Look back to circa 1970. Back then, probably fewer than a hundred people controlled what issues reached a mass audience. Three major news networks and a handful of major papers set the terms of the debate in stone. The editors of those organs dictated what did and did not get discussed. Those gatekeepers created a interrupt in the feedback loop. A small idea or event could propagate and spread only if gatekeepers wished it. Basically, if something didn’t seem significant to a few dozen left of center white guys in New York, then no one in the wider world ever heard of it.

Mathematically, the properties of this system resemble a beaker of water at room temperature. The actions or opinions of one water-molecule/citizen could not perturb the total system because changes in the state of one molecule/citizen did not propagate across the entire system. Fluctuation in temperature/opinion dampen out toward the norm. Simple statistical tools allowed one measure and predict the future behavior of the system.

The internet changed this dynamic. Without the gatekeepers to dampen out the fluctuations, the system begins to mathematically resemble a beaker of water a critical freezing or boiling temperature. Small fluctuations get amplified and spread across the entire system. A minor cluster of low temperature water molecules caused by simple chance triggers a beaker of critical water to freeze solid by creating a self propagating feedback look of freezing water molecules. A single poster on Free Republic triggers a feedback loop as individuals spread the word that something in a major news story in suspicious.

The killer here is that if we are entering a period of critical/emergent mass debate, then the course of events governed by such debates might be fundamentally unpredictable because they hinge on the amplification of fluctuations so small as to be practically unmeasurable.

The problem in your football hypothetical is the same as the problem with the hemline theory of stock market performance, and with other bogus theories based on spurious correlations. They don’t make sense, which was your point, and you (generic you, not TM) can easily fool yourself if you are not careful in analyzing the data. But that doesn’t mean that all such correlations are spurious, and if you can find a way to test them it may turn out that some of them have predictive value.

People test ideas in this way all the time in financial markets. Why should politics, another area of life that runs on crowd psychology, not be a fertile area for similar research? Wretchard sees this possibility and so do I. It may be that research into such issues will ultimately prove fruitless, but it’s an empirical question, so why not look into it?

Well, I am certain that I could track the Tradesports futures market on the contract which pays off if the Tampa Bay Bucaneers win the Super Bowl, and run those odds against the internet chatter for the phrases “Eli Manning, poised quarterback”.

My as-yet-untested (but incredibly plausible) prediction – the odds on the Bucanneers collapsed just as the use of the phrase “Eli Manning, poised quarterback” soared.

Now, do you suppose that the internet chatter led to the defeat by the Giants (led by Manning) of the Bucanneers? Were the Bucanneers a victim of an internet storm?

Or would a search for causal mechanisms be useful? My guess is that such a search would strongly suggest that the Giants coaches and players defeated the Bucs *and* sparked the chatter.

If Wretchard can’t suggest any mechanism at all by which the internet chatter cratered the Hillary campaign, and can’t even establish cause-effect (for all we know, the big drops in the futures contracts *followed* the release of new polls supporting Obama), then all he has shown is that chatter will follow an event. That is an important insight?

And left out entirely – the big media (NY Times, for example) said the same thing that bloggers did, namely, Hillary looks a lot less inevitable after Iowa (hardly a radical or imaginative insight). Why couldn’t her collapse have been entirely a MSM phenomenon, with no role played at all by the blogs? That at least would be an interesting speculation, and might be true.

So, Wretchard is missing any cause and effect, and is missing any attempt to display that the internet message differed from the MS message. Yet he concludes that “the destruction [of her campaign] was accomplished through the agency of an Internet storm.”

Unimpressive.

And I have no idea why this has irked me so – normally I find Wretchard to be fine, and have always admired the Chiccago Boyz.

His testing method makes perfect sense to me, since it’s analogous to methods used to test quantitative trading systems in securities markets. You either make money or you don’t, and in this case you either predict political outcomes accurately or you don’t. There may be other ways of trading securities or making political predictions, that involve detailed understanding of processes, but if such ways exist their existence does not invalidate successful prediction systems that do not rely on understanding processes.

Geez, almost like someone calling out “The emperor has no clothes!” Maybe someone could turn it into a parable.

The Internet may have, in just a few days, destroyed the Clintons as a political force.

Sure, it may have. But neither you nor the other authors described any actual mechanism by which that happened, unlike in the Dan Rather saga they mention, where specific bloggers and freepers introduced new evidence and re-directed the debate.

In the Hillary case, you might just as well say that Iowa voters rejected Hillary and the MSM, which loves Obama and loves a David v. Goliath story, took up the cudgels to finish the job.

Suggested topic for evaluation – check out the Dean collapse in 2004. At one point he was at 90% in the prediction markets and the internet loved him – was he a victim of an Internet storm, or did reality bite?

Second topic – check the internet mentions of “Katrina” and “hurricanes” in late August/early September 2005. Now tells us whether an Internet storm swamped New Orleans, or simply described on an external reality.

The dog barks; the caravan passes by. I may post on this later, but honestly, this confusion of cause, effect, and commentary is embarrassing.