sulla
11d ago
How do I know? I know because I know that my reasoning was solid and strongly supported by the available data.
How do you know that I know? You don’t. But I’m not really here to convince you. I’m here to make fun of Nate Silver for predicting nothing yet declaring victory.
sulla
11d ago
They try but fundamentally, IMO, it’s a good idea to separate data collection and model building.
sulla
12d ago
So Nate Silver's problem is that his method is junk. He takes some averages and models them out. The problem is that a lot of the data he relies on is bad.
I’m more sympathetic to the pollsters than I am to Nate. The pollster’s job is to poll people using a reasonable methodology and report the data, not to make predictions. They can’t just arbitrarily add Trump +3 to their sample because they think they didn’t capture enough Trump voters in their samples.
Nate’s job is explicitly to build a model that predicts things. He can legitimately adjust for things like industry polling bias. He doesn’t because he’s bad at his job.
sulla
12d ago
I get so triggered by this logic because it’s so wrong. Elections are not a football game. They are not actually a random variable. On November 4th the result was already set in stone, unless one of the candidates died or something. You could replay November 5th 1000 times and Trump would win 1000 times. It wasn’t 50/50. It can never be 50/50. It is always 100/0.
Epistemic uncertain is a feature of the model and its inputs, not some inherent feature of the real world. There was enough data to conclude with relatively high certainty that Trump was on pace to win. Nate’s model didn’t pick up on this because it sucks. It has high epidemic uncertainty because it’s a bad model with bad inputs.
sulla
12d ago
I just see it as a mockery/taunt. Obviously Democrats chose to make this election about abortion, under the slogan “my body, my choice.” It stands to reason that if Kamala lost, it must be “your body, my choice” (for some value of “my”). Sorry ladies, Democracy has spoken.
sulla
12d ago
The reason he treats it as an error rather than a predictable bias is because he doesn't think it's predictable.
And this is why he is an idiot. The pollsters all understand at this point that it is inherently due to a predictable non-response bias. As a fall back, many used the recalled vote to reweight the sample. But given the unusually high turnout for Dems in 2020, the recalled vote begs the question and was a sandbag for Trump.
Understanding this, unlike professional idiot Nate Silver, I made some heavy bets for Trump and won a good chunk of change.
sulla
12d ago
Everyone on the right called it with high confidence this time, unlike 2016 and 2020. Everyone on the left seems to call it for their guy with high confidence every election, so Dem/left predictions carry no weight. Nate will maintain his (undeserved) credibility by still being more accurate than most on the left.
The sad thing is that the “correlated errors” aren’t based on polling data or past results, they are just an arbitrary adjustment he adds to the model based on feels. Like he literally codes in “the sun belt states are likely to be correlated” etc.
After this election I am totally convinced Silver a fraud. He simply can’t admit that there is a polling industry bias. His techniques make it impossible to account for this accurately because they are based on weighted polling averages, where really he needs to add a bias term, which he refuses to do.
To elaborate on that, if literally all the polls miss left, you can’t fix that with weighting. In reality, he would have needed to put all of the weight on AtlasIntel and Rasmussen and close to 0 on everything else. This shows that weighting is the wrong approach.
Edit: He does have “house effects” but this adjust polls towards the weighted average, not towards historical results. So it doesn’t help.
sulla
15d ago
You are clearly here looking for a fight, not light. The left just got epistemically pantsed yet you are sitting here throwing stones, demanding that I be “ridiculed” due to your thoroughly uncharitable interpretation of my statements.
All I can say is good luck with that.
sulla
15d ago
They have not lost it. But they did spend a ton of social capital on the failed cause of stopping orange man, which I think was a foolish move.
sulla
15d ago
I looked at many different types of evidences, combined them when my priors, and drew the correct conclusion. That is the not the same as “I blinded trusted the one expert who told me what I wanted to hear.”
The Selzer poll did bother me initially. But after looking at all of the available evidence, it clearly was such an extreme outlier that fraud or incompetence was a more likely explanation than that it was carrying any information. I was so convinced by my deep dive that I made some heavy Trump bets on Monday/Tuesday and walked away with tens of thousands of dollars.
I was right. I probably wouldn’t have made those bets if it weren’t for the Selzer poll, because I hadn’t looked at all of the evidence.
I don’t owe you a detailed writeup of every piece of evidence I considered. However, I do think anyone who seriously believed the Selzer poll was a fool who did not seriously think through the result, or was bad at thinking it through. But again, I don’t owe you an explanation.
sulla
15d ago
You’re not trying to convince me, and you’re not trying to convince the non-existent readers of this thread, so the sad conclusion is that you are only trying to convince yourself that you weren’t made to look like a fool by some old lady in Iowa who Nate Bronze said was “the gold standard” because she predicted Obama 100 years ago.
sulla
15d ago
Other polls, early voting number, the cross tabs on other polls suggesting Kamala was in trouble with black and Latino men. Past polling missed suggested the aggregate underestimated Trump. Statements by polling experts like Nate Cohn who said that nothing changed in the methodology.
And then of course, vibes. Talk to a lot of Trump-curious individuals.
sulla
15d ago
This is the exact misunderstanding of statistics that kills Silver, is confusing aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty.
Aleatoric uncertainty comes from the irreducible randomness of a process. Epistemic uncertainty comes from a lack of knowledge.
The election was not 50/50 going into Tuesday. In terms of aleatoric uncertainty it was nearly 100/0. People’s votes were essentially predetermined at that point. If you reset the timeline to Tuesday morning, you would get the same result every time.
