Regruntled.com

Speech	Grade level
Kennedy Inaugural Address	10.8
Reagan “Tear Down This Wall”	9.8
Lincoln “Gettysburg Address”	9.1
Martin Luther King “I Have a Dream”	8.8
Obama 2004 Democrat Convention	8.3
Obama Victory Speech “Yes, We Can”	7.4

Global Language Monitor analyzed the words in several speeches and assigned grade levels, or reading levels, to each.  There are a number of readability metrics and they pretty much agree on specific texts.  GLM gives Obama a 9.3 in the last Presidential Debate, and McCain a 7.3.

For comparison, another source gives George W. Bush a 6.7 and Al Gore a 7.6 in the 2000 debates.

To carry on the school analogy, my impression during the campaign was that Obama was speaking to the students who were headed for community college or university, while McCain was speaking to those headed for vocational training.  This made Obama an elitist who looked down on the regular folks bitterly clinging to their guns and Bibles.  I don’t know who Sarah Palin was speaking to, maybe the special education kids.

Critics Rant has an online readability analyzer.  How readable is Regruntled?

OK, I think that’s fair.  In comparison, the most difficult blog I read is Overcoming Bias.  It’s also one of the most rewarding, but it’s not for everyone.  Their readability is:

In a comment to my post on Placebo logic, reader CET mentions double-blind studies on the effects of prayer.  The “double-blind” means that the subjects (hospital patients) did not know whether they were being prayed for.  This factors out any placebo effects, as opposed to people praying for themselves.  There have been a number of such studies, with mixed results.  Here are two examples:

• Byrd, 1988, showed a statistically significant effect.
• Aviles, 2001, showed no statistically significant effect.

A cautious conclusion would be that the effect of intercessory prayer, if it exists at all, is at the limits of statistical detectability.  The placebo effect, on the other hand, is so strong that it is possible to measure the difference in effect between expensive placebos and inexpensive placebos.

After several thousand years of experience with prayer, one would think that the basic effectiveness would have been established long ago, and we would have moved on to more interesting questions, such as whether invoking one of the saints is more effective than praying directly to God.

According to a recent study, half of all doctors routinely prescribe placebos, and half don’t.  The placebo effect is well-known.  Placebos work, and they work well enough that trials for new drugs have to be designed  with great care.

I am a consumer of medical services.  Since placebos work, I’m better off with a doctor who will prescribe placebos than with a doctor who won’t.  I can’t come right out and ask for a placebo, because then it’s not a placebo any more, it’s just a sugar pill.

Can I shop around for a doctor who prescribes placebos?  But then I know that whatever he prescribes might be a placebo.  Doesn’t this undermine the effect of real drugs as well as placebos?

How about if I find a doctor who is a really good liar?  Someone I can trust to lie to me convincingly, with my best interests in mind.

It’s an interesting puzzle.  I have to be well-informed to make sure I get the placebo, but the effectiveness of the placebo depends on a certain cluelessness.

Imagine, if you will, a movie that doesn’t end when it should.  The hero gets the girl, wins the big game, triumphs over his adversary…  and the movie won’t stop.  The audience is uneasy, suspecting a False Ending.  Maybe the villain isn’t really dead, and will pop up out of the bathwater with a big knife like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction.

And so it is with the Presidential election.  The contest is effectively over, but the ending is eleven days away.  Note that everyone has a vested interest in prolonging the suspense as long as possible:

• McCain: We still have a chance to win, so get out and vote!
• Obama: We could still lose, so get out and vote!
• Media: This could go either way, so keep watching!

All of this suggests a systematic bias towards believing that the contest is closer than it really is.  We’re starting to hear rationalizations to support the bias: polls are inaccurate, Truman vs. Dewey, the Bradley Effect, underpolling of cell phone users, young people won’t turn out, voter fraud, yada yada yada.

You can probably see where I’m going with this.  The systematic bias should show up in McCain’s Intrade odds.  McCain is currently at 13% or so.  Some of that is the delusion of true believers, some is the gambler’s tendency to overpay for long shots, and some is the dramatic bias.  The idea is not to try to separate these, but to point out that the biases are all in the same direction.  Some of the 13% is a realistic estimate of a Black Swan event, but that probability should decline as time runs out, while the psychological and dramatic biases should remain constant.

