domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
Recursive_Enlightenment
5m ago
Lots of leftists basically think Deliverance was a documentary and have a statistically unjustified fear of rural white Republicans. I don't doubt that some FEMA workers really were afraid to knock on the door of homes with Trump signs.
ulyssessword
12m ago
Double-check where your nearest fire extinguisher is. Make a mental note.
Also: If it's far away, just buy one. I'm renting an apartment, and the nearest fire extinguisher is (or at least was) the entire apartment length and half the building's hallway away from me. Now there's one about 3/4 of the apartment length away in the worst case.
Skulldrinker
14m ago
fighting a war against Israel in the future.
Typo or Freudian slip?
Skulldrinker
16m ago
Height is something that everyone has that you can't change. So anything mentioning height will get rage-engagement in the Internet attention economy. Race-bait, gender-bait, height-bait, they can all be taken as personally as a generic "your mom" insult.
It's not that great to be tall; I still spent most of my life painfully alone, with women often being performatively afraid of me.
Can someone put together an actual timeline of events here? It is proving very difficult to determine from the articles I've read. Those critical of the maccabi depend on them doing genocidal chants, vandalism, and low level violence prior to the game. Those staunchly on the other side are relying heavily on this being "preplanned" but the only pre planned attack evidence seems to be some messages on social media that they were sent the same day as the attacks? So presumably after the prior maccabi provocation? It's not clear to me.
Obviously mob violence is not justified by chants and vandalism, but if you fly into some other city and stir things up, it's not a pogrom or fitting with a "Europe has an antisemitism problem" when psycho locals escalate. This story seems hopelessly distorted in the news coverage.
SomethingMusic
38m ago
I'm not surprised. One of the most effective things Trump did to stabilize the middle east was cut off Iran's funding who is directly funding Hezbollah and anti-israeli sentiment in the middle east. When Biden reinstated Iran's nuclear deal and lifted sanctions on Iran, Iran then had funding to fund Palestine and Hezbollah which led to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict going on today.
With this background, I wouldn't be surprised that Iran sees Trumps rise as a threat to their economic stability and their anti-Israeli agenda. A dead Trump is much better for them than a Trump regime in the presidency.
SlowBoy
44m ago
The polls did better this time than 2016 and 2020. At least, in general.
The controversy about polls starts in 2016. I think this is worth emphasizing, because there are still arguments floating around that the polls in 2016 were fine. And thus every subsequent argument about polls is really a proxy war over 2016. Because 8 years later we're still talking about Trump, we're still discussing how the polls over- or under-estimate Trump. We're still discussing how the polls do or don't measure white rural voters.
In 2016 the polls were entirely wrong. For months they predicted Hillary winning by a large margin blowout, sometimes by 10+ points. (I remember sitting in class listening to a friend excitedly gossip about Texas flipping blue.) Toward election day itself, the polls converged, but still comfortably for Hillary. And when Trump won, and the argument came around that the results were technically within the margin of error -- it missed entirely that whole states were modeled vastly incorrectly. The blue wall states of Pennsylvania Wisconsin and Michigan were not supposed to have gone red. Florida was supposed to have been close. States that had once been swing states were not even close. (To. me, this was the smoking gun that Trump had a real chance in 2016: Iowa and Ohio were solidly predicted for Trump from the very beginning, and no one offered any introspection on what that implied as a general swing.)
2020 was not much better. Without getting into claims about fraud and states: Biden was also supposed to win by larger margins than many states in fact showed. There were still lots of specific misses (like Florida redding hard). And again a series of justifications that polling did just fine because, technically, everything was inside some margin of error.
2024 is actually much better. AtlasIntel and Polymarket both broadly predicted exactly what happened. Rasmussen was fairly accurate (after taking a break in 2020 if I remember correctly). There's also a lot of slop. Selzer's reputation is destroyed (actually people may forget all about it by 2028). The RCP national average was off by a few points. Ipsos and NPR and Morning Consult and the Times were all wrong. Well, maybe that's not much better than 2020 -- but mixed in with all the bad data were predictors who got everything exactly right.
