Romney Handicap vs. Generic Numbers

Typically in calculating the Romney Handicap I've used Obama's margin over Romney minus his net approval rating in PPP state and national polls. But here's a national AP-Gfk poll that asks, first, whether Obama deserves re-election (he does not, 52% to 43%) and second, whether people would vote for Obama or Romney (Obama 47%, Mitt 46%) and for Obama or Gingrich (Obama 51%, Newt 42%). That's a handicap of ten points for Mitt compared to the generic re-election numbers, and eighteen (!) for Newt. I'm pleased to see this, because those numbers are both very similar to the largest numbers I was getting from the PPP data, but for both candidates the gap has narrowed a wee bit over the past few surveys. In any event, neither of these guys are strong candidates. If the Republicans had a replacement-level candidate (which is admittedly not as low a bar as in baseball), they'd be leading by a whole frickin' lot right now.

Comparing Nate Silver and Ladbrokes

From time to time I like to look at the odds that inTrade, the big political gambling/prediction site, is giving various Republicans to win the nomination. But I think I actually prefer the odds at Ladbrokes, a major British betting site. They don't just have numbers on the nomination and general election: they've also got things like Iowa caucus odds. And, by a happy coincidence, FiveThirtyEight just released their first Iowa prediction, where the bottom line is percent chance to win. So what happens if we compare them? Well, for any given odds you can calculate an implicit percent chance to win, so if we do that with the Ladbrokes odds and compare them to 538's numbers we find that... Ladbrokes likes every single candidate more than Nate does. This, of course, is because the bookies like to give you shorter odds than you deserve, so that they make money in the end. Their implicit probabilities of winning Iowa add up to 124.8% between the eight candidates. But if we divide out by this number, and scale it down to a total of 100%, we find a fairly strong correlation between the two methodologies. Nate gives Newt a 49.6% chance of winning, compared to 28.2% for Ron Paul, 10.6% for Romney, 5.2% for Rick Perry, 4.1% for Bachmann, 1.6% for Santorum, and 0.7% for Huntsman. Ladbrokes, by contrast, gives Newt 46.4%, Paul 26.7%, Romney 11.4%, Perry 5.2%, Bachmann 4.7%, Santorum 3.2%, Huntsman 1.2%, and Gary Johnson 0.4% (he's not in the 538 forecast, I think). The big takeaway is that Nate likes the front-runners, Gingrich and Ron Paul, a lot better than Ladbrokes, giving them a combined 77.8% chance to win against 73.1% at Ladbrokes. Conversely, Ladbrokes is slightly overselling the odds of a Romney, Perry, or Bachmann win, and vastly overselling Santorum and Huntsman (giving them 5% combined instead of 2.3%; that's more than double!). Do not bet on Rick Santorum to win Iowa on Ladbrokes; they're giving you awful odds.

Of course, you shouldn't actually bet on Newt or Ron Paul either, because Nate only likes them better than Ladbrokes' oddsmakers once you scale down to a sum of 100%. Overall, though, it's a pretty impressive alignment: the correlation between Nate's odds and the Ladbrokes odds is around 99.9%. (This is impressive for Ladbrokes, by the way, since we assume Nate knows what he's talking about in advance.)

Category Confusion and Religion

There's an article in the New York Times about religion, claiming to take a kind of "reasonable center" view between the "True Believers" and the "Angry Atheists." Never mind the general false-equivalence complaint to make about that kind of worldview; let's look at the way the author describes these so-called "nones," who don't fit in any well-defined religious box:

Nones don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people — more loving, less angry — then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.” (We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”)

There are a couple of problems here. One is that the "truth is what works" maxim could mean something fairly specific in a party-line scientific worldview: purported explanations of the world had damn well better be able to actually explain the world, as we observe it, or they're not true. Richard Dawkins likes to use this principle against various fundamentalist religious types, or a certain kind of "relativist" who disputes the notion of any real "truth": when you're at 30,000 feet being hurtled through the sky in a tiny little metal container, it's true that the theories of aerodynamics that predict that a plane with appropriately-shaped wings will be able to fly. Likewise, flu vaccines are based on the predictions made by evolutionary theory, and they work and fundamentalists who "don't believe in" evolution are typically perfectly happy to make use of the fact that they work. Alternately, "the truth is what works" could mean, "one ought to believe whatever it will make one the happiest to believe." This is a very different statement, but it sort of feels like that's the use to which the idea is being put in the above paragraph: who cares if it's true, as long as it makes us feel good to believe in it?

