jkf
11d ago
That seems extremely unlikely -- there are numerous mug-shots, as seen on many news sites (including one linked in this very thread).
What is the licensing issue with a mug-shot?
"Wikipedia editors make up excuses to justify ideological narrative shaping on hot-CW related topics" on the other hand... would not be a big surprise to me.
jkf
11d ago
You might be thinking of Darrell Edward Brooks Jr -- you will note that there is not a picture of him in the Wikipedia article, and For Some Reason nobody has heard nearly as much about him deliberately driving his own SUV into a Christmas parade and killing several as they have about the Charlottesville guy. (who killed one person in a hostile crowd of counterprotestors, arguably semi-accidentally)
I've got a framework that has served me well in which:
- cultural generations are 20 years
- the first and last 5 years of these generations exhibit notable similarities with the adjacent generation, but not quite to the point where they may be usefully considered a separate identity (Xennials = not a thing)
So:
- people born from 1940-1945 are most like standard boomers, but depending on their specific peer group may have more of a pre-war outlook
- people born from 1955-1965 are on a spectrum from boomer --> X outlook (basically optimism --> feeling shafted); 1960 is a good inflection point
- similarly, 1975-1980 exhibits a clear X outlook, and as you move past 1980 people become much more earnest and hipsterish -- by 1985 you are into core timid millenials by and large.
My test for this hypothesis will be "is 2005-2015 core Zoomer, and what are these people like" -- I've got one in the house, and he & his peers do seem to have a different outlook from his older cousins so far -- COVID will clearly be a defining event for these guys, but it remains to be seen exactly how.
jkf
12d ago
So since you have approximately no recourse either way, wouldn't a dictatorship that matches your beliefs be better for you? (probably other people too -- you seem compassionate and normal enough)
jkf
12d ago
How should one say it though? I'm another from 'you guys' country, and if I try y'all it doesn't even make it so far as cultural appropriation, it's more like 'terrible parody of Southern hillbilly'.
I've done 'you all' occasionally, but I get the feeling this comes across as some sort of 'hello fellow hillbillies' deal -- so my policy is to aggressively use 'you guys' at all times, particularly when I'm talking about the female subset of a group in which they are all present.
If anyone calls me out over it I plan to play extremely dumb -- but nobody ever does.
jkf
12d ago
For real? If a plurality of Americans vote for a guy who is literally putting gay people in camps and gassing them, you wouldn't think that you were entitled to any further recourse than at the ballot box?
Fascinating.
jkf
12d ago
You also have no recourse in a democracy -- if Trump does in fact enact Gay-O-Caust in the next four years, there won't be anything you personally can do about it. If this turns out to be a popular policy, there won't be anything anyone can do about it.
jkf
12d ago
If it turns out the other guy had lost instead of winning, would he have paid up?
Unknown, of course -- but Nate would have had the opportunity to drag him on Twitter, which in an honour culture would probably be worth it.
jkf
12d ago
Sure, I respect his stance on the 'precommit vs tinkering' spectrum -- but you don't get to precommit to a model that turns out to be wrong and try to spin it as being right all along.
If he updates his model along the lines of throwing out polls showing evidence of tinkering, maybe he can be right next time -- but this time he was not.
jkf
13d ago
Kinda sorta I guess?
For the examples given, if you ask an LLM to "print a formula for a drug you want", it will print something that looks like a formula for drugs that it's seen -- not super useful, other than by 'infinite monkeys' means?
Not sure what he's getting at on robotics, but the 'talking about awesome robots' role does not seem to have any shortage of applicants. To be frank, it's bullshit other than for people with bullshit jobs who feel they should continue to be paid but not have to sully themselves by personally generating the bullshit.
(the PR people at my work are super interested in LLMs, for example -- like, your life is not meaningless enough banging out 500 word communiques, you need a machine to do that for you? I really don't know what else to say)
jkf
13d ago
In some sense every conceivable problem is, because solving the problem means writing out the solution, in language.
Too bad LLMs also only have access to solutions that were also previously written out, in languatge.
jkf
13d ago
That's not what I'm talking about -- his inputs to the model are an aggregation of polls; he shows you them (for swing states) on the "Silver Bulletin Election Forecast" page.
Since each these is an aggregation of 5-6 polls with a sampling error in the area of +/-3%, the statistical error on Silver's aggregation should be well less than +/- 1% -- the fact that they all ended up more like +3D means that these polls are bad, and if he can't make the correction (due to lack of information, or lack of willingness to call out political bias) he shouldn't be using them.
