Peggy Noonan on Mayor Michael Bloomberg, November 2, 2012:

New York’s mayor, Mike Bloomberg, was sterling—a solid, unruffled giver of information whose news conferences were blessedly free of theatrics save for his gifted sign-language interpreter, who wowed a city and left the young evacuees in my apartment furiously signing “Where’s the coffee?” and “I think the baby needs to be changed.”

Peggy Noonan on Mayor Michael Bloomberg, November 5, 2012:

Parts of Jersey and New York are a cold Katrina. The exact dimensions of the disaster will become clearer when the election is over. One word: infrastructure. Officials knew the storm was coming and everyone knew it would be bad, but the people of the tristate area were not aware, until now, just how vulnerable to deep damage their physical system was. The people in charge of that system are the politicians. Mayor Bloomberg wanted to have the Marathon, to show New York’s spirit. In Staten Island last week they were bitterly calling it “the race through the ruins.” There is a disconnect.

A few notes on the polling in advance of tomorrow:

(1) So I now understand why some conservatives have it in for Nate Silver. It’s because of stuff like this, where Paul Krugman uses Silver’s work to say that anyone who disagrees with Paul Krugman is “stupid.”

Awesome.

But it isn’t quite fair to hold Silver accountable for the work of his friends. Silver is much more careful with his writing than his allies are in their use of it.

(2) If you want to criticize Silver, this is probably the way to go. But once again I’d suggest that anyone looking to use Silver’s work–or any model or poll–as an up-or-down means of predicting the future fundamentally misunderstands both the system and the tool. There are no crystal balls. When it comes to an election, the best view of the future you can hope for  is something that looks like a Picasso painting where the central figure is depicted from a dozen different vantage points, and appears distorted and, often, grotesque. But even that picture is better than nothing and I’m still happy to have as many lenses to look through as possible.

(3) What do we make of Silver’s final forecast, that Obama has an 86 percent chance of Electoral College victory? It does not mean that Obama will win. It does not mean, in any meaningful way, that the election isn’t very close to being a coin-flip, where the outcome is so uncertain that it could hinge on any number of independent factors and either Obama or Romney could easily emerge victorious.

One of the aspects of the polling overlooked at this point is that we’re so close to the margin of error that it would be completely unsurprising for Romney to win any of the given toss-up states where he’s behind by a point or so. That’s why it’s called the margin of error. Where it gets dicey for Romney is that he’s within the margin of error, but still behind in so many of these state polls. He could very well sweep them. But if you’re in Boston it would be nice to see him ahead in a couple of the averages, since the margin of error could swing the other way, too.

The simplest way I’d summarize what Silver’s “86 percent chance” prediction is this: The election could go either way, but if today you could choose to be in either Romney’s position or Obama’s position–based solely on the polling data–which would you pick?

I think that most people would rather be in Obama’s position, but that they’d still be very nervous.

(4) So how do we explain Jay Cost, Michael Barone, and George Will–three incredibly smart political minds, all of whom see a large Romney win? I’d suggest that they’re looking through a different lens, and viewing the state of the election not through polls but through more fundamental facts about the environment and political history. That’s a completely valid lens, too, and through it their view of a big Romney win makes all sorts of sense.

I’d suggest that whatever the outcome tomorrow, both worldviews are useful and that to the extent that we can understand a system as complicated as a presidential election it’s worth taking in both.

Have you been yearning to read a (really) long, in-the-weeds in-depth story about sex-selective abortion, lowest-low fertility, and South Korea’s demographic death-spiral?

Then boy, do I have a piece for you . . .

(I promise the book is much, much more engaging and fun. This piece is just kind of depressing.)

Instant classic:

Energetic in body but indolent in mind, Barack Obama in his frenetic campaigning for a second term is promising to replicate his first term, although simply apologizing would be appropriate.

And then:

Biden, whose legal education ended well before he was full to the brim, was nominated for his current high office because Democrats believe compassion should temper the severities of meritocracy.

1) Amazingly enough, I’ve seen four (4!) movies in the last three months. One of them was Haywire, which was very good. Watching it, it occurred to me that Marvel ought to reboot Elektra with Carano. It’s a great character and she’s perfect for the role. Not just her physicality, but her ability to just stay silent onscreen and let everyone else act around her. All they need is a script.

2) After the Apple corporate shake-up announcement this week, suddenly Maps makes sense. Scott Forstall has long been suspected to be an eventual heir to Tim Cook’s throne. And Cook was widely assumed to be a transitional CEO, someone to bridge the gap and provide stability between the Jobs era and whatever APPL’s future turned out to be.

But maybe Cook doesn’t see himself as a transitional CEO. If Cook was looking to remove a threat to his regime, knowlingly pushing out a flawed Maps package with the iPhone 5, then uncharacteristically jumping on the grenade and admitting the product sucked makes more sense. Maybe it was all a trap for Forstall.

The fact that Forstall evidently refused to sign the APPL confession apology would only support this reading of events. Forstall saw himself being turned into the fall guy and decided he’d go down swinging. Cook then pivoted to take the heat himself publicly in order to build internal support against Forstall.

Seen in this light, maybe Maps wasn’t bad product design at all. Maybe it was a masterstroke of political infighting.

If it’s true that Disney has just bought Lucasfilm, then Star Wars nerds can finally have hope for a blu-ray release of the original theatrical versions of the original trilogy.

For too long we’ve been held hostage to the personal artistic visions of George Lucas who, like Stalin airbrushing his enemies out of state photographs, carefully disappeared the original theatrical cuts so that Gredo could shoot first, CGI spectacle could muddle up Mos Eisley, and a young Hayden Christiansen could appear to Luke Skywalker and automatically make him realize that he’s his dad.

Now Disney’s corporate greed could give us the product we’ve always craved. All hail Disney corporate greed!

Unless, that is, the fine print on the agreement stipulates that Lucas maintain control over the cuts of the Star Wars movies. Which wouldn’t surprise any of us, would it.

Update: Dear God! Galley Friend Ben Domenech has done the unthinkable–he listened to the director’s commentary on Attack of the Clones!

Oh, the humanity.

I’m huge in Sweden.

Some people seem to be sharpening the knives to go after Nate Silver if Obama loses. I’d like to register an early dissent.

There are valid criticisms of black box statistical modeling. On the one hand, we’re asked to view the results credibly without knowing what the special sauce used to bake them is. You could mount that criticism of Silver as much as you could of any other modeler. Or pollster, for that matter. So at the end of the day you have to either make your peace with the black boxes, or write them off as value-less.

I happen to find some value in them. They aren’t predictive–but I’d argue they’re not really meant to be. They’re simply informative–just more data points from which we cobble together our understanding of a system (an election) which is so multi-variate that, as Scott Fitzgerald once wrote about Hollywood, is so complex that no more than a handful of men can keep the entire equation in their heads.

What’s more, Silver’s a very agile writer. Like Michael Lewis he has a gift for explaining complicated numerical concepts. (I would not agree with the charge that Silver often makes simple mathematical concepts sound grandiose and complex.) And finally, Silver hedges. Always and everywhere. Some people might take this to be weasely on his part, but it strikes me as just the opposite: It’s humility. Silver is in the numbers business, but he understands that the numbers don’t tell us everything. So you’ll never hear him say, “X has happened so Y must happen.” Just the opposite, actually. Silver understands the limits of his own models. He acknowledges those limits nearly every time he writes. I think this ought to be applauded.

If Romney wins should that discredit Silver’s models? Only so far as anybody ever used them as oracular constructs instead of analytical tools.

One final word: People seem to think that it would reflect badly on Silver if Romney were to win while Silver’s model shows only a 25 percent chance of victory. But isn’t 25 percent kind of a lot? If I told you there was a 1-in-4 chance of you getting hit by a bus tomorrow, would you think that 25 percent seemed like a big number or a little number? Or, to put it another way, a .250 hitter gets on base once a game, so you’d never look at him in any given at bat and think there was no chance he’d get a hit.

Ultimately I’d suggest that the real test for Nate Silver is the same as it is for any analyst, on any subject. Not “did he predict an outcome correctly” (or “did he predict the outcome I prefer”) but “does his work add value to our understanding of the subject.”

Speaking only for myself, the answer to that question is an unqualified yes.

Update: On Twitter, Jim Henley (@UOJim) pointed to a meditation he wrote on probability. It’s written from the perspective of a D&D nerd with cancer and it’s very much worth reading on its own, apart from its tangential bearing on our larger discussion here.

Also, Galley Friend A.W. offers the following dissent:

I like Silver quite a lot.  But I have one major quibble: His numerical specificity occludes the enormous subjectivity inherent in his weighing and discounting of various polls.  (See http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/methodology/)

He’s selling a false certainty.  It’s the Washington equivalent of Wall Street’s now-infamous “value at risk” (VaR) models at the center of recent Wall Street meltdowns.  (E.g., http://www.futuresmag.com/2010/12/01/var-the-number-that-killed-us)

In end, my problem with Silver’s presentation is the same as Naked Capitalism’s indictment of VaR:

“But VaR is a particularly troubling example, more so because it is sufficiently, dangerously simple minded enough that regulators and managers a step or two removed from markets have become overly attached to its deceptive simplicity.”  (http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/jp-morgan-loss-bomb-confirms-that-its-time-to-kill-var.html)

Obviously, in scrutinizing and combining polls, such relative judgments are unavoidable.  But Silver ought to be more transparent and up-front in presenting how those subjective judgments affect his bottom-line numbers.