Silver’s epidemic uncertainty was high. That’s not because the election was impossible to predict (I made a lot of money off of it), it’s because he’s an idiot and refuses to update based on past results.
sulla
15d ago
It’s a bad look. At least say something to your supporters. “We’ll get ‘em next time” or whatever. She’s an even worse leader than I thought.
sulla
15d ago
His whole “job” is predicting elections. He literally said “idk.” in terms of doing his job that is actually worse than being wrong. What a failure.
sulla
15d ago
Selzer is obviously ruined. Her whole thing is she predicts 1 state and she produced one of the worst polls of all time.
Silver is similarly ruined, however. His whole grift is predicting elections and he said “idk.” He will refuse to ever admit industry polling bias, so the best he can do is make his model say 50/50 unless it’s already obvious to everyone and their grandma who will win.
sulla
15d ago
Probably anyone who has spent more than five minutes on the Motte knows that I mistrust corporate news media a lot. I am even aware that polls are politically slanted. And yet, somehow, every time I went looking into the polls behind the media's unapologetic shilling for Harris, I came away thinking, "even if that result is wrong, surely it's not so wrong that Trump could actually pull this off." And maybe this just goes back to my difficulty with numbers. But I am such a skeptical person by nature that it feels too convenient to conclude that, no, I need to be even more skeptical.
Nara my friend. It was not that hard. Trump barely lost in 2020 in spite of terrible polls, and was tied in 2024. He was doing palpably better in both the polls and the vibes. Ergo.
The most accurate pollsters in 2020 were dead accurate in 2024. AtlasIntel wears the crown again. Their polls showed a Trump swing state sweep.
If you couldn’t see through the Selzer poll, I don’t know what to tell you. The sample was like, 50% college educated women over 65 in a state full of farmers. Your mistake was not putting enough weight on the obvious conclusion that the poll was just not a bad sample, but entirely fraudulent. In which case, it carries 0 information.
I will admit that poll kept me up at night. But it forced me to think through the obvious conclusions, and I became totally convinced Trump would win. I put money in PredictIt on Monday and bought TSLA calls on Tuesday. But it was only after I had convinced myself that the race was not even close to a toss up.
sulla
16d ago
In what way was it 'beyond obvious'?
Because it blatantly contradicted every other piece of evidence about the state of the race in a way that was wildly implausible.
I find it funny how easily people are willing to label a called shot on a probability 'obviously wrong' as soon the result doesn't agree with the slightly higher probability assigned.
I spent the past few days on X relentlessly making fun of anyone who believed the Selzer poll. And then bet some money on PredictIt for good measure.
If anyone's right, it's those who look at the record of the pollsters they follow and decide who to believe based on how many cumulative shots they've called correctly.
As predicted, zero self-reflection. I could explain to you where this logic goes wrong, but it's better if you figure it out yourself.
sulla
16d ago
They're depressed because they're a swing state but don't actually matter in any of the plausible scenarios.
sulla
16d ago
Regarding the Selzer poll, I had the following exchange:
It’s hard not to view this as just the latest in a long string of people lighting their credibility on fire for a tiny chance of stopping bad orange man. It seems to run contrary to every other piece of evidence: polls, registration, early voting, “vibes.”
A Trump blowout still seems like the most likely scenario to me. There is just too much going in Trump’s favor relative to the very close 2020 election.
We've only got a few days to wait so we'll see. But how willing are you to consider that rather than your ideological opponents willfully blinding themselves, it is perhaps you?
It looks like once again my judgment was infallible and the left was completely and utterly deluded. The entire online left was collectively deluded by the Selzer poll. "She's the gold standard!" It was beyond obvious the poll was rigged.
I ask myself constantly if it is I with the willful blinders. But no, when reality gets a vote in the past 8 years it's always the left who was deluded. The great Selzer debate is just a microcosm. They worship "muh experts" who are bought and paid for, or who are simply lying to support their ideology, and then refused to be moved by facts or logic. I guarantee this will trigger no self-reflection. They will insist they were right to trust the "gold standard" Selzer against all logic.
sulla
16d ago
Except they messed up the Census in a way that undercounts Florida by 2 and NY and CA by 1, and refused to fix it after it was discovered. If Trump sweeps the Sun Belt while Kamala wins the Rust Belt, which is not at all implausible, this error will decide the president.
sulla
16d ago
True, but this idea is fading hard, especially among the younger generation. Women are so strongly protected by the Daddy State that many men feel no obligation.
sulla
16d ago
I don’t think it will move the needle much, but I think his interviews with Trump/Vance/Musk did by a few fractions of a percent at least.
I do think one thing that has been lost is that Kamala will probably struggle with men more than Trump struggles with women. The Kamala campaign has aggressively refused to appeal to men, with their weak attempts doing more harm than good.
On top of that, Biden was the “reasonable” choice that “reasonable” men could get behind. Now that the Biden admin is viewed as a bit of a failed hysterical clown show, the “reasonable” masculine thing to do is vote for Trump. Centrist men in my experience feel Dems had their chance and they botched it. “Go to your room and think about what you’ve done, and maybe next time we’ll vote for you” energy. They did the same to Trump last time
Tesla is all-in on reinforcement learning for their next generation of Optimus robots, but they only spun that team up this summer. When I heard this news the stock price was at like 180 and I bought some calls for 230/250/270 for next June. After some movement I pushed these up to 300. Yet this still looks way too pessimistic. I think some exposure to $500c by the end of next year might be warranted.
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