Mewis
4mo ago
https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-i-dont-buy-538s-new-election
FiveThirtyEight versus 538
Nate Silver, public statistician, has launched a broadside against the forecasting blog he originally set up, which continues to produce modelling that indicates a incredible dead heat between Biden and Trump. What gives?
What it really comes down to is how unusual this election is turning out, and how forecasting is not keeping up with reality. On paper, Biden is secure - he's an incumbent President in an America that is peaceful and prosperous. These indicators have been long championed as the surest omens of victory. But nothing lasts forever. As Silver points out, those advantages count for less and less nowadays. And they assume that the candidates are otherwise mentally competent to run an effective campaign. If Biden still retains the faculties to run the country, he's not demonstrating them.
There of course, is a limit to models. We cannot predict exactly how Biden's incapacity might affect the election, or a horse switch to Harris, because events like this have never occurred before in modern electoral history. But it's at the point where these models now interfere with normal political judgement. Biden backers use the 538 model as a palliative, even as Biden slips further in the polls. As a result they are sleepwalking into picking a candidate who himself seems to be sleepwalking.
Nate Silver's own model does give Biden a fighting chance, especially when fundamentals are emphasized over polling. But he himself admits that the model is probably useless by this point, and that polling is a better indicator of Biden's weakness. Silver also has reason to say "I told you so" - he has beaten the Biden is too old drum for years now, and gotten plenty of flak from his own team over it.
Mewis
4mo ago
I've always suspected that the fictional sport of Quidditch is based on JK Rowling just not liking football and inventing the stupidest sport imaginable to express that dislike.
Mewis
4mo ago
This just seems like typical American bias to me. Room for dozens of baseball, football and basketball stars - no room for Ronnie O'Sullivan, Magnus Carlssen, or literally any rugby player. Federer and Williams over Nadal and Djokovic. Simone Biles in the top five and Kohei Uchimura in the 80s.
Mewis
4mo ago
The revenge is petty in that, by your own admission, it is insufficient. It is like Dostoevsky's mouse:
"To come at last to the deed itself, to the very act of revenge. Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses in the form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question so many unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till their healthy sides ache. Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite. For forty years together it will remember its injury down to the smallest, most ignominious details, and every time will add, of itself, details still more ignominious, spitefully teasing and tormenting itself with its own imagination. It will itself be ashamed of its imaginings, but yet it will recall it all, it will go over and over every detail, it will invent unheard of things against itself, pretending that those things might happen, and will forgive nothing. Maybe it will begin to revenge itself, too, but, as it were, piecemeal, in trivial ways, from behind the stove, incognito, without believing either in its own right to vengeance, or in the success of its revenge, knowing that from all its efforts at revenge it will suffer a hundred times more than he on whom it revenges itself, while he, I daresay, will not even scratch himself. On its deathbed it will recall it all over again, with interest accumulated over all the years and ..."
Again, it's one thing to be cruel. It's another to be petty, or to seek revenge without even really believing in the justice or satisfaction of it.
Mewis
4mo ago
Why, for any reason, would you want to be symmetrical with the left, or even think it's possible to be symmetrical with the left?
Mewis
4mo ago
Sam Hyde's career is calling for political violence. He said he wanted to kill Hasan Piker in real life. His most famous quote is about shooting journalists. He got his career started off of sketches about stabbing bankers in the face.
I wouldn't say that the issue is hypocrisy. It's that I still don't really get what this is supposed to result in. Does Sam Hyde want strong norms against endorsing political violence? No, probably not. If that's the case, why punish people for violating this norm you don't care about?
I don't know if I've ever said it about the left but I've definitely had the thought before. What can I say - I can't prove I'm a perfectly even minded person to the satisfaction of a hostile stranger online.
I don't think people should be upset, but I also don't think that sadistic glee is appropriate either.
Mewis
4mo ago
It is certainly a shame for people to wish suffering upon others, but it is no crime, and in any case it is beyond your reach. You are not, ever, going to force everyone else to love Trump as much as you do, or to have a heart as free of sin as yours.
Mewis
4mo ago
It may be that some Blues think that the US would be better off if Trump was dead. But it's a nasty thought, and the kind that shouldn't be expressed.
At the same time, it's very silly for Reds to get so up in arms about political civility and politeness. Of course it is inappropriate to openly fantasize about the death of your enemies, but this is something that Sam Hyde (affectionately quoted in this thread) has been doing for years now. This notion that "now the gloves are coming off, it's different this time" is just not true. People will whip themselves into a frenzy, take some scalps, and then waste their breath explaining to others how it wasn't really their fault, the guy had it coming, whatever whatever. It's tedious and pathetic, particularly when their idea of "wielding power" is snitching on people to their boss. That's the plan, is it - call the manager? That's not wielding power, that's begging actual power to intervene on your side.
This "golden opportunity" will fade. Some libs will get fired. Most will not. Of the eighty million Americans that voted for Biden, maybe you'll get four hundred of the most replaceable and impulsive, and most of them will just walk effortlessly into new jobs. Maybe libs will be a little bit more careful with their speech in the future and not saying obviously outrageous things. Is that what you want? For libs to be nicer to you?
