Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 64

In Defense of Nate Silver-Updated

Some people seem to be sharpening the knives to go after Nate Silver if Obama loses. I’d like to register an early dissent.

There are valid criticisms of black box statistical modeling. On the one hand, we’re asked to view the results credibly without knowing what the special sauce used to bake them is. You could mount that criticism of Silver as much as you could of any other modeler. Or pollster, for that matter. So at the end of the day you have to either make your peace with the black boxes, or write them off as value-less.

I happen to find some value in them. They aren’t predictive–but I’d argue they’re not really meant to be. They’re simply informative–just more data points from which we cobble together our understanding of a system (an election) which is so multi-variate that, as Scott Fitzgerald once wrote about Hollywood, is so complex that no more than a handful of men can keep the entire equation in their heads.

What’s more, Silver’s a very agile writer. Like Michael Lewis he has a gift for explaining complicated numerical concepts. (I would not agree with the charge that Silver often makes simple mathematical concepts sound grandiose and complex.) And finally, Silver hedges. Always and everywhere. Some people might take this to be weasely on his part, but it strikes me as just the opposite: It’s humility. Silver is in the numbers business, but he understands that the numbers don’t tell us everything. So you’ll never hear him say, “X has happened so Y must happen.” Just the opposite, actually. Silver understands the limits of his own models. He acknowledges those limits nearly every time he writes. I think this ought to be applauded.

If Romney wins should that discredit Silver’s models? Only so far as anybody ever used them as oracular constructs instead of analytical tools.

One final word: People seem to think that it would reflect badly on Silver if Romney were to win while Silver’s model shows only a 25 percent chance of victory. But isn’t 25 percent kind of a lot? If I told you there was a 1-in-4 chance of you getting hit by a bus tomorrow, would you think that 25 percent seemed like a big number or a little number? Or, to put it another way, a .250 hitter gets on base once a game, so you’d never look at him in any given at bat and think there was no chance he’d get a hit.

Ultimately I’d suggest that the real test for Nate Silver is the same as it is for any analyst, on any subject. Not “did he predict an outcome correctly” (or “did he predict the outcome I prefer”) but “does his work add value to our understanding of the subject.”

Speaking only for myself, the answer to that question is an unqualified yes.

Update: On Twitter, Jim Henley (@UOJim) pointed to a meditation he wrote on probability. It’s written from the perspective of a D&D nerd with cancer and it’s very much worth reading on its own, apart from its tangential bearing on our larger discussion here.

Also, Galley Friend A.W. offers the following dissent:

I like Silver quite a lot.  But I have one major quibble: His numerical specificity occludes the enormous subjectivity inherent in his weighing and discounting of various polls.  (See http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/)

He’s selling a false certainty.  It’s the Washington equivalent of Wall Street’s now-infamous “value at risk” (VaR) models at the center of recent Wall Street meltdowns.  (E.g., http://www.futuresmag.com/2010/12/01/var-the-number-that-killed-us)

In end, my problem with Silver’s presentation is the same as Naked Capitalism’s indictment of VaR:

“But VaR is a particularly troubling example, more so because it is sufficiently, dangerously simple minded enough that regulators and managers a step or two removed from markets have become overly attached to its deceptive simplicity.”  (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/jp-morgan-loss-bomb-confirms-that-its-time-to-kill-var.html)

Obviously, in scrutinizing and combining polls, such relative judgments are unavoidable.  But Silver ought to be more transparent and up-front in presenting how those subjective judgments affect his bottom-line numbers.

“iPad Mini is now the future . . . until then.”

More anti-Apple samizdat. And it’s pretty hilarious.

 

 

I’m not entirely surprised that the day after the iPad Mini announcement, Amazon sold more Kindle Fire HDs than it ever had in one day. People on the fence in the 7″ market were going to get pushed by that $329 price tag.

I remain skeptical of iPad Mini as a business decision.

