The 2024 elections were held last week. Americans had an omnipotent gauge they looked to for a prognosis: the New York Times’ “Live Presidential Forecast.” A simple, beautiful, and horrifying instrument that has sparked some interesting thought on how we endure election night.
I have a great deal of faith in the New York Times. I trust that they make thoughtful editorial decisions that keep the approximate interests of their readers in mind. The idea of the Needle is noble. As the Times writes “The purpose of the Needle is to put election results in proper context as they come in.” Fair enough! Election results are complicated, and the surface-level maps and tables (like what we built for the Daily Tar Heel) do not tell the full story.
But I remember how I felt the first time I saw the Needle halfway through election night. It was overwhelming. To understand why, I need to draw a comparison to artificial intelligence. As the Times will tell you, the Needle is not AI, at least not mathematically. But I honestly struggle to tell the difference sometimes. If I had asked an LLM who was going to win prior to the election, I could have gotten a name, essentially the same product as the Needle. Of course, the Needle is methodologically designed to predict election outcomes based on real-time vote counts and language models are far more generalized. But the two methods share the same interpretant: a hard-and-fast interpretation.
These are both black boxes; they both hide something from the reader. They mask and condense the mess of uncertainty that surrounds complicated ideas like the election. But what if that uncertainty is useful? I think there is value in having to sift through what is not immediately clear. The time spent meditating on nascent thoughts, the reflective reasoning required to generate understanding, and the exercise of personally going through these mechanics help us come to terms with reality. It is through these processes that we build a relationship with––an internal mapping of––the world.
By abstracting this away, the reader is left stranded with nothing but a hollow result and empty rationale. The Needle tells us what will happen and obfuscates what is happening. It created a gap in my own mental model of election dynamics, and with that gap, I was left constructing a crude bridge. The information I needed to make sense existed in a superposition that wouldn’t resolve until the real sequence of events took place.
Does it really matter, though? The Times told me the news before it happened. The latency of the wire does not get much better than that.
In the absence of genuine truth, people will substitute the closest synthetic available, and on election night I felt relief from that synthetic. But I hugged the angle of that little tick very tightly. The doomsday clock is maybe not directly analogous in statistical quality, but I hope you can see the resemblance. What is most scary about this ominous clock, is that it restrains the agency of the interpreter. Because I do not understand its parameters, I am hopeless in affecting its revolution. We are left to sit and watch as the clock sways in either direction at the whim of pseudo-science.
Granted, you probably cannot affect the election results on election night. But there is something to be said about connecting to a personal and independent interpretation of events. Statistical models operate in jarring and alienating ways and have a harsh relationship to objectivity that humans are often averse to. This can leave people with the feeling that they are merely passive observers in a fully determinate world. I don’t think that is an attitude we should foster.
Newspapers have a responsibility to inform, but I think also to oxygenate democracy. There is a balance to strike between presenting isolated facts and complete conclusions. The former leaves far too much up to the reader, effectively abandoning the job of the reporter entirely. But the latter over-indexes on what it means to inform. The information is so complete as to be terminal, leaving only dense crumbs for the reader.
The Needle is indeed quite impressive, but it calls into question what the roll of a reporter actually is in a world built on data. Even though such models can unlock incredible predictive insight, we should consider how we platform this knowledge. I think you need to give people a narrative to follow. Even if it means embracing primitive methods, you need to leave the story exposed.