site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34439 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

It always gives me a surge of vindictive glee when someone says something to the effect of, "I hate when outsiders learn to co-opt our language to scam us."* Sucks to suck! Next time learn to receive and transmit factual observations instead of markers of ingroup status!

I'd wager this happens because it's a time-efficient mental heuristic-- you learn that people in your ingroup are unlikely to lie to you because they share the same goals, so when you recieve ingroup-signals you spend less effort discerning truthfulness. Intelligent people need this heuristic less and therefore groups full of high-average-intelligence people have a sort of herd-immunity against this type of scammer. Scammers often try to signal that they're high-intelligence by talking like LLMs trained on smart-people-talk... but that only fools dumb people who've trained themselves to have the separate-but-related heuristic of trusting anything that includes enough technical language. (See: homeopathic remedies, the medbed people, anything "quantum.") To the high-intelligence group, they just look like nuts, cranks, and schizophrenics.

However, implicit understanding of that herd-immunity becomes its own type of heuristic. Which works fine under normal conditions because you need to be smart** to lie to a smart person, and if you're smart you have more alternatives to being a scammer. But there's a particular failure case that I think is especially interesting: when a formerly high-average-intelligence group reduces its selection criteria and lets lower-intelligence people in. High-intelligence people become vectors of information instead of firewalls against it, because their level of laziness when evaluating ingroup claims is no longer adaptive.

I don't have any real conclusion to draw from this... Actually, I suspect I shouldn't draw any conclusions from this, because "the ingroup gets shittier when we let new people in" is exactly the sort of heuristic I suspect I'm already predisposed to have by genetics and culture. It's almost certainly priced in so to speak. So having the mechanistic explanation for the heuristic should actually push me toward being more open to expanding the ingroup-- at least, in cases where I suspect the new members are equal or greater intelligence to the existing ingroup. (Should I be even more in favor of increasing green card caps for technically skilled workers? But then again, I'd guess that I'm predisposed to be biased in favor of that by political affiliation and cultural influences anyways so this might be a wash.)

Though-- if human intelligence actually declined after the invention of agriculture (I'd put a sub-50% probability of this being true, but it would be really interesting if it was) it would imply that we were in a sweet-spot in terms of ingroup formation. If you live in a optimally sized band of primates, there's no need to send ingroup signals because you already have a deep, personal connection to every member of the ingroup. If you live in our current, massively populous, highly-anonymous society, relying on signals of ingroup membership gets you scammed. But for a thousands-of-years-long golden age you could afford to be stupid. Ingroups were both large enough that you could rely on yours to avoid having to think for yourself, and small/impermeable/anti-anonymous enough that scammers weren't a risk.

* See: fake-feminists seducing feminists, trump supporters donating their kids' entire inheritance on accident because of predatory web design practices, LGBT getting suckered into buying rainbow capitalist merchantise, megachurch pastors fleecing their denominations into giving them private jets, etc. (I'm providing politics-related examples of this because they're the most visible, but I'd wager the most common version of this is, "this fast-taking fellow convinced me we'd both be rich but he got away with the money and I was left with the bag.")

** well, you need high fluid intelligence specifically

There is a great cost to scammers utilizing ingroup signals though, it introduces friction akin to a transaction tax imposed by the government, except now it is imposed by lack of ability to trust. Sometimes transactions are so consequential it always makes sense to have vetting with insurance. Something like title insurance on a real estate property. But what about the special Best Buy warranties? What if it made sense to buy that crap for a $400 television because you dont know if you are getting a SONY or a SƠNY? This pretty quickly destroys your economy.

I don't understand why you framed this as a rebuttal to what I'm saying. Was my thesis unclear? In case I need to restate it-- "resist attempts by your ingroup to use language as a status-signalling tool because it will make you all vulnerable to scammers and I will laugh when they take your shit."

You shouldn't laugh, you should be sad.

I won't claim that this vindictive glee is in line with my deepest ethical principles, but... c'mon. Bad things happening to good people is tragedy. Bad things happening to bad people is justice. Bad things happening to idiots is hilarious.

Building social cohesion is not stupid. When it works your community has virtually no transaction costs.

Well if your only means to do that is by using language to communicate status rather than factual information, it clearly doesn't work.

That's why I enmesh myself in communities where status is a factor of conveying useful, factual information. It's much more efficient than handicapping strategies like sticking to a counterproductive party line as a high-cost signal of commitment to ingroup values.

I think it depends on the group of smart people and what their domain of knowledge actually is. My observation is that smart people tend to vastly overestimate their ability to understand things not in their own domain. They think the6 can tell if someone is scamming them in another area but often they’re just as vulnerable as anyone else.

Part of this is the way society works. Everyone specializes in one or two areas, and outside of those areas you really don’t have much more base knowledge than the average person. This makes it much easier to sell a scientist on a financial scam. Not because the guy is stupid, but because he doesn’t know much about finance and doesn’t spend a great deal of time thinking about it. Or maybe it’s home repairs where a roofer can come into a neighborhood full of lawyers after a big storm and make bank by scamming the lawyers on repairs they don’t need and cheap materials that don’t last.

The other part is plain ego. Smart people have been praised for their intelligence for a long time. Everybody since their third grade teacher has probably told them how smart they are. Add in the success they get in their domain, and you believe it. They’re smart and can figure it out. And they actually are much more vulnerable simply because their ego won’t let them notice that something is off. In fact I would consider this an advantage for the less intelligent. They know how much they don’t understand about stuff they didn’t understand at school.

This is a vibes-based claim rather than a data-based claim, but I genuinely don't think scam rates are comparable across intelligence brackets even after controlling for domain-specific intelligence. When you're smart you end up learning meta-strategies to evaluate fact-based claims like checking your assumptions against known cognitive biases and using formal logic to determine whether claims are contradictory without having to access the actual underlying truth value of either claim. If me and a random joe were presented a list of scammy and non-scammy investment options for... I don't know, undersea mining concerns, or instagram influencer management companies, or whatever, I think I would outperform the random joe on avoiding the scams. I wouldn't be immune, but I'd fall for less of them.

And in turn, even after controlling for intelligence-- I think a random joe trained to ignore signals of ingroup membership would do better at avoiding scams than an equally intelligent random joe left to his native heuristics. There's a valid question of global performance-- heuristics are mostly useful and adaptive. But I think, in the current age of massive, permeable, low-trust, groups, I think most peoples' heuristics are lagging behind what's actually efficient.

Re: ego, it's debatable whether the Dunning-Krueger effect is actually real.. If it is real, then smart people must be less unjustifiably confident than non-smart people. If it's not... well, then we still haven't found any evidence in the reverse direction, so the null hypothesis should be that the level of unjustifiable confidence is the same, and non-smart people don't have any relative advantage. (While also suffering from the other phenomena I talked about in my original post.)

Smart people have been praised for their intelligence for a long time. Everybody since their third grade teacher has probably told them how smart they are. Add in the success they get in their domain, and you believe it. They’re smart and can figure it out. And they actually are much more vulnerable simply because their ego won’t let them notice that something is off. In fact I would consider this an advantage for the less intelligent. They know how much they don’t understand about stuff they didn’t understand at school.

To be clear, I've also run into less intelligent people who commonly make bizarre mistakes, people so dumb they're actively destructive with their foolishness. And some of those people notice I'm kinda smart and try to play the know-it-all game with me, making up stuff that sounds vaguely plausible to sound like they know what they're talking about. My favorite was in a technology class where I wondered aloud why the Internet Protocol skipped from IPv4 to IPv6, and a guy I know is this type started telling me all about how big and important IPv5 was. I looked it up on my phone, and an IPv5 did exist, but it was a special-purpose experiment that was never in common use -- obviously not something this guy knew anything about. Instead of having curiosity with me, and going, "yeah, that sounds like a good question, we should find out!" he took it as an opportunity to fake insight.

When I first started meeting people like this, I found it very surprising, because it confused me why people would actively fake knowledge instead of being straightforward -- you know, "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt." But once I met a few, the pattern became clear; once someone starts being like this, you'll notice them doing it all the time. I usually let people get away with a few of these moments simply because I'm interpersonally trusting, but once I realize someone's doing it I lose all respect for them as sources of advice and I tend to assume anything that comes out of their mouth is just noise.

Maybe this is just something people do to me, or maybe they think I'm bullshitting all the time and they're just mirroring it, but long story short, it's not always the case that people who did poorly in school understand, or act in accordance with, their limitations. Dumb people are just as capable of intellectual overconfidence as smart people, especially when they believe it will ingratiate them with someone smarter than them. But someone who says, "I don't know -- but I'd like to find out!" presents intellectual curiosity and actually increases my perception of their intelligence.

But someone who says, "I don't know -- but I'd like to find out!" presents intellectual curiosity and actually increases my perception of their intelligence.

It fascinates me when academics, interviewed on some high-quality podcasts, reply with a point-blank "I don't know". And only after host adds more explicit hedging and reframes the question as the one aimed at best guess (instead of what they've probably been taught to perceive as "give me an up-to-date overview of the field on this question" query) they respond with an account, naturally transcending a median listener's knowledge on the topic by a large margin. Such public talks seem like a promising venue to instill (or at least popularize) the courage of admitting your ignorance.

I remember such a thing happening in a podcast (or maybe radio program? its been a while) where they had a group of physicists on a "popular science" format to speak about some new thing that was breaking in their field. The only one I remember was Lawrence Krauss (b/c he was actually a professor of mine in college). There was the back and forth like you describe, and eventually the host was able to get a fairly detailed answer to his question, after which he asked the guest if they could possibly simplify the explanation for "the folks listening at home". After a brief pause Dr. Krauss simply replied: "no".

Dr. Krauss simply replied: "no".

Nice example. I think it's a decent stance. Compressing models/theories is always lossy and it takes a special skill to map them onto simpler models/metaphors, while keeping predictive power intact. If you are unsure how to do this, don't do this.

b/c he was actually a professor of mine in college

Sounds cool. What was the experience like?

I was a 100s level physics class for non-physics majors, mostly comp sci people with a scattering of others who took it for fun or it counted as a required elective. Apparently it was a special pet class of his that he'd been working on for a while. It was pretty low stress with the grade being mostly based on attendance and participation. He did miss a lot of the classes himself though. In fact, by his own attendance policy he would have failed the class by missing about 30% of them. I do remember he had a 80s era red Corvette that really stuck out in the staff lot and was a good indicator he was actually there that day.

What podcasts like this do you recommend?

Disclaimer: although I consider them high-quality by various proxy measures, ultimately I don't have enough knowledge to assess most of their takes.

Off the top of my head:

  1. Conversations with Tyler (misc);
  2. Any interview with Michael Everything-is-contingent Kofman, eg regular ones on the War on the Rocks (Ru-Ukr war, Ru military history);
  3. Ones and Tooze, by Adam Tooze (misc econ);
  4. SigmaNutrition (typically interviews with the authors of papers/books, discussion of nutrition research and methodology);

There is more, of course. Speaking of literal examples (from CwT):

Claudia Goldin:

COWEN: Let me ask a question I’ve been wondering about. Why does China, right now, have so many of the world’s self-made female billionaires?

GOLDIN: I don’t know, but I wouldn’t mind being one. [laughs]

Joseph Henrich

COWEN: But productivity growth is falling, right? In most countries? This baffles me.

HENRICH: You mean why productivity growth is falling?

COWEN: Right. Japan, US, Western Europe. Productivity growth is lower than it was, say, before the ’80s. I don’t blame the Internet for that, but it doesn’t seem to have helped very much.

HENRICH: I’m a cultural evolutionist so I want to see this on much longer time scale. Ask me in 200 years.

[laughter]

COWEN: OK. 200 years, we’ll have you back for a second episode.

[...]

HENRICH: I’m not sure that that necessarily follows.

COWEN: But it’s a coherent cultural pessimist scenario.

HENRICH: [laughs] I’ll have to think about it more.

Paul Graham:

COWEN: Were the Medici good venture capitalists, or do you give greater credit to the Florentine guilds?

GRAHAM: I have no idea. I need to learn more about the —

COWEN: The guilds would run competitions. The Medici would just pick the people they liked. They both have good records in different ways, but obviously, they’re competing models.

GRAHAM: You’re an economist. You’ve read books about this stuff. I don’t know. What do I know about the Medici? [laughs]

Isn't this mostly what Robin Hanson's The Elephant in the Brain is about? Haven't read it yet.

Even intelligent people are still driven by urge to seek status and fit in and receive social acceptance, and that can be hacked by a savvy operator, even if the smart person 'knows better.'

On this antepenultimate day of election, I've been thinking about how there is too much dark money in almonds. Or really, the dual question from that post, "[W]hy is there so little money in politics?" Naturally, I wonder, if those numbers are rookie numbers, how do we pump those numbers up?

I'd like this comment chain to primarily be a house for other people's whacky ideas to increase the amount of money in politics, in a way that is most productive, least damaging, etc. This is somewhat self-serving, because I'm also going to throw out a half-baked, whacky idea of my own, and I'd prefer if all the comments aren't solely beating up on my terrible idea. Spread the love; make it a target-rich environment; help by offering up your own whacky idea, so that at least some number of comments are beating up on your whacky idea rather than 100% of the comments just beating up on my whacky idea.

Some general thoughts that I'm trying to work with along the way. First, the idea of having money in politics isn't necessarily automatically 100% bad. I've seen a variety of defenses over the years that it is actually somewhat good to value the opinions of more economically-productive folks over others. Obviously, there are also plenty of criticisms of how this could go poorly, but I don't think it's completely incoherent to vaguely think that there could be value in getting political opinions from people with a proven track record of providing economic value, who have an economic stake in getting the outcomes right, and by making them put their money where their mouth is.

People have definitely proposed what were once very whacky ideas to channel money to some specific purpose. Prediction markets are very much that. Scott joked about just putting prediction markets in control of elections and how it could go horribly wrong. This is the kind of whacky ideas I'm wanting, even if I'm going to try to make my own much more moderate/measured.

A second general thought is that people probably do get a bit too hysterical about the results of elections. I know, I know, there are real differences; there are real choices; we can all point to specific examples of how things could or did get significantly better/worse depending on who was ultimately selected, but in many cases, the actual election process already has some level of stochasticity built-in, and we already accept this non-perfection, even though it could give the "wrong" result and end up with a worse president who does bad things. I can't find the Scott Post now, but I vaguely recall him saying something at some time about how an election outcome could be flipped if it happens to rain on election day in this county of Pennsylvania rather than rain in that county, where it is assumed that rain depresses voter turnout by some single-digit percentage.

To some extent, what I've somewhat extended this to mean is that, especially with a race that appears to be a dead heat (as this one is), since some level of randomness very well may come into play anyway, and we're fine with it, from the perspective of building electoral processes, how much does it really matter, anyway? Both candidates seem to have significant support from wide swaths of the country, and since this is after many months or years of public vetting, we've probably already cut out a good chunk of the really pathological cases if we're thinking about making relatively minor changes to the system. I'll come back to this point later.

I'm also thinking about tech. We've talked a bit before about digital elections. I know, I know, many people are against them. Hopelessly insecure, they say. But, I think, bitcoin seems mostly secure, right? At least good enough that a random search tells me that people have put something like $1.3T worth of economic value into it. I will hypothesize some extensions of tech that don't actually exist now, and perhaps there are true barriers to them existing. I'm kind of okay with pointing them out, but I'd prefer if it's not all complaints that the tech is impossible. I've already accepted that I'm probably further toward the side of "it is probably possible for us to build tech systems that at least mostly work well enough to do what we want, even if there are theoretical (or even practical) security issues along the way, at least to the level of insecurity that we generally accept from banks, bitcoin, current elections, etc." than most people in these communities. So, the objections will be noted, but I may not be all that interested in engaging at this time.

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't bring up secrecy in voting. I've made a big deal about this in the past. I do think it's a big deal. And a big part of what's going in to my half-baked thoughts is to ask, "If we can use tech to allow us to inject dark money directly into politics, but ensuring that this money truly is dark, like really truly secret/anonymous, can we possibly leverage that for good?!"

Secrecy/anonymity are related in a way. An individual's vote being secret means that when you're looking at the pile of votes, they're all anonymous. One of the reasons why I've pointed out that this is important is because it makes coercion and quid pro quo harder. I won't choose any particular article to link to concerning Elon Musk paying people to sign a pledge, but you can pay people to sign a pledge, they can take your money, sign the pledge, then walk into the voting booth and vote whatever the hell way they want, and there's nothing Elon Musk can do about it. Similarly with corruption going the other way. I can't remember where I heard it, I think it was EconTalk, maybe in their discussion of crony capitalism, but right now, when someone gives money to a politician's campaign, it's important to them that the politician knows that they, specifically, gave that money to the politician's campaign. If the politician couldn't tell who gave money to his campaign, he could be corrupt in many ways, but at least he couldn't act corruptly in the specific way of just looking to the people who gave the most money to his campaign and doing the things they tell him to do.

There are a lot of whacky ideas possible here already, and I vaguely recall thinking along these lines in the past. Maybe someone else will flesh out a more specific idea for how to focus on the campaign contribution part, but I want to keep in mind my second general thought and get even more whacky.

What if we just said, yes, we'd like to give money some amount of say in presidential elections. People can just put their money where their mouth is and directly pay money to affect the election. The not-perfect idea for what to do with that money is to just put it in the government's general fund, because some folks view that as, itself, a politically-undesirable endpoint. I have vague-but-not-great alternative ideas, but would be open to others. But we want a balance of some sort, like how the electoral college tried to balance state-level interests with population-level interests. I don't want to throw away one man one vote or the state-level interests that the electoral college gives us, so let's just make a minor modification to give money some say. Let's just give money some EC votes. Five, ten, twenty, I don't know how many exactly. Enough to make it a thing. Not enough to make it the main thing. If it's able to sway the election, that means the election was close enough that maybe a rainstorm in Pennsylvania could have switched the outcome anyway, so probably either option was okay-ish. At least, probably not catastrophic.

Re-enter the tech. Imagine the tech allows a person to simply allocate some amount of cryptocurrency to this money vote. It does so with all those fancy bits of 'receipt freeness' that the digital election nerds talk about. Maybe it allows you to freely withdraw/switch your money vote later, making it harder for you to prove to a candidate that you money voted for him/her by just showing them your computer when you do it. Maybe go further and make people have to go to an in-person voting booth, after being scanned for electronics so they don't have a camera or whatever, and give their money vote that way. Whatever it is, imagine this tech allows people to just give their money vote, but it's (within a margin of error that will always exist for real systems) completely secret/anonymous.

Do we care how much people give? I don't know that I do. One side has their billionaires; the other side has their own. If those billionaires want to literally give away billions of their own dollars, that seems fine? I imagine they won't be billionaires for much longer if they're dumping significant fractions of their wealth into an election every four years.

...do we even just let foreigners have a money vote? Remember, we're significantly limiting the impact by only giving them a small number of EC votes. Do we care? We still need to have the regular votes of regular US citizens be close enough for this to come into play. Might as well be rain in Pennsylvania. If a foreign government wants to dump billions of dollars directly into the coffers of the US government (or whatever else we decide to do with this fund), maybe this is fine? It's not like they could actually just buy a candidate, anyway, since Russia's billions of dollars are fighting China's billions of dollars, and the candidate literally cannot know who gave what. Besides, the American public was mostly okay with either result, anyway.

Obviously, this is a whacky idea. Obviously, you'd need to hammer out significant technical implementation details and compromises on things like how many EC money votes to have. Obviously, this is a completely whacky hypothetical that isn't actually going to be adopted by the US any time soon. One last thing floating around in my head is that perhaps whacky ideas like this get incorporated in one of those charter city concepts, which are already whacky anyway. Any thoughts? More importantly, any other completely whacky election ideas?

EDIT FOR POSTERITY: Thanks to @haroldbkny for finding the original Scott Post I was remembering about the "rain in Pennsylvania" thing.

But, I think, bitcoin seems mostly secure, right?

I'm not familiar enough with the mechanics, but would crypto elections be pretty riggable? Could you pay miners to only include transactions that had votes for your candidate in their blocks? There are probably ways to avoid that if you design things right, though.

I can't remember where I heard it, I think it was EconTalk, maybe in their discussion of crony capitalism, but right now, when someone gives money to a politician's campaign, it's important to them that the politician knows that they, specifically, gave that money to the politician's campaign. If the politician couldn't tell who gave money to his campaign, he could be corrupt in many ways, but at least he couldn't act corruptly in the specific way of just looking to the people who gave the most money to his campaign and doing the things they tell him to do.

You can make it pretty clear that you're the one who gave the money if you tell them you're going to give them $648,355.27, and then, lo and behold, someone makes a donation the next day of exactly that amount.

I do think there would be some technical challenges to be solved, but I think we have a lot of really useful pieces that could help solve those problems. I'm not going to pretend that I have a fleshed-out whitepaper with full technical specification or anything, but I can give you some of my general thoughts.

A lot of work has gone into anonymization protocols. They're probably not perfect yet. There are all sorts of timing issues or side channel issues and even just the fundamental problem that metadata is hard. But I think progress is being made. To the extent that one is bullish on the idea that real anonymization is plausible in the not-too-distant future for some form of cryptocurrency, I think they can be bullish on something here, too. Moreover, it's not just cryptocurrency where work is being done on anonymization. TOR was a big leap forward on that front, even if there are still some challenges there, too. Again, to the extent one is bearish/bullish on any hope there, I'd expect them to be likewise bearish/bullish here.

Consider some TOR-like properties. A message can be routed through multiple intermediaries, such that those intermediaries mathematically cannot know the content of the message in question. Those intermediaries aren't even really trusted. They can refuse to pass your message along, but you can realize that it hasn't been passed along by the non-response or inappropriate response you receive. I don't think it's too big of a step to imagine that one can leverage intermediaries, even perhaps untrusted ones, in a way such that those intermediaries are mathematically unable to determine the content of your message (who you're voting for or how much you're spending). Those intermediaries can choose things like random delay times, which can help thwart timing attacks. I agree that timing attacks may pose unique challenges, and again, I haven't solved all of them right off the top of my head, but I think the idea would be to try to show some property that so long as some low percentage of those untrusted intermediaries are observing random delays, we could get in front of those problems.

Tornado Cash gave us a significant step toward anonymity in the transactions, as well. The very basic idea is that you dump a bunch of things into a pot, mix them up, divide them out, and make it significantly more difficult to correlate inputs/outputs. Details here are more complicated; I'd say that it's probably still not perfect, but to the extent that there are lessons to be learned, I think we can learn them and continue to iterate. Again, general bearish/bullish sentiments.

Of course, I'd like to also call back to the 'receipt-freeness' business that the digital election nerds really like. The idea is that they want a way that the the final election tally can be 'published', but in a way that is still specially encrypted. Thus, while people can perform the proper cryptographic operations on the output to determine what the result was, no one can determine from the encrypted, published final tally what any of the individual votes are. Even the people who voted do not have sufficient information to prove how they voted, but they do retain sufficient information to prove that their vote was counted correctly in the final tally. Side note here would be that if you have a system where someone can freely rescind their vote later, even if you had someone watching your computer when you initially voted, and even if they kept that piece of information which could be used to prove that the initial vote was correctly counted, they would not have sufficient information to prove that it was not later rescinded. (There are still tricky choices here, perhaps, and I do think more work would need to be done to decide on every detail.) In any event, this would be another check to make sure that intermediaries couldn't just refuse to include your vote.

if you tell them you're going to give them $648,355.27

Or you could just buy some schlock "paintings" from the politician's son at absurd prices.

What about doing things like what Sports betting does with pro sports. If you could form teams and try to bet on their performance in the election, I think it would be a way to get more money in. And the money put in could be used as push polling because if you can change the odds, then I mean you can change the outcome of the actual election.

I definitely had prediction markets in mind. There have been plenty of conversations in rationalist-adjacent spaces about whether or not you can pump money into prediction markets to change the odds and affect the outcome of an election. It's a weird, indirect thing, though. This is a more direct way of trying to use your money to affect the election. Presumably, it would be a partial substitute for that action. If anything, I wonder if it pulls the money that is more interested in affecting the outcome (possibly trying to make money through influencing federal regulation), while leaving the money that is more interested in predicting/making money directly.

