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2012 Prognostication Quiz: Questions 1 and 2

1. Quiz

What will be the least popular answer to Question 1 of the 2012 Prognostication Quiz? Here are this year's answers, with last year's answers in parentheses:
a. 11 (7)
b. 8 (4)
c. 7 (8)
d. 13 (7)
e. 4 (15)
f. 8 (10)

The answer to the kick-off question of the 2012 Prognostication Quiz is E. Only four people chose it out of the 51 entrants we have this year.

The E Street Band:
Ellen
Keila
Grant
Kevin

People avoided last year's most popular answer, making reverse psychology the big winner over reverse-reverse psychology. (Recall that straight up psychology may have led to the popular choice of E last year.)

None of the four winners had a compelling explanation for why E might have worked better than the rest. Ellen's strategy was to pick her initials E and A for all the questions, and she followed a hunch about E here. Grant utilized optimal game theory strategy and used a random number generator to select the correct answer. Keila and Kevin perhaps deserve the most kudos on this question, since they followed their hunches about human behavior.

2. Freedom

Freedom House is an international organization that studies democracy and freedom in the world, publishing an annual report on how many of countries are free, partly free, or not free. The 2011 report calculated that 87 of the world’s 193 nations were “free” in 2010.

How will the number of free countries change?
a. minus two or worse, 85 or fewer total
b. minus one, 86 total
c. no change, 87 total
d. plus one, 88 total
e. plus two or three, 89-90 total
f. plus four or more, 91 or more total

According to this year's Democracy in the World report over at Freedom House, the number of free countries remained constant this year. That makes the answer of Question 2 in the 2012 Prognostication Quiz is C.

Interestingly, C. No change was the least popular answer. While 34 of the 50 entrants picked D or E, only 3 predicted that Freedom would be remain unchanged.

People were probably bullish on global freedom this year for two reasons: the Arab Spring and also the fact that two countries had already been downgraded last year. Tunisia was actually the only country to go up in status this year, but because it started the year as "not free" it only advanced to "partly free." Sadly, the Arab Spring caused an uptick in repression by some paranoid governments as well. (Grant's reasoning was a bit more involved: see his comment below.)

The noncommittals:
Tom
Zhiqi
Gloria

Leaderboard

Here are the rankings after the first two questions. Ties in the leaderboard are broken by projecting the change in the Dow to the end of the year and then using the tie-breaking procedure. Since the Dow has risen this past month, that means that ties are broken in order of people's bullishness. Congratulations, then, to new entrant Tom (also my father-in-law), who is the most bullish of the seven people with an early point.

1 Tom
1 Ellen
1 Keila
1 Grant
1 Kevin
1 Gloria
1 Zhiqi
0 Matthew
0 Cherie
0 Miriam
0 Sarah T.
0 Chris M.
0 Collette
0 Ryan
0 Peter B.
0 Sarah M.
0 Chris C.
0 Nadir
0 Rachel
0 Russell
0 Katie
0 Jeff
0 Adrian
0 Larry
0 Dave
0 Beth
0 Paul
0 Marcus
0 Megan
0 Zoe
0 Cameron
0 Janet
0 Jason
0 Peter M.
0 Ted
0 Eric
0 Michael
0 Stacey
0 Jan
0 Craig
0 Ben
0 Todd
0 Leanne
0 Missy
0 Valerie
0 Hannah
0 Liz
0 Mary
0 Pete C.
0 Ekrem
0 Tina

Question 3 Update

Now that it's down to the Patriots and the Giants, we can say more simply how the Super Bowl will affect the Leaderboard. If the Patriots win, Grant, Gloria, and Zhiqi will join a three-way tie for the lead with two points. If the Giants win, Cameron and Peter M. will gain their first point and advance to a nine-way tie for first.

Comments

  1. MT12:25 PM

    Very nice chart and Bruce Springsteen reference. I am counting on Tom Brady to put me on the board ...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Grant6:20 PM

    Every year Freedom House assigns each country a score for political rights and a score for civil liberties, with 1 being most free and 7 least. If the sum of those two scores is between 2 and 5, the country is designated "free", 6 to 10 is "partly free", and 11 to 14 is "not free".

    Freedom House publishes all those numbers for previous years. So I counted all the countries each year whose combined freedom score was exactly 5 or 6, on the theory that those were the countries most likely to cross the threshold. Then I checked if the difference between number of 6s minus number of 5s was predictive of the change in number of free countries, and it was. There were several more 6s than 5s in 2011, and a simple linear model predicted an increase of about one more free country.

    ReplyDelete
  3. J. Michael Andresen3:31 PM

    Nicely reasoned! Maybe this year you should subscribe to RSS feed for all of the 5 and 6 countries so you can have better success next year.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous4:03 PM

    Ah. I had not looked at the mechanism used by Freedom House - this will clearly help me use much more complex methodology in order to divine the wrong number next year!

    -Marcus

    ReplyDelete

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