The Hanover Collaboration

Generally, I think “talking tough” is bad foreign policy. Keep in mind that in every country you’ll find people who agree with you and people who don’t. Our “tough talk” tends to buttress the people who disagree with you. Apropos of Iranian elections, John Dickerson basically agrees.

Fred Kaplan makes the argument that now is a moment when talking tough to the Iranian government wouldn’t be construed as talking tough to the Iranian people. As a result, it wouldn’t necessarily be counterproductive.

If you were the President, what would you say?

I’m certain that Megan McArdle is, in my opinion, far and away the most infuriating blogger in existence.

And yet I’m oddly fascinated by her commentary, which means that I keep checking her blog and watching her on bloggingheads.tv. I’m beginning to feel as though reading her blog is my own version of the book.

Please. Put me out of my misery. Enlighten me! Why am I so powerfully drawn to this train wreck of a blogger like a moth to a flame?

PS – Man, that last sentence sucked. It must be McArdle’s fault.

The recent presidential election provided quite a lot of fodder for those of us that have a fetish for quantitative data. I’m speaking, of course, of the staggering volume of election polling that took place. I have a healthy skepticism for the science (art?) of public opinion polling, but presidential elections seem to be providing ever increasing amounts of public opinion data on a single topic. And if there is anything that I do like, it’s large quantities of data!

Of course, it wasn’t long before we were informed that, really, in order to understand the implications of this glut of polling data, we needed some system for aggregating and combining the information. RealClearPolitics (RCP) was an early leader here. The other heavy hitters are Pollster.com, 538, the lesser known Sam Wang and quite a few others who I will omit for space.

I became a fan very early on of Mark Blumenthal, blogging as MysteryPollster, and then went on to found Pollster.com with political scientist Charles Franklin. In particular, I appreciate a style that emphasizes a restrained approach to data analysis. They are interested in clearly and cleanly displaying data. Nothing more, nothing less. (There’s lots of other commentary on Pollster.com, but this is the heart of what they do.) Most of the other sites, RCP, 538, etc. want to be oracles; Pollster.com wants to be a resource for public information.

In any case, one aspect of (most) sites like these was that they provided aggregated estimates of the level of support for Obama and McCain, not just nationally, but in each state as well. (Sam Wang is an exception here, as are some of the lesser known sites that take a fully Bayesian approach.) Inevitably, the question arises, who’s model did the best? This has been looked at (see here, here, and here ) by others, basically concluding that there wasn’t much of a difference.

The reason this is important is because the complexity of the approaches taken diverged wildly. I won’t go into the gory details, but RCP simply took (unweighted) averages of the most recent polls. Pollster.com fit non-parametric regression curves to all the polling data and 538….well, yeah. Let’s just say that Nate Silver built a lot of machinery up to tackle this problem.

I was curious about how much these three methodologies diverged in accuracy as well (RCP, 538 and Pollster; Chris Bowers didn’t consider RCP, though he did include Gov and Sen races, which I did not). I won’t clog this post with zillions of graphs, but it suffices to say that there were essentially no differences in the accuracy of the predictions made by any of these sites, but that they all did much better than had we simply picked one poll near the election and used that as our prediction. (If this post generates a lot of discussion, I might be convinced to go back and put up some graphs and extended analysis. At the moment, I’m too lazy, so you’ll have to make do with me summarizing my conclusions.)

What can we learn from all this? First, we should always be aware of the diminishing returns of increasing model complexity. Second, we should be frightened by how easily Nate Silver garnered a reputation as being (essentially) infallible by

• Evincing an air of certitude and
• Using methods far more complex than are necessary

Is it really surprising that his background is that of a quant, and not really that of a statistician, as is commonly believed? (Technically, Wiki tells me that his education was in economics, and that he worked as a financial analyst.) This isn’t meant as a harsh knock on Nate Silver, despite appearances. I mean, his model was really accurate. It just wasn’t any better than RCP or Pollster.com.