This is a really bad idea.

Activist rich people like Soros, are bad enough. It isn't true that they are wasting their money. Now you want them to be able to just directly buy votes which will not reduce at all the influence they can exert through other means of funding politicians, journalists, NGOs. Which includes both direct quid pro quo but also attack dogs organizations that influence outcomes by attacking people who don't play along.

My impression with your constant "its fine" is that you rather sympathize with the ideological characteristics and agendas of the people who are most involved in funding politicians who do have some similarities ideologically, and even ethnically (plenty of Jews very highly overepresented among the top republican and democrat donors) and want them to get their way. In observing the results of their agendas, these rich activists are more fanatical, less objective, and reasonable on various issues, like policing, prosecution policies, DEI, relations with Israel, than what a good policy, that is independent, objective and in line with the common good would promote. They have bad ideas of how to change things, and their character is questionable too.

I would rather someone like Sam Bankman Fried who was one of the top donors in last election, to not be deciding things.

They are also more connected with foreign governments too. The negatives of one's goverment becoming subservient to foreign goverment interests are real and it is pretty obvious how this would lead to bad governance against the interests of the actual people but in line with the interests and agendas of foreign governments and billionaires.

These rich activists, do not have an inherent right to rule and in fact such claim for their right to run things can be very fairly interpreted as a form of treason. My wacky idea is that they can in fact be stopped from exercising their current influence, and their NGOs banned, and restricting large donations, giving all candidates a goverment backed x amount of money and a right to get small donations. In so forcing politicians to not have to do what AIPAC, ADL, a shitload of NGOs, or rich donors want them to do. Which will result in representative democracy which is already like many systems, a flawed system and not a perfect formula, to come closer to something that could potentially work.

That and restricting citizenship rights to natives with minor exceptions and restricting numbers of foreigners and deporting where there has been mass migration. Not allowing parties to hack democracy by replacing the electorate with foreign population who has to be loyal and prioritize getting away with replacement, or other benefits. Which is it self constitutes an example of a violation of the inherent rights of a people for their continued existence and service of their common good, since you are replacing them and destroying their nation, and also putting the rights of foreigners above them.

Modern states should take much more seriously the currently huge problem of treason and of the violation of the rights of the people that happen when their rights are disdained and foreign groups are favored. Even if we consider a society to not just be one nation's state that has guests but a multiethnic society, even there the consideration of not screwing the majority ethnic group of its inherent rights, which include cultural/ethnic rights, to perpetuate their ethnicity, instead of having an oppressive negative identity that treats this as evil.

Plenty of constitutions have things written in line of this, but an unwritten constitution has been followed that does the complete opposite. My wacky idea is restore the nation state democracy and enforce it, while restricting the agendas that destroy it. Down with the idea of fake postnationalism oppresses the natives, while allowing nationalism for groups of the progressive intersectional coalition.

The influence of billionaire activists and most NGOs result in a very skewed, harmful direction. With enormous overepresentation of certain identitarian agendas and complete absence of the interests of other groups such as white people in the USA for example. It represents massive agency problems and makes a complete mockery of the idea of democracy. So yeah, my idea and favorite evolution of democracy is one in anti corruption, anti treason, where both laws and elite ideology is against the DEI, replace the natives, multiculturalism (which isn't even genuine multiculturalism but no culturalism for natives and allowing culture and nationalism, and even extreme versions of that, for approved groups), and where such tyrannical agenda is not allowed to run the media, governments, NGOs. Where it is taught as an example of tyranny, oppression, corruption and civilization destruction. It has backlash today where its supporters have marched on institutions and created their influential networks, NGOs. Imagine how much it would be hated if it was encouraged to dislike it.

So under this system there would be much fewer influential active NGOs, while all these state within a state NGOs would be banned and subject to further justice measures where necessary and where they are found to have done other crimes like spying. NGOs should be few and influential NGOs involved in activities that enhance the common good, and not in civilization self destructive criminal agendas. They must operate under a framework that has such restrictions, so you don't get any new ADLs to ever come into existence.

I would also add that the system to not become predatory internationally, while should be very adamant and vigilant against foreign subversion, and agendas at the expense of one's own nation and represent a self confident civilization that perpetuates it self and serves its common good and its interests, it should be willing to have genuine win win cooperation with foreign nations were there is a genuine opportunity to do so, rather than being predatory and out to win by screwing over others. Else it isn't a scalable model.

giving all candidates a goverment backed x amount of money and a right to get small donations.

Living in a European country with state financing of political parties, it is utterly alien to me to donate to political campaigns. I know it happens, but I would never do it (aren't you psychologically locked-in after donating to Trump/Harris?) and the amount of effort and time American politicians have to raise funds seem gross.

I looked up how UK does it and they actually harshly restrict political expenses:

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/election-spending-regulated-uk

Each party can spend £54,010 for each constituency that they contest. A party that chooses to contest all 632 seats in Great Britain at the election will therefore be able to spend just over £34m.

A small proportion of spending at elections is conducted by third parties – groups like charities and trade unions that do not stand candidates of their own, but campaign for particular outcomes. … Several spending limits are then applied to registered campaigns.

If the UK (or Canada or Australia or whichever country) is better governed is debatable, at least theoretical raising funds could also be a useful signal in a democracy, but I wonder how an election cycle in the US would look like if Democrats/Republicans (and GreenParty/Libertarian) could only spend $100 Million each?

Now you want them to be able to just directly buy votes which will not reduce at all the influence they can exert through other means of funding politicians, journalists, NGOs.

I'm confused. Presumably, these would be substitute goods. That is, suppose someone is spending 100 on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs right now. Then, an alternate means of political influence arises, say, the money vote. It may, in fact, be plausible that they might even want to increase their total spending, but the nature of substitute goods would imply to me that they would even then spend something more like (made up numbers) 70 units on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs; 60 on the money vote. It seems unlikely that they'd continue spending 100 on funding politicians, journalists, and NGOs... and another 30 on the money vote.

One of the things I actually sort of like about the scheme is that it would be a substitute way of channeling money. Probably one that I'm even a bit more comfortable with than the traditional ways folks use money to buy political influence. We might even get some data about relative values of things, which could help with election design in the future.

Most of the rest of your comment seems almost entirely inapplicable, as it completely ignores the two main features of the proposal - the limited strength of the money vote in comparison to the traditional election, and the strong secrecy. I kinda feel like your response is just sort of irrelevant if it doesn't consider those features.

Here are two wacky ideas for buying elections:

  1. Start a buisiness in an emerging, not-yet-regulated industry. Do all the textbook Silicon Valley valuation-pumping capital-raising stuff, but shove all the money into as many federal elections as possible. Max out the personal limit for every candidate's official campaign of one party, then find a surrogate to do the same for the other party. Hand pick one or two primary candidates in out-of-the-way races and pump their SuperPAC to the moon. Use your positioning as the politician-favored firm in the industry to raise even more money. Of course, the key is to only use investor capital for this, not customer accounts that you happen to have custody over. This is surprisingly cheap. You could do it for about $100 million.

  2. Buy a major social media company. Gut the employees and bring in your own people. Change the algorithm in clever ways that will shake out to favor ideas of your own preferred politics. Unfortunately, this is much more expensive, estimated to be about $40 billion even in favorable circumstances.

At least as far as (1) goes, I think Scott included PAC spending in his comparison to almonds, so that's not currently pumping our numbers up enough. We have to do better. (2) is more interesting/nuanced/complicated. Definitely a part of what Elon was buying with his $40B was political influence, and it's in a way that would not be captured by Scott's numbers. It's hard to know how expensive it was relative to the political influence it bought.

One of the things I like about my idea is that it gives a direct connection between dollars spent and election outcomes, rather than a fuzzy, "Oh, maybe you're buying political influence by buying Twitter or donating to a left-leaning university/think tank, but we have no idea how to connect those things in a quantitative fashion. I'd actually kind of love a more complicated scheme than what I presented here, one that allowed us to then do some math to estimate things like what the implied marginal values of electoral outcomes are in terms of dollars. But the best idea I had in that direction was to make the money EC votes proportional rather than winner-take-all. I don't super love that for other reasons, but perhaps there's a nice design that could help us make better estimates.

"Hey Elon, can I copy your homework?"

"Yeah, just change it up a bit so it doesn't look obvious you copied."

"Ok."

A comparison I haven't seen posed: Kamala vs Hillary. I think the comparison points to a Donald victory. Since he beat Hillary, he'll beat Kamala. (Meta: why is it that Trump is rarely referred to by first name?)

Hillary has the stronger resume: U.S. senator (2001–09) and secretary of state (2009–13) for Obama. Compare to Kamala: attorney general of California (2011–17), U.S. Senate (2017–21), VP (21-). Or, maybe it's a tie, if you're somehow impressed by her time as VP.

Criticism of Hillary's demeanor is around being elitist and robotic, which beats Harris's positionless word salad.

Trump 2016 was much scarier: as a total unknown, it was at least a little more credible he'd do, uh, much more than be in office while three Supreme Court judges died.

Why is it that Trump is rarely referred to by first name?

Virtually all presidential candidates are referred to by their last name (Gore v Bush, McCain/Romney v Obama, Biden v Trump). The outliers recently have been the two female democratic nominies, and while I have seen sexism suggested as a motive, as far as I am aware the first-name designation came from the campaigns themselves. "Hillary" was the obvious one, becuae "Clinton" would be associated with a former president who might have pissed off the sorts of demographics Democrats needed to win- ie NAFTA and the unions, that sort of thing. "Kamala" seems to be more of an affectionate branding designed to emphasize her non-whiteness, but most of her campaign signs that I've seen do read Harris/Walz.

Also "Jeb!", presumably for reasons similar to HRC.

Ahaha, hooo man, I forgot about that one. Has there ever been a less appropriate exclamation point?

Trump has been a brand for decades that has been plastered on buildings, steaks, planes, bottled water, casinos, vokda, perfume, sneakers, and more.

(Meta: why is it that Trump is rarely referred to by first name?)

Ummm... I would guess maybe it's because his last name is more distinctive, he is "the" Trump that people would immediately think of if you said "Trump", while Harris is a fairly common name, and Clinton could refer to either Bill or Hillary.

in office while three Supreme Court judges died

Only Ginsburg died while he was in office. Scalia died under Obama. Kennedy retired and is still alive; Trump appointed Kennedy's former clerks Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

(Meta: why is it that Trump is rarely referred to by first name?)

I’ve thought about that too. Referring to people by their first names invites a sense of closeness and familiarity, maybe makes them appear more approachable or likable even. So it could be strategic on the part of ‘Kamala’ supporters. Alternatively, the name ‘Kamala’ is more unique and memorable for most people than ‘Harris’ as a way to identify her—many Harrises but only one Kamala. A few politicians also are commonly referred to by their first names: Lula (da Silva) by is an example. I don’t think gender has much to do with it.

Also Obama was pretty common.

More identifiable name is the whole of it. Donald could be anyone (Sutherland, Rumsfeld, Duck), while if you say Trump, it could only be one man. So "Trump" is a more useful signifier when bringing up a topic involving him, which makes that use habitual. The same goes for Kamala vs Harris.

You see this all the time in sports. Patrick Mahomes is always "Mahomes", while Lamar Jackson is "Lamar".

Criticism of Hillary's demeanor is around being elitist and robotic, which beats Harris's positionless word salad.

No it doesn’t. Hillary seemed like a bitch on a personal level, whereas Harris seems like a wine aunt with a xanax problem elevated beyond her station in life, which is fundamentally more sympathetic.

People (including many people who were not on the hard right, like average New Yorkers) hated Hillary, or at least saw her as a megalomaniacal, power hungry social climber willing to do anything (even eg humiliate herself during Bill’s affairs) to advance her own ambitions.

Nobody seems to really hate Kamala; they may think she’s stupid or incompetent or a standard “woke” Democrat, but she isn’t personally repulsive in a way that the average politician isn’t, but in which Hillary was.

"Last enemy wasn't so bad now that we have current enemy" seems like a pattern on both sides.

