fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
No bio...
User ID: 2896
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
11mo ago
Edit: this debate is a waste of time.
It was a waste, but we couldn't be certain of that going into it. The previous debate showed how a bad performance could have consequences. But as it turned out, neither were that bad.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
11mo ago
That might be it. No crowd, muted microphones, and a known time limit if one happens to be into that whole "preparation" thing.
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
11mo ago
It seems worse, somehow. But maybe I've just forgotten.
Harris got a question, explicitly said she'd answer all the points, and then all she did was elaborate on "my values haven't changed".
fishtwanger
shirking duties randomly made up by people who hate us
11mo ago
It looks like the current state of the art is to avoid answering questions, and instead treat them as an opportunity for impromptu rambling on a vaguely related topic, or a canned sound-bite on a vaguely related topic. Why not, there are no negative consequences.
While I basically agree that Nate Silver did as good a job as possible, this is a real problem. Garbage in, garbage out. He built a model that relied on free public information, and the quality of that information has degraded over time. I think it's entirely possible that his "business model" (or whatever you want to call it) is no longer viable. Once upon a time there wasn't an Internet, and then there wasn't enough data on the Internet, but eventually we entered the age of Big Data. Now maybe it's ending.
One of the reasons we used to have good polls is that we had well-funded mainstream media sources that were interested in accurately reporting the state of reality. But funding went down, the number of sources doing ground-level reporting shrank, they've become more cautious about taking risks, and most importantly, many of them have stopped caring about reporting reality, and are more interested in shaping reality toward their preferred political pole, or almost worse, they just say whatever the current party line is.
More options
Context Copy link