Exhibit A

In the course of doing some projections about what it would take for Phil Mickelson to pass Tiger Woods in the World Rankings this week (answer: not a whole lot), I happened to have the following idea: what tournament contributes the most absolute points to a player's World Ranking? It's not necessarily an obvious question, because tournaments won a long time ago get weighted very lightly. So, just for fun, here are the answers for the current top 10. Assuming we like the OWGR formulas, these are the tournaments which most make us think these ten people are good golfers:

1. Martin Kaymer: 2010 PGA Championship, Win, 100 Rank Points, .7826 Weighting, 78.26 Adjusted Points
2. Lee Westwood: 2010 Open Championship, 2nd, 60 Rank Points, .7391 Weighting, 44.35 Adjusted Points
3. Luke Donald: 2011 WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship, Win, 76 Rank Points, 1.000 Weighting, 76.00 Adjusted Points
4. Graeme McDowell: 2010 US Open Championship, Win, 100 Rank Points, .6957 Weighting, 69.57 Adjusted Points
5. Tiger Woods: 2010 Chevron World Challenge, 2nd, 30 Rank Points, .9565 Weighting, 28.70 Adjusted Points
6. Phil Mickelson: 2010 Masters Tournament, Win, 100 Rank Points, .5870 Weighting, 58.70 Adjusted Points
7. Paul Casey: 2011 Volvo Golf Champions, Win, 38 Rank Points, 1.000 Weighting, 38.00 Adjusted Points
8. Rory McIlroy: 2010 Quail Hollow Championship, Win, 64 Rank Points, .6196 Weighting, 39.65 Adjusted Points
9. Matt Kuchar: 2010 The Barclays, Win, 70 Rank Points, .8043 Weighting, 56.30 Adjusted Points
10. Steve Stricker: 2010 Northern Trust Open, Win, 58 Rank Points, .4891 Weighting, 28.37 Adjusted Points

The first thing I notice is that I think all of these are correct. These are the single biggest reasons for thinking these guys are good. This, in turn, makes me have a little more confidence in the way the people at the OWGR do things. It's interesting to me that Tiger and Stricker are the two with the least compelling single reason to think they're good. In Tiger's case he's really just coasting on the handful of wins from the 2009 season, none of which are as big a deal at this point as the Chevron runner-up but of which there are several. If those drop out and nothing replaces them, then uh-oh, it'll just be his 2nd-place at a 16-man formerly unofficial invitational in December. This is, also, accurate, I think: the first thing I'd mention if you ask me why I think Tiger deserves to be considered a good golfer now is the Chevron, but next I'd probably talk about the fact that just two years ago he won six tournaments. You also see each of the last four majors represented here, but not all four winners: Louis Oosthiuzen isn't in the top 10, but the man who finished right behind him (though a fair way back) is.

Anyway, not an earth-shattering analysis or anything, but I think it's interesting.

Systemically Underestimating Uncertainty

One of Nate Silver's big things as far as the science of modeling is concerned is that he thinks people have a tremendous tendency to underestimate uncertainty. People will say, you know, "The Republicans are guaranteed to hold the House," but the truth is that at this point the margin of error on a forecast for the 2012 House results has to be ±50 seats. Heading into last year's election day he said that his model predicted that there was no way to call the result within 5 seats either way and have a better than even chance of being right. Well, I think I'm certainly seeing this phenomenon in how people discuss the Mets' chances in 2011. The consensus seems to be that, if the Mets are lucky, they'll win 80-85 games. That implies that people think they'll win 75-80 in a more realistic scenario. First of all I'd maintain pretty emphatically that I don't think these Mets are worse than last year's Mets, so I think people are being overly pessimistic.

But say I'm wrong. Say I'm being my usual optimistic self there, and we really can't count on Reyes or Beltran or Bay to be healthy, Pagan, Thole, Davis, Pelfrey, Niese, or Dickey to reprise their great 2010 performances, or Emaus, Young, or Capuano to be useful additions. Say the 50th-percentile result for the Mets heading into 2011 is really something like 78-84. I still think that to say that the best-case-scenario 90th-percentile result is 85 games is just plain wrong, along the lines suggested above. Maybe we can't count on any of those things. But isn't it possible that the team will stay healthy? And that we'll get a combination of career years and somewhat disappointing years that averages out to a little bit above everyone's career averages? Because if we do, this team will win 90 games. Maybe that won't happen, but I don't think it's a possibility you can dismiss this early in the season. You just can't know.

