The Clairvoyance of Robert Farley

This is all very true. What's more, it points toward a serious objective difficulty with our understanding of electoral politics. The "the major party nominee who lost was obviously deeply flawed" school of election analysis is clearly flawed, but fundamentally the n for presidential elections is so tiny that unless you overinterpret the available data, you wind up not being able to say anything at all.

That, in turn, might be a good idea except I have the traffic stats to prove that nothing gets you, the audience, interested in political commentary like a good ol' fashioned presidential campaign. Thus, there will be election-related commentary. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" works well if you were "born into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in the Austro-Hungarian empire" but some of us need to work blog for a living.

Comments

I'm rooting for an Obama win for many reasons but one of the least noble is the expected ooze of insider books on 'why the Clinton campaign failed' that will emerge like a kind of delicious poison. Tales of intrigue and woe are always more interesting than how everything went methodically and magically right.

Note: Ross Douhat linked to a great Sept. '06 New Yorker piece on Bill Clinton that has LOTS of juicy insights from Big Dog on the '08 race that are pretty revealing in hindsight.

Posted by joejoejoe | February 19, 2008 8:56 AM

Way to shoe-horn Wittgenstein using an out-of-context-yet-appropriate-sounding quote! Seriously, I approve. Wittgenstein should be quoted more, not less.

Posted by szr | February 19, 2008 9:00 AM

the traffic stats to prove that nothing gets you, the audience, interested in political commentary like a good ol' fashioned presidential campaign.

For whatever it's worth, any blogger who panders to the masses with an excess of good ol' fashioned horse-race election posts is likely to lose my traffic.

Posted by James Gary | February 19, 2008 9:03 AM

There definitely is a dealer-junkie relationship going on here. Please post more about basketball, Matt. It will help me work on my dissertation.

Posted by Philly | February 19, 2008 9:13 AM

When he was still a young man Wittgenstein gave away all the large fortune he inherited. He gave the money to his relatives, who were already rich, rather than to the poor, because he believed wealth was corrupting.

Posted by Paul Campos | February 19, 2008 9:18 AM

Most years I would agree with you, Matt. But if the Dem nominee loses this cakewalk of a hanging slider down the middle election, then s/he really must have major flaws that we all should be seeing right now but aren't.

Posted by Ron | February 19, 2008 9:37 AM

Tractatus vs. Investigations--Which candidate will win?

Posted by Matt | February 19, 2008 9:46 AM

Busting out the Tractatus this early in the morning?

The coffee is all that is the case!

Posted by Stax | February 19, 2008 10:06 AM

That presidential "n" thing had always bugged me as well. There are only forty-six of them, how on earth can you derive anything useful from that?

Sure, careful case study analysis might bring out some likely trends and important forces. To think that anything is "settled fact" is still foolhardy, especially in this age of Republican revisionism.

Posted by Demosthenes | February 19, 2008 10:45 AM

And further,

"But what we can't say we can't say, and we can't blog it either."

I feel slightly unclean writing that.

We'll be expecting some later Wittgenstein soon, Matt.

Posted by MattD | February 19, 2008 11:01 AM

Reply to Stax:

The world is made up of coffee, not of beans.

Posted by szr | February 19, 2008 11:11 AM

Didn't most smart people (like myself) know that John Kerry was a flawed candidate. In fact, didn't everybody know GW Bush was a flawed candidate? THe truth is, we don't get many good candidates, at least not in my lifetime. Look at this list: Bush/Kerry, Bush/Gore, Clinton/Dole, Clinton/Bush, Bush/Dukakis, regan/mondale, Regan/Carter, Carter/Ford, Nixon/McGovern, Nixon/Humphry, Johnson/goldwater, Kennedy/Nixon

That's my lifetime. Who of these were without obvious massive flaws? Who of these actually seemed like they would make a good president before the election? I'm going to say maybe Reagan, maybe Carter, maybe johnson, maybe Kennedy. And some of that may be hidsight. The rest were either dumb, weird, obviously crooked, obviously congenitally unfit to be president.

I'd put clinton on that list but he was such an obvious phony. He turned out OK, but as a candidate, he didn't inspire a lot of good feeling form me. And I rememebrr that Carter seemed like a really good idea, but then turned out pretty bad. I think Mondal, Ford, Gore, and maybe Dole would have been OK presidents, but they weren't very inspiring.

Posted by cw | February 19, 2008 11:22 AM

Dont look for meaning...

(wait for it)

look for use

Posted by judson | February 19, 2008 1:51 PM

Actually, ""Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" is a pretty good rule if the local schoolyard bully is Adolph HITLER :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:WittRealschuleCrop.jpg Ludwig got that philosophical insight beaten into him pretty early.

As I recall, Adolph Hitler later made British citizen Wittgenstein cough up a VERY large amount of lunch money in order to ransom his family.

"All your relatives are belong to us".

An act which could have gotten Wittgenstein hung by the British government if it happened a few days later- after the declaration of war.

However, I suspect Ludwig got even. His insights had some value for cryptoanalysis. AKA Bletchley park. Turing. Finite State automata. The theory of something called a "computer".

A blind man gets the crap kicked out of him when his enemy can see. That moron Patton got a reputation as a military genius but anyone can win if they know where the enemy units are and what the enemy units will do in the next 3 days --before the enemy commanders even receive their orders.

Poor Adolph. He never handled pressure very well. Finally, there was nothing to do but lift that little automatic up to the temple and pull the trigger.

Posted by Don Williams | February 19, 2008 1:59 PM

Nice find, Don! Doesn't little Hitler just look like a bully? I know, it is easy to retrospectively project that he was a bully, especially since we know he turned out to be one of the elite group of three people who belonged to the "I killed more than 10 million people in the 20th century" club, but still.

Posted by szr | February 19, 2008 2:25 PM

1) For the fundamental importance of Turing's work to computation --e.g., in determining whether a computer could break the Enigma code in a reasonable amount of time -- see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine

2) For Turing's major role in cryptoanalysis work at Bletchley, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Cryptanalysis

3) For Turing-Wittgenstein's intellectual interaction, see
http://www.phil.canterbury.ac.nz/personal_pages/jack_copeland/pub/leiber.html

4) Sorry, Matthew, but there are certain chunks of information/concepts (and "meta-information", heh heh) that the Overlords deleted from the liberal arts curriculum several decades ago.

After all, the likelihood that NSA will ever want to give you liberal arts weinies security clearances is ..er..vanishing small.

5) Ah yes, forgot to mention. The "computer" also proved useful on something called "The Manhattan Project". For computations in the model to design implosion lenses. (Eventually, the models were run on the early ENIAC computer here at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. )
See http://www.mphpa.org/classic/HISTORY/H-06c18.htm

That was Plan B for dealing with Adolph.

Posted by Don Williams | February 19, 2008 2:31 PM

Re szr's comment "Doesn't little Hitler just look like a bully?"
--------------
Yep. But if you read Mein Kampf, you'll see that what really drove Adolph insane re Jews is that he evidently got into a political argument with SLC's grandfather. (SLC = local poster here).

Posted by Don Williams | February 19, 2008 2:54 PM

Don, do you have a job? This is not a slam, you always have a lot of interesting info in your posts. But they seem quite time consuming.

Posted by cw | February 19, 2008 3:02 PM

Yes.
But it's really supposed to be an adventure.

Posted by Don Williams | February 19, 2008 4:44 PM

So you're in the military?

Posted by cw | February 19, 2008 6:13 PM