In defense of the Iowa caucuses

An op-ed in today's New York Times assailed Iowa's caucuses as "undemocratic," criticizing them for not releasing the first round tallies from the initial caucus head-counts (see The Des Moines Register for a primer on the Democratic caucuses).

I don't like the argument that they should release the "popular vote" tallies. If you're going to have a caucus system, it doesn't make any sense to undermine the caucus results with potentially conflicting tally results.

Besides, the rationale for the caucus system is pretty good, in my opinion. The whole point of the caucus is to force candidates to pay attention to the whole state and to reward those precincts with high participation in the caucuses year in and year out. When you have a field of so many candidates, does a primary win with, say, 38% (Kerry, NH '04) really mean something? Caucuses help the winnowing out process, so that you end up with at most 3 or 4 candidates per precinct. Plus, it really does give it that town-hall feel, since the result reflects the preference of the precinct, not individuals.

Some aspects of the caucuses are truly arbitrary, to be sure... like the 15% rule (why not 10% or 20%?). Not enough is said about how much the location of that viability cut-off truly affects the final results. But because of that rule, any popular vote tally would have little to no predictive power, anyway. It'd essentially be meaningless, and would serve only the spin-doctors of losing campaigns.

Now, if you really want to change the caucus rules, as the authors of that op-ed obviously do, that's one thing. But I don't know why you would want to simultaneously keep these rules and also release preliminary tallies that would undermine the final result. Without a clear outcome, Iowa's impact on the nominating process would surely be diluted. I have no idea why the op-ed's authors, who are all Iowans, would want that to happen.

Skittles: taste the bullshit.

Hey! Remember the "guess the number of Skittles/jelly beans/M&M's in the jar!" game? That game rocked—when you won. Basically, the Responsible Adults thought it'd be a great idea to give one lucky kid 2000% of his daily sugar intake in the form of a 32 oz. bag of Skittles they dumped into an attractive-looking jar. Yeah, you remember. Anyway, I've never organized one of those, but I was thinking... how did they figure out that there were 927 Skittles in that jar?

I mean, I assume they didn't literally sit down and count them one by one (Eww! Grubby Fingers on The Sacred Skittles?! Plus, humans make mistakes!). Eh, then again, maybe they did. Gross. I should've called Health and Human Services on their asses.

Now the cleverer Adults would probably have tried to use some sort of weighing technique, but how do you weigh with enough precision to get 927 and not 928 or 938 for that matter?? This is important. It's potentially the difference between going home with 927 Skittles all to yourself, or losing to that pimply faced brat who's got pull with the Adults 'cause he tattles on your ass in exchange for Skittle-bribes, that sonuvabitch.

Presumably, the protocol would go something lie this: weigh one Skittle, then weigh the jar, then weigh the jar with the Skittles, then divide the difference by the Skittle weight. If you wanted to be less rigorous, I suppose you could trust the "32 oz." on the outside of the bag, but that's bound to be off by a couple tenths of an ounce. Pay it no mind, you say? Nay, say I! Those two-tenths of an ounce represent 5.3 precious Skittles!

In all seriousness though (and I'm a very serious person), what scales are we talking about here? If you use your normal letterweight scale, you could probably determine the Skittle's weight to be, say, 0.03 oz. That's only one significant figure! If you divide that by the total weight of the bag, you'd have like a 100-Skittle margin of error!

To do this right, you'd need an all-out analytical balance that can weigh things out on a milligram scale, so the Skittle weight ends up being something like 737.1 mg.* Then if you wanted to be really rigorous, you'd measure 3 or 4 other Skittles so you could get an average and standard error. Your Skittle weight could then be something like 736.8 ± 7 mg. If you divided by the weight of the bag, which you also determined accurately, you'd get a good estimate of the number of Skittles in that bag (complete with confidence intervals!).

But did the Adults take all of these steps to ensure honest accountability? No. They lied to us. They said there were exactly 927 Skittles in that jar. They were wrong.


*Update: Using an analytical scale, I determined the actual mass of one Skittle = 1066 ± 8 mg (N = 10, ± s.e.m.), or 0.0376 ± 0.0003 U.S. ounces. On a scale of 927 Skittles, this translates to a standard error of about 7 Skittles.

Can Joe Biden really surprise in Iowa?

So I've been reading some speculation about how Biden might "surprise everyone" and finish 3rd in the Iowa Caucus come January 3rd.

