roystgnr
16d ago
is the "calling" of states entirely based on partially counted results?
Partially counted results, but they are at least smart enough to weight the partial count by source precinct, so when Trump's solidly winning the rural Wisconsin in-person votes but the Milwaukee mail-in vote count hasn't been finished they're still not going to call the state for Trump.
Well, they're probably not? There's always tension between "if we call a state first we get a lot of attention" vs "if we call a state too early we might horribly embarrass ourselves". Fox called Arizona for Biden in 2020 with 73% of the votes counted and a 8.5 point Biden lead, despite the expectations for uncounted votes heavily favoring Trump, and Biden only ended up winning by 0.3 points. I'm not sure whether the takeaway from that by 2024 media is going to be "we might also piss off a lot of people and risk having to backpedal embarrassingly if we call it that close" or if it's going to be "they got away with it last time so we might want to play the odds too".
By far the most serious embarrassment I can remember was Florida in 2000. Networks called Florida for Gore before voting in the panhandle region of the state (which is in a different time zone) even closed, then had to retract the call, then called it for Bush, then had to retract that call - after which point Gore, who had already called Bush to concede, retracted his concession.
roystgnr
16d ago
not sure when the election results will be announced
You and everybody here. I presume that explains the "(Day?)" quip in the title.
Most amusingly: Nevada's a swing state, and it's going to be counting mail-in ballots with postmarks up through election day (or with smudged postmarks) if they're received up to 3 or 4 days later. Even if everybody counts competently and instantly with no errors and no recounts there's a small chance we might not know the final outcome before the end of the week.
roystgnr
17d ago
It's an election, though, not a bloody melee. In a melee you want your side to believe you've got the enemy grossly outnumbered and so there's definitely no need for any of Us to break and rout before we force Them to. In an election you want your side to believe you're tied with the enemy and so there's definitely a need for Us to get our lazy butts off the couches rather than either conceding to Them or letting our overconfidence cause an upset.
Hopefully we're just doing the exhortation thing because our psychology evolved through far less history with elections than with bloody melees (100s of years vs 100s of millennia?), not because we've had a few slightly-bloody melees recently and we want to be prepared for when they get much bloodier.
roystgnr
17d ago
Pray that whatever gets me gives me enough advance warning to make funeral plans?
My father wrote up his own funeral service, after a cancer diagnosis that came about a year and a half before he died. I wrote his eulogy, but he had everything else from decor to intro music to hymns picked out. It was astounding. It wasn't so much about his specific choices (though I loved that he'd asked my oldest daughter to play one of his favorite songs on the piano there, and I'd never have had the guts to deck out a church in helium balloons if I hadn't been under specific instructions), it was about the fact that he'd always been the sort of person to take charge whenever something important but unpleasant needed to be done, and make sure it was done right, and there he was doing it again from beyond the grave, for a room full of people who loved him and knew him well enough to find the situation hilarious.
Honestly, though, I'm not even sure if he needed a year to plan. If my daughter (who'd only recently started learning piano) hadn't been in the schedule I'd have wondered if it was a decade old. After the service we took his ashes out to put next to my mother's in niche #1 of the church's columbarium, which of course he'd reserved for the two of them several years earlier when he had the whole thing built.
roystgnr
17d ago
it's more about elevating your position to the null hypothesis.
One of the key differences between Bayesian and frequentist statistics is that the latter has a "null hypothesis" and the former does not. Priors aren't the same thing; in Bayesian-speak an experiment leads to an update that's a real number, not a binary acceptance/rejection.
You can claim to be a good Bayesian no matter the outcome of any particular case.
Yeah, but you can also claim to be a good non-Bayesian pundit regardless. The biggest difference from my point of view is that I've seen the best rationalists publish graphs of how well their past predictions, as declared in advance, turned out to be calibrated. I've never seen anybody more mainstream than Nate Silver do the same, even though "my punditry is my profession and public service and livelihood" would seem to entail a much stronger case for doing so than "I like blogging", so I'm going to doubt that rationalism has led to much of anything in the mainstream media.
