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There's not a ton of money to be made if you believe the odds are 50/50. Prediction markets give Trump 60/40 odds, while Nate's model gives 50/50 odds. If your bankroll is $1M, then it's only rational to bet 167k, for an expected value of 40k. Not nothing, but not a ton of money either.
That also ignores other costs, like counterparty risk. Nate also has to deal with reputational risk: people might value his published models less if they thought he was making bets on markets that were influenced by his models. Since that's his main source of actual income, a bet would be substantially negative EV for him.
There's reputational risk for having his model diverge too far from the prediction market's call, if the markets end up looking more accurate.
And I've seen him offer various bets before.
I like Nate generally, but I end up with the feeling that the Presidential Election model is a bit too gimmicky for my tastes. As stated, he should display some factor that accounts for the inherent uncertainty of a long-term prediction, rather than making confident-seeming prognostications which get aggressively revised as new information comes in.
He's not calling his shot well in advance, he's just adjusting to the same information everyone else gets as it comes in. Credit for the model being reasonable, but what new information is it giving us?
There is no new information. We have no reason to think his model is even particularly good. The only thing that it really brings to the table is that he both has a consistent reasonable process that doesn't give much room for human bias to creep in, and that he doesn't abandon it the second it makes partisans mad. This is, apparently, a really hard thing to do.
Or, a bit more optimistically: it actually does provide information that can be new to people. E.g., post-debate the model showed that Biden was going to get walloped because voters just weren't willing to re-elect someone senile, while many Democrats were doing their best to convince themselves otherwise. It's somewhat fair to say, "oh, so all the model does is tell you things that are blindingly obvious?" Yes, with a significant caveat: seeing what's in front of your eyes is a very difficult thing in politics.
"All models are wrong. Some are useful."
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