Pitt19802
10mo ago
"Amusingly, this used to come largely from the right-wing, who kept making fun of his model for giving Trump a roughly 30% chance to win the 2016 election, because apparently grasping that 2:1 underdogs win pretty often is basically impossible for some people."
I'm going to push back on this as a mis-recollection of the actual facts.
Trump's rise badly damaged Silver's credibility, but its wasn't Trump's general election win, it was his GOP nomination.
Examples that aged poorly:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trump-is-winning-the-polls-and-losing-the-nomination/
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/donald-trumps-six-stages-of-doom/
To his credit, Silver has largely fessed up to screwing this up:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundit-and-screwed-up-on-donald-trump/
Another article delving into the details of this:
All in all, I'm a Silver fan, in the grand scheme of things, I think he does a pretty good job, but the Trump nomination screw up showed that he's not immune to certain biases.
I'm not especially convinced that there's that much of a shortage of Americans who want to work dogmatically hard.
I'm just not sure American culture filters those people to glass factories in Dayton, OH.
In America those people tend to get filtered into industries like Tech, Finance, Medicine, Law, Entertainment, Sports.
Comparative advantage being what it is, glass manufacturing appears to be something to aspire to a bit more in China than it is in America, shrug, so it goes.
Within a couple days of watching American Factory I watched a short 20 or so minute documentary about various supply chains in China, after failing to find it in half hour or so of internet searching I've given up, but most of the factories were of cheap plastic trinkets, the pace of work seemed pretty comparable to the Americans in Dayton.
Even in China, I imagine there are hierarchies of where people are motivated to work, and which places attract the motivated workers, they're just different than they are here.
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