... which is a shame, because an admission of "that's evidence but not enough to budge my priors" really is a big step up from a declaration of "without evidence". When not moving far from your priors is a good idea (which it often is - I've seen legitimate evidence for Flat Earth Theory!) you at least gain a little humility from having to openly admit what you're doing. And when your conclusions resembling your priors is a bad idea, you're more likely to notice that eventually if you have to acknowledge every time when you're dismissing Not Enough Evidence rather than Not Real Evidence.
roystgnr
17d ago
But now you're on The Motte, where everybody is too contrarian. If you're finally following the herd here then clearly you're just not metacontrarian enough. Tsk.
roystgnr
17d ago
rejecting Rationalism, as it leads to cudgels like "falsely claimed without evidence"
Does it? I don't think I've ever seen the phrase "without evidence" used sloppily by anyone whose definition of evidence is "B s.t. P(B|A)/P(B) > 0".
roystgnr
19d ago
She specifically claimed that it was a particular McDonalds in the Bay area, didn't she?
Citation?
Steve Sailer is the one who keeps harping on the vaccine delay most, including a retrospective recently. Not the most persuasive source to cite, but he does cite his own sources and doesn't seem to be making up any facts, just adding speculative but more-plausible-than-the-official motives. The official story is that pharma companies did hold back the analysis of their vaccines until right after the election, but only because it's okay to violate experiment protocols when you're kinda feeling super nervous.
I thought the bottleneck was FDA approval, with mass production starting alongside Phase 2 success.
Pfizer announced 90% effectivity in a preliminary analysis of their Phase 3 trials on November 9, announced the analysis was finished on November 18, applied for FDA approval on November 20, and got the Emergency Use Authorization on December 11.
Certainly the FDA taking 3 weeks to approve was as unhelpful as Pfizer delaying for 2 weeks, but both decisions probably killed thousands in the end.
Of course, the real bottleneck was the FDA, because we could have saved tens or hundreds of thousands more lives if not for decisions like "Forbidding the human challenge trials we could have done in April", "Not jailing the people who did the forbidding and then doing human challenge trials in May", etc. But letting people die in large numbers because of mindless authoritarianism is part and parcel of modern society, whereas letting people die in less-large numbers because you want to hide information from voters feels like a new low.
roystgnr
21d ago
Consider getting checked out for hayfever/allergies.
I took way too long to do this after moving to a new house and subsequently turning into a mouth breather, because I never thought of myself as a person with allergies. It turned out that, although I wasn't allergic to the oak pollen that would fall like yellow snow around my previous home, I was very allergic to the relatively invisible wild grass pollens at the new place. A year or so of allergy shots cleared it up.
Are the Nasonex sprays okay for indefinite use? I was prescribed Flonase nasal spray (way back when it was still prescription-only) as a temporary fix while the shots were doing their thing, and I was warned at the time that some of the OTC options let you build up a tolerance if you used them too frequently and would then have withdrawal issues afterwards.
roystgnr
23d ago
Have they done so yet in this war? All the Wiki examples are from decades ago.
roystgnr
24d ago
Regular social responsibilities are correlated to positive mood.
Well... sure? In a negative mood you're less likely to take on new responsibilities and more likely to drop existing ones.
I've heard lots of stories about how the effect is also causal in the other direction, as you're suggesting, and that makes just as much sense to me so I'd say "try it", but I'd love to know if anybody's done controlled experiments to estimate the strength of the connection in each direction. If both directions are strong enough then you get "vicious spiral" / "virtuous spiral" dynamics, where people would tend to fall into two very separate "attractors" that require major changes to get out of.
roystgnr
24d ago
Two-sigma is 2%+ of the population. That's "be successful following the script" level. Unless the IQ is paired with two-sigma risk-taking or extroversion or some other relevant independent property, it's not going to be "write your own better script from scratch" level. The most interesting deviances are probably going to be where the paired trait is "two-sigma good luck" (what did they do with an uncommon opportunity they stumbled into) or "two-sigma bad luck" (what did they do to recover when the usual script failed them).
