In terms of disabling or disciplining the pundits, though, not so sure. At least they were able to figure out from The Worm that Joe the Plumber was not a winning talking point, but they still nattered on about him for days (and probably weeks). You’d have thought they’d drop it themselves, having seen the reactions. But no.

Also, to add to the geek factor on this comments thread (which is already very very high – integrals of Worms? Fabulous stuff): CNN needs to work on the format of their Worm. The black background is poor, the colours used look too much alike, and for me at least the scale and long lag prior to the moving off the left of the screen aren’t particularly helpful. Maybe someone should consult Andrew Gelman?

Absolutely. And, of course, it’s utterly gripping for politics junkies. I watched the first debate on holiday in the States and was simultaneously enthralled and appalled by CNN’s squiggle. The thing is, it serves the same function as the pundits – ie to tell you how the average American would react to the debate – but does it better than the pundits, who are notoriously bad at judging the average American’s views. Clearly this is a good thing, ceteris paribus. But it reinforces the paradigm that what matters about the debate is what the average American thinks, rather than what was actually said and whether it was true, which is very much a bad thing. And worse than that, it does so in real time, so you don’t even have time to form your own opinion, only to have it contradicted by the pundits telling you what you’re thinking. Instead, you’re constantly flicking your attention between the candidates and the lines, wondering how a given zinger will play with Dems vs Independents and so on. It basically turns you into a Villager, which is horrifically soul destroying. The only consolation is that it makes it much harder for pundits to rewrite history for those who don’t watch or listen to the debate live. It doesn’t seem to have stopped them from trying, though.

To continue: I know that a big part of life in these United States is about giving the benefit of the doubt to people who have had too much from the system already, wouldn’t do the same for you, and are better set-up provided they get dummy retarded about our country. However, the Republican presidential ticket and campaign (Keating the Fifth and Western Family as “anti-corruption”) is an insult to the voting populace and should be treated as such. Really, this is actually quite serious and getting distracted by Palin’s frameless glasses could be hazardous to your mental health.

As with Hitchens, even when DD is wrong or worse[!] he’s still honest. Being contradictory or just god damn bloody-minded is not the same as being hypocritical.
And on that note I’m out.

Stafford Beer tried to implement it in real life in Chile in 1971, as an input to the policy-making side of his real-time planned economy.

When interpersonal communication is based entirely on telling people what they want to hear, then it’s no longer communication at all but a feedback loop.

Good. That’s a considerable advance on the current situation, where the political class tells the people what its courtier commentators tell it is the conventionally accepted thing for them to want to hear, and then does whatever it wanted to a priori. I’m totally on board with Dsquared’s ambition to turn economics (and why not political science) into a branch of control systems engineering.

Also second the recommendation about ‘Interface’ which is both a very funny satire of politics and marketing (the demographic breakdown of voters – “Depression-haunted can stacker”, “Activist tube feeder”, “Pent-up corporate lickspittle”, “Post-Confederate gravy eater”, “Mall-hopping corporate concubine”, “Manic Third World entrepreneur”, “Sunbelt condo commando” and “High fibre duck squeezer”, etc, etc is worth the price of purchase alone) and a bloody good thriller as well.

yes, that’s basically the intuition

There’s a whole industry devoted to telling The American People what The American People think. It would be bad enough if the reports were accurate, but the talking heads were calling Bush a popular president when his approval rating had fallen to the low forties.

A lot of voters are followers (whim voters, low-information voters), and they’re quite capable of thinking “Oh! I thought I liked Kerry’s speach, but after reading David Brooks now I know that I don’t”.

Just one small step.

just as a data point – Seth’s implicit accusation here is correct; I did have one of those walkers while growing up (my parents called it “danny’s Dalek”).

I really like MK’s idea of taking the integral of the crawler instead of having a vote but disagree with his implicit restriction of this idea to American Idol and the like – why not give everyone in America a dial and use the integral every four years for the Presidential election (blah blah primaries, presumably, but really, we can put a man on the moon).

Presidential candidates can run endless prep sessions with their own focus groups, learning how to make the squiggle go up. Call it “surfing the squiggle”.
After a generation, a new crop of leaders will emerge raised on squiggle practice sessions, and preternaturally aware of how minute tone inflections can make the squiggle go up or down.

If nothing else, it’s made it really visually clear to us this election how much the swing voter hates negative attacks. (Well, Michael Drake’s point is a possible counter here).

If you really want to go crazy, throw out audience voting entirely in American Idol and simply take the integral of the audience squiggle across the time of your performance.

Why not mean/variance statistics after each debate showing the bell curve of how much time was spent at each positive/negative squiggle value?

If I unexpectedly die, I hereby will John all my blogs.

Yes! With built-in Tasers as per engels comment above.