The rapid rise of Nate Silver worries me, because it sometimes begins to take on a cult-like atmosphere. Nate Silver doesn’t bother me; if I had as much free time as him, I’d probably spend a lot of it doing something similarly too-complex (and fun!). (Indeed, I read the commentary on his site all the time, although Sean Quinn brought way more to that site than Nate Silver ever did, in my opinion.) What frightens me is how easily many people seem to be convinced that “more complicated” is automatically better. Particularly given how well the quants did with their super complicated models for credit scoring in recent years.

PS – I’m being glib about the quants and credit scoring; all I mean is that “we” (someone!) royally screwed that up. I know it’s complicated and don’t mean to single out any particular group for blame.

I kind of like the idea of “show of hands” questions in the debates. All it takes to make it effective are some really good yes or no questions. It’s got to be better than most of the bland, aimless blather that’s out there these days. Maybe the next question can be, “raise your hand if you don’t believe in the Theory of Gravity.”

So I went to do my taxes yesterday—online, of course—easier for me, easier for the government, more accurate, faster return. So I went with TurboTax. Although I would have loved to access the pages that defined the fucking terminology, those cost money. So I avoided those. I made it all the way to my 1099 (for consulting) at which point it said that I needed to fork over $30 to continue. Since I wasn’t about to pay that fee, I had to either punt a 30min investment or lie and file that income as something else. Looking at TurboTax’s competitors doesn’t make me feel any better. I’m going to head down to the post office and do the thing by mail. I am not pleased by this development.

Why the hell doesn’t the IRS have their own site? The only reasons I can think of are dirty, i.e., that some fraction of those fees are going to the IRS but they are going as bribes.

I don’t know if we’ve actually had a voting debate on the blog yet, so maybe now is the time. I just registered to vote in Oregon. The process was very simple. I downloaded the application from the state web page, filled it out and sent it in. Since I don’t have an Oregon Driver’s License I had to give them the last four digits of my SSN. If I didn’t have one of those there were a lot of other things I could have submitted, some of which, presumably, can be obtained without a SSN. Does this make voter fraud too easy?

On a different note, I just received confirmation of my registration in the mail. I’ve been informed that all voting in Oregon is done by mail, and I’ll receive my ballot sometime 14-18 days before election day. I think this is a great idea. Not only does it eliminate the need to wait in line at a polling place, but I think it makes the ambivalent much more likely to vote. So much less effort required, though since I know nothing about Oregon politics I plan on doing some research after the ballot arrives. Of course, I’ll be curious to see if there’s any mechanism built in to ensure that it’s me who is voting, while at the same time protecting my anonymity.

From slate

Of the 435 seats up for election in the House, the consensus is that only about 32 are contested.

Does this look like a big problem to anyone else? Sheesh, you wonder why people don’t bother voting. I guess I should be happy since a divided government will do less.

You’d think that with the polling numbers around, it would be conceivable for the D’s to get 10/16 in the senate or more than 53% in the house, but that’s not what the experts are saying.

Idea 1: Keep the house as is, but try to redistrict to make there be more races. Replace the Senate with a parliament (i.e. national voting by party). But keep the six year tearm with 1/3rd up for dibs every 2 years, that part is sweet.

Better idea: Keep both the Senate and house as they are and add a parliament. Then we can make them all agree before passing legislation! While we’re at it, we should reappropriate some of the new presidential powers.

Lithwick is still pushing to close Guantanamo. Maybe we need to get a chant going.

This is probably worth reading to.

So there is this prof, Joel Levine that I like who has some methodology for taking non-numerical data and forcing it to a number line. My personal favorite is putting political groups on a number-line by means of religious affiliation. I think it is a great idea. For what follows, I take for granted that I have a single conservative/liberal number for each SCOTUS justice and candidate. You could ask for more numbers but as they tend to correlate well with conservative/liberal (but not as well as in party politics), I don’t think it is worth overcomplicating our treatment. You could break up principle components or something and deal with multiple axis but that is orthoganal to the point I want to make.

