M2RB: Billy Joel
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
One of these guys is a Hall of Famer...
Back in May 2011, the leading liberal poll analyst of this election cycle returned to his roots in an op-ed published in the New York Times.
Nate Silver, who had parlayed a brilliant record as an independent
numbers cruncher in the 2008 presidential election into a gig as the
paper’s political blogger in the age of Obama, first made his name as a
writer as a baseball guy and one of the leading exponents of new and
advanced ways of looking at baseball statistics. On May 9, 2011, Silver
penned a piece for the Times explaining why New York Yankees
captain Derek Jeter was finished as a baseball star. Given that that the
Yankees shortstop had an uncharacteristically mediocre 2010 season and
was off to a slow start in 2011, it was hard to argue with Silver’s
conclusion.
Except the very same day that Silver was planting Jeter’s tombstone in the Times, the future Hall-of-Famer got four hits, including two home runs in a game. I noted this embarrassing development in a blog post here
titled, “The Perils of Punditry: That’s Why They Play the Games.” For
my pains, I was subjected to a chorus of abuse via e-mail and Twitter
from Silver’s fans, most of which knew nothing about Sabermetrics.
Indeed, another Times blogger noted my criticism
(which was laced with respect for Silver’s work on both baseball and
politics) and ironically noted, “the jury was out” on whether the
results of “one game” could disprove the great Nate.
The jury was out in May, but within a few months, Silver’s fans would
be dropping that prediction of his down the proverbial memory hole as
Jeter put together a stellar second half of 2011 and followed it up with
a brilliant 2012 in which he led the Major Leagues in base hits. That
didn’t mean Silver didn’t know what he was talking about, but it was
proof that a proper understanding of what has already happened didn’t
necessarily give even the smartest of researchers the ability to predict
the future. Fast forward to the last days of the 2012 presidential
election campaign, and it looks like that day in May wasn’t the only
time Silver’s crystal ball has clouded up.
As Dylan Byers notes today in Politico,
Silver is fast on his way to being a one-term celebrity. Having become
the top liberal swami by predicting the 2008 election, it’s fair to ask
whether as many people will pay attention to him if it turns out the
forecast model he has been using all year to reassure worried Democrats
that President Obama had to win was fatally flawed. But the possibility
that Silver could be wrong or had let his own bias affect his judgment
is sending his liberal fan base over the edge, as this post by fellow Timesman Paul Krugman indicates.
Let me stipulate that some of the attacks on Silver’s attempts to
establish what the percentages of an Obama win are a little unfair. His
model, like similar attempts to weigh the percentages in baseball games,
is a matter of probability not certainty. A game-tying home run in the
ninth inning can make previous projections that the team with the lead
had a 95 percent chance of winning look silly, even if they were
reasonable at the time. But the problem with his forecast model is not
just that it’s not infallible, but that it is probably a little harder
to being purely objective about political analysis than baseball. There
are just too many moving parts and political judgments about which polls
to believe to make his system work as well as his PECOTA model for
projecting what a player will do in the upcoming baseball season–and
even that is often wrong.
Even when I think Silver’s conclusions are incorrect, I learn something from his analyses. But those who point out that his Times on-line column
that has consistently showed the president with a 75 percent chance of
winning the election appears absurd in a race that is a tossup or
heading in Mitt Romney’s direction are not off base.
Silver survived his whopper of a mistake in underestimating Derek
Jeter. He’s not likely to fare as well if he has been calling the
presidential election wrong all year.
We Didn't Start The Fire - Billy Joel
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnny Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenberg's H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, The King And I, and The Catcher In The Rye
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Kahn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dancron
Dien Bien Phu Falls, Rock Around the Clock
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev
Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge On The River Kwai
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather Homicide, Children of Thalidomide...
Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, Space Monkey, Mafia
Hula Hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go
U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Hemingway, Agman, Stranger in a Strange Land
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion
Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician sex
J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Bacon, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shore, China's under martial law
Rock and Roll, cola wars, I can't take it anymore
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
But when we are gone
It will still burn on and on and on and on
And on and on and on and on...
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenberg's H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, The King And I, and The Catcher In The Rye
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Kahn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dancron
Dien Bien Phu Falls, Rock Around the Clock
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev
Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge On The River Kwai
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather Homicide, Children of Thalidomide...
Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, Space Monkey, Mafia
Hula Hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go
U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Hemingway, Agman, Stranger in a Strange Land
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion
Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician sex
J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Bacon, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shore, China's under martial law
Rock and Roll, cola wars, I can't take it anymore
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
But when we are gone
It will still burn on and on and on and on
And on and on and on and on...
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
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