Author: Joey deVilla

In today’s mailing from someecards, I got pointed to HappyPlace.com’s table showing the US’ ten best- and worst-educated states and how they voted, and surprise, surpise: there’s a pattern!

Table from HappyPlace.com, using data from FoxBusiness.com. Ouch. Click to see the source.

The table takes its data from, of all places, an October 15th, 2012 Fox Business article which in turn got its information from an October 15th, 2012 article in 24/7 Wall Street, which in turn got its information from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. The votes went unanimously to Obama among the best-educated states and nearly unanimously to Romney in the worst-educated ones. (Nevada is the standout, but hey, they make a living playing the odds, which as Nate Silver showed, were in Obama’s favour.)

The data in the 24/7 Wall Street article doesn’t just list the percentage of the population with bachelor’s degrees or higher in the 10 best- and worst-educated states, it also has their median household income and the percentage of the population that lives below the poverty level. I took that data, put it in a table, and colour-coded it with the way each state voted in the recent election, and here it is:

Once again, the pattern shows itself. You may want to keep this data handy the next time someone tries to sell you the malarkey that people who vote Democratic are low-achievers who just want handouts. The numbers show that they’re more likely to have gone to university, do better financially and less likely to be below the poverty line; it’s the opposite of the “window-licking layabout” stereotype of the Democratic voter that the Republicans tried to propagate.

The pattern applies to regions smaller than states as well. Take Florida (please): this electoral map, courtesy of Unsettled Christianity, shows how various regions voted and where the state’s universities are. Note that the areas that voted blue were also those with the universities:

Table from Unsettled Christianity. Click to see the source.

So it turns out that in this one case, Karl Rove was right:

Our education plan allows us to make further gains in the suburbs. It will also allow us to make gains with Hispanics and African-Americans. As people do better, they start voting like Republicans — unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.

– Karl Rove in The Daily Texan, March 19, 2001

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow,
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— In Flanders Fields, written by Lt. Col. John McCrae

I was told that I serve enough booze at my parties to be an honorary Punjabi, and I’m also from the “dance like no one is watching” school of thought. Hence this.

For no reason other than it’s a great pairing of Asian Awesome, here are Daniel Dae Kim and George Takei, taking a break from shooting an episode of Hawaii Five-0.

Dean Chambers has an action hero name. A manly name. He felt that Nate Silver’s data pointing to an Obama win on his site FiveThirtyEight was wrong, so he did what any real man would do in response to Silver’s pansy-ass predictions:

• He created UnSkewed Polls, which also used poll data but employed weightings that better fit his worldview, and
• he made sure that you knew what kind of a faaaaaaag Nate Silver was. Faaaaaaags may know interior decorating and musical theatre, but leave the math to us real men, okay?

(And seriously, dude, running your site on ColdFusion only perpetuates the stereotype that Republicans have no idea what to do with technology.)

The money quote for the second point comes from a rather catty article by Chambers published on October 25th, with the tinfoil hat titled The Far Left Turns to Nate Silver for Wisdom on the Polls. Rather than let the data speak for itself, Chambers saw fit to resort to that classic schoolyard bully tactic: ad HOMOnem…

Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound. Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he’s made out to be. His political analyses are average at best and his projections, at least this year, are extremely biased in favor of the Democrats.

Let’s put aside the petty personal attacks and look at the data, which is what a real man would do, shall we?

Here’s Chambers’ final prediction, predicting a Romney/Ryan win over Obama/Biden, 275 electoral votes to 263, with 270 needed to win. He got a number of states’ results wrong:

Here’s Silver’s final prediction, predicting an Obama/Biden win, 313 electoral votes to 225:

Here are the actual results. Silver’s electoral votes are closer to actual than Chambers’ — 303 electoral votes for Obama/Biden and 206 for Romney/Ryan, plus he’s 50 for 50 on predicting which way each state would go:

A real man would admit he was wrong, and also apologize for his pointless, unworthy, ungentlemanly cheap shots at Silver. We’ll see if Chambers is such a man.

Posted without comment, but with this set of close-ups:

…Nate Silver, who used data and did the math to accurately call the election. It all sounds very Star Trek-y: using a mathematical model that took in poll data, weighting each data source according to how accurate it’s been in the past, and factoring in other conditions that will affect the result. The talking heads in the media who cover the politics beat will have a harder time dismissing “cold equations” in favour of “warm human intuition” — as if mathematics wasn’t as equally human as “that gut feeling”.

The recent high-profile understandable-by-Joe-Average examples of how “doing the math” can pay off in real life — first Moneyball, now this — might spark a short-term interest in statistics and math in general. I’m not sure if we’ll ever see a CNN anchor explaining the differences between mean, median and mode to an audience that has trouble calculating a tip (I’d see it as a good start), but perhaps we might see more news features on how a little math can help improve your life, such as a piece on The Quantified Self, visualizing how much sugar is in that soft drink or the incredible power of compound interest. We don’t face threats that capture the American imagination the way that Sputnik did in 1957 and started the STEM (Science/Technology/Engineering/Mathematics) boom, but there are such threats to which greater STEM knowledge can lead us to solutions. A success story like Silver’s election prediction is just the kind of thing we need.

Macleans columnist Colby Cosh, one of my more seemingly unlikely internet friends, is one of Silver’s more reasonable critics. He’s taken some drubbing from Silver’s true believers (he refers to them as “Silverbacks”), but I think he makes a good point. While Silver’s method is arguably more “scientific” than a pundit’s gut instinct, he hasn’t done one thing that all good scientists and mathematicians do: he hasn’t shown his work. While we know the broad strokes of his model, the precise details are secret and thus the model is not falsifiable (a science term that’s often confused by laypeople — it means that if the model is false, there is a way to prove that it is so; this is a cornerstone of the scientific method). In a math exam, you don’t get full marks if you don’t show your work, and for this reason, Silver shouldn’t get full marks either (a decent mark, yes, but not a perfect score). There’s also the matter that like any predictive model, it won’t be correct all time, as Colby points out in this recent piece. Pure, blind faith in Silver’s model, just because it’s tagged with the impressive labels of “scientific” or “mathematical” is no different from believing the predictions of a psychic or a deck of tarot cards — you’re simply following a different mysterious force that you don’t really understand.

I’ll close with this: from one guy who juggles symbols for living to another — congratulations, Nate Silver!