So I put the 9 current justices in and 9 numbers come out. Since the numbers are only meaningful in the relative sense, I can huck two of them: one to define a zero and another to define a scale. If you understand the details of the system, you’d be able point out that there was already a scale to the numbers. In the politics/religion case, the political units were in terms of delta-religion. But in this case, that scale has less meaningful units than, say, (Ginsberg—Scalia)s.

For example, we could say something like,
Kennedy = 1 O’Connor + -.3 (Ginsberg—Scalia)’s.
which we could call simplify to,
Kennedy = -.3,
by making the units implicit.

So people are going to have the opportunity to try to “change the make-up” of the court. There is someone leaving and someone coming. That is just a single number substitution. How does that change the court as a whole? We need a way of aggregating the numbers.

Your first thought, if you were brought up like me would be, “it shifts the center of mass.” Since I defined zero at SDO, the center will shift by Candidate/9. So the R’s will want to make abs(Candidate) the largest number they can while the D’s will want to try to limit that number.

But why should we use the center of mass? I offered no justification for that. Does the center of mass of the court really matter? If I put Michael Savage, -6, on the court, would that be substantially different than if I put someone with a -3 instead? No. Why not? Because they don’t use votes weighted by strength of opinion (except to the degree that one justice can convince another to change opinion). They use a simple count of votes, and the majority wins. It seems that we should instead be talking about the median.

So how much can we move the median? Since, by all accounts, SDO was the median, we can pick a new one, but only if it falls between the two on either side (let’s just call them Breyer and Kennedy for convenience). So based on that, all that the R’s can do is shift the median as far as Kennedy. That implies that having someone more conservative than Kennedy is no better than having someone equally conservative as Kennedy.

But we are perhaps being short sighted. Our new guy is sure to outlast some of the others. Someone else will be in a position to move the median again. If it is the R’s again and it is someone left or center who resigns or dies, they can move it one more place to the right. In that case (and its repetition), they don’t want to have put the new guy in the way of getting the median out to Thomas. In all the other cases (13/18ths of the time, on average), it doesn’t matter how extreme a guy they pick.

I just wanted to point this out that there isn’t really a large benefit for picking someone too far from the center. But I’m guessing that Rove is thinking to himself. “Let’s start out with a real wing-nut. Make them fillibuster. Harp on them for fillibustering for a week. Then back off and give them our “moderate” conservative. They’ll accept him to save face, and we’ll look like statesmen for compromising. Wait, no. Americans don’t like compromises. I guess we can use the nuclear option and put the wing-nut on the court. The base will be really psyched about that.”

I wonder what Dean is thinking?

It seems that there needs to be a clarification in the rules here. The current justification given by the Dems on the Bolton blocking is the issue of some clasified documents. Let’s suppose for the moment that they’re being sincere. They want to see them and Bush doesn’t want to show them. Simple.

I find it unbelievable that this problem hasn’t already been solved. The President is allowed to decide what information congress gets to see? Does that make sense? I’d say that the constitution implies up and down that congress can have any information available.

Wait a second, what about Clinton. I bet there were all kinds of documents he didn’t wan’t to give up. I think I see my mistake. This time Congress doesn’t want to see them. To want to see it there would have to be a majority vote for a hearing or subpeona or something. Is that it? So if the majority of Congress don’t want to know something then the President can keep it a secret. Am I right in saying that individual members of congress have no information privileges?

Source

THE PRESIDENT: Dick.

Q Thank you, sir. Last week you made clear that you don’t think there’s any such thing as a spare embryo. Given that position, what is your view of fertility treatments that routinely create more embryos than ever result in full-term pregnancies? And what do you believe should be done with those embryos that never do become pregnancies or result in the birth of a child?

