D'Souza knows not what he does

Shall we forgive him?

Dinesh D'Souza is promoting the new paperback edition of his apologia for Christianity (What's so great about Christianity?) and is planning a visit to San Francisco next weekend. That's probably why he deigned to say a few words to Heidi Benson, staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. The book section of today's edition of the Chronicle presents the results of that conversation. I was particularly struck by this exchange:

Q: What religion do you practice?

A: I'm a Catholic by background. I was raised in Goa, a part of India that was visited by Portuguese missionaries a few hundred years ago, which explains my last name.

My wife, Dixie, is evangelical Christian. We met in the Reagan White House, when she was a student intern. We're members of the Horizon Christian Fellowship Church.

Dixie was born in Louisiana and grew up in San Diego. The issue of me being Catholic and her being Protestant made her parents a little grumpy, but the fact that I was Indian was a nonissue.

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Interesting. So Dinesh is no more of a Catholic than I am. We are both “Catholic by background,” but that's not the same as actually being Catholic. If he is a member of Horizon Christian Fellowship Church, then Dinesh has joined the ranks of ex-Catholics and become a Protestant. He should do something about correcting his Wikipedia entry, which lists his religion as Roman Catholic.

In this politically charged election year, quite a few Catholic clerics did some vigorous pulpit-pounding demanding that their parishioners vote Republican (although most were circumspect enough to say “pro-life” instead of endorsing McCain by name). Presumably this would not have bothered D'Souza, had he been present to hear any of those sermons. Given his lapses, however, he might have fidgeted a bit at demands for ideological and philosophical purity by his ostensible co-religionists. After all, Joe Biden's Roman Catholicism was frequently called into question because he supports freedom of choice. I'm sure Dinesh heard about this, even if he has been absent from the Catholic pews. One doesn't want to be ambiguous about such matters, especially if one is a self-anointed Christian apologist. People really should know what religion they belong to.

Of course, Wikipedia is a great source of information, but it's hardly definitive. Maybe it's just a mistake on Wikipedia's part. Perhaps the encyclopedists misconstrued the intent of remarks like “me being Catholic” on Dinesh's part.

But no. Dinesh himself is the source of the error. He has an official website (which is cited in the Wikipedia article). This is what he has to say about himself on the More About Dinesh D'Souza page:

“A believing Catholic but a poorly practicing one,” D'Souza said religious faith is vital to achievement.

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Sorry, Dinesh, but joining an evangelical Protestant church does not make you a “poorly practicing” Catholic. It makes you an ex-Catholic. A non-Catholic. If you honestly think you're still a “believing Catholic,” then you must fear for your immortal soul (since you imagine you have one). Presumably you don't rush to your local Catholic church to attend mass after the services at Horizon Christian Fellowship Church each Sunday, which means you are in violation of a Catholic's solemn obligation for weekly mass attendance. And deliberately missing mass is a mortal sin.

Oh, oh. Dinesh is going to hell.

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Roller-coaster polling

Keep your barf bags handy

I like to follow political polls and I'm encouraged that my preferred presidential candidate continues in most reports to hang on to a significant lead. Nevertheless, I am heartily tired of the constant “analysis” of nonexistent volatility. It's a pseudo-drama ginned up by a combination of deep ignorance and ratings-driven sensation mongering.

It's polling, suckers. It's a statistical art with well-documented error bars. The results are not five-decimal-place scientific calculations. They're probabilistic estimates. The numbers are going to jump up and down even if nothing changes. Got that?

For purposes of illustration, suppose that a poll's accuracy is described as being within 3 percentage points 90% of the time. Got that? Then about 10% of the time it will be off by more than 3 points. If two candidates are within about 5 points of each other, taking 3 points away from the leader and giving them to the other guy will reverse the race! Only not really, because the poll would be in error in that instance. These flukes are not avoidable and they provide grist for the mills of the talking heads who will then scream about upsets and stunning surprises. They're just idiots. Or ignoramuses. Maybe both.

Let's take the illustration a few steps further. We can use a normal distribution (“bell curve”) to model the results of polls whose errors are less than 3 points 90% of the time. With the assistance of Excel's random number generator and built-in normal distribution functions, I ran two dozen trials and plotted the results of the simulated polling errors:


The model calls for the errors to fall within plus-or-minus 3 points 90% of the time (in the long run, mind you). Ten percent of 24 trials is 2.4, so we should expect maybe 2 or 3 results to fall outside the plus-or-minus 3 band. In this little experiment, it happened four times, twice going high and twice low. Please note the dashed line marking the −2.5 boundary. Whenever the leader's margin was underestimated by at least 2.5 points (in a race with an actual 5-point margin), the lead changes hands—according to the poll, not reality. Imagine the breathless reports that would immediately blossom on the cable news networks, newspapers, radio talk shows, and blogs. Panic! Or elation!

Another thing to keep in mind: The model did the exact same randomized calculation each time, assuming no actual change in the electorate. You still get variation, an inevitable consequence of sample-based statistics. You're stuck with it and you have to live with it. And pundits love to live with it because it gives the illusion of motion even when none exists.

People should just calm down.

I swear that I did not cherry-pick my results in order to present one that looked especially dramatic. The graph above shows my initial run. I cranked out some more examples, just to see what they looked like. These appear, together with the original experiment, in the graph below. Does it look chaotic enough for you? (Only the blue graph failed to produce an artificial swap in the lead.) See? Major developments in the campaign! We have headlines!

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