Patrick

Ryan Rainey Wins

 Posted by at 3:16 pm  2 Responses »
Nov 072012
 

For the purposes of our prediction contest, I’m going to call the election at this moment in time and declare the results currently displayed here as the official ones. Theoretically, we could wait around for a Florida recount and for the result to be finalized, but considering how little you all care about this contest already, I can only imagine that you will care less a month from now.

Thus, the results can be summarized by the title of this post. Ryan Rainey predicted every state correctly in the presidential race and every Senate race except for North Dakota correctly. He also was the closest on the popular vote and the vote percentages in the Baldwin/Thompson Senate race. Runner up goes to Sam for missing only Florida and the ND Senate race.

Final results here.

Lastly, I would like to call out Xenu: Lord of Everything for being stupid enough for thinking that we couldn’t catch you cheating by changing your predictions afterward, but also for caring enough about this contest that you felt a need to cheat.

NPS Election Prediction Contest Update

 Posted by at 1:28 pm  1 Response »
Nov 052012
 

With 7 sets of predictions, including my own, already entered into the contest, there are a couple of interesting observations that can be made. All 7 of our prognosticators think that Obama will win Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin, lose North Carolina and win the Electoral College, though Xenu, Carl and Kurt call for him to lose the popular vote in doing so. All but one, though not the same one, have Romney winning Florida and Obama winning Nevada and New Hampshire. 5 call for Obama to win Virginia. The predictions were most split in Colorado with a slim majority of 4 favoring Obama to win the state.

6 of the 7 predict that Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party will reach 1% or higher, though I am the only one to predict that he breaks the 2% threshold. 5 of the 7 predict he will do better than the 1980 LP ticket which got 1.06% which is the best result every for the Libertarian Party. Even the 0.8% predicted by Adam would be the second best showing ever and likely break the 1980 record of 921,000 votes.

Some of our predictors also failed to check to make sure their popular vote prediction totals add up to less than 100%, forgetting either that each vote can only be for one candidate or making the extraordinarily bold prediction that votes for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, all the other candidates on the ballot in various states and people who write in Santa Claus will amount to less than 0.1% of the vote.

Our predictors also agree that Republican Senate candidate Jeff Flake will win in Arizona, Republican Congressman Rick Berg will become Senator Berg from North Dakota, and Democrat Sherrod Brown will be reelected in Ohio. 6 out of 7 like McCaskill to defeat Republican Todd “I Wouldn’t Pass 6th Grade Heath Class” Aiken in Missouri and Republican Dean Heller to be reelected in Nevada. 5 of the 7 favor Democrats, Murphy in Connecticut and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin, along with Republicans, Mourdock in Indiana and Rehberg in Montana. 4 of the 7 call for Scott Brown to upset Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts.

Remember there is still time to enter your prediction. I will lock entries when I leave to go work at the polls tomorrow morning.

NPS Election Prediction Contest

 Posted by at 3:51 pm  No Responses »
Oct 302012
 

Introducing the 2012 North Park Street election prediction contest. The rules are simple. Predict the winners of 9 swing states and 10 potentially uncertain Senate elections. The person with the most right wins. Since if more than 3 people enter, the likelihood of a tie is fairly great, the tie breaker is a prediction of the popular vote to the nearest tenth. Closest guess is determined by the sum of the differences between your guess and Obama and Romney’s actual percentages. For example, if you guess Obama wins 49.0 to 47.5 and he actually wins 49.5 to 47.5, your guess is off by a total of 1.0.

Because I needed to include at least one candidate that I actually voted for, you also are to guess the percentage of the popular vote that Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson receives. That number will also serve as the third tie breaker if needed.

The Senate tie breaker is popular vote totals in the Wisconsin Senate race, so that we can also declare a winner of the Senate prediction contest.

As always there are no prizes other than any you can make up for yourself, such as pride.

