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naraburns  nihil supernum  1d ago (text post)   13528 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.

If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.

Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.

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I wonder how much of Nate's success was simply applying some relatively decent methods to what was formerly a pretty midwit domain. Perhaps a similar comp would be the rise of sports analytics. It's not exactly rocket science, yet prior to the last couple decades, there was far too much credence given to human intuition over hard data.

Silver made some big improvements in the meta, but now the world has caught up. So he's not quite the oracle he once was.

Early-mover advantage of using big data and other quantitative methods to forecasting, tons of positive media coverage, darling of the left by predicting Obama wins and Democratic sweeps of House elections from 2008-2012. He was smart enough to pivot when the left became to extreme.

Nate's model is basically the simplest obvious way to project election results from polls. A motivated high schooler could have built it. At the time he started, however, people and pundits were basically idiots, and even now most people just want a commentator that says why their preferred candidate is going to win.

His only edge now is that he's pretty principled with his modeling choices and doesn't bow to angry Twitter people. Which is rather rare: if you want to build an audience, the easiest way is to just tell your audience what they want to hear.

Since Elon's takeover, building an audience seems to be as simple as being anti-left

Very saturated now though. Becoming a fresh right wing Twitter personality puts you up against some very stiff competition. Sadly even the constant struggle to stay on top has burned out a lot of good men: 0HPLovecraft is about to hit -10

Nate silver literally made this exact point 11 years ago

People often have a glowup after high school, Nate Silver had to wait until midlife crisis! He looks so much better with a beard and losing the dorky nerd style!

Nice find on the video timestamp. How in the world did you dig that up so quickly?

Yeah, it makes sense that Nate would understand that. And I have nothing but respect for him.

So I remembered nate silver's "water level" comment from a powerpoint presentation.

From there I typed "nate silver" got terrible results then typed "nate silver talk" got bad results then typed "nate silver presentation"

I found a few links worth exporing (time> 20 minutes and clearly a powerpoint presentation)

I then watched the video at 2x speed mashing forward key until one of the videos had this waterline graph that I remembered then I pressed back until the start of that slide

note that the actual quote was at 29:30 where He said "I look for fields where that water level is low"

True nerd power right there. We approve.

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