Sailer’s Secret Weapon: Inductivist
One of Steve Sailer’s best kept secrets is how he comes up with his standard-setting political science models such as the marriage stability for white women is the primary driver of Republican victories, explaining an incredible 83% of the variance in the Red State/Blue State voting patterns. When I plugged his data for white female marriage stability and electoral outcomes into the Laboratory of the States database, and ran it against the rest of the hundreds of variables, it still came out as the best predictor of Republican victories. Due to data-dredging effects, even if some of my variables had beaten his, it wouldn’t have meant they were better—nor that his model was wrong. I threw everything but the kitchen sink at his model to beat it looking for any variables to best it. But they didn’t. Just amazing. How did he do it? He didn’t say. But now he has let loose a clue: He has been getting fed insights by a guy calling himself Inductivist and a brief survey of his blog entries reveals the “Inductivist” may have what it takes to come up with models as powerful as Sailer has been promoting via his blog. (If Sailer himself came up with the white female marriage stability model of conservative voting then my apologies but the Inductivist blog doesn’t need something quite that impressive to be a secret weapon for Sailer.)
Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 18 Apr 2006 10:11 | #
James,
You could be right. This Sue Danim guy has a statictician’s natural, but limited, curiosity. I’m not incredibly impressed with his reflections on the religious impulse, and his political analysis is, frankly, shallow. In both cases there’s no grand “Why?”. His thinking extends no deeper than a statistician’s initial finding. Which is perhaps why he benefits Sailer with his material.