One of my favorite NFL columnists, TMQ, often notes that “experts” generally do significantly worse at predicting outcomes by virtue of the fact that they over-think problems. It is true that experts generally do better than just a coin-flip (which means that they do know something, after all)… but they do far worse than they “should” do. In particular, let’s say that you wanted to create an algorithm that would predict the outcomes of football games. You’d probably start by predicting that the team with the better record would win. But of course many games feature teams with identical records; so perhaps in that case your algorithm picks the home team. It’s a simple way to pick every game; so simple that it can’t be right, can it? According to TMQ, that algorithm (which he dubs the Isaacson-Tarbell Postulate after the two readers who pointed it out to him) would have beaten or tied every ESPN, FOX, CBS, and NBC expert analyst.
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You should check out this article on weather forecasting, which compared the actual weather with forecasts made by the Kansas City evening news and the national weather service. It’s not the greatest or most thorough scientific study in the world, but it is a good first-stab at an interesting problem: how accurate are weather forecasts? And the answer is a bit disheartening for anyone planning a weekend vacation: not very. For instance:
“So if a viewer was looking for more certainty than just assuming it will not rain, a successful meteorologist would have to be better than 86.3 percent. Three of the forecasters were about 87 percent at one day out — a hair over the threshold for success. Other than that, no forecaster is ever better than just assuming it won’t rain.”
His conclusion? “If you really want to know what weather will occur in Kansas City tomorrow, find out what happened in Denver today.”
I’ve had some intermittent foot pain over the last few months, and so I went and saw a podiatrist this morning. The doctor poked and prodded my feet for a bit; he watched me stand, walk, and sit; he had me describe what kinds of exercise I do; he talked to me about my shoes; in other words, he did a thorough examination. And then he recommended that I change the way I sit at my desk and buy new shoes. I asked him what I should do if it hurts again, and he told me to put some ice water in a ziplock bag to ice my foot down, and then if it was still hurting in a few months I should come back to talk to him again. At that point he frowned, paused, and said well, if we have to we’ll do an MRI, but I really think if you sit differently and change your shoes that the problem will fix itself. All in all, it was a horribly unremarkable doctor’s visit. So why am I describing it in such detail? Because A) he ordered no tests, used no fancy equipment, gave me no prescriptions, and recommended no medical devices, and B) the fact that he did none of those things made me feel a little bit… disappointed? cheated? I’m not sure, but I do know that some irrational part of my brain wanted something more.
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What is real patriotism? What does it really meant to “love America”? The pundits and politicians love to ask these questions. But they never answer them directly. Instead, these questions are usually set ups for a classic “bait-and-switch”; they ask about patriotism, but answer about something completely different. So I thought it would be useful to look at what the media usually means by “patriotism”–and compare it with what real patriotism looks like.
When pundits ask about a candidate or celebrity “Do they love America”, usually they mean one of three things:
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It’s past time that people stopped thinking about McCain as a “maverick” Senator.
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