Nobody seems to really hate Kamala

Yes they do. There are many people who hate Kamala. None of them would have voted for Biden or a Clinton instead but plenty of them weren't utter nutjobs about, well, at least about Biden.

More specifically, there are lots of fairly sane conservatives who have serious concerns about Kamala's understanding of constitutional rights as they apply to her opponents where they mostly don't about Biden.

More specifically, there are lots of fairly sane conservatives who have serious concerns about Kamala's understanding of constitutional rights as they apply to her opponents where they mostly don't about Biden.

What does this mean? What constitutional rights does Kamala not understand?

Nobody seems to really hate Kamala; they may think she’s stupid or incompetent or a standard “woke” Democrat, but she isn’t personally repulsive in a way that the average politician isn’t

I think Kamala is every bit as bad and dangerous as Hillary, but for different reasons. Kamala comes off as desperately insecure and thin-skinned, as though she’s terrified at every moment of being found out as a fraud.

Say what you will about Hillary Clinton, but she knows how intelligent she is, and has a clear plan to utilize that intelligence. Kamala seems like she’s only pleasant until the second someone corrects her, or pushes back on her, and then she’ll do anything in her power to tear that person down in order to protect her ego. The classic crybully given more power than she’s capable of wielding. “Excuse me, I’m speaking now!” As if she has been victimized by being challenged.

As if she has been victimized by being challenged.

When you're wrong and know being correct is beyond your capability, evolutionary biology mandates you treat challenge and victimization as the same thing.

All politics (and the divisions therein) are merely downstream of that.

I’ve always thought that “at least he isn’t X” as a particularly good long term strategy. It marginally works when neither candidate is exciting their base well, and the Not-X candidate is at least a competent seeming middle of the road person who will do nothing more than keep going down the path. But if not, then it’s really more of a choice between X but he’s doing thing people like, or Not-X and incompetent.

There’s really nothing in the Kamala campaign that’s telling us she wants to do anything as president. When she makes her campaign stops, she’s talking about how scary and weird the other guys are. Well, after the concert anyway. But after nearly ten years of “he’s terrible, horrible, they’re evil” and him doing very little of evil, terrible, horrible things, it’s not landing anymore. Outside of the breathless true believers, nobody thinks Trump is evil. And now that this is gone, what’s left to scare people to the polls to vote Kamala? They don’t hate her, but what is there, besides the rapidly failing “Orange Man Bad” meme is there to get people to actually choose to stand in line for an hour for Kamala?

But after nearly ten years of “he’s terrible, horrible, they’re evil” and him doing very little of evil, terrible, horrible things

Trump had a serious effect on border policies and overturned roe. To voters who are very concerned about republicans implementing a republican agenda that isn't just tax cuts, these things are a big deal.

Now I doubt that progressive culture warriors are a majority of the electorate. But the idea that making an orange man bad pitch to these people is without basis is itself without basis.

Conversely, if Kamala wins, does that mean you underestimated the power of Orange Man Bad?

(Meta: why is it that Trump is rarely referred to by first name?)

Politicians tend to get referred to by their catchiest non-ambiguous name.

"Trump" is much less common than "Donald" as a name. "Hillary" is common but "Clinton" becomes ambiguous with bill. "Walz" is less common than "Tim." "Kamala" is less common than "Harris." "Biden" is less common than "Joe." "Vance" and "J.D." are both uncommon, but "Vance" is more iconic. I admit I don't know why we got "obama" instead of "barack.

I admit I don't know why we got "obama" instead of "barack.

I think if both names are memorable it will default to the last name, but there aren't a lot of other immediate examples. Going back in history there are a couple of other outliers though. Eisenhower was often referred to as Ike, by the public and his campaign itself. John F Kennedy was JFK, and his brother RFK. Ted Kennedy was always "Ted Kennedy", the whole name. Johnson was LBJ, both following along from his predecessor and having a very common last name. Its possible there were more of these pre-WWI but we've forgotten collectively about them.

I admit I don’t know why we got “obama” instead of “barack”

Because Obama’s first presidential run started in 2007 and 2008 when there was still a lot of residual War on Terror fear and suspicion of Muslims. “Obama” sounds African, “Barack” sounds suspiciously Middle Eastern.

suspiciously Middle Eastern

"Obama" and "Osama" sounded pretty similar to me the first time I heard about the former.

The latter, of course, was one of the most famous Middle Easterners especially at the time.

I'm surprised the conversation has gotten this far without anyone bringing up that his middle name is "Hussein." As in, the same name as Saddam Hussein, who was overthrown by the US at the beginning of the war in Iraq.

America elected a man named "Barack Hussein Osama Obama" in 2008. This is like France electing a man named "Hans Goering Hetler" in 1953. I don't have a problem with Obama's name, but I find it genuinely hilarious he managed to win the presidency at the time that he did with the name that he has.

“Obama” sounds African

Or Japanese.

“Barack” sounds suspiciously Middle Eastern.

FWIW prior to Obama’s presidential campaign, probably the best-known “Barack” (by American English pronunciation, not spelling) was Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel and Labor Party leader. He is indeed Middle Eastern, but seeing as he’s an Israeli Jew, I would hardly say “suspiciously” so.

Barack is not a commonly used first or last name for Israeli Jews. It’s primarily an Arab name. The former prime minister’s family name was the Lithuanian “Brog” and when the family Hebrewized that name it came out as Barak.

A case of Brog assimilation, so to speak

Obama was also a relatively young guy with relatively little experience, whose campaign image was serious and professional rather than folksy and relatable. In that context, going by one's surname fits better.

Good point! That suggests another axis, actually-- whether politicians needed to look friendlier or more professional. People hated Hillary on a personal level so she needed to look friendlier. Trump needed to look respectable. Vance is a relatively young guy, so the desire for respectability makes sense. Though that theory sort of breaks down for Walz (who's deliberately trying to make himself look like an extra normal midwestern dude) and Biden (who had a lot of "Joe" related nicknames, e.g. "diamond joe," "sleepy joe," but also biden-related nicknames -- "brandon"/"dark brandon.")

Walz is running as a more down-to-earth and male accessory to Kamala, so he is fitting the role the campaign needs to balance out her flaws with that. I'm curious as to whether his run for governor of Minnesota had lots of 'coach Walz' type messaging.

I think "Obama" is a lot more fun to say. Don't underestimate that part of it, you gotta weave the word into a whole bunch of phrases that have to sound good enough to say on TV, to your friends and pretty much any conversation setting, having a hard to pronounce name is a hindrance.

This is why people with long or hard to pronounce names that stick around get acronyms. Nobody wants to say Fitzgerald, and John and Kennedy are too unspecific, so he's JFK.

And sometimes you transcend the banality of your first name through annoying orthography: T. J. Kaczynski (better known for other work) is "Ted". Because who can remember czy in the right order?

Re: the Selzer poll.

I'd like to examine the wording of this poll and the effect had on the outcome. The wording was as follows:

Likely voters in Iowa were asked: "If the general election were held today and the candidates for president were Kamala Harris for the Democrats, Donald Trump for the Republicans, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for We the People and Chase Oliver for the Libertarians, for whom would you vote? If you already voted, for whom did you vote?"

The September poll, by contrast, did not include language targeted at early voters:

Likely voters in Iowa were asked: "If the general election were held today and the candidates for president were Kamala Harris for the Democrats, Donald Trump for the Republicans, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for We the People and Chase Oliver for the Libertarians, for whom would you vote?"

The 2020 wording of the Selzer poll was as follows:

Likely voters in Iowa were asked: "If the general election were held today, for whom would you vote?"

The 2016 wording was as follows:

If the general election were held today, and the candidates were Hillary Clinton for the Democrats, Donald Trump for the Republicans, Gary Johnson for the Libertarian Party and Jill Stein for the Green Party, for whom would you vote?

I believe the "If you already voted, for whom did you vote?" wording of the October 2024 poll skewed the results for a few reasons. First, it seems slightly confusing. It's possible that respondents could have interpreted the additional wording as being about their perception of how others would have voted. Given that Democrats tend to vote early and people tend to know this because of the 2020 election coverage, this may have skewed the result. Secondly, poll questions should be as short and simple as possible. The 2020 wording of the question was much shorter, and did not include multiple parts for poll respondents to think through. The 2016 wording, while structured similarly to 2024, also did not include language about early voting. One rule of survey design is to avoid asking multiple questions at once, and this violates that.

Lastly, the inclusion of this language may bias participation towards respondents who did vote early. And while that does tend to favor Democrats, Nate Silver has written about how early voting doesn't predict results. Therefore, the accuracy of this poll result may be skewed.

Overall: The markets moving from 60/40 to 50/50 might have happened anyway and this just happened to be the outlier poll that triggered it. It's probably a good thing that the betting markets now accurately reflect where the race has been according to aggregators like Nate. But the result seems to be due to the wording of the poll, rather than an underlying change in the Iowa (read: Midwestern) electorate.

EDIT: For contrast, the Emerson poll showed a 53%/43% lead for Trump and was worded as follows:

If the Presidential Election were held today, would you vote for Kamala Harris or Donald Trump?

Also, I'm guessing that RFK and Libertarian voters on that poll are fairly likely to pull the lever for Trump in actual practice.

538 also has an article about some kind of shenanigans with a Democratic primary poll in 2020 which Selzer was involved with. https://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/iowa-caucus-2020-election-live/#254963

two reasonable interpretations: a mistake was made in the poll and they withheld the results because they would always dump a poll in a situation like this and this is consistent with their strong ethical practices. another interpretation: the poll was damaging to a certain candidate so they either took advantage of a situation or created a situation in order to hide the poll results.

It seems like she heavily oversampled democrats in a state that has gotten redder since 2020. Oddly she gave the poll results to Dems before releasing. I think it is a bad poll designed to discourage Republican turnout nationally.

Edit:

If you look more you see things like seniors moving allegedly almost 30 points away from Trump. Ditto non college voters. We aren’t seeing that kind of data anywhere else. Indeed Selzer showed Trump up over 18 points against Biden. Are we really to believe that Trump lost 21 points over a few months to Harris led by a surge in 65+ voters?

Yeah the cross tabs are damning. If she doesn’t get this one right and Trump wins by 10 or something, her credibility is a pollster is shot.

I'd kinda hope not. If you do 100 polls you will get roughly that is a 1% outlier, and those have wacky results. By itself it is damning, but aggregated with everything else it comes out in the wash. If people are constantly second guessing their polls to guess if its real or outlier and only releasing the "real" ones then not only is the data untrustworthy but what is the point of the statistical confidence levels in the first place?

Is her credibility shot? One thing we've learned over the past four years is that people with connections can be wrong about everything all the time and still be lauded as experts so long as they maintain the right social connections and mouth the right pieties.

I have to control for my own partisan bias and wishcasting, but the Democrat confidence in abortion being such a powerful swing issue as to decide this election is baffling to me. Does it have such a powerful grip on the female vote?

In my opinion, it's what Democratic operatives want to be true rather than reflecting the reality of the electorate - in that the most ardently pro-life voters are also women. Kamala is already winning her base of single affluent women by a lot. Increasing their turnout doesn't seem like a winning play - especially with her losses everywhere else.

Abortion is functionally the only issue that gains votes for democrats this cycle(economy/inflation, crime, the border, censorship etc all gain votes for Trump and usually other republicans. Even the damn squirrel), so it makes sense for democrats to emphasize it.

There is democrat messaging that looks, to me, like being high on their own supply- eg, the Harris ad about how nobody knows who you voted for. But punching the abortion issue, especially in the way that they're doing it(eg- Collin Allred has an ad in my market featuring an ob/gyn claiming Texas law bans abortions to save a woman's life. This is explicitly a lie, but functionally nobody wants it to be true either) is good politics. Democrats are competently and intelligently playing a pretty bad hand most of the time.

Abortion is functionally the only issue that gains votes for democrats this cycle

There's also the scare tactic "Trump is a Fascist! Electing him will mean the end of democracy!" which has been everywhere on Reddit the past few days.

My MIL shockingly seems to support Trump. This is a woman who voted for Biden in 2020. She is pissed off with the Nazi comps as she had family lost in the holocaust.