A Point About Equality

I'm reading some things about Equal Protection with regard to sex discrimination, and among other things (like that Phyllis Schlafly is absurdly annoying to read) I'm having the following thought about equality: being on the "winning" end of an unequal, oppressive caste system is not a good thing. It would be much better indeed to be part of a generally equal society. Now, there's a very limited sense in which this is not true: some material social resources are simply limited in supply, and therefore when the master class can steal the servant class' resources through the organs of social power, it "wins." It gets more stuff. Great.

Of course, to compensate for what might be a somewhat larger amount of material goods for your master class, you participate in a great injustice, and are treated as participating in a great injustice. The breakdown of mutual respect for one another as free and equal citizens that someone like John Rawls is concerned with in unjust societies doesn't just hurt the oppressee, for those who are oppressed will surely not respect their oppressors in this way. They have no reason to, and yet, if you are someone demographically within the group on the "winning" end of the injustice who believes passionately that this injustice is wrong, you are likely to get the same disrespect as anyone else who shares your skin color, or anatomy, or sexual preference, or whatever.

Then we have another dynamic, that just as members of the subjugated class are conditioned to a life of inferiority, members of the subjugating class are conditioned to a life of superiority. This is dramatically visible in the case of sex discrimination, where the flip-side to women's being conditioned to a life of abandoning personal ambition to do thousands of hours of unpaid household work is that men are conditioned to a life of neglecting one's personal life and loved ones in order to work long hours in a boring job to make money. Women, justly, are likely to presume that any man they meet in a bar is like Barney Stinson, a calculating predator just trying to get them in bed and walk away the next day (or even worse, as Barney always goes to the trouble of "convincing" the woman to sleep with him, instead of resorting to some form of coercion); this hurts decent, innocent men, and yet they can't really object. Likewise, men are made to feel that if they aren't Barney Stinson, they're not "real" men.

You get the point. In terms of pure material goods, at best we're talking about a zero-sum game when we play at oppression. It might be substantially negative-sum: promoting women's equality in the workplace dramatically increases economic output. But then on top of that at-best zero-sum game, we've got the vastly negative-sum game in terms of nonmaterial goods. Society is just made worse by oppression. It's made worse for the oppressed, obviously, and it's made worse for the oppressors, even if they don't notice it but especially for the ones who do. That's why men should be every bit as much feminists as women, and why white people should be every bit as opposed to discrimination against African-Americans as those African-Americans are: that is, completely opposed. Discrimination and oppression hurt everyone, ultimately.

Jose Reyes is Gone, Long Live Jose Reyes

Ugh.

That was my first reaction to the news that the Marlins had drastically upped their offer to Reyes, and were likely to sign him last night. That kept being my reaction through the various developments about the details of the offer, to the time when it was officially announced that my favorite active baseball player in all the world is no longer a member of my favorite team. Ugh.

In fact, that kept being my reaction right until the time I went to bed last night. Ugh, I don't want to think about it, this sucks, etc. But I find that, somewhat to my surprise, on waking up today I have a less viscerally repulsed feeling about the whole thing. Instead my reaction has sorted itself into fairly specific judgments of the various parties involved in the whole affair:

Romney the East German Robot: I Told You So

As this Presidential campaign was beginning, one of the things I said about it was that I have a nearly unlimited faith in Mitt Romney's ability to make people who want to like him in paper fail to like him in reality. Check out this quote from Jonah Goldberg, a prominent conservative pundit-type:

Moreover, and this is somewhat unfair to him, he physically, personality-wise, comes across as if he was designed by East German scientists to be the perfect android politician. And his answers come across that way.

I still think Romney's failure to win this nomination, should he ultimately fail, is more about his weakness on health-care than anything else, including his stupendous lack of charisma. (I even understand the logic by which Republicans don't want to anoint as their standard-bearer to challenge Obama someone whose signature achievement is virtually identical to Obama's signature achievement.) But that's old news, and presumably doesn't account for much of the decline in his actual favorability ratings among Republican voters, as chronicled by PublicPolicyPolling. It's the whole "unpleasant" thing that accounts for that, I'd wager. This is incidentally a big part of why I was never scared of Romney as the general-election nominee as compared to Mike Huckabee, who manages to get even people who disagree with him on the majority of the issues to like him. Romney makes people who do agree with him dislike him. Now sure, Romney was a much, much stronger candidate than anyone else in the Republican field (*cackles*), but that's grading on a curve. Taking a more absolute view of things, Romney's been spotting Obama 9-10% of margin in recent state polling compared to the President's approval ratings. That's not a strong candidate, and the reason Romney's such an objectively weak candidate is that he's just plain unlikeable. I told you so.

