Electoral Prediction and Cognitive Bias

Over the past couple of weeks, a startling number of pundits and commentators have been relentlessly attacking political statistician Nate Silver and his blog FiveThirtyEight. Why? Because his electoral prediction model, which uses a mix of national polls, state polls, demographic information and economic data, calculates that Obama's chances of winning the election are slightly better than the convention wisdom suggests. At present, they're hovering at a little below 75 percent.

Nate has a great track record when it comes to predictions: In 2008, he called all 35 Senate races right, as well as 49 of 50 states for president. In 2010, he correctly called 34 of 37 Senate races and 36 of 37 governors' races. When he was wrong, the outcome was usually decided by a razor-thin margin. And his reasoning for this year's prediction is simple: Obama holds small leads in enough crucial swing states (e.g. Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, Iowa) to get him to the needed 270 electoral votes.

But the critics dismiss all that, declaring in a textbook case of 20–20 hindsight that those other predictions were a cakewalk, and this time is different. They whine that Nate's biased because he's rooting for Obama (which never shows in his incredibly calm and even-handed commentary). They complain that his poll weighting system is subjective and introduces bias (even though it's actually based on objective measurements of poll recency, methodology and track record). And when all else fails, they mock him as puny and effeminate.

It would be one thing if Nate was alone in making the forecast that he does... but he's not. The various prediction markets, which despite their flaws are usually pretty accurate, tend to mirror his probability estimate very closely. And it turns out that his model is actually quite generous to Romney compared to other competing models of the same type.

So why have Nate's projections been subjected to such merciless criticism? For several reasons, none of which have anything to do with the merits of his model.

One is that the media has an incentive to portray elections as close—in this case, a virtual dead heat—so that people get excited and tune in for more coverage. So when someone comes along claiming that one candidate actually has a small but substantial lead, the public and the less-savvy pundits are naturally skeptical.

Another reason comes down to the fact that people do a very poor job of grasping probabilities. Commentators hear Nate estimate a 75% chance of Obama winning and think, "Wow, he must be really sure of himself." That's certainly the impression Joe Scarborough gave when he insisted that Obama's chances were at 50.1%. But Nate's prediction isn't all that dramatic. What many fail to understand is that if you assign Event X a 75% probability of occurring, it means you expect it to not happen 25% of the time. In fact, if such events occur more often than three out of four times in the long run, you've made a very real error.

The third and most glaring reason is a combination of wishful thinking and confirmation bias. Conservatives want very badly for Romney to win this election (or more to the point, for Obama to lose), so some will do anything to interpret the data as favorably as possible. Their most common defense is an allegation that the pollsters are (intentionally or not) oversampling Democrats—a claim based on the faulty assumption that party identification is static, rather than fluid and subject to change in response to current events. Another is to hold polls favoring Obama to a higher methodological standard, while clinging uncritically to those favoring Romney, such as the overly volatile Gallup tracking poll. Still another is to ignore polls altogether and point to less direct indicators, like an alleged closing of the gap between male and female voters or the candidates' favorability ratings. Yet one more is to claim, baselessly, that undecided voters break dramatically against the incumbent. Anything to keep the dream alive.

Meet the man who thought Bush's response to Katrina
would be his crowning achievement.

Finally, the more cynical conservative pundits may be consciously biasing their predictions. They have an incentive to tell their audience what they want to hear—Republicans who want to be reassured will look to them for certainty. Dick Morris, for instance, has such a catastrophic track record of predicting GOP victories that it's hard to imagine he's anything but an opportunist looking to get more attention and sell more books.

Now, before any staunch liberals out there get too cocky about the follies of their counterparts across the aisle, I should point out that this mindset is by no means limited to one party or ideology. In 2004, Democrats were guilty of groundlessly criticizing poll oversampling just as Republicans are today. And a quick perusal of the comments on Nate's blog posts will reveal many left-leaning readers expressing far more confidence in Obama's chances than is warranted by the data. Many of his acolytes also seem to follow the blog just to pacify their anxieties rather than to follow the data wherever it leads. So no matter what your politics, beware of how your biases influence your views and expectations.

Now I leave you with one final prediction. If Romney wins, you can bet that all the critics will be crowing with triumph and declaring the demise of FiveThirtyEight. But if Nate turns out to be right, you can bet those same critics will brush it off as a fluke, blaming voter fraud or Hurricane Sandy or anything else they can think of to resolve their cognitive dissonance, in much the same way that a cult will rationalize its failed doomsday predictions.

Hitch and Fry Are Wizards

This very well-known debate took place a couple of years ago, but I only got around to watching it today. If you've got 50 minutes to spare, it's well worth checking out. [Update: Apparently I watched the broadcast version of the debate which was edited for brevity. The full version is substantially longer.] Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry completely overwhelm their two opponents on the question of whether the Catholic Church is a force for good.

