything below this, there is experimentation in progress