THE PRESIDENT: As you know, I also had an event here at the White House with little babies that had been born as a result of the embryos that had been frozen—they’re called “snowflakes”—indicating there’s an alternative to the destruction of life.

But the stem cell issue, Dick, is really one of federal funding. That’s the issue before us. And that is whether or not we use taxpayers’ money to destroy life in order to hopefully find a cure for terrible disease. And I have made my position very clear on that issue—and that is I don’t believe we should. Now, I made a decision a while ago that said there had been some existing stem cells and, therefore, it was okay to use federal funds on those because the life decision had already been made. But from that point going forward, I felt it was best to stand on principle—and that is taxpayers’ money to use—for the use—for the use of experimentation that would destroy life is a principle that violates something I—I mean, is a position that violates a principle of mine. And so—and I stand strong on that, to the point where I’ll veto the bill as it now exists.

And having said that, it’s important for the American people to know that there is some federal research going on, on stem cells—embryonic stem cells—today. There’s been over 600 experiments based upon the stem cell lines that existed prior to my decision. There’s another 3,000 potential experiments, they tell me, that can go forward. There’s a lot of research going on, on adult stem cell research. We’ve got an ethics panel that has been—that is in place, that will help us, hopefully, develop ways to continue to figure out how to meet the demands of science and the need for ethics so that we can help solve some of these diseases.

And listen, I understand the folks that are deeply concerned for their—a child who might have juvenile diabetes. I know that the moms and dads across the country are in agony about the fate of their child. And my message to them is, is that there is research going on and hopefully we’ll find the cure. But at the same time, it’s important in the society to balance ethics and science.

If I were at one of these things, I would call him out. If it were my turn and he dodged the previous person’s question, I would asked it again. These reporters are such wimps.

“3,000 potential experiments”? Uh… never mind.

Extra-Constitutional Governing Structures I Object to More Than the Senate Filibuster:

1) One man one vote
2) Two Party System
3) PACs
4) Lobbyists
5) Senate Committees
6) Senate Seniority
7) Electoral College

Constitutional Governing Structures I Object to More Than the Filibuster:

1) Redistricting
2) Campaign Finance in General

Extra-Consitutional Governing Structures I Love:

1) Activist Judges

NB: My objection to the filibuster increases dramatically when it involves actually reading nonsense into a microphone. Some opponents of the filibuster have tryed to look moderate by claiming they’d support it if you still had to actually talk into a microphone and shut down the Senate. Those people have different ideas about why we pay our government representatives than I do.

NB2: I strongly object to the repeal of only the judicial nominee filibuster. If filibustering is wrong, then it is wrong in general. And filibustering is wrong.

Ah, dear friends, so much has happened since last we talked. I’ve been busy finishing up my term. “Finishing your term?” the Dartmouth students ask. Yes, here we are on a semester system. Maybe sometime I will prate on the relative merits of the two systems but not today.

Oh, there have been so many issues that I have wanted to talk with you and been unable. We’ll have to start with just one.

Congress is working on a no-interstate-abortions-to-avoid-parental-notification law. Maybe they even passed it already, I’ve had my head in books you know. Last time I was listening to the radio, there was a pretty earnest discussion of the affects that such a law might have. They missed the boat pretty badly. I was sort of shocked that none of the experts (nor the host but that is less shocking) picker up on what seemed to be the pretty clear point.

So the law is that it is illegal to transport a girl across a state line to have an abortion if

1. you are leaving a state that requires parental notification into one that does not require it
2. the pregnant person is a minor
3. the pregnant person has not told a parent

There is an interesting caveat in that the law is specifically designed to avoid prosecuting the pregnant women and inclined towards prosecuting other parties for instance the driver, or the care-giver. Seeing how the woman could have herself been the driver and also seeing how a caregiver is obligated to check niether residency status nor parental consent (in the recipient state) it should be obvious that such a law is irrelevant.

