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Notes -
Kamala's word salad causes prediction market meltdown?
https://x.com/CollinRugg/status/1843450980291010656
I guess she could be referring to Article 2(4)?
Even with a positively colossal steelman it's hard to understand what she's saying, charters cannot participate in successes. I think she doesn't really mean anything by this statement. It's what Gary Marcus says about LLMs, how they're just spinning word associations around.
She then continues on to repeat fairly standard US rhetoric 'we're not going to do a deal without Ukraine at the table' and dodges the question of NATO membership. None of it is particularly adept politician-speak IMO, she could do with lessons on muddying the issue.
How hard would it have been to say 'we want a free, democratic Ukraine with 1991 borders' or if they want 2014 borders, why not say that? Or if territory is too sensitive to talk about, just say 'we want a free and democratic Ukraine, a Russia that isn't going to be invading any more countries, deterrence for all America's enemies'? It was a pretty easy question!
It's not just that, there's more:
https://x.com/ClayTravis/status/1843449294008836567
She's asked about whether it was a mistake to let illegal immigration rise so dramatically and fails to dodge the question. She could've said 'oh there are enforcement problems since it's a big border' or given a distracting pre-prepared anecdote about one of the challenges they faced. She just says 'oh we have been offering solutions, solutions are at hand and we'll make more solutions on day one, when I'm elected!"
Here's a bigger chunk of the video, each minute I watch there's all this word salad and flailing question-dodging:
https://x.com/ThisIsJnored/status/1843473339085631770
For instance, at about 1:50 there's a question about the extensive US military aid to Israel and whether the Biden Harris administration is capable of putting any pressure on the Netanyahu govt.
She does say something substantive from time to time, carefully implying that the alliance is between the American people and the Israeli people, not with Netanyahu. She uses a proper technique like 'the real question is...' there which makes her look more in control. But it's still a pretty bad performance overall.
Presumably this is why polymarket has gone from parity to 53-46 in Trump's favour): https://polymarket.com/event/presidential-election-winner-2024?tid=1728364599343
And then there's the editing! I think whatever portion of the interview they're releasing is the most flattering stuff they could get. How else do you explain this: https://x.com/LangmanVince/status/1842964122553761982
He asks the same question "but it seems Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening" with the exact same head movements (from a slightly different camera angle) and she gives a different answer, even more full of spaghetti:
What's going on here? Am I missing something basic? Kamala's answer isn't coherent either way but it's vaguely related to the question, was it edited from something else? This is why you should just give clear answers that specifically engage the question. Not interchangeable babble with with six clauses to a sentence.
I feel concerned (not only because I've placed bets that Donald Trump will lose the popular vote since I thought it was a dead sure thing) but also because this is the apparent calibre of American leadership. Even if we assume that Elite Human Capital or the Deep State is running the show, why can't these people find a decent media spokesperson? How hard can it be?
Apologies for how much of this post is rhetorical questions, twitter links and transcription, I'm truly confused by the whole thing. I also feel like people should know what I'm linking to, they should be able to scan the link with their own eyes and know to nitter or whatever if they don't have an account.
Edit: https://x.com/mazemoore/status/1843664856446316758 (this shows the editing they did somewhat more clearly)
I dont have the link on hand, but someone dumped $7 million onto prediction markets overnight, betting against Kamala. People are suspecting Elon. The swing is artificial knee jerk, but your sentiment is genuine.
Remember, Kamala was never supposed to get this far. 2020 was peak woke and Biden felt pressured into choosing a minority. Kamala had the perfect optics - woman, blackish, indianish, well educated, compliant, could signal as woke but fundamentally centrist.
She was the perfect puppet and therefore a good VP candidate. But the same thing makes her a horrible presidential candidate. Off the top of my mind, every other primary candidate did better than her. Pete, Warren, Bernie.... are all articulate and sharp (whether I agree with some of them or not).
IMO, the deepstate chooses bumbling idiots because they are easy to control. Kamala is perfect.
If someone wanted Trump to win, wouldn't they want to manipulate the market in the opposite direction, to make it look like they're in danger of losing? I'd be less likely to vote for my preferred candidate if I thought they had it in the bag.
Everyone likes a winner. Making your side look good inspires enthusiasm and demoralizes the other side. Much bigger bump than making your side incrementally more afraid.
Any yet Trump won in 2016 despite the common wisdom being that Clinton would likely win.
I think that there are effects in both directions.
If I think that the election result is already predetermined with a very high probability, I am less inclined to vote strategically. So if a candidate is polling at 80% in a state, I will vote for whomever I like most in general, while if two candidates are both polling at 45%, I am much more likely to the one of them whom I consider the lesser evil.
I am sure that the impulse to pick the side of the winner also exists in people. In the ancestral environment, picking the winning side of a group-internal conflict was likely conductive to reproductive success, while habitually backing the underdog was not. Rationally, this matters a lot less in representative democracies where what you do in the voting booth stays in the voting booth.
Personally, I am mildly disinclined to vote for a winning candidate. Statistically speaking, I tend not to be a huge fan of most administrations, and if it is all the same, I would rather be able to say "I voted for Kodos" than sharing the responsibility.
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Exactly.
The expected value theory here is symmetric. If you're close to 50/50 odds then your vote has a relatively high chance of making a huge impact, and you should make absolutely sure to cast it. If you're at 90/10 or 10/90, then whatever; why bother making your margin of victory a tiny bit larger or your margin of defeat a tiny bit smaller?
The psychological theory here is what's asymmetric. Social Desirability Bias tells you that if you agree with the majority and high-status leaders of Our Tribe then you are in sync with the community and safe and loved, whereas if you agree with the outnumbered and low-status dissenters from Our Tribe then you are a traitor and a risk and what are you even still doing here anyways? Best to hop on the bandwagon.
It's weird to see people blowing money on prediction markets to that end, though. They used to be such a niche nerd idea, mostly talked about among small groups who saw expected utility maximization as a goal and biases as obstacles inherited from our less-evolved ancestors, but I guess they're now just as fertile a target for hoary advertising tricks as "people who didn't even get up to stretch during the commercial breaks" used to be.
As I understand it, social desirability bias as a theory is meant to suggest why people may respond to, say, questionnaires in ways that may make them seem in harmony with favored social norms, eg if you ask someone directly (even anonymously) how many units of alcohol do you drink per day they may round down by one or more, if they're a heavier drinker. To do otherwise would give a feeling of hedonistic depravity (disfavored) even if true. This creates considerable noise in self-reported data, and is why parallel forms (similar but not exact) questions are sometimes used within in one questionnaire (and why Cronbach's alpha is used in analysis). Surveys of this sort are very difficult to do even passably well if one wants any data close to reflective of reality.
In this case--voting--it may apply but I would argue only within one's own imagined society. In other words so-called red tribe types will vote red because their people vote red. It's arguably not about some larger percentage of the population, it's about whom you value socially. I suppose you could tell some "blue triber" that the vote is 99% Trump and argue that they will be swayed to vote Trump to stay in sync, but I'm not so sure that wouldn't be very inconsistent across a large population.
edit: of to if
Polarization these days is strong enough that I wouldn't expect that bias to make a huge difference, it's true, only a difference on the margins. But we're on the margins again with this election, aren't we? +3% Harris nationally, but Trump's leading in a couple swing states he lost last time, probably within one swing state's electoral votes of winning. I could easily imagine a decent number of undecided voters being swayed (or just persuaded not to stay home) by the belief that one candidate or the other is socially acceptable or at least not too socially unacceptable.
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