So Nate Silver's problem is that his method is junk. He takes some averages and models them out. The problem is that a lot of the data he relies on is bad. A lot of the polling industry is still wrong. And unless Silver is willing to stake a lot of expertise on highly specific questions about counties and polls, he can't offer all that much insight.
roche
54m ago
And what are tribal reasons? Differences in behavior. A symbiotic relation is made possibly only by very advanced social mechanisms, and when you consider the advancement of tribal peoples, you should take it to heart that failure to innovate in these systems more than anything concrete is the culprit for their failure. Someone very well read in Chinese history would probably get me, since this process is much harder to see in Western society, as low population density is the historical norm and we had generous time to figure these things out.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
I heard The Band cover of Atlantic City
That song is a fucking epic novel or movie in just a few minutes. And The Band's cover blows Springsteen out of the water. When you listen to Springsteen on his own, it's great and poignant. But side-by-side with that cover, you realize how melodramatic and overwrought a lot of the emotionalism is. Levon Helm's more subdued vocals tease out the desperation and forlorn feeling of the song's protagonist so much better.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
I can run 7B models on a Macbook M2 with 8 GB of ram. This is because of how Macbooks handle VRAM.
It's pretty slow, and 7B models aren't great for general tasks. If you can use one that's fine tune for a specific thing, they're worth it.
Frankly, however, I'd just recommend using something like together(dot)AI or OpenRouter to run larger models elsewhere. Normal caveats about not pushing sensitive info out there, of course. $30-$50 worth of credits, even for monster models like Meta's 405B, will take you easily though a month of pretty heavy usage (unless you're running big automated workloads 24/7).
I think there's going to be a race between local AI specific hardware for consumers and just cloud based hyperscaling. I don't know which will win. Privacy definitely plays a part. I'm quite optimistic to see a new compute hardware paradigm emerge.
flailingace
1hr ago
The USSR died a very slow death and the 'balkanization' that took place was primarily revolutionary independence movements. There were no radical idealogues seizing power, rather the people essentially rose up to throw off Russian rule. This would not be the case if Russia collapsed into civil war. Some regions (see Chechnya) are essentially run by warlords who are kept in check by Moscow giving them money. And Putin's cronies include many who have called for offensive use of tactical nuclear weapons, and in a civil war scenario they could easily come out on top.
The question, if you're the West, is to what extent you want to risk the literal end of humanity. At least that's how some people see it.
justmotteingaround
1hr ago
Knowing the reason we fight is pretty much just genetics is a downer.
Isn't this backwards? The two genetically similar groups fight each other for tribal reasons. The US nukes Japan and within a decade both are cooperating to get rich as hell, improving the lives genetically distinct populations. I'm a realist when it comes to genetics, but en masse we seem to fight often because of the ideas we have.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
There's doing the thing and then there's talking about doing the thing.
One of the unfortunate results of social media and the internet more generally is that it allows people to show you what they're doing in another domain. This is everything from innocent cooking videos, to building things, all the way up to a statistical analyst (Silver) showing you what and how he is statistically analyzing. While this may let new people learn things they previously had limited information on, I believe it corrupts the thing itself (i.e. the cooking, the building, the numbers crunching).
Why? Because the focus of the "creator" turns to audience views, approval, satisfaction etc. instead of doing the thing itself well. Cormac McCarthy once said he never hung out with writers because, when writers get together, they talk about writing - where any writer who was serious would just go and write!
The French Gambler is a great antagonist to Nate Silver. He didn't care about explaining himself, he didn't need to find a way to capture and entertain an audience. He focus on the thing - betting intelligently on the election - and he executed it well.
I've toyed around with starting my own blog (I won't share about what because it's niche enough as to be identifiable) but this is the number one reason why I haven't so far. I worry that the thing I'll be writing about will suffer because my focus will be writing-about-the-thing instead of doing-the-thing.
I think that's what's happened to Nate. He's become so focused on writing about how is models work, or how the polls are biased that he's no longer spending the mental bandwidth necessary to build the best possible model. How could you even do that when you're setting daily print deadlines for yourself. Furthermore, a lot of the time, models have very weak explanatory and/or predictive power. How do you maintain an audience by writing "Eh, looks kind of ... like nothing. Whatever." Nope. You need 1,000 words that "examine the correlate intricacies and inherent cognitive blah blah blah blah."
I don't know what Nate Silver wants. Does he want to write about probability and statistics? Does he want to build models to predict events? Does he want to play professional poker? It doesn't matter, but he should probably choose one thing to do and another, different thing, to talk about doing. When you stack all of that on top of one another, you get a 50/50 chance of being either wrong or insufferable.
flailingace
1hr ago
Good question. Basically Russia has a war economy right now, and all the military production counts as GDP, which gives the impression of growth. This hides the issues in the economy.