Shankar Vedantam at the Washington Post  has an interesting article about political views and party affiliations.

“Party identification is part of your social identity, in the same way you relate to your religion or ethnic group or baseball team,” said Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego.

Referring to political scientist Marc J. Hetherington at Vanderbilt:

Rather, he said, what has happened in recent years is that partisans have come to identify with their parties in much the manner that sports fans identify with their teams. The strong views they feel on many issues do not drive their party affiliation; it is their party affiliation that drives their strong views.

Isn’t there a chicken-and-egg problem here?  If political views come from party affiliations, then where do party affiliations come from?  We seem to have a cultural assumption that information flows upwards in a political hierarchy (representative democracy, the will of of the people, yada yada yada).  On the other hand, in a religious hierarchy we assume that information flows downwards.  So if we substitute religion for politics in the basic premise:

Religious views do not drive religious affiliation; rather religious affiliation drives religious views.

It sounds perfectly reasonable.  I suspect that in politics, the information flows in both directions, but upwards in some people and downwards in others.

From the Washington Post:

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration’s prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation — the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration’s claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might “argue back” against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same “backfire effect” when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration’s stance on stem cell research.

Nyhan and Reifler are both Democrats.

A survey from Baylor University finds that believers in the supernatural are less likely to believe in the paranormal, and vice versa:

The Baylor Survey found that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases credulity, as measured by beliefs in such things as dreams, Bigfoot, UFOs, haunted houses, communicating with the dead and astrology.

The ISR researchers found that conservative religious Americans are far less likely to believe in the occult and paranormal than are other Americans, with self-identified theological liberals and the irreligious far more likely than other Americans to believe.

It’s as if we have only so many superstitious brain cells, and if we fill them up with one kind of superstition, we crowd out other kinds of superstition.  I’m not sure whether that’s good news or bad.

Some research on the social effects of mirrors:

People exhibit less prejudice when they’re in the presence of a mirror, Dutch researchers have shown. Carina Wiekens and Diederik Stapel said this effect occurs because mirrors make us more aware of our public appearance, and therefore remind us of the need to fall in line with social norms.

(There is no mirror in the video. It’s done with twins and plain glass.)

Intrade changes the psychology of politics.  As a voter, I can participate twice, once in the primary and once in the general election.  I can show up at the prescribed time and place like a dog that comes when he’s called.  I can stand in line like a good little citizen, show my photo ID, and choose between the Red Team and the Blue Team.  It doesn’t matter who I vote for.  In a national election, I’m more likely to be run over by a bus on my way to vote than I am to tip the election one way or the other.

As an arbitrageur in a prediction market, I can participate early and often.  I can participate in both the Red and Blue primaries.  I can participate in the contests for Vice President.  I can participate whenever it is convenient for me.  I can participate sitting down, with a refreshing adult beverage by my side.  I can even participate in my sleep.  I woke up this morning and found that my short position in Rudy Giuliani got covered at a profit by a limit order.  So I shorted a few more Fred Thompson.

A voter sees an endless spectacle that tries to motivate him to vote for someone.  As an arbitrageur, I see more opportunities in taking positions against someone, simply because there are always more losers than winners.  I shorted 12 different VP candidates in all, including people I’ve never heard of.

It may not matter who I vote for, but it really does matter who I bet against.

There are a few human languages that are deficient in words for numbers.  One would expect that people who lack words for numbers larger than two would have difficulty performing certain numeric tasks, but recent research suggests that this is not so:

British and Australian researchers assessed 45 indigenous Australian children aged between four and seven years.

They compared those who lived in remote areas and only spoke Warlpiri or Anindilyakawa - two Aboriginal languages with very few number words - with those who lived in Melbourne and spoke English.

There was no difference in numerical ability between the children who spoke languages without number words and the English-speaking children.

Study leader Professor Brian Butterworth, from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, said two studies in tribes in the Amazon had concluded that words were necessary for exact number tasks but this research showed otherwise.

I don’t know about this.  We seem to have internalized the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to the point that learning something new is inseparable from learning a new vocabulary.  On the other hand, crows are said to be able to count up to three, and parrots up to six.  Maybe we have some very simple innate numerical ability, but anything beyond that requires language.

Synchronicity department

After I posted this, I heard about John McCain having more houses than he could count.  I swear that the timing was entirely coincidental.