The issue with conservatives is not that they're cruel. You need to be capable of cruelty. Enforcing laws is cruel. War is cruel. Borders are cruel. It's that they're petty. This cruelty is not in service of anything but resentment that the libs got away with it for so long.
Mewis
4mo ago
Well, the best argument is that this will be over soon. Left-liberals will go back to using their disproportionate control over institutions and offices to push their politics. So there is a limit to what left-liberals can get away with, but then, it's pretty generous. So this is totally pointless. Maybe you get a few idiots cancelled, but that's it.
Cancel culture from the left is a manifestation of power, not it's source. Even sixty years ago, employers can, and did, fire people for being pinkos, for being homos, for getting divorced, for having interracial relationships. This didn't maintain those societal taboos, or prevent them from being eroded. And cancel culture from the left hasn't snuffed out conservative beliefs either.
Mewis
4mo ago
It's not that monumentally consequential in a healthy political party. Part of the Democrat Party's problem is this weird desire to keep passing the Presidency to anointed successors instead of actually allowing any kind of party democracy to occur. That's how they got Clinton in 16, Biden in 20 and now look stuck with Harris in 24. But it really doesn't have to be this way, and it wasn't so long ago that it was quite normal to hand the Vice Presidency to an empty suit like Spiro Agnew or Dan Quayle.
Mewis
4mo ago
To the extent that history is just a series of interesting photographs (or, I should say, a series of photographs that 105IQ historians think are interesting enough to command the attention of what they think average people are), sure, this is history. A hundred years from now, bored teenagers will read about it on the 22nd century equivalent of cracked.com. Because they certainly won't read about Trump's meagre achievements. The people of the future will write history, not us. And chances are, they'll value very different things to us. "Making history" is what - putting on a performance, a show, for the benefit of alien, unborn observers.
Mewis
4mo ago
It is, in fact, a nothing. I'm happy to argue this point, but I can't prove a negative.
If you don't want me to post about myself, don't ask.
Mewis
4mo ago
Right, clearly this place is now for consensus building and pushing people to have the same opinion and agree. If you think it's wrong of me to think, say, that Trump is ugly, then fine, I'll fuck off, because you're not going to debate me into thinking otherwise. And quite frankly a mod should have better sense than to operate as an enforcer of public opinion.
My opinion on Trump is that opinions on Trump don't fucking matter. When I don't vote in the US, does it actually matter if I find him to be likable? My opinion is that this event doesn't matter, beyond the sad death of two people and perhaps the increase in security at Trump events in the future. Those are legitimate opinions to hold, you just don't like them because it goes against the consensus here.
Mewis
4mo ago
The real political effect of assassinations is so subject to context and specifics that it's hard to say. Culture is also relevant - in Japan, assassination of politicians rarely results in a martyr effect - if anything, public opinion often ends up turning in favour of the cause of the assassin.
(I suspect that if anything, the supposed martyrdom effect is just a cultural strategy to discourage assassination. When politicians rally behind an assassination victim, they're contributing to a political norm that protects their own behinds.)
What else should I do? It's Sunday afternoon, I'm bored and slightly depressed. This is light entertainment and stimulation, like playing a video game. That's why you're here, that's why everyone's here. Why is it that people need to know, now, exactly who fired the shot? If you really wanted to know... Wait 72 hours and you'll find out. Instead people are scouring photographs and speculating online. Because it's entertainment! How many people went to CNN to get mad about them using the wrong words to describe this non event? Because the event and the reaction and the discourse are entertainment - they wanted to feel mad, not to get information.
Why share my opinion? I've opened on Trump before, it makes no difference. I'm just adding to a mountain of shit.
Mewis
4mo ago
I do have an opinion on DJT and this assassination, but I don't want to share it - it's counter to consensus reality. You would probably just disparage it. And, like the ending of Game of Thrones, having an opinion on it doesn't make it important!
Things actually happening, not Things Almost Happening.
Oh, I'll add, I think the person in the crowd who actually died is news. One person dying is more important than DJT having his picture taken.
Yes, if Trump had died, that would have mattered. Not in of itself, but because someone else would be the next President and presumably do things differently. But he didn't! He's not seriously hurt. He might get a cool scar out of it.
Assassination attempts aren't unusual. If anything the lack of serious attempts to kill DJT is unusual.
I don't think this event is historical. It will at best become a piece of trivia.
Mewis
4mo ago
No. This is drama, not things happening.
The real joke is this stupid fucking discourse. Trump got a "cool" photo taken. That's news? Could give him a boost in the polls. That's not news, that's conventional wisdom, repeated. Republicans are already complaining about Biden's "bullseye" comment. Already, this non event is just more discourse fodder.
I honestly think there's nothing to discuss or learn here. Of course, it's also fun to say Nothing Ever Happens.
Mewis
4mo ago
What exactly, is worth saying about it, given that we don't really know what happened? Even if we did know what happened, what gems of insight are likely to come out of front page Reddit? That it's good for Trump? That it's really cool that he put his fist in the air? You might as well ask ChatGPT.
Are you talking about the fundamentals-based models or the polls-based models? They give very different results.
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