Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Undecideds Are Smarter Than You

Not really. But in spite of the assertions by those who have decided that it's a clear choice, and anyone who hasn't decided between Obama and McCain is an idiot, here's support from the scientific community that we're acting in an intelligent manner. Below is an excerpt from an NYT op-ed on the subject. To read the whole piece follow the link.

AS we enter the final week of a seemingly endless election campaign, opinion polls continue to identify a substantial fraction of voters who consider themselves “undecided.” Although their numbers are dwindling, they could still determine the outcome of the race in some states. Comedians and other commentators have portrayed these people as fools, unable to choose even when confronted with the starkest of contrasts.

Recent research in neuroscience and psychology, however, suggests that most undecided voters may be smarter than you think. They’re not indifferent or unable to make clear comparisons between the candidates. They may be more willing than others to take their time — or else just unaware that they have essentially already made a choice.

Neuroscientists have begun to tease out the brain systems that make decisions. Even when it takes no more than a second, decision-making is thought to involve two parts, gathering evidence and committing to a choice. In tasks as simple as deciding whether a shifting pattern of dots is moving to the left or to the right, brain activity in the parietal cortex rises as evidence is gathered, eventually reaching a tipping point (though it’s not yet known which brain regions drive the final choice).

Inherent to this process is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Commit early and you can get on with your life. Take more time and you might make a wiser or more accurate decision. Since a commitment to John McCain or Barack Obama is not required until Nov. 4, for the greatest accuracy, one should gather evidence until that date. So then why aren’t there even more undecided voters? In measurements of decision-related neural activity, after there is enough evidence to reach a person’s decision threshold, his brain can ignore further input even when it might improve accuracy. The brain goes ahead and decides, freeing up mental resources to deal with other problems.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

The Candidates are working hard to lose my vote

"McCain would be an outstanding president. In government, he has almost always had an instinct for the right cause. He has become an experienced legislative craftsman. He is stalwart against the country’s foes and cooperative with its friends. But he never escaped the straightjacket of a party that is ailing and a conservatism that is behind the times. And that’s what makes the final weeks of this campaign so unspeakably sad." - David Brooks, NYT columnist in Sunday's Times.

"Palin goes Rogue" - Yahoo headline for a newswire story on Gov. Palin's resistance to tightly scripted campaigning. The article described her bent towards articulating a neo-Regan conservatism that is at odds with the image the handlers sought to project.

So, is going against the grain of the merchandisers the reason McCain-Palin ticket is convincing me not to vote for them? No! It's that they're in this battle is why. Each has a history of taking positions outside the party orthodoxy and pushing their agenda when they believed it was in the interest of the people. Each have abandoned that in an attempt to be elected. Why should I think that if elected they would rediscover their backbones?

Sen. Obama has a long history of avoiding controversial stands. His hundreds of present votes in the Illinois senate is but one example. He is an very intelligent and extremely gifted politician, but he has a penchant for "politics" over governance. As energy costs spiraled and it became clear that strict environmentalism was no longer the popular position in regards to oil production he adroitly shifted from being an opponent of off-shore drilling to presenting himself in a chameleon stance that allows voters to see him as both a champion of the environment and a supporter of increased off-shore production. Does he have the backbone to take the hard stand? Is he ready to push an unpopular agenda if national interests demand it? He hasn't shown me any reason to believe he would.

All of this does not mean that either major party candidate is destined to be a Buchanan of a president. (He was the president right before Lincoln. He was basically useless.) As the investment ads all say, previous performance does not guarantee future results. But it's rare when a politician behaves radically differently from their past once elected president. But I do have hope.

LBJ was a great example. American Perspectives had a great show on his presidency and showed how this Southern democrat who had opposed and defeated every attempt to pass civil rights and voting rights legislation while Senate leader did a u-turn and used every bit of his political capital to pass the highly unpopular Civil Rights Act of 1964.