Abortion is functionally the only issue that gains votes for democrats this cycle(economy/inflation, crime, the border, censorship etc all gain votes for Trump and usually other republicans. Even the damn squirrel), so it makes sense for democrats to emphasize it.

Right, but the mainstream media gets to pick the issue that matters, so they only need one.

Presuming that one of America's biggest culture war issues of the recent half-century might have electoral significance? In MY Culture War Roundup megathread?

I'm a relic of a time when pro-choice advocacy was 'safe, legal, and rare'. If that's the definition of pro-choice, then I understand (if not in favor.)

The modern incarnation is not that.

I cannot imagine being fired up to vote for the new, aggressively feminist formulation of it, that views an abortion as a empowering, independent act of a liberated woman bereft of moral weight or consideration. Or rather, I don't want to understand the kind of woman that would be attracted to that kind of rhetoric. If there are enough women like that to sway an election, it would make me very sad.

That's not it. Abortion is about a woman's absolute right to control her body, and any quibbling with that has been pushed outside the Overton Window.

If women can't figure out how to have an absolute right to control their bodies and a replacement fertility rate, then Stein's law applies.

So if we’re to think about this like Stein did, there’s no need to worry about women figuring that one out because the problem is self-correcting anyways.

What people state as their most important issue is as much a result of campaign strategies as a cause. People decide on a candidate; candidate says the campaign is about issue X; supporters of the campaign say that they support the candidate because of issue X.

Democrats probably believe abortion is an important issue to voters, but that's downstream of intra-coalition politics determining that abortion is the most important issue. It also is an issue that lends itself to sound bites and anecdotes, which is great for acting as a rallying point and ads.

Does anyone know if there are models that take into account sentiment analysis (ie ingest lots of data from TV viewership, FB,YT, comment sections, clean it, weight it, etc)? This is how I'd solve the game for betting purposes.

Just by eyeballing it, Trump seems to have a massive advantage. Trump-positive yt vids are more viewed and have a better like/dislike ratio than any vaguely Dem positive video. The top comments are often mostly pro Trump. A large percentage of MSM TV coverage is pro Trump, FB used to lean more pro Trump, Twitter is operated by a Trump fanatic. Polling leans old, this leans younger. The comment section of NYT, WaPo are obviously anti Trump, but these are comparatively microscopic players. What does themotte think, and what might I not be seeing?

Does anyone know if there are models that take into account sentiment analysis (ie ingest lots of data from TV viewership, FB,YT, comment sections, clean it, weight it, etc)? This is how I'd solve the game for betting purposes.

Many people build their own. I know Bloomberg and probably also Refinitiv have at least some election-related alternative data and then there are countless smaller providers and consultancies selling their own models and datasets to others. I don’t think it would yield any actionable insights radically different to what the markets are expecting now, though.

Some further digging and it seems "election prediction by SM (usually twitter) sentiment analysis" is an academic area of research with dozens of papers going back at least to 2010, getting more advanced. However I can't find anyone doing publicly. This is why I wish the election prediction markets were more accessible and liquid. Eventually it'd be profitable to build the most accurate model even if you gained only a few percentage points in accuracy. With enough to be gained you'll get a Jim Simons team of election forecasters.

if all the polls are 'herding' the results in order to remove outliers then there should be some kind of opportunity for someone with a lot of cash and willing to take the risk to produce 'real' polls, keep them a secret and make EV bank on polymarket.

This is kind of how it worked at the top levels of online poker in ~2016ish. Various groups spent 100kish each to build analysis software years before a dev released a version for sale. Top regs eventually pooled resources to build GTO bots, prompting top poker sites to learn how to ban them. For prediction markets the stats are way different (ie fewer trials, lots of noise) and a 10% edge wouldn't translate translate into a lot of money unless you could bet many millions, plus the variance would be insane. With active trading (ie more trials) I could see decent profits, but I don't know what liquidity looks like.

the fun part about polls herding is that we rarely see the outliers, so we don't know if it is a fluke, a trend or massaged because we have nothing to compare it to.

My expectations for the election (btw - it is time to open the megathread since everything that will be coming next few days will be about it) is that:

It won't be close electoral college wise, doesn't matter who wins. There will be at least two states that are not battlegrounds that will actually turned out to have been battlegrounds. I have steeled myself for Kamala win.

Polling wording absolutely influences results, so although I don't see it as at confusing, I would not be at all surprised if some respondents did.

That said, Trump won IA by 8 points in 2020 and by 9 points in 2016. I have a hard time imagining the wording shifting the results by over 10 points. It's either a really bad poll with an unlucky non representative set of recipients; Selzer cooked the numbers, either intentionally or not; or Trump is in deep trouble among white Midwestern voters.

Thought this tweet was interesting. Seems like you might be right about the non-representative sample (Independents didn't move, so the shift if it exists is being driven by republicans flipping).

Iowa is not exactly a reliably red state either. We're not taking about Texas here. Obama won it by almost 10 points in 2008 and by over 5 points in 2012. "Dem wins Iowa by 2-4 points" is not, historically, a crazy outcome.

Democrats aren't competitive in Ohio anymore, either. This isn't 2012, when Missouri elected a democrat for the senate.

The 2012 senate election in MO was complicated by Todd Akin being an idiot and talking about "legitimate rape," during a time when such a scandal could actually bring a candidate down. McCaskill's margins were much smaller in 2006, and when her seat came up for re-election in 2018, Hawley won handily. A more apt comparison for the 2012 Missouri senate election would be the 2017 special election in Alabama, where Doug Jones (D) beat Roy Moore (R) because of accusations of sex abuse (which he essentially admitted were true) against Moore, and then in the very next election lost his seat. Although the margins were much smaller, because we're definitely more polarized in the past 8 years than in 2012!

Ok, fair, I’d forgotten about Todd Akin.

I stand by my statement that Iowa voting for Obama in 2012 doesn’t make it competitive for democrats. So did Maine’s 2nd district, so did Ohio, so did Florida.

There’s been a major swing in predictions markets with Harris gaining serious momentum.

this is due to a new Selzer poll. Selzer is apparently one of the most highly credible polling firms out there, with very high historical accuracy, and it shows Harris winning Iowa by several points. If true, this signifies a potential Harris blowout victory across the entire country.

Either way, it seems polling is fundamentally broken for calling elections now. Emerson is showing a 10 point lead for Trump in Iowa. All the other polls showed Trump ahead for a long time, but they either were subject to “herding” or were just massively off in the opposite direction of previous elections.

Previously I thought Trump had a pretty solid shot at winning this but I’m seriously thinking Harris has it in the bag now, against all odds.

Somebody's definitely going to have egg on their face after this. Selzer has a long track record of proving her critics wrong over and over, and most of the rest of the polling industry has been herding more than at a sheep farm in the Scottish highlands.. There's a good chance polling firms have been cooking the results in favor of Trump, in a desperate attempt not to underestimate him for a third time in a row. Even if the result in Iowa is at the extreme end of Selzer's MoE and Trump wins the state by a point or two, that likely bodes ill for his chances elsewhere. Trump's best hope in this case would be that Iowa just really, really likes black people (it voted for Obama twice).

On the other hand, if Trump wins Iowa by 5-10 points as previously expected, then it will be a rare black-eye for Selzer. I really wouldn't want to bet against Selzer given her track record, but 1 in 20 polls will go outside the MoE even if everything is calibrated correctly.

It'll be interesting to watch no matter what happens.

Her track record looks impressive until you pull back the curtain a bit. She got many primaries wrong. Her final polls differed from polls a month prior in strong ways.

Also there is a bit of survival bias here. Stock pickers that survive may not be that much better; could just be a random walk.

Her track record looks impressive until you pull back the curtain a bit. She got many primaries wrong. Her final polls differed from polls a month prior in strong ways.

Please provide links.

Also there is a bit of survival bias here. Stock pickers that survive may not be that much better; could just be a random walk.

She's been high-profile since at least 2008. 16 years of bucking conventional wisdom is a lot of record to just dismiss as "random walk".

16 years sounds like a lot. In reality you are talking about four presidential elections. Also not nearly all of that was “bucking conventional wisdom.”

Keep in mind the claim re random walk in stock pickers is frequently much larger compared to Selzer.

In 2020 in the penultimate poll she had the race in Iowa tied between Trump and Biden tied. Is it possible the electorate moved by 8 points? Sure but not likely.

She also in for example had the Iowa 2016 primary going for Trump.

She also does midterms and a bunch of other stuff, and I'm pretty sure she started in the 90s sometime and only became well-known in 2008 after a few runs having relatively robust results. You can cherrypick anything she's gotten wrong, but she has one of the best track records of any pollster bar none. It's clear that some around here are only questioning her because they don't like the result she's getting, rather than for any relative inaccuracy.

No we are questioning her because the poll doesn’t make sense for all the reasons given.

My best argument for Trump given this poll:

The poll itself is likely an outlier, and Trump is winning Iowa by low single digits. This might seem to bode badly for swing states. But Trump's power is motivating low propensity voters to come to the polls, and he's spent essentially no effort on doing so in Iowa. In WI, MI, and PA, on the other hand, he is effectively bringing out his broader base, making them much more competitive than you'd infer from this poll. And in other swing states, his path to victory relies on a different coalition, so you can't project IA's results to them. Additionally, Iowa had a six week state-level ban on abortion, which is a state-specific effect that doesn't carry over to other states.

I can buy this argument, but if I were Trump's campaign, I wouldn't be especially happy making it.

It's a pretty mediocre argument for Trump. Polls already try to correct for propensity for voting (read up on "registered voters" vs "likely voters"), and if anyone is doing this correctly, Selzer would. Certainly fewer campaign events on both sides have been held in Iowa, but Trump has always had a relatively poor get-out-the-vote operation, and races have become so nationalized that it's unlikely for local conditions to be particularly anomalous relative to their demographics. It's banking a lot on Trump's rallies having large local effects, when there's not a lot of evidence for that.

The abortion point could be relevant, though, I'll grant you that.

This poll is a complete outlier in the wrong direction. It's not just that it's different from all other polls (which are probably herded to a close split 50-50 so nobody has egg). It's that it's totally divorced from every other fundamental. Republican early turnout is up, voter registration is up, enthusiasm and endorsements are up. Trump is the most popular he's ever been, he's bringing Democrats like Gabbard and RFK onto MAGA, he's got billionaire and tech endorsements, Muslims in Dearborn and Minneapolis are endorsing him, he's filling out rallies in New Mexico and New York. Trump got 40M views on Joe Rogan, Kamala wouldn't even go. If Kamala was winning in Iowa, why isn't she campaigning there? Tim Walz is in the state next door, it would be trivial for him to go. They're campaigning in Pennsylvania. And wouldn't Kamala be more popular? Major newspapers are withholding endorsements, her rallies are tepid at best, shouting broke out at one because attendees didn't get their promised Beyonce concert. It's possible this poll is right and every other indication is wrong -- but then, aren't the crosstabs of this poll awfully convenient? Republicans are apparently shifting further left than Independents, and after 4 years of Biden-Harris, inflation, immigration, and Ukraine, voter's biggest concern is... Abortion? In Iowa?

This is too much, it's not worth taking seriously. Maybe, really really, everything else is wrong and this one poll is right, but it's not very likely. I don't know why this poll gets so much credulity here. It's like listening to a LLM, which has no experience of the world, and has no reference or context. It's possible this one outlier poll is right. But it's exceptionally unlikely. And in the world of crazy outlier predictions, there are lots of other outliers that are just as credible.

Republicans are apparently shifting further left than Independents, and after 4 years of Biden-Harris, inflation, immigration, and Ukraine, voter's biggest concern is... Abortion? In Iowa?

Well, why not? I've seen a number of people refer to Iowa having a six-week abortion ban just enter into force in July, and it's one of the few states with a six-weeks-or-less that's not deep red (in the sense it voted for the Dem candidate as recently as 2012). If there's an actual swing, it could very well be an effect very specific of Iowa (and with limited predictive value elsewhere).

I'm not sure why Ukraine was included here, most polls I've seen (like this one) have shown supporting Ukraine continue to be relatively popular. Of course the recent events (rapid Russian advance in Donbass) might make a difference, but I haven't also seen the Trump campaign refer to Ukraine too much, compared to issues like inflation and immigration.

