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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Political Science has long had physics envy.

But political science cannot quantify all the variables in the human and historical experience.

Weird shit happens at odd times. And there’s no formula for that.

I think Harris will win. And I can point to data in Michigan or Wisconsin or wherever and it all seems logical.

And then Pearl Harbor happens. Or Kennedy gets assassinated. Or 9/11 happens.

And your little PhD models are useless. Because human beings remain unpredictable

The best we can manage are patterns, not predictions [/quote]

Yes, but social/political science can still be accurate at a macro level.  Yes, humans are unpredictable, but groups of humans are often much more predictable.  If your predictions account for a certain percentage of variation, then it doesn't matter if the lowest percentile or a middle percentile varies from the model, the model can still be a fairly accurate predictor.

In this case, Professor Lichtman uses modeling tools that may not be accurate on the micro level, but his research has shown it to be fairly accurate on the macro level and he has analyzed it for all elections in the last 50 or so years.  So that's over 10 elections and with the exception of the case that was decided on a court case, not on the actual election, he was 100% correct.  And his model did predict who would be the popular vote winner, just not the electoral vote winner and that win was decided by a court case.

It's a pretty sound model that has, so far, been accurate.  And it will remain a highly watched index until such time as it fails to be more accurate than not.[/quote]

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