… UCLA vs Berkeley, Conservative vs Liberal, Eugene Volokh vs Brad DeLong. They go head-to-head over Bill Bennett. Brad thinks it absurd, as a matter of simple probability, that Bennett might have broken about even over the years. Eugene says the sources for the evidence might be untrustworthy:

Some casinos are estimating the total losses at over $8 million, but Bennett explicitly says otherwise; instead, he’s saying that he’s come out pretty close to even (whatever exactly that means), and thus … that the supposed casino estimates are mistaken or highly incomplete. This has little to do with statistics—it’s a question of fact. Bennett may be lying, but only if you think the casino estimates are sound, something that the article certainly doesn’t prove.

I don’t think Eugene is ignorant of statistics (his undergraduate degree is in math and computer science) but I’m not sure his response addresses Brad’s main point. Eugene correctly insists that we’re not fully sure Bennett lost $8 million, because that number is a possibly wrong estimate from the casinos. But Bennett didn’t just say “That estimate of my losses is incorrect” he said he had come out pretty close to even over the last 10 years. I find this claim absurd for the same reasons as Brad. No-one disputes that Bennett was a high-rolling, high-stakes slot-machine player for years. We know how slot machines work. They are set up to make a fixed profit over time. There is no uncertainty about their profitability. The house cannot lose in the long-run. It defies belief that a single player routinely playing the house’s slots for 10 years could break even. I can’t see a way around this, unless Bennett wants to say that by “breaking about even” he means “losing no more than the 2%-8% set by the machines,” and that seems a little disingenuous for such a virtuous guy. Brendan Koerner has more on this over at Slate.

Update: Eric Rescorla continues the conversation.