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Don't Read My Lips
scitex writes "Two economists, Rasa Karapandza and Milos Bozovic, from University Pompu Fabra, Barcelona wrote a very interesting paper "You Can Fool Some People Sometimes..." They say that on all US Presidential Elections from 1960, when presidential debates were held, won the candidate that used less future tense in the debate. First debate was televised in 1960. They predict that these elections will be won by George W. Bush. They used a similar approach to analyze performance of US companies and found that companies that use less future tense in their annual reports perform better. Will this change the way companies write they reports and presidential candidates speak?"
...that they used the future tense to predict the outcome of the election.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What exactly do the editors do to earn their keep? They certainly don't edit.
Usually speaking the incumbent is going to talk about what they've done over the last couple years, and usually speaking, it's the incumbant's race to loose. That would account for the majority of the time that this happened, and the remainder is probably just coincidence.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
You can't apply them to an individual case in an attempt to predict the future.
For example, the divorce rate in North America is very high. Pretend that it's an even 50% of marriages that end in divorce.
If you get married, you are not beholden to that statistic. Whether or not you get divorced cannot be predicted by the statistic. You do not have a 50/50 chance of breaking it off with your partner. The conditions may exist that cause a 50% divorce rate, but they may not apply to you, for whatever reason.
Predicting things from past results is interesting, and sometimes something to talk about, but they don't mean anything. Up until a couple of weeks ago, nobody had ever come back from being down 3 games to 0 in the World Series.
You use future tense because your present tense is screwed up so you use future tense to assure us everything is ok and enron is not falling to pieces. And everythign is okay, the entire world doesn't hate you and we're not goign to get lapped by the rest of the industrialized world while we insist evolution is just one of many valid theories.....
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
And I believe US presidential speakery will remain at its current levels of excellency.
Why can't we redirect this kind of research energy towards applications that really have a benefit to mankind? How about predicting patterns which lead to cancer or destructive weather? Doesn't that seem like a more noble use of time and resources?
What's next for these guys? An analysis of peoples' choices for celluar ring tones as they relate to their propensity to purchase expensive designer salad croutons? Stouffers is waiting anxiously for your results.
It was before my time, but selective lighting on TV might have influenced the Kennedy/Nixon results in 1960.
I seem to remember when pointing became a bad thing. This is why we now see awkward hand/finger positions and weird flinging of digits.
People are more interested in what you've done rather than what you say you're going to do which may or may not happen. Everybody knows that campaign promises tend to be broken so what you say you're going to do is going to be taken with a grain of salt.
This campaign really is about what GW did and whether you like it or not. Not so much about what either candidate plans to do the next four years.
I invested in my current stock AVN because they've done interesting things in the past, their stock history is good and because they had interesting current projects. I paid $1.76 a share and it's now above $3 a share. Their current project at the time is now showing real promise and getting some attention.
Work Safe Porn
This story conjures up some clever side-conjectures, such as the notion that you can create statistical probability for virtually any scenario you desire if you keep researching until you find the data set that substantiates your claim. I wonder how many sets of criteria these guys churned through before they identified a pattern that jived with something significant? It sounds like a great gimmick to use to get grant money. 1. Pick an issue, formulate a premise, and then 2. start mining historical data until a substantive pattern arises which substantiates your claim. 3. Profit.
In this case, the future-tense references are kind of obvious if you ask me. People that talk about the future are often trying to detract attention from the present, and in those scenarios whether we're talking about a presidential election or a corporate report, tend to be reflective of whether or not the status quo is desireable or change is needed. Who needs a report to recognize this? If a company is doing badly, of course they're going to focus on the future. If a company is doing well, they'll be talking about their present circumstances. DUH.
As a result, I'm inclined to believe the outcome of this upcoming election is going to shatter these analysts predictions. In the business world, you can't really get away with lying about the present to the degree Bush has managed politically, and he's invented a new approach towards attempting to re-invent reality, which I'm not quite sure the majority of the public has bought, so his present tense propaganda is a completely different monster than any historical data these guys might have used for comparison.
"Europeans who oftenly drive on the left side of the road tend to have a better knowledge of English."
That doesn't mean that if you start driving on the left side of the road, that you start to become better at English, or if you'll learn English, that you slowly start to drift leftwards.
I'd like to post this to suprnova but the upload page has timed out for me in the past 2 weeks. Maybe someone can try to put it on suprnova?
I ripped these older Presidential debates from various websites. It was a pain to get them. Dowload the torrent here or here or here
Low quality Real Video files ripped from streamings from the web.
If you have other debates, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, Presidential and/or VP, or higher-quality of the above, PLEASE POST!
I think this is the most awkwardly written slashdot submission that I've ever read, and that's saying a lot.
Read carefully: scitex writes "Two economists, Rasa Karapandza and Milos Bozovic, from University Pompu Fabra, Barcelona wrote a very interesting paper "You Can Fool Some People Sometimes..." They say that on all US Presidential Elections from 1960, when presidential debates were held, won the candidate that used less future tense in the debate. First debate was televised in 1960. They predict that these elections will be won by George W. Bush. They used a similar approach to analyze performance of US companies and found that companies that use less future tense in their annual reports perform better. Will this change the way companies write they reports and presidential candidates speak?"
is likely to give you many seemingly uncanny correlations between multiple events. The outcome of Washington Redskins home games prior to the election has predicted all the presidential elections since 1936. The sale of Halloween maks of the presidential candidates have predicted the elections since 1980. Does this bear any significance to this election? No. However, on the surface, this new prediction seems interesting. A person's word usage is a reflection of his character, education, and background. And there's been plenty of analysis of the word used by Bush and Kerry in this year's debates.