The first guy, Archbishop John Onaiyekan, says virtually nothing except that the church is big, well-organized and owns some AIDS-related charities. Hitchens rips into the church more in his first two minutes—rattling off the Crusades, child abuse, forced evangelism in South America, anti-Semitism and other horrors—than the opposition manages to defend in the entire debate.

The second church defender, Ann Widdecombe, does a little better than the first, but still whines about the focus on child rape scandals and discouragement of condoms without really addressing them. Fry attacks this attitude straight on when he says, "It's a bit like a burglar in court saying, 'You would bring up that burglary and that manslaughter. You never mention the fact I give my father a birthday present.'" He also makes an impassioned speech condemning the Church's own condemnation of homosexuality.

Another great moment from Fry is when he challenges Widdecombe on the Church's changing position on issues like slavery, saying: "And what is the point of the Catholic Church if it says, 'Oh, well we couldn't know better because nobody else did.' Then what are you for?"

The real highlight of the debate, though, was the result:

As a consequence of this debate, 774 minds were changed for the better. Naturally, it won't always be this easy—the two apologists were hopelessly inept, and it's often harder to convince people of religion's falsity than its negative impact—but even so, this should serve as an encouraging testament to the fact that debate really can make a difference.

It's (Still) Not Just Me

I'm getting a little tired of covering O'Reilly's comments on God, but I felt like I should mention a few of the other responses he's gotten. Theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel has some very nice answers (complete with illustrations) for Bill's ignorant questions. Late night talk show host Conan O'Brien also had a joke about Bill's line of reasoning:

"Bill O'Reilly said the ocean tides could only be explained by God. Then, when told they were caused by the moon, he said, 'Then how did the moon get there?' In a related story, Bill O'Reilly is a five-year-old boy."

It's funny, but at the same time a little depressing, since that really is roughly his level of discourse on the subject. Finally, Stephen Colbert weighs in again (starting at 2:25 below):

The Colbert Report

Around the 4-minute mark Colbert points out something I missed—namely, that Bill asked why Earth has a moon and Mars doesn't, but Mars actually has two moons, Phobos and Deimos. The rest is mostly mockery – which is totally okay. When an argument is just too dumb, and the arguer isn't going to be persuaded by reason, that's often the best response.

The Stupid, It Burns...

In two previous posts I covered Bill O'Reilly's ridiculous arguments for a creator. I happened upon a YouTube video where he responds to someone who points out that we do in fact know how tides work. He does so by smugly asking a bunch more science questions and declaring unbelievers "desperate." Of course, it takes far less time to ask these questions than to answer them, so believers could easily gain a false sense of confidence from a response like this one.

First I'll point out the obvious: once again, many of the phenomena O'Reilly refers to have already been explained by scientists. We have a fairly good idea of how the sun and the moon formed. We aren't yet sure how life first began (though we have several hypotheses), but abiogenesis is a difficult and fairly new field of study, so that's not at all surprising. As for why there's life here as opposed to elsewhere, Earth happens to be a Goldilocks planet; it's simply a matter of having the right conditions.

But this is all moot, because in Bill's mind, the best solution is clearly to posit an all-powerful being who magically answers all of our questions. Naturally it doesn't occur to him that this is a classic example of the "God of the gaps" fallacy: we can't yet explain X, therefore God did it. Richard Dawkins said it very well in a discussion with O'Reilly back in 2009: "it's the most extraordinary piece of warped logic to say that because science can't answer a particular question, you're going to throw in your lot with Jesus."

What I thought was especially funny (and sad) about this video is that O'Reilly actually sounds annoyed that we can explain the tides. To him, this fact is not a valuable piece of knowledge, but an obstacle to his wonderment. If all of us had this mentality, we'd still believe in a sun that revolves around a flat earth. O'Reilly just doesn't seem to understand that the gaps in our knowledge are closing, that we're slowly but steadily explaining all the phenomena that were once attributed to God. Given this trend, why should we expect the currently unexplained information to be any different?

Wrong Rite Reviews

My local newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, recently started adding movie reviews by regular people to supplement its professional reviews. Last Friday, two of them reviewed a horror movie called The Rite. It's been panned by critics (currently 17% on RottenTomatoes) and it got one star in the U-T. But remarkably, both "citizen reviewers" not only liked the film, but treated it practically as though it were a documentary.

First up is a 63-year-old guy who says the movie is "based on real experiences ... and presents what I believe is a theologically accurate picture of the battle between the forces of good and evil." The movie does claim to be based on true events, but it's absurd to take such extravagant assertions at face value, especially when the parties involved have a monetary interest in selling the story.

