Wednesday, November 07, 2012

I Got A Feeling

This is the last remotely political post you'll see on these pages for some time. Tribe hoops season starts Friday, and the Futile Superfans need a few days to get our costumes ready. You guys will not believe the codpiece Teejay found at Goodwill.

In the final weeks of the election, a bizarre battle between the punditocracy and the forces of math and science came to a head, with the unassuming Nate Silver becoming a lightning rod for a chattering class that both disdained and feared his nebbishy magic. Silver, to put it mildly, had a good night (though he wasn't the best of the nerdocracy). Lots of others didn't, headlined most prominently by Dick Morris, a man so bad at his job it strains the mind to wonder what kind of pictures he has of Fox News executives with underage barn animals.

Here's a list of predictions curated by Adam Pasick of New York Magazine. Note, for the record, that the worst of the bunch was the addled Jim Cramer, who saw Obama getting 440 electoral votes. But note further over the next several years that none of these people will see their livelihood impacted in the least by being very right (Sam Wang of the Princeton Election Consortium was even better than Silver, nailing 332 electoral votes) or wildly, insanely wrong (George Will, playing out the string in an increasingly absurd fashion, calling for Romney to win 325 electors).

We're all, regardless of beliefs, poorly served when the ostensible intelligentsia ignores facts in service of political positioning. It's our hope that this election result (and the rebuke to wishful thinking it provided) signals a change in how our political process is covered. Our hope, but not our prediction. The math - in this case ratings and pageviews - don't lie.

48 comments:

rob said...

there is some serious cognitive dissonance in my facebook feed. kinda sad, in some cases. he's duly elected, friends. he's not a socialist. the country's not doomed. get a fucking grip.

rob said...

are heitkamp and tester gonna win, too? last night exceeded most blue folks' wildest dreams. only thing better would've been michele bachmann losing. her constituents are batshit crazy.

T.J. said...

SO FUCKING HAPPY THIS ELECTION IS OVER.

My twitter feed is much more manageable now.

T.J. said...

Pot brownies for all.

T.J. said...

BALL DON'T LIE

Shlara said...

math geeks rule

Dave said...

i can't even find any results for jill stein, but i don't think she won.

four more years of obstructionism and exactly the same crap as the last four. essentially nothing changed with this election.

highly recommend nate silver's new book, or you can just read my sentence about it.

zman said...

In just one sentence, Dave can convey Nate Silver's 544 page thesis. Dave is a model of efficiency.

rob said...

also a model hobbit, large scale

rob said...

heidi heitkamp, y'all. i have no idea who she is, but she won north dakota for the blue team.

Clarence said...

Heitkamp... where Rob was sent during the summers of his childhood, to no avail.

rob said...

clarence, despite your hurtful words, i offer you a gift:

http://www.dailypress.com/news/top-list/dp-weird-science-cast-reunion-this-weekend-20121107,0,3930945.story

Geoff said...

Welp...5-11...not very good!

Marls said...

The idiotic blathering of supposed intelligencia on the tee-vee is only topped by the moronic diatribes of actual idiots on social media. For every "OMG he's a socialist, murica is doomed" post this morning, there was a corresponding "OMG, he wants to mutilate vaginas and if he wins I'm moving to Canada" post last night.

Democracy is fucking hard. If you don't like the result, get out there and do something about it. Get involved, run for office, support groups that have similar views as you.

rob said...

dc united vs. red bulls in the wind, rain, and snow this evening at 8. winner take all final leg of their conference semifinal. get some.

rob said...

fuck yeah, marls.

but they did want to remove vaginas. seriously. shit was weird.

Professor G. Truck said...

i don't feel like a model of efficiency. i have been intermittently napping on the couch for two hours, after finishing a very boring book called "herland," which was recommended by zman. its snowing here, and i think i've forgotten how to be a productive member of our great "democracy."

Geoff said...

I enjoy the Republican social agenda about as much as I enjoy drinking bleach. And apparently so does America.

Marls said...

Which is funny since I believe Todd Akin likes drinking strychnine and dancing with snakes.

Marls said...

Dave should get Mr. Truck's lazy ass to come over and walk his dog for him.

zman said...

