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naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (text post)   28015 thread views

U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

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Did Nate Silver just get obliterated by some twitter random (Keith Rabois) for 100K? Back a month ago there was this exchange where Nate asked this dude for a binding promise to transfer 100K if Trump didn't win by 8 points in Florida. Nate seemed pretty confident and I assumed he knew what he was doing. The other guy seemed like an angry lower-caps twitter dude.

https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1842211340720504895

Florida is 91% in and it's looking pretty bad for Nate: https://www.axios.com/visuals/presidential-election-results-2024-updates-harris-trump?selectedRaces=all

Trump 5,864,014 56.1% Harris 4,491,712 43.0

Am I fundamentally misunderstanding what's going on here? It seems very bad for Mr Forecaster if he bets so confidently and gets nuked.

Edit: According to Rabois Nate Silver later withdrew his offer of a bet: https://x.com/rabois/status/1853971462744359299

The continued glazing of Nate Silver, and the absurd belief in the validity of modern polling, betrays that the Rationalist/Rat-adjascent community is pathologically obsessed with appearing to be "scientific," at the expense of actually being right.

As I have pointed out ad nauseum, the shift to landline surveys has destroyed polling. No, Nate was not "less wrong" when he shifted his probabilities in 2016 to give Trump around 30%; there wasn't a single poll at the time that justified his change, but you lot still want to believe his model has any validity, and we'll be playing this same song and dance 4 years from now, and likely, until the end of the republic.

I'm not a Nate fanboy, I read Scott's most recent post (TLDR: Polymarket bad, Metaculus good, Nate good) with disapproval back when it was written. I am a Polymarket true believer. But I wasn't brave enough to post my thoughts beforehand since I thought Nate might have some idea about what he was doing...

Proposing a bet and then refusing to sign it (and then being proved wrong later) is very poor sportsmanship though. It shows his true beliefs are not aligned with what he says.

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