roystgnr
27d ago
The thing is, there is no "last minute" anymore. There are many states where millions of people have already cast their votes. I'm not a huge fan of the consequence of this system where we now have to maintain a proper chain-of-custody for week after week after week, but I am a huge fan of the consequence of this system where anyone with an "October Surprise" in their pocket might as well release it in September, because if you release it late then any "voters don't have time to think past their gut reaction" advantage gets canceled out by "it doesn't even get to all the voters".
roystgnr
28d ago
Isn't "other places" apples-to-oranges, though? The city of Milwaukee was at 19.3% for Trump in 2016. If the mail-in voting included around 40% of those voters plus 60% of anti-Trump voters just like in Florida as a whole, you'd expect 14% for Trump among mail-in ballots. They saw 14% for Trump in the big "drop" of mail-in ballots, part of 19.6% for Trump on the whole. The math here really does check out.
roystgnr
28d ago
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that he was faking.
IMHO Trump's only clear advantage over most Republican candidates is that, despite his very loose relationship with honesty in general, he will occasionally turn on "I'm going to piss off everyone who disagrees with me" mode as a costly signal of sincerity. Kamala's trying to backpedal on her previous statements on things like policing and border security in very weasel-worded ways that are obviously intended to barely placate moderates while being easy to un-backpedal from later. Vance's "Trump would have won except for big tech" phrasing is a great way to say something technically true without either actually agreeing with Republicans who think it was vote fraud or openly disagreeing and pissing them off. But when Trump goes full on anti-illegal-immigration or 2020-was-fraud or whatever he doesn't use his charismatic-real-estate-negotiator language, he brings out scare-the-normies level language that he's clearly not going to back down from. He might be mistaken but he's not lying.
My point is just that relying on him alone to fix any problems is strictly inferior to relying on both him and on grassroots-level efforts too. Maybe some of the evidence that convinced him was spurious (the reason I'm not convinced is that I waded through enough of that) and he'll go after those red herrings and never get around to other real problems, so the only way to get real problems fixed is to publish the evidence. Maybe he won't get reelected because that's just not happening again, and fixing any vulnerabilities will have to be done by others, so the only way to point out what to fix is to publish the evidence. Maybe he would have been reelected if he made a strong case for voter fraud evidence, but he didn't, so there are people who would have voted for the anti-voter-fraud Trump but will vote against the weird-fake-electors-thing Trump. Maybe he will be reelected and will go after real problems but will be thwarted by federalism or another branch or the deep state or whatever and fixes will have to come in at the local level. There's just so many ways that Trump making a public case could make things better. It seems like the one big risk here for him is that putting everything out in the open might reveal that none of it is convincing, but that's also a situation where "good for Trump" vs "good for the country" diverge, and I'd be on the "good for the country" side in that case.
roystgnr
29d ago
Were they in Obama's campaign? The story calls them "local officials", and details
Burkett confessed that “there were meetings at which several people explicitly agreed to forge these petitions” and that his job was to “forge petitions for candidate Barack Obama.” Furthermore, Board of Voter Registration worker Beverly Shelton “was assigned to forge petitions for candidate Hillary Clinton,” while former County Board of Voter Registration worker Dustin Blythe “was assigned to forge petitions for candidate John Edwards.”
It's pretty damning that the three of them got away with this (only the "ringleader" Butch Morgan was convicted), and it might have ended up being a turning point that led to Obama's election (though the "momentum" theory here is a little shaky), but it doesn't seem like it was a conspiracy to elect Obama so much as it was a conspiracy to avoid excruciating embarrassment. Imagine having to drop one or more candidates from the ballot because of a county where the campaign failed or forgot to get the 500 requisite signatures.
roystgnr
29d ago
Fair, but "at least there is some chance" applies here too. Wasn't that the point of Trump's "you won't have to vote anymore" speech a while back, that if you can convince enough voters to beat the "margin of fraud" then you can get into power to shrink that margin to 0?
