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naraburns  nihil supernum  16d ago (text post)   26860 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.

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It's weird that the Modal outcome happening means Silver lost.

(no seriously his forecast was that trumps most likely path to victory was sweeping all 6 swing states happening 20% of the time)

His other 3 forecasts for most likely trump victory being

Winning everything but Michigan and wisconsin, winning everything but wisconsin, and winning everything but nevada.

When you read deeper into his forecast as to how each candidate would win you see that it's basically "win by a narrow margin in every single major contest causing a blowout in the score"

His whole “job” is predicting elections. He literally said “idk.” in terms of doing his job that is actually worse than being wrong. What a failure.

But...sometimes things really are 50/50. If I tell you an unweighted coin is equally likely to come up heads or tails, I'm not somehow at fault for not being able to give you more insight than that.

But that's the thing. What if the coin is weighted, but you refuse to admit your scale is broken? Or whatever tool you'd use to detect a weighted coin.

You hear a lot about how the results of this election were in the margin of error of a lot of the polls. Not the chances of winning, but what they estimated turnout to be. In some states, especially the better polled states, that might be true. In others, the polls were dashed to pieces. I think Texas, Florida, New York and Virginia had huge polling misses, despite turning out as predicted. I saw Sagaar Enjeti last night downright gleeful that the left's project for a Purple Texas seemed utterly destroyed with how hard Latino's realigned with Trump, and how hard Ted Cruz won them in his district versus prior Cruz victories.

A single flip of the coin doesn't tell you that it's weighted though.

This is the exact misunderstanding of statistics that kills Silver, is confusing aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty.

Aleatoric uncertainty comes from the irreducible randomness of a process. Epistemic uncertainty comes from a lack of knowledge.

The election was not 50/50 going into Tuesday. In terms of aleatoric uncertainty it was nearly 100/0. People’s votes were essentially predetermined at that point. If you reset the timeline to Tuesday morning, you would get the same result every time.

Silver’s epidemic uncertainty was high. That’s not because the election was impossible to predict (I made a lot of money off of it), it’s because he’s an idiot and refuses to update based on past results.

If there is no way of acquiring that knowledge, then those two types of uncertainty are, for all intents and purposes, the same.

The commodity silver is down significantly from yesterday. Not sure if that's what @zeke5123a referred to...

Silver got feisty about Florida, trying to make a 100k bet that Trump would win by less than 8.

Trump won by 13.

It was an unnecessary own goal.

Betting markets > Silver

In a roundabout way, that is a win for Silver since he's been promoting prediction markets for years (even when they were much less popular; he used to get scoffed at routinely by his 538 podcast co-hosts when he brought up prediction markets), he's an advisor to Polymarket, he acts as a spokesman for Polymarket in some capacities, his new podcast focuses heavily on prediction markets, etc.

Well it feels similar to 2016 for Silver. He comes across as simultaneously wrong and cowardly in that he ultimately did say Harris winning was more likely while pushing the odds as close to a coin flip as possible. I think it leaves people asking themselves: why listen to a guy that will ultimately just tell you "I don't know, anything could happen, it's a coin flip"? For a guy that wrote a book about how he liked to live on the "river" (or was it the village?) as a high-stakes risk-taker he seems to do a lot of bet-hedging and saying "I don't know". You don't have to subscribe to The Silver Bulletin to get a shrug and an idk.

That's the whole point of being a good high-stakes risk-taker. If I challenge you to a game where you bet $6 and win $10 if you correctly guess whether I roll even on a d6, the correct high-stakes risk-taker answer is "lmao, no bet".

Some things just are pretty close, odds-wise.

Wait, I'm confused. Multiply that out for me? If you demonstrate a fair die and I bet evens every time, why isn't that +EV? Transaction costs? Or are you leaving unstated that it's one round, few rounds, or rare rounds (enough time between rounds to invalidate assumptions)?

You pay $6 dollars to enter the bet, so you start at -$6. 50% chance of $10 is $5. -$6+$5=-$1. The bet is negative EV.

Derp, thanks.

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