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Notes -
On Prognostication
Over the past several weeks, I've become increasingly irritated by discussions, both here and elsewhere, involving election predictions. While I agree that speculation can be fun, I think too many people try to read too much into the day-to-day ups and downs of the election cycle. While I agree with Nate Silver on a lot of things, there's something I find inherently off-putting about his schtick. I read The Signal and the Noise around the time it hit the bestseller lists and had an addendum about the 2012 election. One of the themes of the book is that the so-called experts who make predictions on television don't base their predictions on rational evidence and don't face any consequences when their predictions fail. No in-studio commentator on The NFL Today is losing his job solely because he picked too many losers.
Around this time, I became interested in probabilities, and I was regularly hitting up a friend who had majored in math and was pursuing a doctorate in economics at Ohio State. At one point he told me "Probability is interesting, but when it comes down to it, the only thing it's good for is gambling. We say there's a 50/50 chance of drawing a black ball from an urn when we know that the urn has 50 black balls and 50 white balls. When we talk about probabilities in the real world, it's like talking about the chances of drawing a black ball from an urn we don't know the size of." When discussing cards or dice, we're discussing random events based on repeatable starting conditions. When discussing elections, we're discussing a non-random event that will only happen once.
Beyond that, though, the broader question is: What's the point of all of this? This isn't a football game where scoring points confers an obvious advantage. If Trump is up by 5 points in June or Harris is up by 5 points in July, it has absolutely no effect on the actual election. My irritation with this started a couple weeks ago when someone posted here about Trump having large odds of winning on some betting site. I mean, okay, but who cares? What am I supposed to do with this information? I guess it's marginally useful if I'm thinking of putting a little money on the line, but I'm not much of a gambler, and the poster wasn't sharing this information to spark discussion on good betting opportunities. I pretty much lost it, though, last weekend, when news of the Selzer poll showing Harris winning Iowa hit and had everyone speculating whether Ms. Selzer was a canary in a coal mine or hopelessly off. Again, who cares? Selzer's prediction may be correct, or it may be incorrect, but it has no bearing on the actual election. Harris doesn't get any extra votes because Selzer shows her doing better than ABC or whoever. Trump doesn't get any extra votes because of his odds on PredictIt.
I will admit that polling is useful to campaigns trying to allocate resources and determine what works and what doesn't. But they have their own internal polling for that. But unless you're actively employed by a campaign, there's nothing you can do with this information. As much as arguing about politics in general may be an exercise in futility, there's at least some chance you can influence someone else's position. Arguing about who's going to win the election doesn't even go this far, since no one is arguing that you should vote based on polling averages. The only utility I see in any of this is entertainment for the small subset of people who find politics entertaining. Which brings me back to my original criticism of Silver: The reason these professional prognosticators don't get called out on their inaccuracies is because their employers understand that their predictions are ultimately meaningless. Terry Bradshaw may predict the Browns to beat the Bengals, but at a certain time we'll know the winner and if the Bengals win the sun will rise the next morning and his being wrong about it will have no effect on anything.
For the record, a think Harris will probably win, but my prediction is low-confidence and isn't based on anything that's happened since campaign season started. In 2016, a lot of people in swing states voted for Trump because he was an unknown quantity and they preferred taking a chance with him rather than Clinton. In 2020, a certain percentage of these people regretted their decision and voted for Biden. I haven't seen anything in the past four years that suggests that any of these people are moving back to Trump. Electorally, the Republicans haven't shown anything, despite the fact that the first half of the Biden presidency wasn't exactly a cakewalk. But that's just my opinion. I don't know what you're supposed to do with it. You can disagree with it, and you may have a point, but after tomorrow what I think and what you think won't matter. The votes will be counted, a winner declared, and Dr. Oz's midterm performance won't matter, and my being wrong about it won't have an effect on anything.
No, it's a referendum on whose tribe is larger, better organized, and has seized the moral high-ground of the culture. Pumping up your own supporters through exhortation (we're winning - one more great surge of effort, comrades, and we shall triumph!) or demoralizing the enemy through propaganda (your puny candidate is weak and is failing! Abandon hope and don't waste your efforts and resources in what is obviously a doomed cause!) are valid tactics.
It's an election, though, not a bloody melee. In a melee you want your side to believe you've got the enemy grossly outnumbered and so there's definitely no need for any of Us to break and rout before we force Them to. In an election you want your side to believe you're tied with the enemy and so there's definitely a need for Us to get our lazy butts off the couches rather than either conceding to Them or letting our overconfidence cause an upset.
Hopefully we're just doing the exhortation thing because our psychology evolved through far less history with elections than with bloody melees (100s of years vs 100s of millennia?), not because we've had a few slightly-bloody melees recently and we want to be prepared for when they get much bloodier.
Well, you want your side to believe it is close and while you are winning if you don’t do something we’ll lose. People like a winner so gives them good feelings there but you don’t want complacency.
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Elections are, in no small part, symbolic melees. We do things memetically and through balloting as a slightly-more-symbolic version of the "stand on opposing hill-tops outside of spear range and ineffectually chuck things at each other while yelling to establish bravery and dominance" paradigm that prevailed throughout most of human history, and a much-more-symbolic version of the "line up in two opposing phalanxes and grind against each other until someone breaks and runs away" that got more common in Europe during recorded history.
Either way they're still contests with dominance and submission on the line; we've just decided to accept proxy battles for the real thing.
Exactly.
The way I've heard it is that an election is a simulated civil war. Both teams show up, you count up the members, assume the larger side would win, then everybody accepts the results and goes home because actually fighting the war would involve lots of unnecessary death and destruction.
Problem #1: Because of median voter theorem, both sides converge to political positions that are almost equally appealing to the center, meaning each side is only winning elections by a few percentage points of the population. This makes it much more likely that the losing side could win the war than e.g. a 30%-70% split, and makes the incentive for the loser to flip the table much larger.
Problem #2: When democracy was first implemented, the franchise was limited to white landowning men. Each expansion of the franchise to people who make for worse soldiers and workers (women, blacks, etc.) has represented a decoupling between the number of voters on each side and that side's actual military and productive capacity, meaning it is no longer at all obvious that the smaller side would lose a civil war. As the sides specialize to appeal to different demographics, the incentive for the party of white men to realize that they are getting screwed for no good reason and start shooting is, again, greatly increased.
(The elites know this, which is why they spend so much time and effort preventing white men from developing class consciousness.)
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