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naraburns  nihil supernum  5mo ago (text post)   27920 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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Just wanted to point out the big losers of last night were:

  1. Harris
  2. DEI (with Harris being the epitome of the DEI candidate)
  3. Selzer
  4. Silver
  5. RDS (clearly the party will be JD’s after this term though I could obviously see RDS as a running mate)

The big winners:

  1. Vance (his star is ascending massively)
  2. Trump
  3. Betting markets (crushed the poll prognosticators)
  4. Elon

It's weird that the Modal outcome happening means Silver lost.

(no seriously his forecast was that trumps most likely path to victory was sweeping all 6 swing states happening 20% of the time)

His other 3 forecasts for most likely trump victory being

Winning everything but Michigan and wisconsin, winning everything but wisconsin, and winning everything but nevada.

When you read deeper into his forecast as to how each candidate would win you see that it's basically "win by a narrow margin in every single major contest causing a blowout in the score"

His whole “job” is predicting elections. He literally said “idk.” in terms of doing his job that is actually worse than being wrong. What a failure.

But...sometimes things really are 50/50. If I tell you an unweighted coin is equally likely to come up heads or tails, I'm not somehow at fault for not being able to give you more insight than that.

This is the exact misunderstanding of statistics that kills Silver, is confusing aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty.

Aleatoric uncertainty comes from the irreducible randomness of a process. Epistemic uncertainty comes from a lack of knowledge.

The election was not 50/50 going into Tuesday. In terms of aleatoric uncertainty it was nearly 100/0. People’s votes were essentially predetermined at that point. If you reset the timeline to Tuesday morning, you would get the same result every time.

Silver’s epidemic uncertainty was high. That’s not because the election was impossible to predict (I made a lot of money off of it), it’s because he’s an idiot and refuses to update based on past results.

If there is no way of acquiring that knowledge, then those two types of uncertainty are, for all intents and purposes, the same.

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