Russia is facing down stagflation. Wages have been artificially inflated because military industries are being propped up, with the consequence that other industries have to match those salaries in order to find workers. This has led to acute labor shortages in many industries. Meanwhile the Ruble is facing serious inflation. The central bank has raised the key rate to 21%, the highest in modern history, but nominal inflation remains at 8-9%. Russia's trading partners are no longer as willing to accept payments in Rubles, for a while now the majority of trade with China has been in the Yuan and it's getting worse. Nobody wants to hold Rubles.
Though, I'm not an expert on the economic side of this problem. One of the sources I trust most on Russia-Ukraine is Anders Puck Nielsen, and he has a good breakdown here: https://www.logicofwar.com/russias-war-economy-is-unsustainable/
Dean
1hr ago
In other international news that totally-isn't-a-consequence of the US election shaping state decisions, Qatar has agreed to remove Hamas from its territory after Hamas refused to conduct genuine hostage, ceasefire negotiations (as characterized by an anonymous US official).
This is a significant development if true, as it represents a significant drop in Arab political support for Hamas inclusion into a post-Gaza-War unified Palestine government, a point of post-war tension with Israel, and likely signals the further political decline of the Palestinians as a key factor in Arab politics as the loss of one of their key sponsors / sympathizers will likely see Hamas turn more towards Iran, and thus burn further bridges with the Arab states concerned about Iran and its axis of resistance.
For those unaware, Qatar has been the host to the political wing of Hamas for some times. Qatar-Hamas relations more or less started in earnest after Hamas's take over of Gaza in the mid-2000s, and in 2012 Hamas set up a political office in Qatar. Due to Qatar's role as a 'negotiates with everyone' regional diplomatic power, Qatar is a country the Israelis do not generally conduct assassinations / targetted killings, and so Hamas was able to operate with... not impunity, but relative safety and patronage. While this was supported by the Obama-era US and Israel to facilitate negotiations between Israel and Hamas, Qatar has provided its own support, including lots of money (well over $1 billion USD over the years, 'for the Palestinians' but via Hamas), safe shop, but also a very supportive media relationship with Qatari-owned Al Jazeera news. Setting aside cases of Jazeera journalists outright supporting Hamas, the Qatari line via Al Jazeera is one of the most public and influential Arab media / information influence shapers for the pro-Hamas / anti-Israeli side of the current conflict.
While the Hamas military and political wings are not synonymous, and the political wing in Qatar likely were not directly aware of Oct 7 (because why wouldn't they be spied on intently), the Hamas political wing being stationed in Qatar represents something of a last-stand of Palestinian resistance politics in the Arab world. The various Palestinian violent resistance movements across history have progressively gotten less support / more opposition from regional Arab states after various misteps, including Black September, support for Saddam during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and others. The Qataris were, to a real degree, the last major Gulf Arab state both willing to host Hamas and able to sponsor them... and whose hosting provided protection from Israeli retaliation.
With Qatar ejecting the Hamas political leadership during the Oct 7 war, that protection is ending. Hamas leaders will almost certainly seek alternative patronage support in other countries... but the list of those (a) willing to host, (b) who Israel isn't willing to attack into anyway, and (c) willing to protect Hamas if Israel tries is very small, and mostly non-Arab.
Especially since there is a not-very-subtle US pressure in play.
"After rejecting repeated proposals to release hostages, its leaders should no longer be welcome in the capitals of any American partner. We made that clear to Qatar following Hamas's rejection weeks ago of another hostage release proposal," the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
This doesn't mean a country like, say, Turkey couldn't do so anyway, but in all likelihood the confluence of 'willing to sponsor Hamas in the Oct 7 war' and 'doesn't care about US pressure' is probably Iran... and honestly, either Iran or Turkey (though less Turkey) demonstrate the same point: the Palestinian resistance issue is transitioning from an Arab-led issue, to an issue led by Arab-rivals.
This doesn't mean a sharp or sudden change in political cultures or such is imminent- al Jazeera will still be running pro-Palestinian / anti-Israeli issues for years to come- but as states change their priorities, and their patronage networks, so do their information efforts and priorities. It's been said before the Palestinians never lose an opportunity to lose an opportunity, and in this case the opportunity lost was Qatari sponsorship.
