A Qualit’s tribute to Quants
[ by Charles Cameron — now the election dust has settled, let’s hear it for Nate Silver, Megyn Kelly, Zeynep Tufekci and xkcd ]
.
.
I’m about as Qualit as you can get on the Qualit vs Quant side of things, and if I had a bête grise, it might well be statistics. Why? As Albert Einstein once said, or is said to have said:
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts
Look, it’s even on his blackboard:
But look: votes can be counted, and what can be counted is Quant territory. So here’s a little hommage from a Qualit to a Quant — Nate Silver, in this case — with a bow to Megyn Kelly for calling out Karl Rove like that (upper panel, above), and a tip of the hat to xkcd (lower panel) for the usual spot-on commentary from his “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”.
Quality work, Quants!
**
Ah — but then, what should we do with Colbert‘s comment?
Math has a liberal bias
Joking aside, one reading I’d add to Zen‘s post-election list would be Zeynep Tufekci‘s In Defense of Nate Silver, Election Pollsters, and Statistical Predictions.
November 10th, 2012 at 7:25 am
Who counts the votes…. also matters 😉
November 10th, 2012 at 7:55 am
Indeed. What’s your read on that?
November 11th, 2012 at 9:46 am
More coming out on that soon. More numbers getting crunched in Florida, with St. Lucie County/Alan West country leading the way in irregularities.