Banking on a dream without data to back it up

[Guest]

I tend to do this. In high school, I believed a girl liked me based mostly on my own personal bias. Come to find out, she really liked my best friend. I was totally floored when he (my friend) came and told me the great news. My false hope made the news a tragedy. If, on the other hand, I had simply done some research before making a conclusion about whether she liked me, I would have prepared my mind for the news. I may have considered her devotion to me as more of a probability than a dream.

Similarly, as a missionary, I would fall into this trap over and over again. "Is this investigator going to convert to Mormonism? I think so!" Time and time again, I was disappointed. Praying didn't seem to help, for I always felt inspiration upon asking God if so-and-so was to be baptized soon.

Similarly again, Mitt Romney held a grand dream that he would win the nomination for Pres. He was so convinced that he hired a company to put on a fireworks show in Boston Harbor. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- ... ton-harbor. He also didn't have a concession speech prepared. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ ... story.html

Would he have gone to this effort/non-effort if he had believed he may not win? Did he have anyone on staff giving him realistic data?

[_beastie]

It appears that many of the Republican "notables" had themselves totally fooled. They believed their own stories and rationalizations. See Rove's reaction on Fox news when Ohio was called for Obama for example.

[_Res Ipsa]

Reading the postmortems, it looks like the entire crew was fooled. Usually, the doubters come out of the woodwork and start talking. Everyone seemed to be saying that the loss came as a complete shock.

Maybe a extreme example of confirmation bias? I dunno.

[_Equality]

Reading the postmortems, it looks like the entire crew was fooled. Usually, the doubters come out of the woodwork and start talking. Everyone seemed to be saying that the loss came as a complete shock.

Maybe a extreme example of confirmation bias? I dunno.

It is comforting to know that people who were so fully encircled by the conservative bubble are not now entrusted with the grave responsibility of running the country. This group of folks (including Mr Wonky Wonkypants Paul Ryan) apparently were unable to look at the markets and the polling aggregators (not just Nate Silver, but also RealClearPolitics, HuffPo, and TPM), ALL of which said Obama had a slight but fairly consistent lead and see that Romney was the underdog and Obama the favorite. It was not unreasonable for people to think Romney had a chance to win. But to so believe he was going to win as to be shellshocked when he didn't shows a level of self-delusion that is alarming.

It is not difficult to see the connections to Mormonism: the belief that something is true if you just believe it strongly enough and get together in a group and reinforce your shared belief by stating it over and over. That's the way Mormon testimonies are obtained and maintained. And it seems to be how the Romney campaign approached the polling data they received. Like a TBM who hears uncomfortable truths about Joseph Smith for the first time and dismisses them as "anti-Mormon lies," so the Romney campaign responded to unfavorable polling data by "unskewing" it to make it more palatable. "Biased liberal media" was the Romney campaign's equivalent of "anti-Mormon lies."

[_zeezrom]

Maybe a extreme example of confirmation bias?

Yes.

Maybe this is why so many of my TBM friends/family were so angry about the results.

[_beastie]

I do think there is an LDS connection. I think Romney sincerely believed he was going to win. I have long suspected he had some sort of spiritual witness, and that refusing to write a concession speech was a demonstration of faith in that witness.

The best salesmen fool themselves before they fool anyone else. I'm betting Romney's complete and sincere faith in his eventual victory is part of what persuaded everyone around him.

It's also a symptom of the bubble. This is what the cable age has afforded us - the luxury of reaffirming our biases with a 24 hour news cycle devoted to just our biases.

[_moksha]

I thought Romney was going to win. I forgot about Murphy's 139th corollary in the Laws of the Perversity of the Universe, "Moksha only remembers the one about how if things can go wrong, they will go wrong".