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naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (text post)   28014 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

I called him Nate Bronze back in 2016: I'm calling him Nate Bronze now.

I wonder how much of Nate's success was simply applying some relatively decent methods to what was formerly a pretty midwit domain. Perhaps a similar comp would be the rise of sports analytics. It's not exactly rocket science, yet prior to the last couple decades, there was far too much credence given to human intuition over hard data.

Silver made some big improvements in the meta, but now the world has caught up. So he's not quite the oracle he once was.

Nate's model is basically the simplest obvious way to project election results from polls. A motivated high schooler could have built it. At the time he started, however, people and pundits were basically idiots, and even now most people just want a commentator that says why their preferred candidate is going to win.

His only edge now is that he's pretty principled with his modeling choices and doesn't bow to angry Twitter people. Which is rather rare: if you want to build an audience, the easiest way is to just tell your audience what they want to hear.

Since Elon's takeover, building an audience seems to be as simple as being anti-left

Very saturated now though. Becoming a fresh right wing Twitter personality puts you up against some very stiff competition. Sadly even the constant struggle to stay on top has burned out a lot of good men: 0HPLovecraft is about to hit -10

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