Yarvin's theory is pollsters have to adjust for the better Democrat election tech or else they will get egg on their face when they underestimate the Democratic vote.

Where did he write on this?

It was on a podcast: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3kBW-6TebUg

I believe the prediction market swing started days before the Iowa poll, pretty much after the Hinchcliffe joke.

I can't remember, was there this much hubbub among election nerds over one particular poll in Iowa as a bellwether as there has been/is now? When I saw this first start someone had spelled it as "Seltzer poll" and I thought that it was like the bakery "cookie polls" expect with different varieties of Alka-Seltzer or something.

I'd guess I'd give current odds as 60-40 for Harris, but this is solely because the online American right spending the final days before the election losing its shit over some squirrel seems like losing type behavior.

Updating prediction back to 50-50 after seeing news of Finnish Social Democrats doing door-to-door knocking for Harris in the US.

There was a story about British Labour staffers working for Kamala as well. If this isn't illegal, I feel like it should be. I hope it doesn't kick off some trend where Americans help European parties in their campaigns.

I'd guess I'd give current odds as 60-40 for Harris, but this is solely because the online American right spending the final days before the election losing its shit over some squirrel seems like losing type behavior.

I think this is disingenuous way to describe the kerfuffle. It is not about a squirrel, it is so much more. The owner was treated as some kind of criminal, waiting for hours while government agencies raided his home as if he was some member of cartel or something. Also the squirrel we are talking about was a mascot of his nonprofit serving 300 other animals, it was quite famous minor social celebrity with many cute videos. There is so much packed into it besides a cute little squirrel getting killed, it is what its killing represents. There is so much you can read into this: the insane level of licensing, the fact that government probably spent thousands of dollars in mandays of agents investigating and killing some "random" squirrel. It is about facelessness of bureaucracy, where even blunders like these cannot be pinpointed and they just go away as if nothing happened

And it is also about media coverage, including comments like yours here. Which is now standard "why do you care so much about X" response. It is easy to throw back - if some stupid squirrel is so unimportant, why did government went so hard after it? You cannot have it both ways, where on one hand it is just some stupid problem, while at the same time it is a problem that requires probably dozens of people investigating it. So which one is it? If I grant you that it was just some stupid squirrel, then the person in charge of the raid should be automatically fired for mishandling public resources on such a stupid thing, right?

Sounds like the system wanted to make an example of P'Nut.

Like Bill Foster's wife's divorce lawyer made an example of him in "Falling Down".

the online American right spending the final days before the election losing its shit over some squirrel

I thought that was everyone, not the right particularly.

The Selzer poll was released on Nov 2, but in the field from Oct 28 to Oct 31. If it were leaked early, it probably would have exerted an effect on the market.

I first encountered Selzer during the Democratic primaries in 2008, when she predicted Obama winning the caucuses, against the conventional wisdom. It was a big deal then. Back in 2016, 538 called her the best pollster in politics: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/selzer/

This cycle, if you followed e.g. the 538 subreddit, you had people regularly speculating on what the Selzer results would be. So the current near orgasmic state and level of interest isn't merely focusing on a random poll because it shows a pro-Harris result.

I can't remember, was there this much hubbub among election nerds over one particular poll in Iowa as a bellwether as there has been/is now? When I saw this first start someone had spelled it as "Seltzer poll" and I thought that it was like the bakery "cookie polls" expect with different varieties of Alka-Seltzer or something.

I heard about this poll pre-election back in 2020. But I think its prominence has increased in the years since because of the amount and degree of polling errors the other big boys have had, which has increased since. Selzer made big outlier pro-Trump calls in 2016 and 2020 and was dead on both times. So given the track record of success combined with the increased inaccuracies of other polls the attention on this specific one has mounted considerably since 2020.

The American left spending the final days before the election losing its shit over Trump calling Liz Cheney a chicken hawk and blatantly lying to claim he wants to put her in front of a firing squad seems like loser behavior.

Kamala refusing a Rogan interview after both Trump and Vance go on likewise reads as "losing type behavior."

At least the squirrel thing is fun and seems to be based on truth.

Sure, neither campaign seems to be covering itself with glory, which is why I said 60-40, which is still pretty good for Trump. The squirrel thing just seems particularly frivolous to me.

Trump's odds in '16 were 70-30 and in '20 they were even worse per 538. 60-40 is the best odds he's ever had.

It is frivolous, but it taps into a particular undercurrent for anybody who distrusts the government and likes cute critters. It sort of analogizes to the theme of "uncaring government arbitrarily killing things you love" vs. those who trust government to be mostly benevolent with its power which defines at least some of the Trump/Harris divide.

I don't know if Harambe dying swung any election outcomes, but it was probably the most popular meme to arise that year, and has persisted for a long time.

I dunno, the right clearly likes meme magic more than the left, so its not surprising to me they'd try to cast one last spell right before its time to vote.

I don't know if Harambe dying swung any election outcomes,

It didn't need to directly, specifically affect the election, it only needed to let the inherently-chaotic properties of meme magic do their thing on the fabric of reality.

the online American right spending the final days before the election losing its shit over some squirrel seems like losing type behavior.

Huh... most of the stuff I've seen looks like they're having fun with it.

A lurking issue with the vast bulk of the polls so far: they all show a tossup. Not "they follow a distribution that's consistent with a tossup," but "they follow a distribution that's tightly clustered around a 0-1% margin for one or another candidate, in all the swing states." It's statistically impossible for this to arise by chance. You never see significant outliers. You would with the sample sizes they're working with.

This isn't indicative of a tight race: it's indicative of pollsters being scared to publish results favoring a candidate one way or another. If it were the former, you'd see obviously wrong outliers in one direction or another, but you don't.

If there's a single pollster I trust, it's Selzer. She has a reputation, and it's an earned reputation: she's been willing to publish outliers before, and consistently those outliers have been more consistent with the actual results than the mainstream popular wisdom and other pollsters.

Iowa itself doesn't matter: if Harris wins it, she's already won (and if I had to guess, I'd still bet Trump wins Iowa). But even if the actual results are at the pro-Trump edge of her confidence interval, he's very likely cooked: there is no way Iowa doesn't vote substantially to the right of all the swing states, particularly PA, MI, and WI.

It’s a BS poll. A prior poll had Tru o up 18 over Biden. Do we really think there was in a few months a 21 point swing in Iowa? Look at the cross tabs. It is just a really bad sample.

It would be odd for that result to show in polls, however I think it could be correct simply because everyone is measuring the exact same data. They should be getting results within the error margin of the correct answer. And the reason I tend to buy a dead heat is that Americans are highly polarized on almost every topic. Abortion, Israel, Ukraine, the economy, education, culture, etc. all are by now completely coded blue or red. There’s very littLe left to persuade in the middle. It’s all about the base. That should be producing a very tight race.

Even if the ground level truth is an exact tie in all the states, you would still expect more outliers than there are: there's always the luck of the draw, and it's irreducible. If someone has a process to massage the sample data enough so that these outliers never show up in the final published numbers, they're destroying information in the process.

Interesting, except the number of people claiming to be "independent" is near all time high.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/548459/independent-party-tied-high-democratic-new-low.aspx

I'd say the bases of each party are probably smaller than it has been in a while. Lot MORE people to be persuaded.

I think its a tight race because the Democrats managed to pick a candidate that is arguably less popular and likeable with independents than Trump.

I suspect that's just because it's fashionable among Democratic party-line voters to claim independence. Has been for a long time, but the weaker Harris ticket likely encourages that more.

and not only with the voters, let's not forget that supposedly Bernie Sanders is an independent. In my opinion, the number of true independent voters in any given year is half or less of what we are told.

It's hard to square the Selzer poll with anything else we're seeing. Looking at Iowa early voter turnout as a percentage of 2020, R got 83% and D got 56%. Sure it's possible that there's a huge block of voters coming out on EDay or that large numbers of Rs are coming out to vote for Harris.

The top 2 issues found in the poll were Democracy and Abortion. Which seems a little weird. Iowa passed some major abortion restrictions over the summer. It seems possible that voters would take that out on Trump, but it's odd that it's suddenly showing up in a poll.

Ann Selzer is 67. It's certainly possible that she took a big payout from someone so she could retire and the Harris campaign could save house seats. Or it could be a polling miss.

Or it could be real. But I'm surprised no one else noticed it if it was real.

OK, I'm totally willing to believe that Iowa is way to the left of where is usually is due to abortion. This isn't Missouri here in terms of the voter base's social conservatism and the restrictions are pretty recent. But 'democracy' as a top issue is a dead tell for something weird with the poll; my guess is it's way oversampling nevertrump demographics.

There has been noticing, if you wanted to notice.

There was a recent poll showing Trump only up by 5 in Kansas, in the polling no matter the result Kamala has been consistently doing better among white voters than even Biden, and in general, the Blue Wall state have been holding up better than Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia.

Now, I, a party hack social democratic Democrat don't actually think Kamala is up by 3. But, if it's off by let's say 150% of Selzer's worst result ever in the past basically 20 years - 5 points. So, let's say 7.5 points.

A Trump +4.5 in Iowa would be disastrous., as personally in a busy election-related Discord, Trump +5 was our hope for the poll.

Nate Silver on the Selzer Poll:

Releasing this poll took an incredible amount of guts because — let me state this as carefully as I can — if you had to play the odds, this time Selzer will probably be wrong.

I'm not believing late in the game polls that show large swings out of nowhere. There's been a few influencers that have wisely said 'don't believe anything you see in the news in the last few days before the election.'

Edit: Nate didn't have much good to say about the Emerson poll either.

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.

The idea that abortion is going to cause a massive polling error in favor of Harris is just a blatant wish fulfillment fantasy. There is no evidence for it. It’s completely made up. Even in 2022 the polls underestimated Republicans slightly, they just didn’t miss as badly as they did with Trump so people misremember them as overestimating Republicans.

Odds are the polls will underestimate Trump like they always do, meaning it will be a Trump blowout. The “right leaning” pollsters haven’t changed anything about what they do, and the gap between them and the polling average is the same as ever. This strongly suggests nobody has changed anything, meaning they will be wrong in exactly the same way.

The phenomenon isn't unique to the left. Sidney Powell torched her career for no reason last time. Occasionally, people (even smart ones) just self immolate pointlessly. There but (mostly) for the grace of God go I

Most people who have blown their credibility against Trump have blown it the first or second or billionth time he's been on the brink of starting the Fourth Reich or whatever. Selzer hasn't: her results in both 2016 and 2020 were consistent with Trump's margins.

I guess she's nearing retirement, so maybe she wants to blow all her reputational capital in one go on orange man bad.

But I would not be happy if that were my only explanation for her results.

Which results? The final poll? Or the poll before the final poll? Because she showed Biden and Trump tied in September in 2020. Why do we test her against only one poll?

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?

I've got no horse in this race; I suppose I would prefer Harris wins but it would certainly be funnier if Trump does. Seems like this pollster has a sterling track record. I'm not sure why your initial response would be blanket denial.

She has gotten a lot of things off. You are being shown a curated list to prove she is right and only looking at the final poll.

I don’t know why after the insanity of the past 8 years, your initial reaction to something absurd like this wouldn’t be blanket denial.

This pollster also shared the results with Kamala surrogates well in advance. People tweeted rumors about it yesterday. Apparently a surrogate let it slip by accident, not realizing the poll wasn’t released yet. So a pollster colluded with Democrats and released an absurd “momentum shifting” poll 3 days before the election, but your default response is to take it at face value? I have a bridge to sell you, man.

So a pollster colluded with Democrats and released an absurd “momentum shifting” poll 3 days before the election, but your default response is to take it at face value? I have a bridge to sell you, man.

Well, we've got three days to see. I'm willing to eat crow if I'm wrong.

I believe Harris winning Iowa about as much as I believe Trump winning Virginia.

Trump winning Minnesota would be the funniest outcome in this election.

Well, I'll toot my own horn:

I called it.