Yeah, well whatever. The thing that bugs me most about presidential candidates is that they always say "when I am president" and not "if I am elected president", even the ones who know they have no chance of winning (like Kucinich). I know their speech coaches or whoever tell them it makes them sound more assertive and confident and blah blah blah, but shut up already. NBC did this too, with their "MUST SEE THURSDAY" crap. It always sounded like a threat to me. Oh. Also, have they done an analysis of whether the person who repeats the same damn phrases over and over again the most is more likely to win? Because that seems to be the strategy of both camps.
And they all predict different things.
I've lived through several elections by now. There is always a tiny New Hampshire which always predicts the election since 1918 (until this time); always a sports team that wins when the Democrats win (until this time); etc, etc.
In the modern world, we have a lot of things we can keep statics on; therefore, we would expect to find impressive simple coincidences. If you line up 10,000 people and they all start rolling die, and leave as soon as they get the first non-pair, a day later their is going to be one sleepy and exhausted guy who just kept rolling pairs through the whole thing. Don't bet your savings that his next roll is pair, however.
You can use people's interest in coincidences to rip them off.
Get a list of 16,000 investors. Send them all a letter saying you have developed a super-secret algorthim that predicts the Dow; in 8,000 of the letters, offer the free prediction that it is going up next week, and in 8,000 other ones, offer the free prediction that it is going down.
Next week, toss out whichever 8,000 got the bum prediction. Send out 4,000 letters elaborating a little on your algorithm and predicting a bull market, and 4,000 predicting a bear market.
Soon you will be down to a handful very excited morons. Offer to sell them the next prediction for $10k a piece. Be sure to give half them one prediction and half another, so that their are some rich people who whorship you who will fund your defense if you get caught.
There are ways to do this that give you a pretty plausible defense.
For example, sell a neural network machine to stock traders. Tell them you sell a subscription to weekly updates to the neural weights, that you are using your Cray with it's secret sauce to compute. The manner in which you get away with giving different predictions to different customers is that you calculate a different set a weights according what stocks they are invested in and what amount of risk they are willing to take.
Then, if you get busted, you can plausibly claim you believed it yourself.
The above are true stories. The guy who did it with letters in the 1920s was knowingly committing fraud, and fled the country with a lot of other people's money. The neural network guys who did it in the 1990s may well have believed it themselves, or most of them did. I don't think anyone ever even publically called them on it.
Notice the recent scandal about drug companies commissioning dozens of trials of the effectiveness of a drug, and then only reporting the ones that said the drug worked ? Same principle. That's why you can't allow as evidence of effectiveness any trial that was not publicized before it was started; and you also must force them to pre-disclose the "protocol" or method of analyzing the data, because otherwise they will try out several different ways to divide up the data until they get what they want.
This is about as meaningful as correlating election success with sports term performance, combined length of last names, weather, or astrology.
43 presidential elections (much less the 11 since 1960) are just not enough data points from which to extract any remotely significant analysis.
we like to refer to it as fromage
I am living proof of the Peter Principle
They need to add occurences of the phrase "we're gonna" to calculate bush's chances for election.
My first thought when I heard this was of psychohistory and that for it to work, no one could know about the predictions. Now that the cat's out of the bag, this pattern is useless.
Use the present or active tense as much as possible. Never the future or the past tense. Future tense implies uncertainty. Past tense implies rationalization. Present tense exhibits a certain confidence in whatever statement you are making; whether this confidence is due to a strong position or a strong will.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Bush can always say "We're at war", but saying "We'll still be at war in 4 years" might not be a good idea.
perception is reality
We will have to wait to see if this will be true, will we not?
Ahh, now I'll never get elected.
Love the Third Amendment?
Where I came from, won is past tense, but hey... don't let my illiterate hick colloquialisms get you down...
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Will this change the way companies write they reports and presidential candidates speak?
Yes. But so what? The lack of future tense isn't what's winning the elections, but merely a side effect of something else. That something else is easy to figure out: the average voter/consumer wants to know more about the practical here and now and less about the promises of the future.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
" won the candidate that used less future tense in the debate" Yoda? Is that you?
Now, more than ever, it's plainly obvious we need better voting technology. The group with the best effort underway is the Open Voting Consortium. We've mentioned their open source, Linux based, paper ballot voting system before. Give 'em a look at http://www.openvotingconsortium.org Thanks, Ed Kennedy
Can you blame us? Those fancy cheeses are delicious, and are only made more so by the knowledge that they're paid for with the hard-earned money of productive Americans. Also, I do not support our troops and I hate America. Don't even get me started on how I want to force everyone to have a gay marriage to a trial lawyer.
Did we switch to ebonics all of a sudden? Let me try my hand at it...
Yee-yah, the way they writes they reports is the shiznit! :D