Reading for Hurricane Week

Via the Transom, a 4-star amazing essay on Frank Miller and the composition of Dark Knight Returns.

A Campaign Counterfactual–Updated

Looking at both the polling data and the emanations from the Obama operation, I get the sense that we might be witnessing a campaign on the verge of collapse. Obama never articulated a vision for his next term in office, but when he was succeeding in the polls he was mounting a passable defense of his first term and making a sustained, targeted critique of Romney as an unfit challenger. For the last week or two, both of those prongs seem to have been abandoned in favor of any-club-at-hand. Big Bird. “Romnesia.” Bayonets. This has the smell of panic. It also reeks of amateur hour–a moment when the grownups on the campaign feel as though their quivers are empty and start letting the Jim Messina’s of the world dictate tactics.

A couple observations:

* As Haley Barbor likes to say, Bad gets worse. It was always a mystery why Obama was leading Romney for most of the last year, despite being the weakest incumbent since Carter. (Or Ford. Or Hoover. Take your pick.) Now that the polls have caught up with him, it’s unclear what he can do to stop the bleeding, because he should have bled out months ago.

* That said, there’s still the possibility that he could hold on for another week and a half. If the election were going to be held on December 6, you’d probably think that Romney’s chances would be better. As it is, you can envision a scenario in which Obama holds onto the ball just long enough to squeak out a win.

* A word of praise for Romney: His performance in the first debate was great and since then he’s done an admirable job of staying out of Obama’s way and letting him collapse. I’m sure there must have been an urge to try to pile on and hasten the fall. Resisting that urge was smart.

* Finally, a counterfactual question: My own sense of the first debate was that Obama was probably weaker than he should have been, but that he wasn’t disastrous. It wasn’t a question of the president being bad, it was a matter of Romney being that good.

So here’s my question: Imagine a world in which, during and after the debate, the left didn’t have a collective, public freak out. In other words, a world in which a still-functional Journolist-type of operation was able to corral lefty elites and get them into something like a coherent message instead of having them set themselves on fire over Twitter. Imagine if they had gotten some message discipline and taken a line more like Republican heads did after the second and third debate–Yes, our guy probably lost this on points, but this was a strong performance and blah-blah-blah.

Would it have made any difference? The debate would still be the debate, and the insta-polls would have been the same. But if Chris Matthews and Andrew Sullivan and their fellow travelers hadn’t micturated on the carpet in public panic, would the story out of the Denver debate been anything more than, Strong performance by Romney, Obama needs to up his game.

As our president likes to say, let me be clear about a couple of things: I’m not suggesting that people should self-consciously manipulate their public opinions to further political goals. You should call things like you see them. What I am suggesting is that this was the first real Twitter debate and the newness of the encounter may have exerted a real Heisenberg pull, stampeding people into opinions that, had they been publishing the next morning having only traded a couple emails with friends, they might not have actually had.

And that in the specific case of the Denver debate, that stampede might have had an effect. How much of one? I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s crazy to wonder if the simultaneous, public collapse of the president’s liberal supporters had as much of an effect on the race as the president’s actual debate performance.

Update: Santino gets to the nub more clearly than I did:

[I]t’s impossible to arrange talking points when the members of said list are one-upping each other in a public forum, panicking in the cleverest and most retweetable way possible.

That’s something worth dwelling on a little: Did the competitive nature of Twitter—the rush to be funniest and fastest and most visible—push the Democrats over the edge? “God, Obama is terrible.” “He’s SO terrible.” “He’s SO terrible that he’s like the Titanic!” “He’s SO terrible that he’s like the Titanic crashing into an iceberg made of black holes!” “And the black holes are like the wormhole in Event Horizon and he’s going to go through them and come back all evil and scary and AH AH AH PANIC.” Etc.

Anyway, the lesson here is that real time political analysis is a terrible idea. I sure am glad it’s the future!