Even if it were enforcable, it would affect something like .05% of women who want abortions. Now admittedly, there are enough abortions that it will end up affecting a few unlucky souls and (as far as I can tell) all of them adversely. But that is not the point.

The point that everyone failed to make was this: The enormous moral-values (i.e. anti-abortion) voting block managed to get pretty much everything they wanted in the last election and in the election before that. But what have they gotten in terms of legislation? Nothing. The ones that have any sense have started asking, “Are we just being pandered to? We control everything except the judiciary. How come we don’t have anything to show for it?”

Some would use that as an excuse to go after the judiciary. Those are being pandered to after their own fashion. But for the rest, I think that the party decided they needed a bone. This law is that bone. It was designed to keep the base solid.

Since I am breaking my silence on abortion, I should perhaps voice my other major gripe with the standard coverage. The other side are always talking about how the “mother is the second victim.” They say things like 75% of women who get abortions “regret it.” Our side is painfully unwilling to call them out on that. “In what way do they regret it?” or “How exactly are the mothers victimized?” Maybe I don’t get it because I am a boy. What exactly are the negative affects of having an abortion besides not having a baby? Seriously, I welcome other viewpoints here.

This whole filibuster/judges thing just goes to show that our government is a little messed up. I give the founders a great deal of credit considering they were coming up with most of that stuff completely on their own (independent judiciary? brilliant!). But now that we’ve played with it for a bit, we can see the flaws.

Does it make sense that the party with 51% be able to get everything they want and the party with 49% get nothing? Does it make sense that the only way that the 49% team can prevent being shat on is to hog the microphone for days, or at least promise to? Does it strike you as odd that a bare majority can change the rules about something that takes more than a majority to do? I can imagine systems that work a little better.

So here’s the crazy idea of the day. Amend the consitution to make it harder for a small majority to pass controversial laws. Here’re some ideas. Maybe let a minority vote of %33 can call for a referendum before a law is passed. Maybe require at least a larger majority to do pretty much everything. Another neat change would be to add another new house that uses proportional representation and then make all three of them agree on stuff.

Yeah, less would get done but that is exactly the point.

“How is that going to get passed?” you may ask. Using the Constitutional Convention of course!

Yeah, even then it still would be difficult to make happen. But seriously, how cool would that be?

I guess that might shift too much power the executive’s way. Before the convention we should work on that part too.

I make no effort to hide the fact that I made every effort not to be liberally educated while at Dartmouth. When they made me take a history class, I didn’t go very often and I certainly didn’t read the books. I couldn’t write down the order of the presidents from 1950 to today.

As a result, I found this article very illuminating. (If you didn’t read the comments would would have missed this) I had always thought about the “Cold War” as one of those things that was out of blown proportion but you didn’t really notice until after. Now I am pretty sure I can say that had I been at my current level of mental development at any time during the cold war, I would have been against it. I think Brad draws the parallels to the modern predicament very well. Or maybe that is just what I think he meant. Jon says that once its written, it doesn’t matter what he meant anymore.

We mustn’t be “soft on terror.” Oh no, that would be the worst of things.

The terrible suggestion is that we are again embarking on another open ended “war” that will deplete our resources and political energy and achieve dubious to marginal results. But what sort of catharsis will it take to get out of this one? An end of “terror”? Suddenly, one day they’ll be able to say, “You can stop being afraid now. Noone anywhere is trying to hurt us anymore”?

No, that is not how the current stupidity will end. However much people try to play it up, we are still just talking about a small group of enemies, with very limited capabilities compared to the USSR. It is just a matter of time before people reprioritize. Eventually the political gain will diminish and then and only then will we move on. I thought that was supposed to start last November but it seems they postponed it four years.

You know, if I had studied more history, I could probably go back through all of time and find examples everywhere of leaders basing their authority on relatively immaterial security concerns.

But I didn’t study history. Let’s give it a go. Eisenhower, Truman, Ford, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush. Shit I forgot Johnson. He should be between Kennedy and Nixon.
How’d I do?