Quoth me 12 days ago:

I also expect the markets to narrow in a bit as we come closer to the election and people decide to close out their positions at a marginal profit rather than actually take the dice roll. If somebody bought a bunch of Trump shares at ~45-50% and can sell them for 55-60% that's a decent profit for a short period trade.

Wasn't sure if they'd get right back to 50-50, but when there's THIS MUCH actual uncertainty (everyone has their vibes, but there simply no trustworthy, unbiased way to call the election in advance) then the 'money' has to return to baseline because very few people are willing to keep their funds at risk all the way to the final bell.

Previously I thought Trump had a pretty solid shot at winning this but I’m seriously thinking Harris has it in the bag now, against all odds.

Lmao. Harris doesn't have any single advantage that Biden lacked going into 2020, and has a number of disadvantages.

My personal expectations, in order of decreasing confidence: Trump squeaker win. Kamala Squeaker win. Trump blowout.

A Kamala Blowout doesn't seem possible, and my post up there explained my thoughts:

So in short, she's got the die-hard Dem base + the anti-Trump brigade on lock, but I think she utterly lacks cross-demographic appeal AND has been boxed in by the dueling demands of demographics they DO have support from, such that any attempts to outreach sincerely to outgroups will be interpreted as defection.

Which demographics is she pulling in 2024 that Biden DIDN'T pull in 2020? Make the case for me because I don't see any way she pulls better numbers than Biden. I can buy that Trump might do a bit worse than he did in 2020.

Which demographics is she pulling in 2024 that Biden DIDN'T pull in 2020?

The argument I've heard (I'm not a polling or campaigning expert, so I can't really gauge how true it is) is that Kamala is relying upon a massive swing among women, of a similar magnitude of the increases in turnout that the Obama candidacy relied upon among black voters. This isn't related to her own sex, but instead a combo of abortion fears and disproportionate female distaste for Trump and concern about potential authoritarianism. That kind of reasoning is the only way that ads like this make sense to me. It also explains why Kamala prefers to go on SNL (demographic overwhelmingly elderly) than Rogan (demographic primarily young and male).

I actually do expect a large gender divide this time, because yes Harris is banking on her appeal to women, mostly single ones. Their attempts to snag married women are, as you see in that ad, tone deaf.

And I expect that single males have been driven away because Harris literally cannot try appealing to them as a group with their own independent concerns without pissing off said single females and a few other groups that she relies on. There hasn't been a single aspect of the Harris campaign that has made me, a white male, feel confident she represents 'my interests' or even acknowledges what those interests or concerns are.

(my opposition to Harris is deeper than my identity, mind)

I'm also on record stating that single females are a reliable voting block who can be motivated and steered by fear. So messaging on fascism and abortion are probably good at energizing these types to get out there and vote EXACTLY how blue tribe wants. What is also does is primes them for absolutely insane freakouts if she loses, though.

So it may indeed come down to male turnout vs. female turnout.

Which demographics is she pulling in 2024 that Biden DIDN'T pull in 2020? Make the case for me because I don't see any way she pulls better numbers than Biden.

A much larger portion of the cemetery demographic? The non-citizen demographic?

Which demographics is she pulling in 2024 that Biden DIDN'T pull in 2020?

…even MORE women? That’s the only demo I can see since it’s A) a female president nominee, and B) abortion.

abortion

Are happily married women with children being mobilized by abortion? Are sexless 20-somethings with nose rings shitting themselves over having to carry a purely hypothetical baby to term?

What is happening with this abortion Handmaid's Tale fanfic? Why is the a-word such a powerful meme?

Are women actually afraid of losing policy advantages, or is it just posturing that goes over well in their book clubs and socially reinforces itself into a loosely-held belief? I personally know a married woman who does not want children and would happily kill 2 babies for every abortion she needed to keep her DINK lifestyle, but she is notably liberal to an extent that normal women definitely are not. Does anyone have an actual model for what's going on for this issue?

Are the Democrats really out here convincing every single woman that it's perfectly normal to find yourself needing an abortion, and it will kill you to give birth?

Democrats are quite happily lying about the actual content of abortion bans. It is literally false that Amber Thurman died because Georgia law forbade saving the mother's life when it would kill the baby- for one thing, she had a legal abortion, and for another, Georgia law allows the care that would have saved her life if she'd sought medical care before spending four days bleeding through one pad per hour. But democrats say this anyways.

It is in fact very very unpopular to require women with ectopic pregnancies to just die. There is no state which does that, but claiming that red states routinely do this is a key part of democrat's messaging, their actual ads aren't 'Women are being FORCED to GIVE BIRTH instead of living their best life'.

Looking at "Who Gets Abortions in America?" (NYT article dated 2021)... 60% of women who have abortions already have children, although only 14% are married, so "happily married women with children" aren't getting a large percentage of all abortions. That said, about 25% of women get an abortion at some point in their life, so it's not exactly rare.

Of course, that's not counting "spontaneous abortion" (better known as miscarriage). I was having trouble finding statistics for how many women will ever have a miscarriage, probably partially because it's tricky to define since well, I'll let Wikipedia explain:

Among women who know they are pregnant, the miscarriage rate is roughly 10% to 20%, while rates among all fertilisation is around 30% to 50%.

I bring up miscarriage because some of the concern over abortion bans has been over healthcare for miscarriages getting lumped in with abortions.

I bring up miscarriage because some of the concern over abortion bans has been over healthcare for miscarriages getting lumped in with abortions.

Well yes, because democrats lie constantly about the actual content of abortion bans. Women denied a D&C invariably turn out to have been kicked out of the hospital before it was apparent they needed one because they were uninsured(=hospital had to eat the cost for her being there), or primarily victims of their own terrible decisions(Amber Nicole Thurman should have gone to the emergency room four days before she actually did).

I mean you're also not going to get statistics on miscarriages because no one, except the women who experience them, care very much and lots of them don't get or need any medical care. The whole miscarriage issue is a distraction driven mostly by democrats lying.

Of course, that's not counting "spontaneous abortion"

Oh please, this is like calling death by accudent, illness, or natural causes "spontaneous murder". It has nothing to do with the issue of abortion.

Are sexless 20-somethings with nose rings shitting themselves over having to carry a purely hypothetical baby to term?

As best I can tell yes. And they aren't perfectly sexless. There is some hypothetical possibility that someday they would want an abortion. They could easily obtain one of course.

But yes fear mongering about a hypothetical national abortion ban forcing them to carry a hypothetical baby to term seems popular.

Are happily married women with children being mobilized by abortion?

That phrase describes an increasingly-shrinking minority of women these days. And ones with teenage and older female children may well vote on vicarious fears/worries about abortion access.

Are sexless 20-somethings with nose rings shitting themselves over having to carry a purely hypothetical baby to term?

Young people are low-propensity voters, and overwhelmingly progressive for other reasons. The abortion talk is aimed at 35+ women, who are much higher-propensity voters.

Does anyone have an actual model for what's going on for this issue?

Sure, women find the idea of not being able to even have the option of terminating a pregnancy intolerable, even if they might otherwise want to keep the kid. Also, our culture denigrates devotion to family and unpaid child-raising as a life-style.

Are the Democrats really out here convincing every single woman that it's perfectly normal to find yourself needing an abortion, and it will kill you to give birth?

More like, "it's perfectly normal to find yourself needing an abortion, and banning "normal" abortion care will kill you." Of course, these stories are complete and total BS, not attributable to abortion restrictions. But most people don't look behind the screaming media spin.

Coworker and I were discussing election betting market when a woman on the team asked how concerned she should be about Trump winning. She’s married, has a young child, and, if not outright smarter than me, definitely has better math chops. She’s the best product forecaster we have. I asked her what she was most worried about. Her answer: birth control getting banned.

In case someone doesn't know, birth control is literally the least controversial political issues there is.

People who are smart in one area aren't always smart in another, especially when values, tribes, and deep-set fears come into play. There are vanishingly few people I trust to provide level-headed insights into politics, even people I respect in other areas. It requires an extreme level of intellectual humility to look at such emotionally-fraught issues even-handedly -- something that, understandably, very smart and insightful people often struggle with.

Yes, among actual voters, sure.

But, Republican's voted against various pro-birth control bills on both the state and local level.

Then, you've got members of The Heritage Foundation, who wrote Project 2025 talking about returning consequentiality to sex - https://x.com/Heritage/status/1662534135762624520

Project 2025 also says the morning after bill is an abortion bill and the coverage of it should be eliminated and there's also been talk about the Comstock Act.

Republicans voting against free birth control because some money would go to planned parenthood is what actually happened there and the uberconservative wishcasting to ban the morning after pill was walked back by the Louisiana state legislature, let alone by the national GOP(and aside from a few deep southern states there has not been a case where republicans had a realistic path to getting the morning after pill banned- in all cases they chose not to do it).

Yes, that's what the Heritage Foundation believes. That's also what the Catholic Church believes. Those organizations are not the Republican party or the Trump administration.

If Trump is elected, there will not be a national ban on birth control. Despite the idle wishing by the Heritage Foundation.

I stand by this prediction and discount anyone who goes against it as having lost touch with reality.

Are sexless 20-somethings with nose rings shitting themselves over having to carry a purely hypothetical baby to term?

Yes. Young women are genuinely terrified about the possibility of being raped and forced to carry the baby to term, or having a hookup and [...], or even just accidentally/intentionally conceiving a baby with their husband and having their life threatened by some malady an abortion could fix. Three of the women in my close circle have of their own volition brought up fears about maternal mortality rates/abortion restriction... Despite the fact that all three were on birth control and additionally one also mentioned that she would personally never get an abortion (though she's pro-choice in general.)

I would say the fear is out of proportion to the actual probability of potential negative events, but that doesn't stop them from genuinely feeling it. It's just what women-centric filter bubbles bring up. It's like how men are irrationally terrified of false rape accusations.

It's like how men are irrationally terrified of false rape accusations.

Don't forget irrationally terrified of being seen as a creep because they asked a woman out in the wrong way/in the wrong place.

Or women's fear that their date will turn out to be a creep. Or worse, a Trump supporter.

Something in the water supply's just trying to get men and women to fear each other. And what we fear we often end up resenting, even hating. Women are convinced that men have it easy and waste their privilege playing video games and jacking off while doing things to hurt women ("patriarchy theory"), while men are convinced that women have it easy and waste their privilege eating hot chip and lying putting on makeup and getting railed by Chads ("gynocentrism theory"). These two sides aren't completely symmetrical, and one may have a point in some connection where the other doesn't, but they do reflect growing resentment by normie men and women towards each other.

In that sense, it's no wonder so many people are going, "wow, it must be so much greener on the other side!" and gender-transitioning.

Yeah, I do expect the gender split to be significant.

Because I'm also sure a lot of guys will peel off because holy SHIT the Harris campaign has been horrible at marketing to males, in particular white ones. Not sure if that means they'll come out for Trump, though.

There's certainly an argument that higher female turnout relative to male could tilt it for her.

Women do tend to be more likely to vote than men, especially young women.

Yep. I don't know what is most likely to motivate otherwise detached males enough to get them to the polls, so this might be what tilts it for her, honestly.

Although... it is entirely possible that males are motivated to vote because of how horrible the Harris messaging towards them has been. It might be enough for them to realize there's nothing good for them coming if she wins.

https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1852849659347124434

AtlasIntel CEO confirms that if white male turnout is high, Trump wins. That’s a big if! But also still plausible

Yes, I'm certain it's going to come down to turnout, and that's where the Democrat machine has an unbeatable advantage. They've got people going door to door making sure the right people's ballots are collected here, in a place where turnout literally doesn't matter because half the Democrats are running unopposed or against 5 different permutations of the People's Socialist Environmental Indigenous Justice Party For Killing Whitey.
If they're doing organization like that just for fun in a blue state, I doubt there'll be a single ballot unharvested in swing states.

On the other hand, that's a deep blue state where democrats have a massive advantage in personnel and they have to do something.

Fascinating.

Had you heard that the GOP has tightened the voter registration gap in PA by about 300k?

Do we recall that Biden won PA by 70k in 2020., and the GOP has gained support since then.

Do we think the Dems were more or less efficient at ballot harvesting that year?

Do we think the GOP might be more or less organized at getting out the vote in 2024?