They Don't Realize They're The Same

Republicans say a lot of very silly things; that's nothing new. But apparently Newt Gingrich, who somehow gets to pose as the wise elder statesman of his party despite having always been, as my dad (who remembers Gingrich's first trip to the halls of power) tells me, an unimpressive Republican hack, has just made the following dire prediction: within 60 years, America may have become a "secular atheist country." But that's not all! Because it won't just be any secular atheist country, it will, quite possibly, be a secular atheist country dominated by "radical Islamists."

Ahem.

To me what this demonstrates is not just that Republicans in general, and in this particular instance Newt Gingrich, are not the sharpest tools in the shed. It's that they really refuse to see one basic truth about the Islamic conservatives in the Middle East: they're the same as each other. Republicans in this country favor, relative to the overall political culture here, state support of religion, restrictive laws and customs regarding sexuality, censorship of the press and of literature, militaristic nationalism, the death penalty, etc. They also both tend to be, relative to their culture, scornful of democracy and willing to use violence or the threat thereof to avoid being judged by democracy. Liberals tend to oppose the Republican Party or the Tea Party or Pat Robertson for the same reason for the same reasons that we oppose Hamas, the Taliban, or the Muslim Brotherhood. No, Republicans are not as bad as these groups, not in absolute terms. But they want to move our society in the direction of what the Islamists want their societies to look like. And we don't like that.

Why do Republicans oppose the Islamists? The simplest explanation is competition. After all, while the faction that opposes state support of religion is going to oppose all groups that favor state support of a given religion, the faction backing state support of a given religion ought also oppose all the groups favoring state support of other religions. If we're establishing right-wing Islam, we can't exactly be establishing right-wing Christianity at the same time, even if many of the public policies formed as a result would be similar. Alternately there's just the plain old racist/intolerant explanation, i.e. that most conservative Christians in this country just don't like Arabs. But the point is, they don't seem to get that they are in the same role in the American political culture that the Islamists play in the Mideast's political culture. And so you have Gingrich being scared of those secular, atheist, radical Islamists. Which, last time I checked, don't exist.

 

The Proper Structure of the Judicial Branch

The current election for a spot to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which (not shockingly!) has become intensely politicized, reminds me of some of my thinking about how to structure a judicial branch. One's first inclination is to say, "judges shouldn't be elected!" and indeed I don't think you go very wrong by adopting that approach. But I think my actual main feeling about how to set up a court system is a little different: no one one the top policy-setting court should have any opportunity to be concerned with having to keep themselves on that court. There are two ways to accomplish that: one is life tenure, and the other is some sort of fixed term with an absolute lifetime 1-term limit. The point is that you don't want justices on your court system's Supreme Court to be looking over their shoulders. I don't think you can avoid some political ambition influencing judges on lower court systems, because they will always be aspiring to appointment to higher courts, so I suppose I can't really object all that forcefully to re-appointment to lower courts. I'm not sure I see any reason for it, though, and I probably think that for a sitting judge to focus on re-election is a mistake. So, all in all, I guess I would say:

• Judges on the Top Court should either have life tenure or a strict term limit. There should never be any opportunity to be re-appointed or re-elected to the highest court.
• Requiring re-appointment of lower-court judges seems permissible, though probably not particular desirable as far as I can see.
• Re-election of lower-court judges strikes me as deeply questionable.
• I'm not that fussed how judges get onto a court. If you can be elected once but then never have to worry about facing the voters again, that strikes me as fine. However, I imagine there are various practical problems here; would there be elections only for open seats? So a judge would get elected to fill a vacancy and then serve for as long as they wanted with periodic re-appointment? It seems like an odd system, and I would probably prefer to keep elections out of it altogether.

Retaking the House, Historical Data

1916: +19/196 (+9.7%)
1924: -24/207 (-11.6%)
1940: -7/169 (-4.1%)
1948: -75/246 (-30.5%)
1996: -9/237 (-3.8%)

These are the numbers from the five cases in the last hundred years when the President's party lost more than 20% of its Congressional delegation in a midterm election and the President's party won the next Presidential election. Specifically these are the changes in the Congressional delegation of the opposition party that had made large gains in the midterm in the Congressional elections that coincided with the Presidential election. To me this is the kind of case to look at to see if the Democrats have a shot at retaking the House next year. There are 242 Republicans in the House; that means the Democrats need to reduce the Republican delegation by 10.3% or more in 2012 to retake the House. Obviously, that happened in two of the five cases I've highlighted. To my mind, that suggests that it's eminently possible, based on scant historical evidence. The Truman performance of 1948 would be serious overkill, and indeed was serious overkill in its own time.

