What is it with Republicans and Making Up Facts?

What is it with Republicans and bad science? They seem to invent justifications for whatever political position they have already decided on, and then dress these rationalizations up in sciency sounding language. Unfortunately for these politicians, reality often does not conform to their worldview. As a case in point, we can take former OB/GYN Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX):

So, according to Rep. Burgess, fetuses feel pain, and male fetuses masturbate as early as 15 weeks, and this is evidence that abortion should be banned much earlier than the 20 week ban under consideration. He further notes that, "There is no question in my mind that a baby at 20-weeks after conception can feel pain." Unfortunately  despite his experience delivering babies, Rep. Burgess's views are well outside the mainstream scientific consensus and have no basis in reality. According to this systematic review published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, fetuses lack the ability to feel pain until the beginning of the third trimester, which is about 24 weeks, and significantly later than the 15 weeks suggested by Rep. Burgess.

So, what is going on here. I think we have a combination of Wishful Thinking and Pareidolia. Burgess has faith in the truth of his conclusions, so he goes out and looks for evidence that he thinks confirms his beliefs. When he sees sonograms of male fetuses with their hands between their legs, he interprets this as the fetus masturbating (why his mind goes there and why he doesn't think female fetuses masturbate is a question for the psychiatrists to answer). He sees the vague and random movements of an early term fetus and interprets those movements as purposeful because he wants that to be true because it supports his conclusions. The key here is that his beliefs about fetal pain perception are not formed on the basis of evidence, but rather he has decided that early term fetuses do feel pain, and then looks for evidence to support that belief. Someone who had a genuine interest in crafting effective legislation would develop positions on the basis of evidence rather than look for evidence that supports one's pre-existing biases.

h/t to Salon

Republican Delusions

Over the course of this election cycle I have written several blog posts looking at Right wing delusions about polling data. I focused quite a bit on Dean Chamber of Unskewedpolls.com and his attempts to "fix" polling data that didn't fit his desired outcome for the election. And now reports are coming in that th Romney campaign itself bought into these delusions, believing that the publicly available polling data (data collected and published by trained professionals with years if not decades of experience) was incorrect and was underestimating the Republican vote. From CBS:

As a result, they believed the public/media polls were skewed - they thought those polls oversampled Democrats and didn't reflect Republican enthusiasm. They based their own internal polls on turnout levels more favorable to Romney. That was a grave miscalculation, as they would see on election night.

This report makes it increasingly clear that the Republican party, even at it highest levels is, quite simply, delusional. On a whole host of issues they have taken positions that have little bearing on reality, and in many cases contradict established facts. The classic example of this is Global Warming, but it extends to a whole host of issues ranging from female anatomy to the policies of Barack Obama. In effect, it appears that the entire Republican world-view is based on wishful thinking and the belief that something must be true because one wants it to be true. We saw this as well on election night with Karl Rove's now legendary refusal to believe that Obama had won the state of Ohio, thus winning re-election:

And this raises an important and disturbing question: What are we to do when one of the two major political parties supports policies and platforms and endorses beliefs that are delusional and have no relation to reality? How can a democracy survive when people are picking their own facts to fit their already established ideological views? If we can't even agree on what the problems are, how can we possibly come up with solutions to them? I have no idea what the answers to these questions might be, but it will be interesting to see if the Republican party modifies any of its views to actually correspond to reality. If history is any guide, they will likely just become more extreme and more delusional.

Reality has a well-known liberal bias

Wishful Thinking is a fallacy in which on argues that something is true because she wants it to be true. As should be clear, this is a fallacy because the universe is generally indifferent to what we want. Reality is objective and wishing things worked differently is not going to make them happen. In my daily reading of the news I cam across this story on Salon.com about a website, UnSkewed Polls which claims to correct for liberal bias in all national polls. According to the author of this site, all national polls are skewed towards the democrats due to liberal bias among the pollsters. The author then claims to be able to correct for this bias, and when he does so, it appears that Romney is leading Obama by 7-10 points, a significant margin.

The basic "methodology" if we can call it that, is to assume that the votes of Republicans are under-counted, so the author simply reweights the polls so that, in his opinion, Republicans are no longer under-counted. For example, the author assumes that 34% of voters are Republicans. So, if a poll shows that only 24% of the respondents are Republicans, then the data must be skewed. So, the author reweights the data as if those 24% of respondents actually accounted for 34% of respondents. Basically he just gives more weight to the polling data of people identified as Republicans. Unsurprisingly, this reweighting seems to always lead to Republican dominance in the polling. Basically he is counting each Republican vote multiple times, which naturally leads to Republican dominance in the polling. If you don't believe that this is what the author is doing, you can read the details of this "methodology" here.

As should be obvious, this is a classic example of wishful thinking. The author doesn't like how reality is structured, so he just wishes up a new reality and assumes that to be correct. The problem, of course, is that the people who conduct the polling are really quite good at it, and very good at correcting for various biases. As Nate Silver of the NY Times notes:

First, the polling by this time in the cycle has been reasonably good, especially when it comes to calling the winners and losers in the race. Of the 19 candidates who led in the polls at this stage since 1936, 18 won the popular vote (Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 is the exception), and 17 won the Electoral College (Al Gore lost it in 2000, along with Mr. Dewey).

If the author of UnSkewed Polls was correct that polls have a statistically significant liberal bias, then why are they accurate predictors of the winner of the popular vote 94% of the time? If such liberal bias was infecting the polls, we wouldn't see them as accurate predictors of the winner so often. Thus, the only way the author of Unskewed Polls can object to polling data is by making up his own methodology that tells him what he wants to hear. As Stephen Colbert famously remarked concerning George W. Bush's falling approval ratings:

Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias ...