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naraburns  nihil supernum  10d ago (text post)   26734 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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There could be 100 trends but two or three of them dominate all else. Picking out these key trends is very valuable information!

I think it's a little like investing. You can draw up a 300 page PDF on market analysis with dozens of incomprehensible graphs, throw supercomputers and humanity's top minds at the problem, only to fall well behind 'Nvidia = AI and AI is enormously powerful' or 'Iphones are great, Apple really knows what they're doing'. A simple thesis can easily beat a complicated, measured, nuanced analysis that uses all the data and considers 1000 points of information.

Sure, but that doesn't imply that the simple thesis has more predictive power the next time a coin is flipped. Maybe the Nvidia people got it right the the first time, but you can bet on the fact that when it does inevitably become the bad choice, there will still be people holding onto that simple thesis incorrectly. And the only way to disabuse themselves of that incorrect choice would have been to consider other points of information.

As I said, the past record here is the only thing that gives me pause when claiming that this prediction wasn't as great as claimed. That is by far the best selling point to me, not how close the exact number was this time without considering the nuances

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