Where is Karl Popper when you need him ?
A small point on Klein on Klein
Ezra Klein is too kind to
Joe Kleinwho discovers a remarkable tautological regularity.
There have been six elections in which control of the presidency has switched parties during the television age. In five of those six, starting with John F. Kennedy's victory over Richard Nixon in 1960, the less experienced candidate won. The other four were: Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford in 1976, Ronald Reagan over Carter in 1980, Bill Clinton over Bush the Elder in 1992, Bush the Younger over Al Gore in 2000. The one exception to the rule was a toss-up: Nixon and Hubert Humphrey had similar levels of experience in 1968.
Joe Klein's result is almost perfectly tautological as incumbency of one's party and experience are almost perfectly correlated (perfectly correlated if one claims that 5 = 8 as he does in the case of Nixon and Humphrey). Thus, since 1960, we have known before election day that a switch of party would logically imply the election of the less experienced candidate. The observation that, surprise surprise, after election day, it became clear that when there was a switch of party the less experienced candidate won adds nothing to our knowledge whatsoever. Joeseph Klein has presented an un-falsifiable hypothesis and drawn conclusions from the failure of the data to refute it. He demonstrates only that he does not reason well, but we already knew that didn't we ?
The answer to the question in the title is "taking credit for ideas due to Charles Sanders Pierce and Rudolf Carnap by inventing a neologism more snappy that 'abduction' which did not set a very high standard".