As for why now? Well, as hinted above, probably US election political politics. The US message quoted above was 'weeks ago' for an issue apparent months ago, but the President coming in was only determined days ago. How Trump might have approached the issue likely had a non-trivial influence on the Qatari decision.
sulla
1hr ago
Everyone on the right called it with high confidence this time, unlike 2016 and 2020. Everyone on the left seems to call it for their guy with high confidence every election, so Dem/left predictions carry no weight. Nate will maintain his (undeserved) credibility by still being more accurate than most on the left.
MaximumCuddles
1hr ago
I’d imagine you could file that under “still worth it.”
justmotteingaround
1hr ago
Doesn't the actual article imply that this could only possibly effect 0.6% of water systems in the US? And even then only to children and pregnant women. And even then the cause is not government addition of fluoride, but rather government failure to remove fluoride below the separately arrived at EPA number?
Mantergeistmann
1hr ago
My best friend--been with me through thick and thin for most of both of our lives--straight up told me if I was a Trump supporter, that was the only thing that could ever end our friendship.
To me, there are far worse things than simply supporting Trump, and there's a not implausiblr chance it was simply a venting/signaling sentence, but it was still a bit chilling to hear (as someone who is most emphatically not a Trump supporter, but at risk of being assumed to be one in certain circles for simply not thinking it's as bad as the histrionics would suggest).
justmotteingaround
1hr ago
But yeah, I think putting literally any medication in the water supply is foolish.
You have to count the hits and the misses. Lets just concede that fluoride in drinking water was or is now a mistake. There is still chlorine/chloramine. Also gov't mandates and/or influence in the food supply: iodine, vit D, niacin, folate, iron, thiamine, riboflavin etc.
Interestingly, the gov't got I think niacin temporarily wrong, assuming the cause of pellagra was a corn heavy diet, delaying the addition of niacin. Which is fine I guess as extreme caution with the food supply is probably a good idea.
The sad thing is that the “correlated errors” aren’t based on polling data or past results, they are just an arbitrary adjustment he adds to the model based on feels. Like he literally codes in “the sun belt states are likely to be correlated” etc.
After this election I am totally convinced Silver a fraud. He simply can’t admit that there is a polling industry bias. His techniques make it impossible to account for this accurately because they are based on weighted polling averages, where really he needs to add a bias term, which he refuses to do.
To elaborate on that, if literally all the polls miss left, you can’t fix that with weighting. In reality, he would have needed to put all of the weight on AtlasIntel and Rasmussen and close to 0 on everything else. This shows that weighting is the wrong approach.
Edit: He does have “house effects” but this adjust polls towards the weighted average, not towards historical results. So it doesn’t help.
miras_chinotto
certified low iq
1hr ago
Asking mid-low functioning people to plot to do bad thing and then arresting them for it is absolutely the FBI MO (see also kidnapping Whitmer). I wouldn't be surprised especially since we don't have much information about this guy that would explain why he's the go-to guy for the IRGC (he seems low level, arrested for robbery at one point even).
Dean
1hr ago
It is not his reputation as a confident bettor at stake, it is his reputation as an honest man which reflects on both the value of his words as a bettor and his words as a political scientist.
Hinging an argument on an accusation of dishonesty is precisely why I feel it is reasonable to request evidence of dishonesty, lest that accusation of dishonesty also be dishonest.
Ranger does not appear to have meant to make an argument about Silver's reputation as a bettor in the sense of upholding a bet, but if you wish to on the basis of Nate Silver being 'a weasel with no integrity,' I would make the same question of you: please provide the evidence that Nate Silver weaseled out of the bet.
and that should absolutely inform your opinion of his political commentary as a good Bayesian
I don't believe I have ever claimed to be a Bayesian, or ever particularly cared about others being Bayesian, particularly when the claims of being a good one or not revolve around character rather than statistical grounds.
In fact, for transparency I have a general skepticism of arguments about when other people are a 'good' [Insert Applause Category], since in my experience these often attempts to use assumed category requirements as a cudgel in either a No True Scotsman fallacy sense (if you wish to qualify as [Good Group], you must meet my critiera) or in ad hominem effect (this person is not [Good People]).
I would say that's likely doable, but it'd still take professional-level talent and effort to make a video that long that convincing.
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