A Campaign Counterfactual

Looking at both the polling data and the emanations from the Obama operation, I get the sense that we might be witnessing a campaign on the verge of collapse. Obama never articulated a vision for his next term in office, but when he was succeeding in the polls he was mounting a passable defense of his first term and making a sustained, targeted critique of Romney as an unfit challenger. For the last week or two, both of those prongs seem to have been abandoned in favor of any-club-at-hand. Big Bird. “Romnesia.” Bayonets. This has the smell of panic. It also reeks of amateur hour–a moment when the grownups on the campaign feel as though their quivers are empty and start letting the Jim Messina’s of the world dictate tactics.

A couple observations:

* As Haley Barbor likes to say, Bad gets worse. It was always a mystery why Obama was leading Romney for most of the last year, despite being the weakest incumbent since Carter. (Or Ford. Or Hoover. Take your pick.) Now that the polls have caught up with him, it’s unclear what he can do to stop the bleeding, because he should have bled out months ago.

* That said, there’s still the possibility that he could hold on for another week and a half. If the election were going to be held on December 6, you’d probably think that Romney’s chances would be better. As it is, you can envision a scenario in which Obama holds onto the ball just long enough to squeak out a win.

* A word of praise for Romney: His performance in the first debate was great and since then he’s done an admirable job of staying out of Obama’s way and letting him collapse. I’m sure there must have been an urge to try to pile on and hasten the fall. Resisting that urge was smart.

* Finally, a counterfactual question: My own sense of the first debate was that Obama was probably weaker than he should have been, but that he wasn’t disastrous. It wasn’t a question of the president being bad, it was a matter of Romney being that good.

So here’s my question: Imagine a world in which, during and after the debate, the left didn’t have a collective, public freak out. In other words, a world in which a still-functional Journolist-type of operation was able to corral lefty elites and get them into something like a coherent message instead of having them set themselves on fire over Twitter. Imagine if they had gotten some message discipline and taken a line more like Republican heads did after the second and third debate–Yes, our guy probably lost this on points, but this was a strong performance and blah-blah-blah.

Would it have made any difference? The debate would still be the debate, and the insta-polls would have been the same. But if Chris Matthews and Andrew Sullivan and their fellow travelers hadn’t micturated on the carpet in public panic, would the story out of the Denver debate been anything more than, Strong performance by Romney, Obama needs to up his game.

As our president likes to say, let me be clear about a couple of things: I’m not suggesting that people should self-consciously manipulate their public opinions to further political goals. You should call things like you see them. What I am suggesting is that this was the first real Twitter debate and the newness of the encounter may have exerted a real Heisenberg pull, stampeding people into opinions that, had they been publishing the next morning having only traded a couple emails with friends, they might not have actually had.

And that in the specific case of the Denver debate, that stampede might have had an effect. How much of one? I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s crazy to wonder if the simultaneous, public collapse of the president’s liberal supporters had as much of an effect on the race as the president’s actual debate performance.

 

Obligatory iPad Mini Post

I completely understand why Apple reversed course and went into the 7″ tablet market. It’s a real market and there’s no reason for APPL to just cede it to others. I think it was smart to make an iPad Mini.

That said, I’m not sure if I think they did the Mini smartly.

Will it sell initially? Sure. But a bunch of things jump out at me as potentially problematic right from the start:

1) The complexity of the product lineup suddenly goes from relatively simple to insane–there are now 54 flavors of iPad to choose from just at the Apple Retail level. One of APPL’s strengths has always been limiting choice for consumers because Jobs and Ivey knew what you wanted better than you did.

2) The price point strikes me as nuts. Or maybe just potentially nuts. I had originally thought that the Mini was meant to kill the Nexus 7, Kindle Fire, and other sub-compact tablets. But at nearly twice their price, I don’t see the Mini doing that at all. Instead, it looks like they were either trying to create a whole other category or just extend their own price-basement a tiny bit further down the scale.

