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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.
I also think it's important to remember the lesson Scott tried to drive home here, that absolutely no one heeded: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/07/tuesday-shouldnt-change-the-narrative/
Back in 2016, I believe Scott was right, and yet, immediately EVERYONE's narrative shifted to "Trump beat Hilary because of <whatever reason: racism, sexism, Trump was better then her, people liked him, people disliked her, etc>". I think Scott's lesson is probably right here as well, but already no one is acting that way. On this very thread, we have many people saying Harris's win is inevitable because leftists control institutions, or Trump's win is inevitable because Harris is less likable or more stupid than Biden or Hilary ever were. Once one of them wins tomorrow, everyone will be frantically updating their priors accordingly, in order to make their world make sense. But should they really, or are they just overfitting to noise?
Oh man, thanks for finding that link! It's what I was thinking about but couldn't find in this comment a couple days ago.
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