While political intrigue may not excite the general readership as much as prison breaks, I found myself equally on the edge of my seat reading about how the US government narrowly avoided a shutdown as I was following the story behind my last column. There is a very disconcerting element to this, as I’ll explain later in the piece, but for now, let’s stick to the juicy drama.
The line that struck me the most from this past weekend occurred right before House Speaker Kevin McCarthy put the bill that ended up passing both chambers just in time to keep its doors open and money flowing for another two months up to a vote. “We’ll find out [if it passes],” he said, adding, “I like to gamble.”
At first, I saw this as a moment of uncharacteristic candor from a politician (we don’t get much of that from them these days!). The move was, indeed, a gamble — something the speaker resorted to after a vote on a previous bill failed. The new bill was 71 pages of law no other representative had read, and because of that, it required a two-thirds majority to pass, with much of the support needing to come from Democrats, as the new law had been stripped of many conservative demands. This all was occurring as the Senate was considering a vote on its own stopgap measure to avert shutdown.
And moreover, it was a high-stakes gamble. This was no playing with house money, but rather paying with US House (and Senate) money, which, if lost, would result in funds for a key food and medical assistance program that helps almost seven million mothers and children running out; farmers missing out on important loans during harvest-time; two-thirds of the IRS being furloughed in a month where the service receives 46,000 calls per day; and work orders to air traffic controllers and TSA officials being issued despite no pay available.
If that isn’t shocking enough, consider how much of the research being conducted at universities is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), which would have lost much of its ability to provide funding for labs and researchers. Stevens sent out an email earlier this week about potential effects of a shutdown, and they may have to send another one in November if the issues surrounding last week’s drama remain unresolved by then.
This all got me thinking: would mathematicians, or mathematically-minded people, take this gamble? Probability theory provides a powerful framework for quantifying instances of chance, but even the shift from probability to statistics involves the introduction of yet more uncertainty when trying to predict the likelihood of certain outcomes. A simple example of this involves the concept of a null hypothesis, which, for those unfamiliar with the term, can be thought of as a baseline guess for what answers a given data set will have to a certain question of interest, like “what is the correlation between politicians who like to gamble and the passage of bills in Congress?”
We have tests that can either “reject” or “fail to reject” the null hypothesis, but we can never truly “accept” this hypothesis. Data collection is always incomplete, so there may be some pieces of data we haven’t observed yet that change the picture entirely. This is what’s so scary about making predictions, and why gambling can be met with both utter joy and crippling disappointment.
Nonetheless, decisions have to be made at some point, or else nothing would get done. Speaker McCarthy decided with the data he had available to go through with the final House vote, and it paid off — at least when it came to averting the shutdown. But these questions are ones where mathematics doesn’t have as solid a framework to answer, and it may never find one. So for now, predicting what a mathematician would do in this instance is probably as easy as predicting what a politician would do.