While I would love that outcome, anything to get him in the top tier, I just don't see how it happens in the Democratic caucus system in Iowa, logistically speaking.

As I understand it, you need ~15% in a precinct to be viable. Since the latest RCP avg has him at 4.3% in Iowa, are there really that many precincts where he breaks 15%? I know he's a lot of voters' 2nd choice, but I don't see how that helps if you're not viable in the first place.

Even where he does hit 15%, to make a strong showing, he'd have to peel voters away from nonviable candidates to get an appreciable share of delegates. What seems to be important is how many 2nd tier supporters have Biden as their 2nd choice. It doesn't seem to help him to be the second choice of Clinton or Obama supporters, since they'd probably be viable in most precincts.

My point is, while I can see Biden leap-frogging Richardson into 4th place, since they both draw on the same pool of foreign policy-minded "experience counts" voters, I can't see how he gets anywhere near or past Edwards. But hey, didn't someone say something about the Politics of Hope?

The Flynn effect and the conceit of IQ tests.

James Flynn
What Is Intelligence?
Cambridge; $22

I cringe whenever someone invokes his or her IQ score in the course of bullshit justification—as if the ability to "pick the shape that doesn't belong" were the only indicator of intelligence. Citing your MENSA membership doesn't make you smart; rather, it exposes the unfortunate extent of your douchebaggery.

Now, I get that pattern recognition undoubtedly plays a large role in that amorphous quality we call "intelligence," but I think we can agree that some people will respond better to geometric shapes than others. It all stems from Plato's contention that there is something mystically universal about geometry that every *intelligent* human being surely understands. The logic problems on IQ tests are concerned with Aristotelian logic, which is entirely theoretical and certainly not universal to all cultures. My point is, IQ tests don't measure intelligence; they measure your performance on IQ tests.

Which brings me to James Flynn's latest offering, What is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect, and an excellent book review by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. It turns out that absolute IQ scores have been rising worldwide at a more or less constant rate of 3 points per decade—the so-called Flynn effect. By Gladwell's estimate:

If we go back even farther, the Flynn effect puts the average I.Q.s of the schoolchildren of 1900 at around 70, which is to suggest, bizarrely, that a century ago the United States was populated largely by people who today would be considered mentally retarded.

For IQ fundamentalists, this is not what you want to hear. Average IQ scores aren't supposed to change over time. In 1996, Herrnstein and Murray infamously asserted in The Bell Curve a racial hierarchy based on IQ statistical averages. James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, recently attempted to lend credence to this claim by musing publicly that "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really" (ironically it turns out that Watson is about 12% black).

Flynn's central conclusion revolves around the idea of "cognitively challenging" environments, arguing that children brought up in such environments do better on things like IQ tests. It helps explain why children of German mothers and white or black American GIs fared similarly well on IQ tests, or why the performance of Southern Italian immigrants skyrocketed upon assimilation.

Cognitively challenging environments, like the advent of the media age, also help to explain why the most common IQ test, The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), has been "updated" four times, each version slightly more difficult, in an effort to keep pace with the rising scores (we're currently on WISC IV). That said, one of the book's weaknesses appears to be an overuse of this phrase as a catch-all for any number of already verified beneficial factors, such as two-parent affluent households with access to books, etc.

All of this should not detract from Flynn's assertion that we need a better way to measure intelligence, and that it might not be possible to have a unified worldwide test. Given the importance attached to IQ tests (childhood stigma or criminal defense pleas), it's a crucial distinction. Thankfully, What Is Intelligence?, a result of 25 years of research, takes us a long way toward understanding the cultural underpinnings of intelligence measurements.

Rudy's advisor: 9/11 gave us World War IV

Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy advisor is Norman Podhoretz, whose positions could only be described as terrifyingly ultra-hawkish. Here's an essay Podhoretz wrote in The Wall Street Journal last May entitled "The Case for Bombing Iran: I hope and pray that President Bush will do it."

Although many persist in denying it, I continue to believe that what Sept 11, 2001, did was to plunge us headlong into nothing less than another world war. I call this new war World War IV, because I also believe that what is generally known as the Cold War was actually World War III, and that this one bears a closer resemblance to that great conflict than it does to World War II. Like the Cold War, as the military historian Eliot Cohen was the first to recognize, the one we are now in has ideological roots, pitting us against Islamofascism, yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of communism; it is global in scope; it is being fought with a variety of weapons, not all of them military; and it is likely to go on for decades.

