dendroica: quickhits: Romney supporter took war with reality…
Romney supporter took war with reality to a whole new level.
Buzzfeed: One trader lost at least $4 million betting on former presidential candidate Mitt Romney through Intrade, possibly to make it appear he was faring better against President Barack Obama in the waning days and hours of the 2012 election than he was.
That’s what a new study by Microsoft Research’s David Rothschild and Columbia University’s Rajiv Sethi suggests. The study, published earlier this month, analyzed Intrade transaction level data over the course of the final two weeks of the election cycle.
[…]
Rothschild and Sethi found that a single trader accounted for one-third of all bets made on Romney during the two week period of the study, which saw about 3.5 million contracts traded. The total election cycle had 7.6 million contracts traded.
The trader bet solely on Romney and constantly sold on Obama, losing about $4 million in the process.
I’ve been thinking off and on about how conservatives often confuse cause and effect. Most recently, the example that’s come up most often has been the argument that violent video games cause mass shootings. But wouldn’t the sort of person who’d commit that sort of crime be attracted to violent video games in the same way that someone who likes boobs enjoys porn? If video games were responsible for crime, there’d be one helluva lot more murderous loons out there shooting up crowds of people. It’s like saying chess is responsible for war.
But this… this is a whole ‘nother ballgame. This is magical thinking. The problem with doing this is the same problem you have with putting out deliberately biased polling; you can’t lie to people about what they think. People knew who they were going to vote for. If you tell them otherwise, how can you expect them to believe you? Polls do influence polls, but this is just some form of sympathetic magic.
I’m at a loss. All I can say is that Mr. Mystery here is probably someone who blew a chunk of their inheritance — because it’s so freakin’ obvious that they weren’t smart enough to earn that kind of money themselves.
I think this just shows the ridiculousness of the Intrade obsession. The people who leave bets on Intrade and the like are looking at the same polls and other factors that everyone else is. And then there are people like this fool who try to manipulate the market. If gamblers had special knowledge, casinos wouldn’t make nearly as much money.
I think the previous two commenters are misinterpreting the data. This isn’t a sign of magical thinking and partisan foolishness (or at least, not the kind they appear to be describing). It’s a sign that someone connected with the Romney campaign was trying to manipulate the Intrade odds — and was successful at doing so. That is, this money was spent by someone who understood that these were likely to be losing bets, but who nevertheless was willing to spend the money in order to push Romney’s odds on Intrade higher.
There was discussion of this possibility at the time. In October 2012 Nate Silver’s aggregated-polling approach showed Obama taking an increasing lead in the race, at the same time Intrade showed the race tightening. See Republicans Gaming Intrade. Commenters pointed out that a relatively small amount of money (which is what this was, on the scale of the $992 million the Romney campaign and its supporters ended up spending on the race) could make it look like Romney was doing better than he actually was on Intrade, which in turn could help drive a media narrative that he was mounting a comeback.
With the benefit of hindsight the money was wasted, and the comeback narrative sputtered out. But that doesn’t mean the Romney people were being irrationally foolish, any more than it’s foolish when a quarterback throws a hail-Mary pass into the end zone with the clock running out. The odds are against the pass succeeding. But it can still be a rational strategy if no other option offers a better chance of winning.
As a side issue, there’s an aspect of the commentary above that bugs me a little. It’s the same problem I have with some of Chris Mooney’s recent writing (see The Republican Brain). Yes, the modern Republican party in the US has taken a lurch in an anti-science, anti-intellectual direction. The Tea Party movement has succeeded in making the holding of silly, factually wrong positions a litmus test for holding office as a Republican, and there are many unfortunate consequences of that, including the effect it is having on climate and healthcare policy.
But magical thinking, dismissing discordant data, and being willing to ascribe expertise and authority to scientists only to the extent that doing so is congenial to one’s worldview, are not uniquely Republican or conservative traits. When the subject is vaccinations or genetically modified foods or nuclear power, unscientific views suddenly skew more toward the liberal end of the political spectrum.
Everyone is prone to motivated reasoning and logical fallacies. No one is immune. The stories liberals (like me) like to tell about the ridiculousness of conservative views are matched by stories they tell about us.
Both sets of stories are true. Each group cherry-picks the anecdotes that make them feel better.
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/62255663922.