Maybe that will prove to be really smart. I’m sure they’ve run the numbers on this. But if it is, it’s smart in a consultant-y kind of numbers-driven way. Not in a product design way. Which is to say, not in the way we traditionally think of APPL as being smart.

And if it’s not smart, then it’s just a weird move to make.

3) Here’s where (1) and (2) kind of merge. So say you wanted a cheap tablet. And you wanted an iPad. So do you buy the Mini, with the new chips and connectors and whatnot? Or do you spend just $70 more and get the iPad 2? It’s a real iPad! It’s big! But the connectors are old and the tech will be obsolete faster. It’s confusing.

I suppose APPL would say that the Mini let’s people make their own choices and that neither is wrong. And maybe they’re right. But that strikes me as the path to making widgets. You want to sell as many widgets as possible to as many people as possible. Because a widget’s a widget.

(4) Honest question: What’s the point of a 7″ tablet? Is it media consumption or productivity?

I ask because if media consumption is the prime use of a 7″, then you can be an APPL user everywhere else and have a non-APPL 7″ tablet. You’re going to stream media from apps like Netflix, Amazon, Google Play, ESPN, etc on your devices. You can do that on your Big iPad, your iMac, and, say, your Kindle Fire HD (or your Nexus 7). Where’s the benefit for being in the APPL ecosystem at the 7″ level? Basically, just iTunes, right?

All the other benefits of being on iOS center around how nice it is to use when you’re doing stuff. But if, at the 7″ level, you’re mostly consuming, and not doing, then how much value-added are you getting from being on the Mini?

This question points the way to something could actually be good for tech consumers: The ability to play some of these big companies against one another. Having a single tech overlord is kind of scary. But if we wind up in a world where we can cling loyally to APPL for most devices, but split consumption between content ecosystems such as Amazon, ESPN, and Netflix, and then still be able to use a few non-APPL devices, like a Windows 8 or an Android 7″ tablet, that’s the best of all worlds because it gives us maximum consumer choice and keeps everyone honest.

So maybe a $329 iPad Mini isn’t such a bad thing after all.

Iron Man 3: The Dark Bot Rises

I kid, because well, yes, obviously. But on the other hand, Shane Black is really, really smart and I suspect it’s going to be awesome.

 

I Hope Molly Ball Saved Her Notes

With respect to the Atlantic’s Molly Ball, whose work I generally like quite a bit, she missed the real story in her weekend piece about the Romney-Obama war for women.

Ball goes to Chantilly, Virginia, and does a bunch of mom-on-the-street interviews–and I’d guess that’s exactly what her editors told her to do. But man-on-the-street pieces aren’t particularly helpful. It’s a big country and you can find some normal person to say just about anything if you look hard enough–and often without having to look very hard at all.

But in the course of her reporting, Ball meets a woman named  Zebib. She’s a 46-year-old Ethiopian immigrant. She lives in Chantilly. She’s well enough to do that her kid(s) attend a private Christian school. She’s pro-life. And she nominally supported Ron Paul.

I’d bet just about anything that whatever journey led Zebib to where she is right now in life is a thousand times more interesting than a generic horse-race piece about the women’s vote. I wish Ball had just done a straight-up profile of her. It wouldn’t have told us anything about the 2012 race, but it might have told us something about America.

I hope Ball goes back to her for another story.

JVL Elsewhere

Over the weekend I had a review of Sean Howe’s excellent Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. It’s a giant, authoritative book and I only had space to go into a tiny bit of it. If you’re into comics history, don’t miss it.

How awesome is it? Howe got his hands on the transcript of the phone call during which Todd McFarlane ousted Rob Liefeld from Image. Hotness.

Galley Slave Made Good

A little bird tells me that in addition to being a fantastic book, OGS David Skinner’s The Story of Ain’t is getting huge amounts of praise and play from places as high as Vanity Fair.

The book (and the author) deserve ever last bit of it. If you haven’t already, get your copy today.