“Intrade and the oddsmakers are based on people putting money on the table.”

And today, they’ve been putting their money on the table for McCain right around the 46.0 mark, way up from the mid-30s the contracts had been in when this thread started. One transaction today hit 50.5. There’s a definite shift in perception out there among people with money on the table.

You had an exceptional teacher, and you and Shannon were exceptional students.

That doesn’t address the cases of dull students or bad teachers or teachers with agendas to undermine the conventional wisdom they should be teaching.

Nevertheless, if Palin said that school curricula are matters for local control, I’d probably find her stand acceptable. I’d feel sorry for kids whose access to the biotech professions was impeded by flawed educations, but IMO federal intervention is not warranted for most imperfections in society.

If Palin wanted to use the Education Department to abet the introduction of creationism and the like into public-school curricula, that would be a completely different matter. I doubt I could support her for office, even given an unpalatable alternative like Obama.

Although I still want Palin to clarify her position, unless evidence appears to the contrary I assume my concerns are hypothetical.

Thanks again for your responses.

These days — probably. After all, Barack’s half-white, too.

Charles has gone a little bit off the deep end with his “OMG ID is teh scary” thing recently, to the point of (IMO) seeing the creationist bogeyman in places it’s not. If even he can say her position doesn’t cause him any discomfort, there’s no reason to worry.

Along those lines, read these recent comments by me on LGF:
How to talk about evolution with creationists
My story, including my teacher’s approach.
(Interestingly enough, in that same thread, I linked to the Chicagoboyz roundtable on Boyd/OODA.)

I strongly disagree with this assessment. Intrade and the other bookmakers are not always right, but they have an excellent predictive record on elections as compared to most opinion polls. (I suspect that the private polls run by political campaigns are at least as accurate as Intrade, but 1) the results of such polls are not available to us and 2) to the extent that such polls predict election outcomes well it is probably for the same reason that Intrade does: the people calculating the odds have a strong personal interest in their accuracy.)

The blog post to which Dove links (here) makes a good point about Intrade’s reliability around the day of an election, but this point is irrelevant to our discussion. The more important question is whether Intrade provides accurate odds in the weeks and months before an election. I think that in most cases it does.

On Intrade, McCain’s odds of being elected President have never been higher than where they are now, around 40%. I don’t know if this number is accurate, but McCain’s radical VP choice suggests that he believes himself to be in a weak situation in which such bold, risky decisions are necessary if he is to win.

(N.B. that 40% is an odds estimate for an overall election victory, not an estimate of the percentage of voters who will vote for McCain. The race may actually be very close in terms of vote percentages in the handful of states that will determine the overall election outcome.)

I tracked it during the 2004 race and it was uncanny. Every gaffe by Kerry was reflected, and the minute Teresa Heinz Kerry opened her mouth, the trend started going against him, never to recover.

I’m going to dig into my poorly-sorted archives to look for the annotated graph I printed. From memory, I’d say Kerry looked better at the end of August ‘04 than Obama does now.

Nothing’s wrong with that, Lotharbot, but let’s not forget what preceded it. Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.

I’m unpersuaded by that.

Thanks for describing your personal experience, which counts with me. I respect Charles Johnson and if he’s mollified, I am too, somewhat.

Even so, I hope that Palin clarifies the matter. I suspect she’ll have to.

No; Tyouth said that.

The charts for Republican VP choice are up on intrade.com right now. Sarah Palin’s sat consistently in the low teens, dropping to single digits toward the end. Mitt Romney’s hovered consistently around 30%, spending the final few days in the 50-70% range. That’s a whole lot more damning than the current prices predicting an Obama win.

And Google directs me to this commentary on Intrade’s accuracy.

Intrade is a neat idea, but it’s a curiosity. Don’t take it too seriously.

That is an unqualified statement.

You also said I was wrong to think otherwise because unlike you I am deluded by my surroundings.

People betting large sums of money think the odds are 2/1 against McCain. You are wrong, or they are.

I made a preposterous suggestion to you to show that the level of confidence you claim to have is baseless, and that my assessment is in line with people who are actually putting money on the table, and not warped by my surroundings.

What I hope will happen cannot ever be a datum in my analysis, or my analysis will be worthless.

I don’t see what’s wrong with the view that

“I don’t think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum.”

The fact is, when evolution comes up, people WILL debate it. Attempting to quash that debate through ridicule, legislation, etc. is counterproductive. Personally, I thought my high school teacher handled it quite well — he gave us a whole class day where people could promote alternatives to evolution, point out problems, etc. In the end, everyone felt like they’d been respected and they had their say, we all learned the science, and the hard-core creationism position showed itself as weak. (For the record, I was the creationist kid; I went on to do my masters work studying evolutionary genetics, in large part because of that teacher’s approach. So trust me when I say it’s a good approach.)

Palin appears to be promoting a realistic solution: it’s a controversial subject, so let the kids argue about it and reason about it, but keep the curriculum truly scientific.

1) She continues the McCain “maverick” tradition. She’s not an insider by any means; she’s known as a reformer and an outsider.

2) She further differentiates McCain from Bush. The Obama campaign wants to paint McCain as Bush III, which has always been a little bit silly, but I think it becomes even sillier with Palin on the ticket. She’s not in bed with big oil, and she’s not a big-government type like Bush.

3) She has some actual executive leadership experience, unlike Obama and Biden. I’d have liked someone with more experience, but I’m not sure Romney or any of the others had enough experience to overcome their own negatives…

4) She’s a solid conservative, but hard to attack using traditional leftist attacks like “bigot”, “anti-woman”, etc. A lot of other choices bring big negatives with them; the main attack we’re likely to hear about Palin is that she’s inexperienced, which of course is easy to turn around toward the “community organizer” Barack Obama.

—–

Lex: are you suggesting the mortgage-and-bet-on-McCain strategy as a gamble, or as an investment strategy?

The first rule of gambling is to never gamble with money you need, only with surplus. The first rule of investing is to diversify, to insulate yourself from unexpected consequences. Either way, it’s a bad idea — even if you’re 99% sure of a McCain win.

Whaaat?

The guy was a fighter pilot! You’ve only just noticed?

Sheesh!