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Assorted links
1. What really happened in the New Hampshire polls
2. Amazon has the best book reviews
3. Thinking with your body, not just your brain
4. Anthony Bourdain's new blog
5. Martin Feldstein: the economics of the FBI
Posted by Tyler Cowen on January 14, 2008 at 01:13 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
Second, we're talking about Democratic primary voters, NOT the general electorate. These people are the least likely to be racist.
The inference here for Replubicans is not flattering.
Posted by: Trieu Truong at Jan 14, 2008 2:42:44 PM
It would seem to me that verifying poll methodology would be very easy if the polling agencies release their methodologies. Have they done so? In the absence of this information, it may be time to break out old Occam's shaving implement and ask ourselves what the simplest explanation may be for the fact that all the polls were so wrong. And the simplest explanation points to fraud. Just my $0.02.
Posted by: djg at Jan 14, 2008 3:12:13 PM
That first article is utter nonsense. Some of the stuff is just false (HC did not have anything close to a 20-pt lead before Iowa), and the rest is just varyingly implausible speculation. The correspondent in the link appears to be some random person with a statistical background who made some cursory guesses.
I don't understand why everyone seems to claim that the polls must have been "wrong." I assume they would have been quite different if taken on election day. Indeed, Zogby said that there was a dramatic shift on Monday night that wasn't reflected very much in his results, since he uses a several-day tracking poll. Shouldn't Occam's Razor suggest that the crying incident/media inanity about said incident led to Hillary's extremely strong showing with women and very % of late deciders, which means there was an actual shift rather than every single poll (with their different methodologies) failing?
The race thing does not strike me as very plausible on its face (the effect applies to white women in NH and not anyone else?) and is taken care of decently here:
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=17dabbce-95ad-40c1-805c-5c12d0158ba8
Posted by: Dan at Jan 14, 2008 3:12:36 PM
Second, we're talking about Democratic primary voters, NOT the general electorate. These people are the least likely to be racist.
Well not so fast. It isn't just racism it is the manifestation of a desire not to be racist. Democrats are probably more likely to have this condition than republicans. In Iowa and caucases one votes infront of people. It is public. I don't think the Bradley Effect explains the entire difference between the polls and the vote but I think it may well have been a factor.
Posted by: Michael Foody at Jan 14, 2008 3:24:41 PM
One thing that always struck me about physical expression aand thought and language is that adjectives expressing scale tend to use expanding mouth movements for 'large' words and contracting mouth movements for 'little' words. This seems to be true across languages.
Posted by: Michael Foody at Jan 14, 2008 3:32:10 PM
As for New Hampshire, I haven't heard much in the media about something I think was a factor: voter fatigue. We got *blitzed* by campaigners, and I know a number of people who just threw up their hands and refused to vote for any of the people whose campaigners have been constantly calling and knocking and leaving pamphlets. The warm weather only encouraged people to go door-to-door: I wound up putting a sign on my door, "The best way to get me to vote against your candidate is to bother me at home" and that seemed to do the trick.
The Obama campaign was particularly bad about that out here in Lebanon, and I think people were turned off by it. One person I know was already saying "It's probably Obama again" every time her phone rang, a full week before the election. It only got worse after he did well in Iowa.
So, while I wouldn't discount the other suggested reasons, I think that the campaign was just overeager and over-intrusive, and they wound up turning people off.
Posted by: Dolohov at Jan 14, 2008 6:53:57 PM
In regards to the accuracy of polls, I've heard the phrase "It is simply unprecedented for so many polls to have been so wrong" and its ilk quite a bit. Perhaps it's just cynacism and a deep disbelief in the competence of cable news pollsters, but I always had the impression that polls were wrong a good deal of the time.
I wonder if there are any statistics on the accuracy of polls out there...
Posted by: Elliot at Jan 14, 2008 7:10:06 PM
"Second, we're talking about Democratic primary voters, NOT the general electorate. These people are the least likely to be racist."
I laugh at this as well.
Have you been to a working class neighborhood in Boston?
Posted by: thehova at Jan 14, 2008 9:04:12 PM
It was not just the polls that were done before the election that were wrong, but the exit polls also predicted an Obama win by several percentage points. Someone suggested that working class women are reluctant to talk to pollsters so both the pre election polls and the exit polls under sampled them. Because the Obama support was primarily from up scale voters this produced a much larger error in NH than it usually does.
Posted by: joan at Jan 14, 2008 10:20:43 PM
It was not just the polls that were done before the election that were wrong, but the exit polls also predicted an Obama win by several percentage points. Someone suggested that working class women are reluctant to talk to pollsters so both the pre election polls and the exit polls under sampled them. Because the Obama support was primarily from up scale voters this produced a much larger error in NH than it usually does.
Posted by: joan at Jan 14, 2008 10:22:41 PM
The argument that the Democrats are less likely to lie about voting for the minority seems wrong to me. To lie about your voting preference implies that you feel guilty about supporting the white candidate over the minority candidate. Now, which do you think would feel guilty about their preference... the person who has a conscious race bias, or one that has a race bias, but is embarrassed by it or tries to explain it away.
Posted by: Yogi at Jan 15, 2008 2:20:22 AM
Hayek was talking about the key role of the motor system and the body in learning as long ago as 1952, in Hayek's _The Sensory Order_. Every year brings more evidence supporting many of the revolutionary conceptions formulated by Hayek over 50 years ago. Neuro-scientist Joaquin Fuster at UCLA continues to hold up Hayek as the guy who's still ahead of the pack in putting together the whole "global brain" picture of mind, brain, learning and memory. I'd say Edelman has moved past Hayek in some important ways, but there you have it.
This "embodied learning" model may be revolutionary only in the context of which ideas dominated academia, not in the context of which ideas have been put on the table by some of the best minds of the age.
Posted by: PrestoPundit at Jan 18, 2008 2:12:00 AM
