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Nate Silver, Superforecaster

Pick your own sports hero analogy. Nate Silver, who runs the blog fivethirtyeight, is the Michael Jordan of election forecasting, or Muhammed Ali, or Peggy Fleming, or Michael Phelps, or Cy Young. Or Serena and Venus Williams rolled into one.

If election forecasting were baseball, Nate Silver nearly pitched a perfect game in November of 2008; the results in 49 out of 50 states, as I remember it, followed his most likely outcome. If that was nearly a perfect game, then four years later, he pitched a perfect game without an opposing batter ever making contact with the ball. The results in every state, including Florida, followed his most likely outcome. He did so much better than everyone else, he really isn't playing the same game.

But people misunderstand something about forecasting when they say Silver predicted on November 5th, 2012 that Obama would win the next day.  What Nate said is that Obama had a 90.9% chance of winning.  Obama did in fact win, which is to say Silver was 90.9% right and 9.1% wrong.

Here's another way to think about it. If we reran November 6th 1,000 times, in the style of the movie Groundhog Day, Silver said that, most likely, Romney would win 91 times and Obama would win 909 times.

Silver clearly knows a lot, but what really sets him apart from most prognosticators is that he knows what he doesn't know. That is, he knows he can't predict the future with perfect accuracy, so he designed his model around probabilities, not predictions.

There's a hint, however, that his model overstates the odds of the underdog, suggesting the model is overly cautious. This time around, in six states Silver gave the underdog (Romney in five cases; Obama in one) a chance of winning between 15 and 49.7%. Yet in none of those cases did the underdog prevail. Even with long odds like this, one might expect one upset, or maybe even two. In reality, since results in different states are highly correlated - had Romney upset Obama in Ohio, for example, he almost certainly would have also won Florida - you would expect either very few upsets or a whole lot of them. Nevertheless, it's curious that there was only 1 upset out of presidential elections in 100 states (50 in 2008; 50 in 2012).

There are plenty of angles Silver could pursue in enhancing his model; to cite just a few, he could consider incorporating data about voter registration, early voting, the extent of voter suppression and get-out-the-vote efforts, different economic and polling data,etc. While he does that, he might also consider re-calibrating the odds produced by his current model.

Fordham University President's eloquent comments regarding bad speech

When Fordham University's College Republicans invited Ann Coulter to speak, Father McShane, the University President, had this to say, as reported on Salon.com:

There are many people who can speak to the conservative point of view with integrity and conviction, but Ms. Coulter is not among them. Her rhetoric is often hateful and needlessly provocative — more heat than light — and her message is aimed squarely at the darker side of our nature.

...

Still, to prohibit Ms. Coulter from speaking at Fordham would be to do greater violence to the academy, and to the Jesuit tradition of fearless and robust engagement.

The Republican group withdrew the invitation.  (They claim they had decided to withdraw it prior to the President's statement.)

We enthusiastically endorse President Obama, who has earned a second term; Mitt Romney offers dangerous ideas, when he offers any.

New York Times

Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has gotten this far with a guile that allows him to say whatever he thinks an audience wants to hear. But he has tied himself to the ultraconservative forces that control the Republican Party and embraced their policies, including reckless budget cuts and 30-year-old, discredited trickle-down ideas. Voters may still be confused about Mr. Romney’s true identity, but they know the Republican Party, and a Romney administration would reflect its agenda. Mr. Romney’s choice of Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate says volumes about that.

Why did the Financial Times and other defenders of the free market endorse Obama? Because Romney can't be trusted

Free market defenders agree: Vote Obama

"For both [the Financial Times and The Economist], the primary issue comes down to trust. Romney’s constant shifts in ideology make it difficult to believe in anything he says. Even worse, if you take him at face value right now, he makes no sense.

"The Financial Times:

The more serious objection to Mr Romney is that he has gone through so many contortions to win his party’s nomination that it is hard to see how he would govern in practice. His wishlist includes an aspiration to raise Pentagon spending by a fifth while cutting everyone’s taxes and still somehow balancing the books. Such fiscal alchemy is an exercise in evasion, not a recipe for sustainable economic recovery.

"The Economist:

Obama’s shortcomings have left ample room for a pragmatic Republican, especially one who could balance the books and overhaul government. Such a candidate briefly flickered across television screens in the first presidential debate. This newspaper would vote for that Mitt Romney, just as it would for the Romney who ran Democratic Massachusetts in a bipartisan way (even pioneering the blueprint for Obamacare). The problem is that there are a lot of Romneys and they have committed themselves to a lot of dangerous things."

Suroweicki: Beware of Romney(candidate)care

James Suroweicki, whose book The Wisdom of Crowds I highly recommend, has an insightful article in the New Yorker titled "Beware of Romneycare," but which perhaps would be better titled "Beware of Romneycandidatecare," since he's not referring to what Romney did in Massachusetts.

As for Romney/Ryan's plan to voucherize Medicare, Suroweicki says:

the government would spend less, but only because it would provide less, and Americans would get less. It’s like saving on defense by protecting only two-thirds of the country.

A brilliant analogy, in my opinion.

Curiously, James didn't mention Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), which have the potential for simultaneously improving quality of care while reducing costs.  I'd be very interested to hear what he thinks of them.