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I owned up to the Selzer poll being wrong, specifically about thinking it would be off by less than 10 points. The arguments against it were pretty uniformly medicore, along the lines of "nah, it just feels wrong" or crosstab diving or "unskewing", against a pollster who had a track record of proving her critics wrong over and over (e.g. in 2020, when she was far more pro-Trump than most of the competition, and ended up being right). Obviously it ended up being incorrect, and now Selzer has a lot of egg on her face.
Also, I'm not a fan of ad hominem attacks so this will probably be my last response to you.
Perfectly justifiable. If you prefer: "My priors of this being true are so enormously low and a single extreme outlier poll is such a small unit of evidence, so I refuse to significantly update my belief regarding this. The likelihood that a single poll is wrong is far greater than the likelihood that my entire understanding of the electorate is this far off. By far greatest likelihood is a one-off polling error. Miniscule likelihood it is correct and I am demented and detached from reality in my understanding of Trump's support."
Luckily our brains have excellent heuristics that approximate all this. So at a glance you can easily say "Smollett is a liar, no way that happened" or "Nah, that poll is just wrong". And you sound jivey talking about priors and weights of evidence if you simply state the obvious likelihood delivered to you by the sophisticated mechanisms in your brain.
Did you check the link I posted up above? Democrats were saying the same thing in 2020 about Selzer in Iowa, with similarly flimsy arguments, and were simply dead wrong. Comparing Selzer's reputation (before this election) with Smollett is just silly. I agree most "bombshell" polls aren't usually worth much, but if there was one person who had consistently proved her critics wrong it was Selzer.
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Dude. This isn’t an ad hominem. You made nothing but an ad hominem in the OP and then I called out that maybe you should show more humility.
As for the Selzer poll, I pointed out that the Selzer poll would require believing there were massive shifts in multiple populations over a short time that wasn’t captured by anyone (indeed her prior poll showed Trump +18 — a 21 point move wasn’t explained by Biden to Harris). That should’ve given you pause. Calling those bad arguments ignores the fact that those arguments actually reflected reality whereas yours did not.
Tbf cricitizing (even unfairly) a 3rd party is not really ad hominem.
It is functionally the same. Ad hominem in the classic sense is “your argument is bad because you are a bad person.”
There was zero intent to engage with the concept that Tulsi is good or bad pick Instead, the poster just said “she is a crank.” It is functionally the same—not addressing the issue and instead basically name calling.
Funny enough the poster claimed I was engaging in ad hominem. Instead, I was pointing out that the poster’s judgement isn’t great—especially when it comes to political topics. So read most charitably his comments re Tulsi amounted to “trust my judgement.” So bringing up his bad judgement is directly addressing his argument. He couldn’t handle it and decided to throw a fit and block me.
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