Isn't it much better, then, to convince these voters by specifically explaining to them how the fraud is working and what needs to be done to stop it? If you have a plan that's more detailed than "just elect Trump" then even if you fail at the presidential level you can still get election reforms going at local levels.
roystgnr
29d ago
a. the votes were counted in a prompt manner
A lot of states didn't let mail-in ballots be processed until after election day polling closed. Reasonable if you don't want to risk preliminary count data leaking and influencing later voters, but not great if your priority is "prompt". Florida seems to have figured out how to thread the needle on that by allowing all the tricky work to be done ahead of time:
“They can determine the validity of ballots, confirm they should be counted and run them through machines,” Morley said. “They just can’t press the tally button.”
I'd still worry about possibilities of low-level fraud, since maintaining a proper chain of custody for weeks has to be a lot harder than doing so for hours, but it seems to have done wonders against possibilities of delays.
b. the difference in Dem/Rep turnout for the two methods was not very large.
No? The first data I found claims that early voting by mail was from voters registered 31% R to 45% D (24% minor or no affiliation), versus early in-person votes from voters registered 45% R to 32% D. That's not as large as the "how could you go out in public during a pandemic" vs "are you going to be a shut-in the rest of your life" bluster to pollsters before the election would have suggested, but it's still pretty large, and that's for the state as a whole; I wouldn't be surprised if the less moderate Democrats and more moderate Republicans were disproportionately in the larger cities.
roystgnr
29d ago
If you'd said "This fucking looks weird", I would have absolutely agreed. The rules for how ballots were counted in Wisconsin were a bad idea. Democracy derives less of its value from "the median voter is super smart and should be in charge of everything" than it does from "there are a lot of people similar to the median voter who ought to be able to trust they're not being screwed over", so predictably reducing voter trust, even if the new suspicion is unfounded, is a horribly anti-democratic mistake. The Democrats used to know this, e.g. back when opposition to voting machines was left-coded, and it's shameful that they're forgetting it when they no longer expect to be the ones who might need to be distrustful.
roystgnr
29d ago
Who said anything about court? Your theory that judges are more likely to dismiss people who publish more evidence is an interesting one, but there is a reason why I said "publish", not "file". As I admitted, if the judges dismiss you then you still lose 2020, but if the voters don't then your team wins 2022 and 2024 and a lot of opportunities to prevent whatever fraud you detected from happening again. Maybe it takes time to go through evidence in the moment and make sure you're not hurting your credibility by putting credence in bad evidence too, but after three or four years have passed Vance shouldn't be dancing around when asked if Trump lost, he shouldn't be pointing to social media censorship (or whatever "big tech rigged the election" meant) as reasons why Trump morally won, he should be advertising "trumpwon2020.com" or whatever URL they picked to host all the evidence they have that Trump actually won.
roystgnr
29d ago
Look how long it's taking to get back to the Moon
IMHO this is evidence of increased competence, not decreased. We spent hundreds of billions of (inflation-adjusted) dollars to develop the Apollo program, with a marginal cost of billions of dollars per mission, and because we prized speed over sustainability we had very little to show for it in the end besides expendable rockets we couldn't afford to keep using. Even SLS (at mere tens of billions of dollars to develop!) isn't that bad, and Starship HLS (a few billion NASA dollars, on top of a few more billions of private investment with an actual expected return and commercial use cases, with sub-billion-dollar marginal costs at worst) is an absolute bargain by comparison. The major flaw of Starship HLS is that high capabilities come with a high level of technical risk (though not quite as high as I thought it was before I watched the giant robot arms catch the decelerating megarocket on their first try...), and we're even mitigating that now with Blue Moon as backup. There's definitely some structural problems inherent to the way everyone always pretends to believe that this time the brand-new aerospace development programs won't be delayed, but we're at least getting something out of the delays.
They didn't poll Russia, but among the 34 countries Pew did poll, only the Tunisians and Hungarians prefer Trump to Biden, at least when the only question is whether they "have confidence in ____ to do the right thing regarding world affairs".
Globally (at least in these countries, which are a somewhat diverse sampling), Biden had 43% confidence and Trump had 28%.
I feel like the interpretation of that could be a hell of a scissor statement. Democrats: "Everybody else everywhere in the world knows the right choices to make; why don't you?!?" Republicans: "Hundreds of countries are run the way you want, and for some reason you can't understand why everybody wants to live here instead!"
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