Just thinking out loud. Like I said, Kamala has no advantage that Biden lacked, and some apparent disadvantages.

Seems absurd to expect her to do better than 2020 Biden.

I don't see any reason their ballot harvesting ops would be less effective now. They've had four more years to organize and consolidate power, how could they have lost any capacity?

Because they don't have the advantage of an ongoing pandemic to motivate against in-person voting and creating cover for a sizeable increase in absentee ballots.

I think there's just going to be fewer ballots out there to that are ripe for harvest, ultimately.

Kamala has no advantage that Biden lacked

Except what Curtis Yarvin dubs "Moore's Law of election 'fortification.'"

There are rumors, stemming from the boss himself, that Republicans found some “secret” to help improve turnout. I’m skeptical, but you never know.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/us/politics/trump-secret-house-republicans-panic.html

Elon musk lottery?

Might be the efforts of Scott Pressler in PA. The guy exhudes weirdo, cult leader energy and if someone could turn it around for the GOP there, I think it's him.

My guess is Republicans are just using the same election 'tech' that Democrats used last cycle. Shady stuff like vote harvesting.

In general it just doesn’t make sense, given that the demographics showing Harris making new headway compared to Biden are basically swapped in comparison to what you would usually suspect. Crosstab-delving within polls is generally discouraged unless they have wild results, but the issue in this cycle is that all top-line polls are being exceedingly risk-averse in anticipation that their jobs are on the line if they get another huge overwhelming ‘miss’ in getting Trump wrong after the last two elections. The only A-rated pollster (before Selzer) whose methodology isn’t just ‘herd now, answer questions after the election’ so far is AtlasIntel, and they just released a poll stating that Trump is ahead in all swing states.

I would recommend buying the dip in terms of Trump’s odds of winning Iowa obviously, but polling is just totally broken this year. Emerson releasing a poll showing the exact opposite of Selzer in Iowa today (even as Emerson has historically underestimated Trump) is just another example.

Both Emerson and Atlasintel are on watch as some of the worst herders this year. Emerson is especially bad. I'd trust Selzer over these guys just based on reputation beforehand, but especially after learning they're cooking the statistical books.

none of the polls he's including are unweighted; when pollsters get results, they weight them depending on their predicted turnout which is heavily biased towards the last similar election which will necessarily reduce variance

his assumptions are just wrong: no, they won't be a binomial distribution even in theory, and almost no one uses random phone dialer to randomly select voters; they have models and try to find the voters which fit the proxies in their models through panels, surveys, mixed-mode contacts, etc.

His article isn't about "herding" as to how he defines it using his chosen metrics, it's a complaint by an alleged model maker that the people's who work he's relying on stealing don't have more variance which would make his model better. The article is really about pollsters being cowards, which make the almost guaranteed Silver final prediction being 50:50 all the more funny. Nate's a coward only because the people whose work he steals relies on are cowards!

This isn't herding which Silver admits when he refers to 538 penalizing late polls which move towards released polls calling it herding. NYT/Sienna, Washington Post, ABC, the "golds standards," etc., are herding when they release a poll in Sept which is Harris+5 and then just so happen to conveniently get a near identical prediction as Emerson which has been claiming a close race all along. Those pollsters aren't just honest non-manipulators who happened to get Harris+1/Tie as their final result joining all the dirty manipulators.

It's honestly perplexing to me why Silver continues to have such high esteem in these spaces, but it's easy money every election cycle.

cooking the statistical books

pollsters cook statistical books when they weight and predict turnout the same way Nate Silver "cooks the statistical books" when he weights polls in his glorified poll average

Selzer isn't a coward by releasing a Harris+3 for Iowa, but whatever the reason for it and I have my speculations, she'll get a double digit miss as a result.

Polls have long weighted their results, but there's ways to do it well, and ways to do it poorly. The goal is to calibrate demographic metrics based on likely voter data to create a facsimile of a perfectly representative sample. Getting it correct makes for more accurate polls. Getting it wrong in an innocent way can lead to mixups like 2016, where there was insufficient weighting by education especially in swing states.

But with degrees of freedom comes the ability to misuse it, where pollsters can coax their models to produce results they think are "better". Or they can just not release results that show something they think is strange. No matter what happens, polls should still show something resembling a normal distribution. They should create their model first, then enter in their results and see what pops out. The fact they're not getting a normal distribution is evidence that they're looking at results, then tweaking the model and rerunning afterwards, effectively mangling the results into whatever they desire. The fact that this is very prominent around a few polling houses and not others should be an indication that something is wrong.

Selzer isn't a coward by releasing a Harris+3 for Iowa, but whatever the reason for it and I have my speculations, she'll get a double digit miss as a result.

I'd gladly take an even-money bet that Selzer is off by less than 10 points.

The point was trying to make is that because they're all weighted and because the underlying data are not random, you would not expect to see the variance numbers Silver is using as his thresholds. The claim of binomial distribution around +-6 is dependent on the assumptions Silver is making, but those assumptions are wrong. Polls are done individually, they're tailored individually. When Silver writes articles like this, he comes off as someone who would be actually lost if he ever attempted to conduct a poll and then he makes a bunch of statements about polling generally using assumptions which are just wrong for polling.

Polling with predictive capacity is extraordinarily difficult. The end prediction is what matters, not the particulars of the models they use. The models are a tool, they're not the entire prediction. Of course I think pollsters who adjust their model to better fit what they believe is the correct result and they should. I have far more respect for individual pollsters than aggregators, who I consider to just be poll readers.

If I was Selzer, I would have gone back and tried again because her poll is ridiculous for a variety of reasons we can see in the information released about the demos she reached and what they care about. I understand aggregators don't like this and they don't like when variance shrinks, but the pollsters are the ones making the predictions more so than the aggregators stealing their work.

I'd gladly take an even-money bet that Selzer is off by less than 10 points.

Well, I didn't expect a response like this and didn't check back here. I am already overbudget on political bets this season, but I likely would have taken this depending on the amount and hassle to set this up. Bravo, though! I love to see people willing to put money down on their predictions.

Selzer is currently off by a whopping 16.5%. I should go back and look at my model for Iowa and why I undestimated Trump by 3 points. Selzer sold her credibility in an attempt to motivate downtrodden Democrats into thinking it was still possible. No serious person could have looked at some of the results from that poll, e.g., abortion most important topic, among others, and take it at face value; anyone who did should be discounted if not entirely ignored going forward.

For what it's worth, I'll cop to the fact that I would have lost the bet. Selzer had a pretty stellar record before, but this was a massive, high-profile mistake that she'll likely never recover from, at least not fully.

That’s not true according to Silver. https://www.natesilver.net/p/theres-more-herding-in-swing-state

Yes Emerson herds but Atlasintel he is showing as one of the higher quality ones. Also they’ve been very accurate in the past.

The list in that article isn't a list of all pollers, it's just the ones that he's accusing of herding. Atlasintel is borderline. It only looks OK relative to Emerson, where the evidence is more incontrovertible.

That’s not how Silver is framing it. He states:

By contrast, the most highly-rated polling firms like the Washington Post show much less evidence of herding. YouGov has actually had fewer close polls than you’d expect, although that’s partly because they’ve tended to be one of Harris’s best pollsters, so their surveys often gravitate toward numbers like Harris +3 rather than showing a tie.

Note that WaPo has the same odds of herding as AtlesIntel. So if Silver thinks WaPo isn’t herding, then he thinks atlasintel isn’t either.

Alright, yeah I've reread it and you're correct.

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.

You are right and the other poster is wrong. Read the article and not what Ben Garrison stated.

Like I said to the other guy, that chart does not include all pollsters, it just includes the ones that show the worst signs of herding. AtlasIntel is borderline, and only looks ok next to egregious examples like Redfield and Wilton.

And you seemed to miss the context where Silver said WaPo is one of the high quality non herding. Silver had them as the same odds as Atlasintel. So Silver, who published the article, clearly disagrees with your assertion.

I am a native of Tennessee, have lived in Kentucky, and currently live in Ohio. None of these could be described as "blue states." Pretty much everyone that I talk to on a daily basis lives and votes in one of these three states.

For the last three or four months, almost every person I know has been assaulting my ears, unsolicited, with monologues about how Trump is a racist, sexist and fascist, and he must be kept out of the White House. Literally - I'm not saying that as a stock example, I mean that people have actually used those terms, in series, in sentences to describe him and his politics. Additionally, multiple people have told me they wish the would-be assassin's bullets didn't miss their mark. These people include my dad - a blue-collar tradesman; my coworkers, at a blue-collar manufacturing firm; my mom, a retail worker; a close friend of mine who joined the Army; and a guy I know who works in construction. No matter their age, race, or who the winners' policies would be likely to benefit, there is a lockstep consensus, even though these are all people who are the types of people, in the appropriate states, that you'd expect to support Trump. The only exceptions that I personally have are my fiancee and her family, a close friend from church, and an old coworker. All other people are happy to start venting about Trump to me.

(Notably - and this is not meant to be boo outgroup - I never hear anyone talk about how the election outcomes, or the policy outcomes that follow from that, will affect them personally. One guy I work with did at least reference his neighbors who are voting for Trump because they don't want their taxes to go up, which he described as "greed.")

My subjective impression, is that this is primarily caused by the successful capture by liberals of so many institutions, resulting in leftism becoming the "default position" in America. When all the big companies, all the media, and all the artists and musicians push in the same direction, you have to be a serious non-conformist to push the other way; and that is an uncommon trait. With that in mind, I don't know how the Republicans ever win any elections.

Given that the election is a dead heat, the House is split and by thin margins, and a conservative leaning SC, perhaps there isn't any non-conformity so much as an extremely common difference of opinion. I'd wager that R's win elections because approximately half of voters are R's.

Did you go eat at McShlucks after?

LOL

Tbh, it's like I'm the guy in the original post except I really want it to stop.

With that in mind, I don't know how the Republicans ever win any elections.

My impression is that people will say one thing and vote another. It’s the only explanation, because I see the same pattern of virtually everyone hating on conservatives or its ideology.

I have no idea what's going to happen. But I do think there's a real chance of a Harris blowout. Trump was underestimated in 2016, but the previous 8 years have not been kind to his reputation among low-information voters. The abortion debate and Harris's gender have joined revulsion to Donald Trump as factors polarizing a lot of female voters to the left. I suspect we're going to see unprecedented gender splits on the ballot.

Whether anyone likes it or not, Trump is uniquely polarizing, with 40% of the population loving him, 50% hating his guts, and 10% trying to figure out what to do. As someone who moved from column B to column C, I don't see how Trump gets over the hump of how many people believe he's deeply evil.

I'm going to vote for him for the first time ever, but if I had any money to put down, I'd bet on Harris.

Yeah, I’m thinking the same. I’m disappointed since I think illegal immigration is going to be a huge issue for the western world in the coming decades and we needed to set a strong precedent with Trump for mass removal, as well as his government efficiency and moves towards Musk being big bonuses. But unfortunately the sole champion we had was this guy who couldn’t get enough women on-side, because he is quite frankly a pig and a womanizer, and such a megalomaniac he couldn’t take an L

My only hope now is that Kamala wasn’t lying with her pivot towards the centre. It’s a very slim hope; I know.

I wish my boy Musk luck - not sure he will survive a Kamala term.

If it makes you feel better, there was never any chance Trump would manage a significant removal of non-natives. It's as likely as ending social security.

I'll bet you a Trading Spaces dollar right now that Elon Musk is alive and well when Kamala leaves the Oval Office, whether it's 2029 or 2033.

I don’t mean literally survive, I mean he’ll be ruined from a business perspective

I'll take the other end of that bet. In 4 years, Musk will be fine and about as rich as he is now.

As rich as he is now would be a huge hit to him, given we should expect large growth. Or do you mean he will still be the richest man on earth?

sure, if you want to retreat to that particular bailey.

the great filter is rocket men get thrown in jail before they can explore the stars

For what it's worth, the Soviets did fish Korolev out of the gulag after WWII because they needed him...

Musk is hardly anywhere as technically competent as Korolev

Korolev's also had the benefits of state resources, sharashkas and priority in a state planned economy go a a long way.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats