Low Probability Events

1. Zimmerman, in his car, sees Martin "acting suspiciously" (walking while black, ducking into a doorway during a rain shower.)
2. He calls 911.  The operator tells him *not* to follow Martin and that police are on the way.
3. He follows Martin anyway.  He is carrying a gun in violation of his "neighborhood watch" policy.
4. Martin freaks out.
5. At some point, Zimmerman stops his car, gets out, and confronts Martin.
6. Fisticuffs ensue.  Zimmerman, despite outweighing Martin by 100 lbs, gets the worst if it.
7. When Martin has him on the ground and is slamming his head into the pavement, Zimmerman assumes he's in deadly danger, pulls his gun, and shoots Martin.

There's a nasty situation that small plane pilots can get into called a "graveyard spiral". The plane is losing altitude, so the pilot tries to pull up. But it's not in a dive, it's in a spiral. Pulling the nose up just tightens the spiral. This continues until the plane hits the ground or the spiral gets so tight the wings come off. This is, according to the best guess, what killed JFK Jr.

To get out of a graveyard spiral, the pilot has to ignore the seat of his pants, which is telling him he's headed straight for the ground, and get the wings level. At this point, the plane is no longer in a spiral and the pilot can pull out of the dive.

Try to do it backwards and you're dead.

We're in the economic equivalent of a graveyard spiral. Unemployment is high, so consumer demand is low. With low demand, businesses lay off more people, which reduces demand. Unemployed people don't pay income tax, so tax revenues go down. Spending doesn't, so deficits go up. And because there's a Democrat in the White House, the Republicans get all bent out of shape over "the Deficit". (Funny, deficits weren't important under Reagan or either Bush.)

Trying to "fix the deficit" by cutting Government spending is like trying to pull the nose up in a graveyard spiral. It won't work and will only cause a serious crash. Cut Government spending, we lose more jobs, which reduces tax revenues, which increases the deficit ... Economically, this is called "Hooverism". It's what Herbert Hoover did to try and fix the Great Depression. Didn't work, bigtime. It won't work any better now than it did then.

To break out of the spiral, we need to put folks back to work. We have the questionable advantage that we've been deferring infrastructure maintenence for far too long, so there's a lot of work to do. We also have the real advantage that folks ::cough::China::cough:: are willing to lend us money at, effectively, negative interest rates.

Once we get people back to work, we can go back and look at the deficit again. Ideally, all we'll have to do is sit back and watch it shrink as the economy picks up.

It's no secret that politicians, political pundits, and political reporters are innumerate and scientifically illiterate. It's a job requirement.  Can't let those nasty old facts get in the way.  Joe Scarborough's famous attack on Nate Silver is just one of the most notable examples before the actual election results started coming in and the real meltdowns started:

Nate Silver says this is a 73.6% chance that the president's going to win. Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73.6% — they think they have a 50.1% chance of winning.

.... Anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue [that] they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops, and microphones for the next ten days, because they're jokes.

— Joe Scarborough, Morning Joe, 2012-10-29

So what's Joe doing here?  There's the obvious answer that everybody in the news media absolutely needs to see the election as a "horse race".  As long as it's a close race, they can keep everybody interested.  If everybody agrees that one side is going to win, folks lose interest.  The pundits, not having facts (which they can't recognize) or math (which they can't understand), fall back on "momentum" and "energy" and "excitement" and other things that can't really be quantified.  Journalists -- want to cause a panic?  Force a politician to put a number on something.  And follow up on it.

What I suspect he's doing (other than supporting his favorite candidate, of course) is making a very common error. He's assuming that, since there are only two possible outcomes, that each has a "probability" of 50%. After all, it has to be one or the other.  That's not how it works.

Let's use a gambling example.  (After all, probability theory was originally developed to calculate gambling odds.) Assume we have a roulette wheel, but instead of the standard layout we have 100 numbers that are either red or blue.  Let's say, so we have a number to think about, that there are 75 blue numbers and 25 red numbers.  Over a very large number of plays, red will come up 25% of the time and blue will come  up 75% of the time.  Basic probability.  We'd have no trouble saying that "blue has a 75% chance of winning."

However, we're going to introduce a problem — we're only going to play once.  Now, what's the probability of blue winning?  Well, nothing has changed — it's still 75%.  Let's change the question a bit:  Who is going to win, red or blue?  We can't say.  As long as there is at least one number for a color, it has a chance of winning.  It may be a small chance, but it's not zero.  If we have 99 blue numbers and one red number, we can't guarantee that blue will win.  After all, lightning does strike; somebody does win the lottery.

And of course, let's not forget the tinfoil hat explanation.  The fix was in; they had to make it look like Romney pulled off a not-completely-unexpected upset.

The Republican Super-PACs spent a jaw-dropping amount of money on this campaign, to amazingly little effect. Karl Rove, in particular, is going to have a lot of uncomfortable explaining to do*. I hope the reason he failed so spectacularly is that his style of campaigning isn't working any more.

Rove's campaigns are about as "content free" as it's possible to get — remember that his chief beneficiary was George W. Bush, about as close to a completely "empty suit" as you can get. His chief gimmick is to accuse the opponent of the candidates's failings — if your candidate has a drinking problem, accuse the opponent of being an alcoholic, no matter how far-fetched, and do it first. That way, the opponent's response looks like "you're another!" sour grapes.

The campaigns are also relentlessly negative — if you're selling an empty suit, you really don't have anything positive to say.

The icing on the turd, of course, is that he lies** constantly. He is fully aware that his lies will end up has headlines and that any "corrections" will be at the bottom of page 3 and published after people have already made up their minds.

In general, the Rove strategy is to win elections, by whatever means necessary.  Governing after the election?  Doesn't care.  The opinion of non-voters (especially foreigners)?  Doesn't care.  The chief result of this, of course, is to make the voters cynical, destroy trust, and in general, pollute the discourse.

Not what we need, to put it mildly.

* The classic advice at this point is "make a run for the border".  In this case, that won't work very well ...

** Not really lies, but bullshit. (See "On Bullshit", by Harry Frankfurt). In his definition, bullshit is statements made to have an immediate effect with no regard to their truth or falsity.