A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how the 2012 presidential election was a "war of math." Well, it turns out that math won. And that's a very good thing. When math wins, science wins. And when science wins, everyone wins. The benefits of science trickle down in a way that Ronald Reagan could only dream of, and probably did given the 10 to 16 daily hours he allotted to dreaming. The benefits of science are a rising tide that could turn the peak of K2 into a major maritime shipping center.

In an ideal world, the party that understands and cares about science would always win. In this case it did.

First off, let's talk about the polls. In spite of my previous evenly distributed joshing, not all poll aggregations are created equal. RealClearPolitics and Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight were each, in their own way, built on polling data, on a foundation of polling data, and held together with polling data and, okay, a little bit of secret sauce. UnSkewed Polls took a wad of polling data and threw it into a cauldron of secret sauce, then added a 5-pound sack of wishful thinking and delivered what would most honestly be called Artifically Fact-Flavored Processed Pasteurized Data Product.

And, of course, Silver was right. Silver was so right that even if he's wrong he's right. At the last minute Florida flipped to blue on his map, and he explained that the Florida race would be incredibly close. As it turns out, he has the right color, but if you understand math you understand it's not the colors but the numbers that count. Even if Florida somehow flips into Romney's lap at the last minute, Silver was still amazingly freaking right.

In the wake of the election, I've read forum posts saying that the polls got lucky, that their assumptions of a Democratic advantage ended up correct and that the "unskewed" assumption of a larger Republican turnout were wrong. There's just one problem with that: the poll results were not assumptions. The poll results were data. The turnout spread, with a few exceptions like Rassmussen, wasn't something applied going in, it was the end product. In other words, it was science. Science beat "gut feelings" and selectively applied "common sense" hands down.

I'm not here to gloat. I have no reason to gloat, the conservative partisan press had me half-convinced that the pollsters, and by extension the poll aggregators, were missing something crucial. Instead, I'm here to make a plea to Americans of all political perspectives.

I hate that science is politicized. I hate that the question has become "do you believe in global warming?" I don't believe anything about global warming. I understand that the best way to understand climate change is to ask climate scientists, not to engage in "unskewed atmospherics."

Here's one thing I haven't read anywhere in the conservative blogosphere. "Hey, turns out we were letting our emotions get in the way of the facts. I wonder if maybe that applies to other aspects of our understanding of the world?"

Well, I'm saying it. I let my emotions – fear that the emotion-driven ranters knew something I didn't – get in the way of the facts. That's because irrationality isn't a liberal thing or a conservative thing, it's a human thing. That's why we have science, to correct for the irrationality of individuals.

There isn't such a thing as conservative science or liberal science, there's just science. There isn't such a thing as conservative delusion or liberal delusion, there's just delusion.

There are legitimate questions that science will never answer, because they're not scientific questions. To what extent do the needs of the many outweigh the desires of the few? When is it acceptable for society to step in and protect people from their own poor decisions?

These are questions that we can discuss and disagree on and still have a reality-based society. The opposition process is vital; a one-party system is good for nobody. But when science and math are subsumed by gut feelings and irrational loyalty to a desired outcome, society suffers no matter who wins.

I'd like to think that this is the moment where all of us, across the political spectrum, reject the idea that if reality doesn't conform to our pre-assumptions, then some nefarious conspiracy is cooking the numbers. To discuss ethics and uncertainties without resorting to painting science as faith and faith as science. In other words, I'd like to see us all agree to live in the real world.

I'd like to see that. Unfortunately, in this case I don't think the math is on my side.

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Born helpless, naked and unable to provide for himself Lore Sjöberg overcame these handicaps to promise to try to tell some actual jokes next time.