I’m reading this awesome article by Srinivas Bhogle (with Rajeeva Karandikar) on election forecasting. To be fair, not much of the article is new to me – it’s just a far more readable version of Karandikar’s seminal presentation on the topic made at IIT Kanpur all those years back.
However, as with all good retellings, this story also has some nice tidbits. This one has to do with “index of opposition unity”. The voice here is Bhogle’s:
It is easy to understand why the IOU becomes so critical in such situations. But, and here’s the rub, the exact mathematical formula connecting IOU to the seat count prediction is not easy to find. I searched through the big and small print of The Verdict by Dorab Sopariwala and Prannoy Roy, but the formula remained elusive.
Rajeeva suggests that it was likely based on simple heuristics: something like ‘if the IOU is less than 25%, give the first-placed party 75% of the seats.’ It may also have involved intelligent tweaking based on current survey data, historical data, informal feedback, expert opinion, gut feeling, and so on.
I first came across the IOU in Prannoy Roy and Dorab Sopariwala’s book. The way they had presented in the book, it seemed like it is a “major concept”. It seems, like I did, Bhogle also looked through the book trying to find a precise formula, and failed to do so.
And then Karandikar’s insight above is crucial – that the IOU may not be a precise mathematical formula, but just an intelligent set of heuristics, involving intelligent tweaking.
Sometimes putting a fancy name (or, even better, an acronym) on something can help lend credibility to the concept. For example, IOU is something that has been championed by Roy and Sopariwala for years, and they have done so to a level where it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a respected scientist for Bhogle has gone searching for its formula!
Also, sometimes, telling people that you “used an intelligent heuristic” to come up with a conclusion can lead you to be taken less seriously. Put on a fancy name (even if it is something that you have yourself come up with), and the game changes. You suddenly start to be taken more seriously, like Ganesha assumed when he started sending fan mail under the name “YG Rao”.
And like they say in The Usual Suspects, sometimes the greatest trick that the devil ever pulled was to convince you that he exists. It is the same with “concepts” such as IOU – you THINK they must be sound because they come with a fancy name, when all that they apeear to represent is a set of fancy heuristics.
I must say this is excellent marketing.