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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Notes -
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.
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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.
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