Counting on the good faith efforts of the NPS community not to change other people’s predictions we are going to use a publicly editable Google spreadsheet for the contest. Remember, it saves a record of who makes what changes.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnmCmnnrNZmNdFhTUlBDcktSZ2g0azVoaTl6UUJ0dXc

Thoughts on Paul Ryan as Romney’s VP pick, Part 1

 Posted by at 11:44 am  2 Responses »
Aug 122012
 

My years of debate experience have taught me that the most fundamental choice you have to make when deciding upon a strategy is whether or not to engage in a debate over the framework (Sidenote: If you’re unfamiliar with the term framework in the context of debate, the framework determines how various incompatible values are evaluated against each other. For example if an action saves a life, but violates a people’s rights, the framework would determines whether the good done by saving a life is more important than the bad done by violating rights. In this case a utilitarianism would value the life while deontology would favor rights.) or just concede it and spend all of your time winning on the issues themselves.

If both sides choose to engage on both the framework and on the issues, the winner of the framework debate nearly always will emerge victorious because there simply isn’t enough time to articulate positions on the issues that function in both frameworks and each side will tend to craft their arguments on the issues to function best in their own framework. Conceding the framework and choosing to debate in your opponent’s framework can be a great strategy option because it allows you to not bother spending time introducing your own competing framework and focus entirely on the issues. Of course it has the downside of letting your opponent choose the framework.

An election can be thought of as a debate of sorts with the question as hand being who should hold the office in question and the judges are each voter. In a debate competition, the framework is determined by the debaters. In an election, it is set by each voter who gets to decide what issues they care about and what criteria they will use to determine for whom they will cast their vote. Candidates face a similar strategy choice to debaters in that they can either choose to only talk about the issues voters want to hear about or they can attempt to change the framework and make voters care about the issues that they want to talk about and convince voters to agree with them. This makes choosing to try to change the framework much more difficult for candidates. However, just like a debate round, when a candidate can engage in the framework debate and win, they very nearly always end up as the winner of the election.

Influencing the framework of elections is not just the goal of politicians. It’s exactly what Grover Norquist and his tax pledge are an attempt to do. Though the goal of outside groups and people is to have an impact on policy rather than trying to influence the outcomes of elections.

It is this basic campaign strategy decision that makes the choice of Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s VP so interesting.

In the history of political candidates, there may not ever have been a candidate who chooses to run away from engaging in the framework debate as much as Mitt Romney. Romney’s campaign strategy over the years has basically consisted of trying to decide what voters want a candidate to say and then saying those things.

It’s harder to say where he ranks historically, but in the present day I don’t think there is a political figure who is more effective at deciding the framework of elections than Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan is so effective at deciding what issues will decide an election that the issues he wants to talk about not only decide his own elections, but they decide elections across the country.

Most speculation about VP choices centers around how they change the ticket. The assumption is that Ohio voters want a candidate from Ohio and therefore Rob Portman would be a good pick because he is from Ohio. The logic behind Marco Rubio being a good pick is that he is Hispanic and some voters want a Hispanic on the ticket. That was why McCain picked Palin and Obama picked Biden. Obama thought voters wanted experience and Biden brought that to the ticket. McCain thought that voters wanted a good looking Alaskan hockey mom and turned out to be completely wrong about that.

That’s what most analysis of the Paul Ryan pick centers around. People are talking about the fact that he is from Wisconsin or is a white male. Paul Ryan isn’t that kind of politician. He doesn’t win elections because voters in his district inherently want someone like Paul Ryan to represent them. He wins elections because he makes voters want someone like Paul Ryan to represent them.

For the choice to make any sense, it has to come with a complete reversal of strategy from the Romney campaign. Paul Ryan is not a choice that turns the Republican ticket into one that more Americans want to vote for. Up until now Romney’s entire strategy has been to transform himself into what voters wanted. Paul Ryan isn’t going to help him do that. What Ryan helps him do it is convince voters that they want to vote for a Romney/Ryan ticket.

Polling numbers up to this point make it pretty clear that voters currently prefer Obama to Romney. The old Romney strategy would have relied on either voters changing what they wanted on their own, perhaps due to continued bad economic news, or the ability to turn the Romney ticket into what voters wanted. The first option is entirely out of their control. This pick is a signal that the Romney campaign has decided they don’t want to try the second. If they were trying that, the pick would have been someone like Marco Rubio or Nikki Haley. Instead they will try to convince voters that Romney is the candidate they want.

Whether or not it is a good choice is essentially a question about which strategy is best because I think it is pretty clear that Paul Ryan was the best choice for changing the framework of the election. I tend to think this is a good strategy because I’m not sure if it was possible for a Romney ticket to transform itself into something voters preferred to Obama no matter who he had picked to be the VP.

Part 2 will hopefully be published in a day or 2 and will contain some more of my thoughts on Paul Ryan. Both posts are being cross-posted to both of my blogs.

In Opposition to the NCAA’s Handling of Penn State

 Posted by at 11:40 pm  No Responses »
Jul 252012
 

Ever since the NCAA’s punishment of Penn State was announced 2 days ago, I haven’t been quite comfortable with it. I needed a few days and to read some more of what the NCAA officials had to say about it before I really felt comfortable trying to articulate exactly why that was.

However, an article that I read this morning that contained several quotes from various people, namely NCAA president Mark Emmert, confirmed several of the thoughts I had about the situation and affirmed in my mind that they were the correct feelings about the situation. All quotes that follow in this post will be from that article.

The basis of my concern is namely that, despite the terrible, terrible things that happened in Happy Valley over the past few decades, Penn State did not violate a single NCAA rules. Big 12 commissioner Bob Bowlsby echoed my concerns:

In Dallas, former Stanford athletic director and new Big 12 Conference commissioner Bob Bowlsby also wondered about whether the college sports governing body should be stepping into a criminal matter.

“I don’t know that it is absolutely clear on what basis this becomes an NCAA issue,” he said at football media days.

The issue is not necessarily that the NCAA took a stance on ethical issues that have nothing to do with sports. The article mentions examples of NCAA stances on American Indian mascots and South Carolina’s use of the Confederate flag. Though my own views don’t exactly mirror the NCAA’s on those issues, I’m fine with their course of action because they clearly both laid out their stance on the issue and the actions that they were going to take as a result. In both cases they laid out new rules and punishments rather than handing out punishments ex post facto for actions that at the time did not violate their rules.

Despite that, I do recognize the unusual circumstances in this case, and am sympathetic to the case made by Emmert that this situation is unique and called for a new approach.

Perhaps, I would have been willing to give the NCAA a pass in this case, except for one rather glaring omission from their punishment – a clarification of why Penn State is being punished. So, yes I know *why* Penn State is being punished, but I’m still not sure exactly why. Is it because children were molested and raped on this campus by one of their football coaches? Is it because Joe Paterno and other administrators acted to cover up the abuse? Was it because those same people enabled Sandusky’s terrible crimes against boys to continue? I’m not really sure and the NCAA’s actions and statements are just baffling.

We gain some insight into what behavior the NCAA was trying to punish from the time period when wins were vacated. All wins from 1998 to the present were vacated. Interestingly enough, this makes Penn State’s 1997 win over Wisconsin, a game Penn State won with Mike McQueary starting at quarterback. The very same Mike McQueary who witnessed Sandusky raping a boy in the shower in 2002. I tend to agree with Kurt that the penalty is unjustified, but for slightly different reasons. Namely, that it is both possible to be a terrible human being for reasons unrelated to football and at the same time win football games in full accordance with the rules governing those football games. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that there are a large number of people who are both good at winning football games and bad people outside of football. In contrast to Kurt, I fully support revisionist sports history when appropriate, whether to vacate wins from teams that used ineligible players or to correct blown calls on the 27th out of a perfect game (I don’t care what baseball history books say, Armando Galarraga threw a perfect game).

When you compare the timeline of vacated games to the time line of Jerry Sandusky’s abuse, it becomes quite clear that the vacating of wins was designed to punish the cover up of the abuse rather than the abuse itself. This is evident from both the starting point and ending point of the vacated wins. Sandusky’s abuse started in (or very likely before) 1994. Wins were not vacated until the season when Joe Paterno and school administrators first learned of the abuse, 1998. Every single win in 2011 was also vacated. Including the last game of the season, after Sandusky was arrested, Paterno was fired and every other coach and administrator who was involved in the cover up was no longer working for Penn State. Only the ongoing cover up could justify vacating that win.

This punishment is clearly in contrast to the rhetoric employed by the NCAA that it was Sandusky’s crimes that were the darkest days at Penn State:

Emmert told Ley he saw multiple media reports labeling the NCAA’s ruling as the darkest day in Penn State history. Emmert disagreed with that sentiment.

“(Monday) was a very, very bad day for Penn State University, but it wasn’t as dark as the day boys were being abused on their campus,” Emmert told Ley. “It wasn’t as dark a day as when their former assistant coach was convicted. It wasn’t as dark a day as any number of tragedies that they may have endured on that campus.”

The crime versus the cover up is a difficult ethical situation that I don’t know if I can make any solid statements about, but lets be clear, the NCAA’s actions demonstrate that it was the cover up and not the crime that was the worst thing happening in State College, PA.

The worst part of it all were the justifications for the suite of penalties handed out that were given by Emmert in multiple quotes in the article. That

“What we’re trying to do with these sanctions isn’t just penalize and punish the school, but help them reshape that culture so that they never say the culture of hero worship or the culture of sport is ever going to overwhelm our values again so that we don’t make the right choice at the right time,” Emmert told Ley.

and that

“One of the grave dangers stemming from our love of sports is that the sports themselves can become too big to fail, indeed, too big to even challenge,” Emmert said. “The result can be an erosion of academic values that are replaced by the value of hero worship and winning at all costs. All involved in intercollegiate athletics must be watchful that programs and individuals do not overwhelm the values of higher education.”

and that

“If you find yourself in a situation where the athletic culture is taking precedence over the academic culture,” Emmert added, “then a variety of bad things can occur.”

I’m not sure whether to laugh or to go vomit.

The situation at Penn State had nothing to do with academics. By nearly all accounts Joe Paterno did an exemplary job of handling the academics of his football team. Jerry Sandusky raping boys in the locker room had nothing to do with academics. It seems to be a case where the culture of hero worship needed to change, but that has nothing to do with academics.

If this punishment is really about stopping an athletic culture from taking precedence over an academic culture, I think about half the SEC needs a multi-year bowl ban and to be docked just as many scholarships as Penn State. Just to put things in perspective, Nick Saban was greeted by “throngs of screaming Alabama fans” when stepped off of the airplane at the airport when he was hired by Alabama. That was just for signing a contact to coach at Alabama.

Of course, I don’t think any person is seriously suggesting that this is actually about stopping a college culture from over emphasizing athletics, engaging in hero worship, or failing to sufficiently care about academics.

The NCAA president was much more honest when he said that

“This is so public, so shocking, so disturbing that it called for a very different approach.”

Yes. The NCAA actions was a response, not so much to the actions of anyone at Penn State, but to the media and resulting public outcry over the situation. They felt they had to so something and fast. This was the worst PR fiasco in the history of the NCAA and they responded with the worst punishments in NCAA history.

I have to wonder what the difference was between the situation at Penn State and the nearly 10 alledged cases of rape and sexual assault by women against the University of Colorado football team from about 1999 through 2004 when Gary Barnett was the coach there including one by a female kick who was on the team that resulted in the worst sanctions ever for Penn State and as far as I can find absolutely no punishment for Colorado. Both schools had football programs with a culture of looking the other way in the face of rape and sexual assault allegations against members of the football program.

Was the punishment they ended up deciding on for Penn State fair? I’m not really sure. But, I am quite certain that the justification for that punishment was terrible and sets a terrible precedent for the future as a result. The message sent by the NCAA seems to be that if you are going to do bad things, we don’t really care as long as you don’t cover it up and create a huge storm of media criticism that makes us look bad. The fact that I wonder if Penn State’s punishment would have been different if the Freeh Report came out after the season had started when college football game discussions and NFL topics would dominate sports media instead of the middle of July when sports radio shows are desperate for anything other than baseball to talk about highlights all that was wrong about the NCAA’s handling of this situation.

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