A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Friday, April 22, 2016

SWANS, TURNS OUT, ARE UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS

I want to finish with Philip Tetlock’s[1] ideas concerning our abilities to predict our futures in the realm of social and political developments.  There are those among us who count on TV pundits and newspaper columnists to do that for us, assuming there exists a basic agreement between the consumer and provider of such a service.  In our midst, there are those who, with a heightened interest in political and social affairs, regularly take in the predictive insights of such commentators; the problem is, according to Tetlock, these dispensers of wisdom do not enjoy very good “batting averages” in being able to predict accurately.  Lucky for the pundits, their listeners are not so much interested in accuracy as they are hungry for general rationales and talking points for their already held beliefs.  By the time their failure to forecast becomes evident, the attention of their audience has moved on to other matters and so the mistakes go unnoticed.  I saw a video the other day in which President Obama spouts the predictions that pundits warned us about if the president were to be reelected in 2012.  To remind you, one was gas prices in the $5.00-$6.00 range and another was unemployment at levels nearing ten percent.  He then juxtaposed those figures with rates prevailing at the time he was giving this comparison.  Actually, the disparities made for a fairly humorous bit of comedy.

Tetlock’s castigation of these pundits was not so much critical of these predictors, but to address how we might approach this fine skill of forecasting in order to be more successful.  For better prognostication, it turns out, being modest in our ability to predict is helpful.  As I reported in my last posting, research indicates that being less than confident in this endeavor, unlike in playing golf, seems to up our chances of getting it right.  This modesty is enhanced by realizing that political realities are best anticipated with apprehension.  Over what?  Over what is referred to as “black swans.” 

Black swans are unexpected developments or events that disrupt the equilibrium of forces that are holding sway at any given time.  These swans appear recurrently, but without any regularity in terms of their timing.  It’s as if we are going along within certain patterns – for example, the patterns of our presidential campaign cycles – and boom, up comes a Donald Trump to belie all of our expectations as to what will happen next – have you picked out your Canadian domicile?  Tetlock goes on to describe this whole process by which one attempts to responsibly forecast the political future as a cloudlike endeavor as opposed to a clocklike endeavor.  That is, it’s best to see the whole movement of politics as clouds coming and going in no particular pattern, here and there, and not to see it as the fine, mechanical movements of a clock.

Tetlock next draws our attention to the type of mistakes these pundits can make.  But before I share these with you, I want to remind you of what a former secretary of defense once said:  there are things we know we know; there are things we know we don’t know, and there are things we don’t know we don’t know.[2]  Of course, black swans fall into the last category.  With this as context, let’s look at Tetlock’s two-pronged possible prediction outcomes.  There are false-positive mistakes and there are false-negative mistakes.  I will quickly add a third possibility, an accurate prediction.  A false-positive mistake would be an erroneous prediction of something going to happen.  Around this time every year, for example, I predict the Yankees will win the World Series.  I usually make a false-positive mistake, but my “batting average” is higher than any other type of similar prediction for any other professional franchise here in the US.  It is a prediction situation in which I know what I don’t know, namely how the baseball season will unfold.  That is, if there is a World Series this year, there will be a winner, but I don’t know which team will win; I believe a particular team will win, but I don’t know which one.  If I am wrong – heaven forbid – then I would have committed a false-positive mistake.  Implied in this prediction is the assumption, as I just pointed out, that there will be a World Series, but what if there is some development within baseball that I am not aware of that threatens that eventuality?  After all, I can remember a year when we didn’t have a World Series due to a player work dispute.  Now, I have no reason to believe that will happen this year, but say it does.  In my prediction of who will win, I didn’t predict a necessary precondition.  In other words, I didn’t predict something will not happen – playing the World Series.  That is a false-negative mistake.  It also demonstrates an unknown, unknown.  People who study this sort of thing point out that sellers of health insurance face this lack of relevant information all the time.  In selling you a policy, they don’t know what you are not telling them about your health or what you don’t even know about your health.[3]  As for what you know you know, even when the reality is not a hundred percent one way or another, you do know probabilities and can manage any entailed risk the situation presents, but in the world of political developments, those are often not with what one is dealing;  hence, the high occurrence of false-positive and false-negative mistakes in predicting future events or developments.

This gets us back to the poker player’s way of thinking about this game of predictions.  Probability studies come into play and the use of math becomes useful – i.e. visualizing the different possible hands one is confronting.  The irony is that such probability studies are highly dependent on a history of false-positive mistakes and false-negative mistakes as well.  It is the analysis of these mistakes, of reviewing how and why mistakes were made and placing numerical values to the correct factors, that ups our chances (and let me emphasize “chances”) of getting it right.  It turns out that mathematical algorithms have been developed and programmed into computers to work on these types of predictive projects and they actually, by a long shot, do better than their human counterparts.  There are a lot of simulated ways to test this.  For example, there is the playing of chess in which algorithm based programs beat the best players regularly.  But as Tetlock points out, this need not be a competition between humans and machines but a possible collaboration in which the use of machines can up our chances to get it right.  So while the political world is not clocklike, the use of exacting mathematics can enhance our ability to foretell where those clouds are apt to go and where those swans might be lurking.

Of course, the likelihood that the regular viewer of Fox News or MSNBC shunning the more flamboyant pundit for the drier math “nerd” to provide them with a view of the future might not be what is wanted.  I must say, I have seen the not nerdy Nate Silver on MSNBC.  He is one of the more mathematically based predictors who has been relatively very successful at predicting elections and does, apparently, rely on the type of analyses indicated above.  But of course, elections and their counting on votes and responses to survey questionnaires lend themselves readily to such algorithms.  But how about punditry that applies such rigor to foreign relations or welfare policies?  Can we stand watching and listening to this type of predicting, where nothing is “guaranteed”?  If we had measurable stakes such as predicting the stock market and other financial developments with such accuracy, perhaps our need for such forecasting would be enhanced.  Oh, I forget, we do have a personal stake but alas, these stakes are not so quantifiable.



[1] Tetlock, P.  (2013).  How to win at forecasting.  In J. Brockman (Ed.), Thinking:  The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction (pp. 18-38).  New York, NY:  Harper Perennial.

[2] The exact quote by Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is:  “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.”

[3] For this limited point about health insurance see Huettel, S. (2014).  Behavioral economics:  When psychology and economics collide.  [A transcript]  Chantilly, VA:  The Great Courses/The Teaching Company.

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