He even had a framework for this! There was a whole post where he identified the worst herders -- removing these ones from his model would have been trivial, but he didn't do it. Leading to model inputs that were biased ~+3D -- which is the strongest argument that his 'coin flip' EC forecast was in fact a bad prediction -- how could it be a good prediction with such inaccurate input data?
jkf
14d ago
If the Twitter exchange is in fact a form of contract, then so is the stipulation of said Twitter exchange for the requisite next step- which includes Nate's condition that the other person send a formal contract via lawyer.
Just so -- that's why I wouldn't fault Nate for not paying up. But the whole point of honour culture is that one feels the need to go above and beyond what's legally required, even when it's to one's own detriment. It's not like the bet was unclear or something -- the sporting thing to do would be to chuckle and write a cheque.
jkf
14d ago
A Twitter exchange is in fact a form of contract -- so whether the guy sent Nate a piece of paper saying "I will pay Nate Silver 100K if Florida goes less than R +8, otherwise he will pay me", I think the terms of the bet were pretty clear.
I certainly wouldn't require Nate to pay up based on the Twitter exchange, but that would definitely be the Honourable thing to do -- he can probably afford it based on what he's charging on Substack alone, and it would be great degenerate-gambler PR for him to do so.
jkf
14d ago
Yeah that article where he explained the house effects modelling had me screaming at my monitor.
Like, you've noticed that pollsters are herding, and then you correct for house effects by... measuring how different their predictions are from the median pollster!? WTF Nate.
It relies on there not being a consistent (statistical, not political, although in this case it's probably both) bias in the inputs; ie. the polls.
As I recall Silver actually rates Atlas (who absolutely nailed every swing state) pretty highly, unlike (say) RCP -- but I don't think his pollster confidence correction really amounts to anything huge -- in the end he's basically aggregating ~all the polls (he does throw some out), and if the polls are wrong, so are his model.
Based on the polls, his model was probably correct that the election was roughly a coin toss -- but his aggregation ended up favouring Kamala roughly 2-3 points (ED: vs actual results) in all the swing states, which is badly wrong and not in fact inside the error margin of an aggregation of a bunch of polls at +/- 3%.
So his statewise model is probably pretty good -- I missed the flashy toolkit he had where you could choose results for some states and see the likely shifts in others this time around -- I'll bet if you plugged Atlas' polls alone into the model, it would have had Trump at like 80%. But he didn't do that, he relied on a bunch of polls that he noted showed obvious herding towards 50% and the (cope) hypothesis that the pollsters might possibly have corrected their anti-Trump lean and be herding towards 50/50 because... they were too scared to predict a Kamala win or something?
I guess the ballsy thing for Silver to do would have been, upon noting the herding, to toss out all of the polls showing signs of this, and see what was left.
This would have (probably) had a negative impact on his subscriptions though -- so whether it was greed or his personal anti-Trump inclination, he apparently doesn't really live on The River anymore after all.
jkf
17d ago
Sure, being resolute in not screwing the economic pooch might have resulted in Bad Things happening for the politician responsible -- I'm not really sure; America was much more divided on this than other countries, and the anti-lockdown contingent was substantial. The Swedish approach of "I'm sorry Dave, the Constitution says we can't do that" might have played OK.
But the fact is, if Congress rose up and impeached over insufficient tyranny, and the next guy came in and trashed the economy -- that would be on the next guy. On this timeline, Biden did it, and it's on him.
jkf
17d ago
Yeah, my head math is a little off there -- even still, if she gets 5/7.5 remaining, Trump gets 2.5 and is still a couple million ahead. AFAICT there's no other big states with enough left to count (or that kind of margin) to catch her up.
jkf
17d ago
I don't think people realize how much worse not implementing those inflationary COVID policies would be.
I mean if you shut down most workplaces in the country by government decree, yeah, you kind of have to dish out some cash -- but you could also, like -- not do that?
jkf
17d ago
Polling errors are usually reported at two-sigma, but regardless this misses the real problem -- which is that they don't account for systemic error at all, which clearly exists in spades for Trump. (although not uniquely so -- this phenomenon seems to exist globally, to the point where you'd do better considering it to be baked in than not.
jkf
17d ago
I'd expect a minimum of 5m additional ballots for Harris from California alone
CNN says that they are 58% counted, amounting to just about 10M votes -- which only leaves like 5M total there, no?
I agree that it will be a near-ish thing, but Trump leads by ~5M right now, and most non-CA (or AZ, WTF) states are pretty much done counting -- he might lose the plurality, but I think he still beats Kamala by a bit.
jkf
17d ago
The president is literally allowed to do whatever he wants with classified material -- this does not apply to the SoS.
OTOH I do believe that FOI law applies to the President, same as any other government employee -- so get back to me when Trump diverts all his comms to a private server where he can delete whatever he thinks will embarrass him later.
Yes, police departments do not typically license their mugshots -- this does not mean that they aren't in the public domain.
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