05/02/2002 Archived Entry: "On Conventional wisdom & being right"

After doing the write-up for House 2002, and having a few back-and-forths between other quasi-pundits like myself. I came across an interesting Spleen article: We know what we know about politics largely through what we're told by television, radio, and the print press. The writer, Fish, goes through some different scenarios than I am thinking about, but the gist of his point is found in this quote:

So it is with politics-- we "see" current events through polls and the media, and take on faith in large part the precept that what they tell us bears a direct relationship to reality.

I think he's got it right in that quote, especially thinking of this in regards to stocks and elections. To be able and stand apart, while being engaged in the forecast, is a delicate business. Conventional wisdom follows a majority opinion which is composed of laggards following trendsetters. There are three areas in politics where I see this at work:

1) The valuation we put on our media resources.
2) The hidden bias in the value-laden speech.
3) The work of polls in shaping values and expectations.

All three of these are issues that go into anyone's political forecast. Ones which are usually not talked about upfront, as if in doing so, one would be perhaps more unbiased and factual. I don't think so, in fact I think it's just the opposite. That the less one is up front exactly on where they stand. The whole idea here gets back to representative thinking. A supposed "non-biased" forcaster is supposed to be able and project across the spectrum, looking at all the races from a perspective that takes in account all of the different viewpoints, and then formulates an opinion which is supposedly representative.

However, an individual who attempts to do this, is not only vacuous to their own individuality, but are more beholden than others, to the conventional way of thinking and projecting. Sure, they will be right enough to be respected, but are they correct? Hardly. Being upfront with your own bias out there may not win you conventional praise as unbiased, but I'd rather be right.

You can pretty much get anywhere with your polls that you want to nowadays. An 85% rejection rate pretty much assures right off the bat that you are dealing with a subset of a subset of the population. Resources that I find as the best predictive value: 1) go over the numbers in competitive elections (the have to be competitive); 2) match them up with the demographics given the current historical standard; 3) and then get a sense of the candidates by looking at the local press on the election. Polls, if they are done by an independent party are something that I look at to see if the race is competitive or not, but that's about it as far as their worth. Even lower in shaping my opinion would be the TV talking heads & most DC pundits. I avoid TV, and most of the stuff out of DC is not original, but access-oriented.