Alt Text: When Science Wins the Popular Vote
Alt Text: When Science Wins the Popular Vote
In an ideal world, the party that understands and cares about science would always win. In this case it did.
First off, let’s talk about the polls. In spite of my previous evenly distributed joshing, not all poll aggregations are created equal. RealClearPolitics and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight were each, in their own way, built on polling data, on a foundation of polling data, and held together with polling data and, okay, a little bit of secret sauce. UnSkewed Polls took a wad of polling data and threw it into a cauldron of secret sauce, then added a 5-pound sack of wishful thinking and delivered what would most honestly be called Artifically Fact-Flavored Processed Pasteurized Data Product.
Here’s one thing I haven’t read anywhere in the conservative blogosphere. “Hey, turns out we were letting our emotions get in the way of the facts. I wonder if maybe that applies to other aspects of our understanding of the world?”
Well, I’m saying it. I let my emotions — fear that the emotion-driven ranters knew something I didn’t — get in the way of the facts. That’s because irrationality isn’t a liberal thing or a conservative thing, it’s a human thing. That’s why we have science, to correct for the irrationality of individuals.