Whoa whoa whoa. I only recommended Herland after you wrote a sentence pondering what the world would be like if it was ruled by parthenogenetic women and concluding that you would write a novel on the subject as it had never been done before, a la Father John Misty. That the 100 year old book (of which you were unaware) is boring merely shows that your ideas for novels are neither novel nor entertaining.

Clarence said...

Lumosity is a brain training website that has released studies characterizing the general brain power of cities and other groups of individuals -- now they've analyzed the cognitive skill at the nation's top colleges to determine who has the smartest students.

Here are the results:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. Harvard University
3. Stanford University
4. Northwestern University
5. Yale University
6. Washington University in St Louis
7. Dartmouth College
8. Wellesley College
9. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
10. Duke University
11. College of William and Mary
12. University of Pennsylvania
13. University of Portland
14. University of California-Berkeley
15. Vanderbilt University
16. University of Chicago
17. Carnegie Mellon University
18. Macalester College
19. Worcester Polytechnic Institute
20. University of California-Los Angeles
21. Emory University
22. Lafayette College
23. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
24. Case Western Reserve University
25. Boston College

Here's a bigger list (in case your alma mater didn't make the top 25) and a blurb on it.

rob said...

as always, w&m underrated.

we should get lumosity to evaluate the cognitive abilities of the gtb community. should make sure mark's not around that day, i guess.

Dave said...

obviously william and mary wouldn't have made it when i was there -- i brought that entire school's intellectual level down several notches.

the post apocalyptic sci-fi novel that i'm never going to write about how men are finally freed from a civilization in which women have been in charge for a long time, and can finally throw spears at stuff would be SO much better than "herland." charlotte perkins gilman could have used a little of dave's charm and charisma . . .

zman said...

I call bullshit on this list because (A) Columbia doesn't crack the top 50, and (B) I knew tons of morons at W&M (myself included). I will not even address BU's farcically high ranking.

Clarence said...

Zman, you are coming off pretty hostile today. Did I not mention that we have a Buffalo Bills bar here in Norfolk?? Come on. Enjoy life.

Danimal said...

i've been on at least 3 of those campuses.

rob said...

7

zman said...

8!

I got a right to be hostile.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcv3McUVyAo

zman said...

Actually, 9!

Danimal said...

Weird Science reunion in VABEACH?! Yay-uhh! But no Chet. What the fuck.

rob said...

whit, marls - pour a little out for the jason bay experience.

rob said...

squeak, on mould's new single, 'the descent', what song do you think he refers to in the lyric, 'didn't want to play the song/that gave people so much hope'?

TR said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Clarence said...

See a Little Light, right?

rob said...

that's what i figured, but squeak says he's heard bob play that one several times.

Mark said...

Screw you, Rob.

rob said...

ahl

Dave said...

it is snowing like fuck here. my dog went berserk in the snow, very fun, but while i was at my kid's dentist appointment, we lost power. they checked his retainer with a flashlight. the dentist is across the street from the high school i teach at. they also lost power, as did that entire road. i took a serious gamble and restocked my fridge today and i'm going to be very pissed if i lose all the food again. also, i may have trouble attending the OBFT because there's going to be school all the way through august. of course, i am thankful that my house is intact!

rob said...

dc united v red bulls in a snowstorm on nbcsports. brilliant.

TR said...

There are all kinds of tree branches that still have their leaves and are looking like they're about to snap from the weight of this wet snow. Brutal stretch of weather here in NJ.

TR said...

There is a symphony playing the music of Zelda in NYC. I shit you not.

Danimal said...

more jesse jackson news out there today. kinda makes his mayo clinic victory look even more outrageous.

Dave said...

no school again for me today. i have forgotten the names of my students, what i am teaching, and how to get up in the morning.

Squeaky said...

Sorry for the late response, but 'Makes No Sense at All'. There was a period of over a decade where he didn't play Husker Du songs.

TR said...

Florida!

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/woman-high-masturbating-starbucks-article-1.1196127#ixzz2BZGVt8D6

Danimal said...

She was lookin for another bean down there.

Danimal said...

Tremendous piece at Grantland on the Twin Towers/Houston Rockets.