Exploiting a Packer victory

Are you quietly hoping that Bush is reelected? Are you distressed that the Washington Redskins lost their pre-election home game, auguring a presidential loss for the incumbent party? Worse yet, were you a conflicted conservative cheesehead on Sunday?

If you are... jeez! Snap out of it and use your brain! There's a big difference between patterns that have plausible cause-and-effect relationships, such as a major league baseball team's payroll affecting whether the team has a winning record, and data-mining artifacts where relationships are discoverd in retrospect and persist only as long as pure chance allows.

Once you get that straight, you can ascend to to the next plane. Namely, exploiting (for fun or profit) the poor thinking habits of others. For example, this is one of those nice opportunities that lends itself to a substantial trading advantage. Election futures and polling in recent weeks peg Bush's election chances consistently better-than-even, around 55 to 65 percent. Therefore, if you run into a pro-Kerry coworker emboldened by Washingon's Sunday loss, it's a great opportunity to draw that coworker into an even-money bet. That spread between the wager (fair for a 50-50 contest) and the "true" probability (skewed in your favor) always makes you money in the long run, and hopefully the near-term too.

Still got lingering doubts? Hesitant to buck the oracular power of two squads of athletic millionaires chasing after a ball for three hours? Well consider this: Maybe we're just intepreting the data wrong. Maybe when the Redskins lose, it actually cuts against the last popular vote winner's party. Would that not also be consistent with the available data? Of course it is! So what do you think of the predictive power of the Packers-Redskins game now?