Should Giuliani be elected president and Podhoretz follow him to the White House, let me say it now... may God help us all.

Rudy Giuliani: a review.

I'll post some commentary later, but for now here are some articles. Taken as a whole, they're a sad reflection of the staggering extent of Mr. Giuliani's quite unsavory past. They also give the best insight into what a Giuliani presidency would look like (hopefully no more of this or this).


Rudy Awakening, by Rachel Morris, The Washington Monthly, Nov. 2007:

As was also the case with the White House, the events of 9/11 solidified the mindset underlying his worst tendencies. Embedded in his operating style is a belief that rules don't apply to him, and a ruthless gift for exploiting the intrinsic weaknesses in the system of checks and balances. That's why, of all the presidential candidates, Giuliani is most likely to take the expansions of the executive branch made by the Bush administration and push them further still.

Rudy the Rude, by David Freddoso, National Review Online, Feb. 14, 2007:

If Giuliani’s stances on babies, guns, and gay marriage do not sink him in the Republican primaries, he will probably suffer in a general election campaign from the fact that there is so much evidence in the public record that he is a total jerk...

It understates the case to say that a massive terror attack saved Giuliani’s political career — it would be more accurate to say that nothing short of 9/11 could have saved it.

A Tale of Two Giulianis: Politics and Power, by Michael Shnayerson, Vanity Fair, Jan. 2008:

On the back of 9/11, Rudy Giuliani refashioned himself as a national hero, a top presidential candidate—and, through his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners, became a very wealthy man. But the questionable backgrounds of some of the firm’s clients make one wonder what Rudy wouldn’t do to make a buck. As Giuliani’s former crony Bernard Kerik faces trial, the author uncovers troubling signs of greed, poor judgment, and conflict of interest.

Funny Man: Rudy Giuliani hides his rage behind ridicule, by Michael Crowley, The New Republic, Dec. 10, 2007:

For months, Giuliani has coasted above the campaign fray on the strength of his 9/11 celebrity. But, in New Hampshire this past weekend, things took a sharply rougher turn, as Giuliani and Romney bashed one another repeatedly over their respective governing records. The general election promises to be even more brutal, if recent history is a guide. Can Giuliani really suppress his inner bully? Already, one can glimpse flashes of a darker side, as when Giuliani accuses Democrats of "defeatism," "pessimism," and emulating "foreign principles."

Mayberry Man, by Peter J. Boyer, The New Yorker, Aug. 20, 2007:

When Giuliani’s tenure as mayor ended, in 2002, he left behind a city that was grateful, and more than a little relieved to see him go. He had achieved much of his program of radical reform, and he performed well on September 11th, but it had felt like an eight-year fistfight. Giuliani had fought with teachers and with Yasir Arafat, with the Brooklyn Museum and with Fidel Castro, with squeegee men, tennis fans, street venders, taxi-drivers, his own police chief, and, of course, his wife. He had repeatedly chastised New Yorkers for their incorrigible jaywalking and careless bicycling. . . Many Manhattanites felt that when the rest of the country experienced the Rudy Giuliani they knew—the flashes of pique, the slashing remark—the celebrity glow would quickly fade.

A fate worse than Bush: Rudy Giuliani and the Politics of Personality, Harper's (subscription), by Kevin Baker, Aug. 2007:

Rudolph Giuliani has, by far, the most dubious known personal history of any major presidential candidate in American history, what with his three marriages and his open affairs and his almost total estrangement from his grown children, not to mention the startling frequency with which he finds excuses to dress in women's clothing.

Bible polls, Mitt Romney, and two-inch nipples

Rasmussen poll: 75% in Arkansas, Alabama Believe Bible Literally True (Only 22% in Vermont, Massachusetts).

Oh, and how does anyone buy this Romney 2.0 conservative schtick? Ken Silverstein wrote about it in last month's Harper's. I mean, I know politicians pander, but this is ridiculous. Clintonian trangulation is nothing compared to Mitt's all-out metamorphesis.

Rolling Stone's take:

The most common thing you hear from voters after a Romney event is how impressed they are by his demeanor and delivery, his obvious vitality, by the fact that he looks like he could do this twenty-four hours a day and twice on Sunday, taking off only twenty-six minutes once a week to make monogamous, missionary-position love to his baby-factory wife.

This is amazing... "The Ron Paul Song."

The Onion is amazingly prescient. (thanks, Spring!)

In other news, Mentos can give you two-inch nipples.