Interestingly, in every single one of these cases the electoral margin of victory for the President or his party was narrower than in the previous election, or only just barely bigger. Clinton went from 370 EVs to 379, but Wilson '16, Coolidge '24, Roosevelt '40, and Truman '48 underperformed Wilson '12, Harding '20, Roosevelt '36, and Roosevelt '44, respectively. So one thing about this data set is that it strongly suggests that Presidents don't take this kind of shellacking in a midterm election and then expand their electoral majority significantly two years later. And Obama probably won't either, unless the Republicans nominate a lousy candidate. But it does make me think that if he does expand his majority significantly in 2012, which seems like a definite possibility (see the part about "Republicans nominating a lousy candidate"), then retaking the House would be just that much more of a possibility.

Yes, It's (At Least Partially) About Repressive Sexual Mores

I'm reading a book about Justice Brennan, and a chapter I read last night discussed the very important case Griswold v. Connecticut. It mentions how, around the time of Griswold, the Catholic Church was beginning to debate itself about whether or not it ought to think birth control was unacceptable. And it quotes some Pope from shortly before that era, probably Pius XII, saying that birth control was not okay because it was "mutual masturbation...gaining pleasure by an unnatural act." Which brings me to my point: yes, this is about an anti-fun ideology. By "this" I mean, very broadly speaking, every aspect of the modern Christian conservative political movement's desire to regulate all and sundry forms of sexual behavior. Birth control, gayness, abortion, premarital sex, all of it. It's about being anti-pleasure. Having too much fun in the wrong ways is considered a Sin. Why? Unclear. Who does it hurt? Why does god mind, if he does? Is it that, if we like this life too much and have too much fun here, we won't be sufficiently attendant to some sort of supposed future life? Or is it just that a bunch of old men think that young people having fun is disturbing to them, personally? Probably a heavy component of this last one. But in any event, we do know that the old line about how Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere is having fun applies more broadly than Puritans per se.

Side note: I do admit that there are legitimate reasons to be opposed to abortion that do not involve being anti-fun. I myself don't think that a pro-fun position is sufficient to make abortion good (in fact, I don't think anything makes abortion good, I think certain circumstances make abortion least-bad and that the government shouldn't criminalize it), just as I don't think a pro-sexual privacy position is sufficient to make it constitutionally protected (though I do think it is constitutionally protected). But I think as an empirical fact the anti-fun movement is a considerable part of the anti-abortion movement.

My Theory of Tiger

Tiger Woods, as of this very moment, sucks. It's a shame, but there's really no debating it. He's shot his first round over par at Bay Hill since 1999 this week, and then also his second. He's had his worst finish ever at Torrey Pines, by far. He hasn't won anything in well over a year. He's hitting shots you've just never seen from him. He's not the same Tiger Woods. What's different? I think I know the answer: fear.

Tiger says that he's hitting the ball great on the range, and just can't bring it to the course. Various announcers confirm that he looks really good on the practice tee. To me, this is very similar to the thing I and people I know sometimes get of taking really good practice swings and then messing up on the real shot, and I have the same basic belief about it. It's got to be psychological. We know Tiger can make a dozen perfect iron shots in a row, physically speaking, because he does it, over and over again, on the range. So it must be the case that something about the difference in the psychological setting between the range and tournament competition is messing him up. And that's got to be psychological. I also think that the main mental factor that destroys one's ability to hit good golf shots is fear. On the range there is nothing to fear. But in competition, fear ought to be everywhere. Except I think Tiger's never really felt fear before. He's always known, not just believed but known, that he was the best golfer of all time and that he was just going to go out there and win. But now his personal life has all gone to hell, and he's lost a good measure of his public support, and he knows now that whenever he does badly people will interpret it as a sign that his career is finished. So he's scared. And you can't hit good golf shots while in the grip of fear.

This theory has two main consequences, one a prediction and the other advice. The prediction is that, if he wins again relatively soon, he'll be back, more or less at full strength, and will go back to his dominating, winning ways. The advice is that he really needs to notice that it's fear he's dealing with, at least if I'm right. The trick with fear is to notice that you're scared, and then tell yourself not to be (as long as it's a fear that you shouldn't just actually go along with, like the fear of jumping off of cliffs with no bungee cord). If you have fear but you don't know you do, there's no way you can conquer it.

Alternatively, he could just head over to Augusta where he knows every inch of the course and knows exactly how well it suits his game, and start feeling pure confidence just based on that. Either way, really.