The Modified DH: No Way.

I just read a proposal regarding the impending destruction of the National and American Leagues, and the implication that destruction has on the current major difference between the rules in the two leagues, the designated hitter. (Yes, destruction is the right word: two sets of teams of odd order who will be encountering each other every day are not separate leagues, but separate divisions.) It feels problematic to maintain the two separate DH rules if interleague play becomes an everyday matter, since any American League full-time DH on the order of David Ortiz would have to sit out routinely but any National League team would be unable to stock a full-time DH and would thus suffer a disadvantage in American League parks. It seems likely that the result will be the adoption of the DH across the entirety of Major League baseball, and the abolition of pitchers hitting in North America.

Instead, this proposal would adopt a uniform DH rule across the two leagues, but with the DH replacing one of the eight players other than the pitcher. The only advantages listed of this system compared to a uniform standard DH system are that pitchers would see better defense behind them, the strategic elements of pitchers hitting, double-switches, late pinch-hitters, etc. would remain a part of the game, and both leagues would have to change their rules rather than the NL just accepting the dominance of the AL's system. It's also asserted that simply not being the AL-style DH is an advantage. But the normal DH does, or should, promote good defense, as teams will not have to "find a position" for a strong-hitting, weak defensive player by bumping a stronger defensive player from their lineup.

More fundamentally, the argument against the DH is not the "stylistic" one that double-switches are cool. They are, but that's not the point. The old philosophy of baseball was that nine people were playing the game at any one time, and each of them had a "dual mandate": produce offensively and contribute defensively. These two requirements are in tension. In football they don't have dual mandates like this; every player only has one thing they're supposed to do. Baseball requires every player to play both sides of the ball, and earn their keep between the two skills. Some players do this by hitting 40 home runs a year and standing on top of first base with a glove, catching (most of the) throws from the other infielders. Some do this by playing a masterful shortstop or center field, or by being a superb defensive catcher, and holding a respectable batting average in the mid-to-low .200's. Others do it by being a pitcher, which is such a tremendous contribution to the team's defensive effort that it can "carry" a negligible offensive performance.

But the dual mandate is obviously most stressful on pitchers. Put bluntly, it is essentially impossible to be simultaneously a competent Major League pitcher and a competent Major League hitter. Pitching is just too much of a specialized craft; to succeed at it you need to devote nearly zero time to your hitting, which regardless of your offensive talent will make you a lousy hitter. We can see that this dual mandate is orders of magnitude more onerous on pitchers than on any other position player by seeing that, in 2011, National League pitchers hit .142/.177/.184, while the lowest batting average from any other position was the .250 from catchers and the lowest on-base percentage and slugging percentage were the .314 and .374, respectively, from shortstops. The difference between the weakest position at each basic offensive rate state and pitchers was .108/.134/.190, while the difference between the weakest and the strongest position was .021/.036/.077. Pitchers are categorically less able to pursue offensive competence than any other position player.

So the Designated Hitter rule, while it does constitute a distinct and categorical breach of the principle of duality, is by far the most justifiable breach of that principle. Adding a second DH, for the weakest offensive position player on a team, would be a breach of a vastly greater magnitude. Compared to the difference between a pitcher's hitting skills and a shortstop's, the gap between a shortstop and a first-baseman, or an American League designated hitter, is trivial. Subtracting the initial DH would do nothing to dam up this gaping hole in the fundamental principle that people play both sides of the ball. If we're inevitably tending toward the football model, then it's inevitable and there's nothing to do but be sore about it. We shouldn't welcome that move as being preferable to the current DH system, which after all has a great chasm lying between it and the slippery slope of pure football-ism. If the two leagues really are going to give up their league-ness in 2013, and if we can't get rid of the DH altogether, then the best remaining option is just to accept that the DH is in, everywhere, for now.