The second reviewer is a 14-year-old girl, who's even worse. "I enjoyed learning a lot about exorcism because I never knew anything about it before. I got the chills when I imaged what 'the possessed' must go through," she says. "I would recommend this movie ... if you like learning about the world of devils, demons and exorcism." She seems to be accepting the views presented by a fictional movie as if they were facts taught in a classroom.

It genuinely saddens me to see that the thinking of so many people is apparently stuck in the Dark Ages. We have a pretty good idea of why claims of demon possession exist: they result from a potent combination of mental illness or drugs, communal reinforcement, and the placebo effect. Stories of such events can also be exaggerated due to faulty memory (very common in high-stress situations) or transmission from person to person, and fabricated to gain attention or strengthen faith.

Demon possession is already an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, but since we can already explain why people think it happens, that need for evidence is compounded. So what should the believers do? Get the James Randi Educational Foundation or a team of impartial psychologists to observe an exorcism. Get video footage of people's heads spinning around and furniture flying through the room that couldn't have been plausibly faked. Or preferably, do both at once. But don't pretend that anecdotes from heavily biased religious sources are even remotely convincing.

It's Not Just Me

As it turns out, I'm not the only one who noticed Bill O'Reilly's bizarre argument for theism – Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report did as well. Colbert summarizes O'Reilly's argument beautifully: "God must exist because I don't know how stuff works." He even has astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on to explain the tides, which was a nice touch.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Bill O'Reilly Proves God's Existence - Neil deGrasse Tyson
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog March to Keep Fear Alive

And it also turns out that this isn't the first time O'Reilly has used this reasoning on his show. The video shows him the exact same argument (with the addition of "sun goes up, sun goes down") on several other occasions.

This is somewhat worrying to me. He didn't just unthinkingly blurt this out once in conversation. The fact that he's used this argument before means he's had time to really reflect on it, yet he still finds it compelling. From what I've seen of O'Reilly, he seems at least as intelligent as the average believer. So is this argument representative of the sort of reasoning that the average believer would accept? If their standards for accepting theist arguments are really that low, it seems that nonbelievers truly have their work cut out for them.

An Atheist on The O'Reilly Factor

My dad watches The O'Reilly Factor, a conservative talk show, and he told me about a segment with an atheist who supposedly said some dumb things. I decided to watch it and see for myself.

The atheist was David Silverman, president of American Atheists, who was on to discuss a billboard put up by the organization that reads "You KNOW they're all SCAMS" – "they" being religions. First there was a discussion over whether the word "scam" constituted an insult. O'Reilly thought it did; Silverman considered it merely a true statement. I'd consider them both right: it's a true statement, stated in a way that insults religious people.

The statement that most amazed me with its stupidity came from O'Reilly. In defending his belief in God, he said: "Tide goes in, tide goes out, never a miscommunication. You can't explain that." Um... actually, we have a pretty good idea of how tidal forces work. It's simple physics. O'Reilly's use of the phrase "never a miscommunication" reveals his assumption that phenomena like these absolutely require a supernatural being pulling the strings to make them work. Silverman sarcastically suggested that "maybe it's Thor on top of Mt. Olympus" who's doing it, which helped underscore the absurdity of the argument (bonus points for mixing mythologies). O'Reilly also asked "why" the tide goes in and out. For religious people it seems there always has to be a "why," a meaning and intention behind everything that happens. In reality, there is no answer: the question itself is flawed.

Silverman did say a few silly things, though. He tried to claim that "everybody knows religion's a scam" – a ridiculous assertion that went more or less unsupported. He also claimed that "the churches are filled with atheists," which is clearly a massive exaggeration; most churchgoers are there because they believe what's being taught. When asked for reasoning, he initially said "we don't know," which O'Reilly (and my dad) seized upon triumphantly. But neither of them seemed to notice his subsequent mention of "familial and social pressure," which was spot on. In fact, familial pressure is precisely the reason I go. O'Reilly called him a "loon," but although Silverman's claim was overstated, there's undoubtedly a grain of truth to it as well.

At the end of the discussion, O'Reilly asked what good it did for the atheist minority to "attack" the theist majority. Silverman replied that the real intention was to "lure the atheists out of the pews." It's not clear whether that's an effective strategy, but it does make some sense. Unbelievers often feel isolated in their unbelief, and a billboard criticizing religion shows that there others like them, which may in turn embolden them to be more vocal about their unbelief.

Overall, I wasn't that impressed with Silverman's performance. He made some good points, but his exaggerations were annoying and probably alienated a lot of viewers.