daguerrean
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User ID: 3252
daguerrean
16hr ago
Reputation as a confident better
It is not his reputation as a confident bettor at stake, it is his reputation as an honest man which reflects on both the value of his words as a bettor and his words as a political scientist. Nate has shown himself to be a weasel with no integrity and that should absolutely inform your opinion of his political commentary as a good Bayesian
Massive cope. His model got a few small things right, it got the big things people actually care about wrong. As usual he will hide behind the “things with <50% probability still happen!” defense, but this is just sophistry as it was never 50/50
He liked to tout how in 2016 he allowed the errors of different polls to be correlated, rather than being purely independent experiments. But at the end of the day all this does is increase the uncertainty and expand the error bars. If you keep doing this and allowing for more error here or there it tends your “prediction” towards throwing up its hands and saying “idk it’s a coin flip”, which is what happened to Nate and why he had to shut off his model so early on election night. He did plenty of bitching about “herding” of polls while he himself was herding towards coinflip. His big brag in 2016 was ultimately that he had herded towards 50/50 harder than anybody else.
In the prediction thread I called this for Trump with high confidence and said it was an “easy call” because there was ample evidence there for those with eyes to see. 2020 was an extremely close election and by every metric (polls, fundamentals, vibes, registration, mail in voting) Trump was better positioned this year than he was then. Nate can call everything a coin flip and cope all he wants but his credibility is shot
Water fluoridation is one of those things that always astounds me and reminds me how completely different the past was, politically and in terms of social cohesion and trust in science, experts and all that. The idea that a few scientists could run a few relatively short-term experiments (just a few years) and see a relatively minor benefit (tooth cavities hardly seems like an existential crisis) and based on this get the government to introduce a chemical to the water supply nationwide without facing widespread riots or resistance is just insane to me. I'm not trying to claim that fluoride is harmful or anything like that, just that the public seems to have had such complete trust in politicians, scientists, public health officials, bureaucrats and the media to accept it is an amazing demonstration of how different things are. It is an oft raised lament that "we don't build anything anymore" or that we aren't capable of the large-scale works of the past and I think this is directly related to that. I think there needs to be a certain level of blind trust in authorities to enable that which is a bit of a two edged sword.
It is becoming very hard for me personally to reconcile my lament that "we don't build anything anymore" with my own anti-conformist and stubborn opposition to things like covid lockdowns and covid vaccination as I think they are in direct opposition to some extent. As I've gotten older I have come to believe that public consensus and trust in institutions is more important than the actual content of that consensus or the 'correctness' of those experts and institutions, but at the same time I remain skeptical and stubborn. Does anyone else relate to this conflicted feeling?
daguerrean
2d ago
I've seen it repeatedly stated that Democrats didn't lose votes to Trump but just had lower turnout than 2020, but is there any evidence for this other than what you stated: that Trump got roughly the same number of votes and Democrats got fewer than 2020? Just as a possibility:
2020: Trump: 10 votes / Biden: 10 votes
2024: Trump: 10 votes / Harris: 8 votes
It is possible that the same 10 people voted for Trump and 2 of Biden's voters stayed home for Harris. But it is also possible that 2 of Trump's 2020 voters stayed home and 2 of Biden's voters switched to Trump. How do you distinguish between them?
daguerrean
2d ago
This is the game played when calling it socially constructed. Of course there are messy edge cases where the lines get blurry and arbitrary socially constructed rules throw people into one bucket or another. You could play the same game with most other categories like species or colors or flavors and so on, but that doesn't mean that they aren't basically capturing real and useful information and describing somewhat natural categories.
daguerrean
3d ago
Loser: Lichtman
Winner: The Keys
daguerrean
3d ago
Well it feels similar to 2016 for Silver. He comes across as simultaneously wrong and cowardly in that he ultimately did say Harris winning was more likely while pushing the odds as close to a coin flip as possible. I think it leaves people asking themselves: why listen to a guy that will ultimately just tell you "I don't know, anything could happen, it's a coin flip"? For a guy that wrote a book about how he liked to live on the "river" (or was it the village?) as a high-stakes risk-taker he seems to do a lot of bet-hedging and saying "I don't know". You don't have to subscribe to The Silver Bulletin to get a shrug and an idk.
I have think it will be a Trump victory. Lately the attacks by the Harris campaign have seemed weak, desperate and inconsistent signaling a campaign that knows it doesn't look good. I remember back in September there was a big push for the 'Republicans are weird' angle and there was much agreement even on this site that it was devastatingly effective. Despite the alleged effectiveness it seems to have been dropped pretty quickly and by late-October we were back to the usual 'Trump is a fascist dictator existential threat', which to me indicated that the 'weird' angle was actually pretty ineffective and largely astroturfed. Latching onto Trump's Liz Cheney comments seems incredibly weak too, not only is it a blatantly dishonest misinterpretation of his words (this is typical) but it is supposed to win people over through their sympathy for...Liz Cheney of all people? Fundamentally Kamala Harris has always been unpopular as she got an absolutely negligible amount of votes in the 2020 primary. All the enthusiasm I saw on reddit in the wake of her being chosen felt forced and inauthentic. She isn't popular and Trump is more normalized than ever. Seems like an easy one to call.
As for rioting and looting, I don't think there will be much at all. I don't remember any substantial riots in 2016 and as I said, Trump is more normalized now than he was then by far.
daguerrean
6d ago
are on watch as some of the worst herders
I assume you're referring to the chart titled 'Which pollsters are the biggest herders?'. Unless I'm reading this wrong AtlasIntel appears to be doing little or no herding, as their 'Actual' total of small margin polls matches the 'Theory' total of small margin polls. The smaller the fraction in the 'Odds against...' column, the more herding they are doing right? By my reading Redfield, Emerson and InsiderAdvantage are herding most, while AtlasIntel, WaPo and Rasmussen are doing the least.
daguerrean
1mo ago
Trump has always been rambling and nearly incoherent. He has always been sensitive to slights, particularly about his rallies/businesses/resorts and prone to distracted ranting defending them. The Washington Post picked Hillary as the clear winner of every debate in 2016. Trump simply does not come across well to educated people in a debate format, and that includes Motte users, even those of us that support him. Despite some users here predicting that Trump had a nontrivial chance of openly calling Kamala a racial slur on national television, that didn't happen. This debate won't change anything and Trump is a known entity.
It was funny but I don't like this sort of thing. It disturbs me that battle of the sexes has apparently become the leading interpretation of this election result, which is somewhat nonsensical given that Trump won White women. Men vs women strife is much worse than racial strife in my opinion (yes I understand that racial strife can lead to wars and genocides in a way that gender conflict doesn't, but I'm talking about at the non-violent levels we are currently experiencing). I've never had a conversation with a black person in my life, what do I care if they hate me? But I really would rather not see my family divided. I would much rather political battlelines become White vs non-White than man vs woman.
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