this is where we talk about nate silver's 'most livable neighborhood in nyc' ranking

would = woulda

have lived in 1, 17, 18 and 20

i question the ranking of #2, frankly

i mean it's expensive, debris-strewn, and filled with fucking douchebags at night

yeah, even worse, w/ the 'livability calculator' (http://nymag.com/realestate/neighborhoods/2010/65355/) it's the #1 neighborhood for "Young, Single, and Cash-Strapped"

yeah when I saw that I thought, "LES must be cheaper than I imagined"

and Greenpoint kid-friendlier than I imagined

LES ranking is totally bizarre--i dont understand what figures hes looking at to say that its cheap.

i voted prospect heights btw due to it feeling like one of the few places that has some combination of an interesting nightlife without an overwhelming jerkoff factor

a lot of individual stats are straight up wtf - for example: jackson heights scores 32nd on food and LIC scores 14th.

i voted prospect heights btw

<3<3 u rock

i mean technically i live in crown heights i guess??? but i spend 90% of my time in the prosp

there also should have been some kind of adjacent-neighborhood halo effect taken into account. a friend of mine who used to live in bk heights was like "sure brooklyn heights has mostly shitty bars and restaurants, but all the stuff nearby in cobble hill basically functions as part of the neighborhood"

xpost I live in P Heights proper

where did you move to, max? we should go to Washington Commons or something. I was just there the other day

freddy's r.i.p.

jackson heights scores 32nd on food

yeah that's completely messed up, I've gone to Jax Heights for food and it's an hour-plus away!

im at franklin & bergen! we should do a washington/vanderbilt bar crawl

to me #3 and #31 are alike in so many ways and the fact that they so far apart makes me think silver's "science" is dubious at best

yeah I really like inwood and was surprised it didn't do better, but sunnyside really profited from being #1 on the diversity statistic (and the fact that nate really, really low-balled sunnyside rents...)

wow I used 'really' 4 times in that sentence

also this is splitting hairs cause they're #1 and #2 and basically the same neighborhood....but there's no way sunnyside is more 'diverse' than woodside

this is the most relevant fact imo
When I moved to New York from Chicago last April

haha idk I've been here even less time than that

(and most native new yorkers that I talk to seem sorta proud of the fact that they never leave their immediate surroundings)

not that I'm claiming to be an expert on anything...more that I don't think that your average person who's been here 10 years really would have done a better job

I've lived in Crown Heights but voted for Washington Heights cause that's where I live now and repping for my hood!

yo where's the creative capital at?

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

People sometimes say that Prospect Heights has OK nightlife. I live here, and like it for other reasons, but it doesn't. What do you have in mind? Soda Bar? The Vanderbilt? Washington Commons? er...

sure! i mean what do you mean by "OK nightlife"? all im looking for is a handful of bars with crowds that dont make me feel like committing suicide

when i lived in prospect heights, i liked washington commons. do not like franklin park usually. sepia is alright, was down the block from me. don't really like soda, or plan b. sharlene's has a trivia night we've been to a few times.

also, brooklyn museum's first saturdays are fun. (believe it or not.)

yeah im not a soda fan. franklin park is OK! and now has a good burger place attached. wash commons is good, i like woodwork so far. havent been to vanderbilt.

starlite lounge is fun but i guess thats crown heights

i mean i would 10000000% rather go out in p'spect heights than williamsburg or really anywhere in manhattan

I was forced to take G shuttle bus today; Greenpoint looks livable, but can I afford it? I'd love to pay less rent but I hate hate hate moving.

Also, Sunday Times pimping LIC in real-estate sec today.

also let's drink in P' Heights real soon huh?

trains were awful this weekend. we should do a p-heights fap some weekend soon tho.

i also was fucked by a shuttle bus today! noticed the G was fucked, took the L to the F without checking first & the F was also not running past jay street. took a shuttle bus and was half an hour late to meet a girl for scrabble. d'oh.

Dozens of trains fucked every weekend.

Bunch of bus stops in my nabe have notices of end-of-June service cuts - no overnight B67!

"meet a girl for scrabble"

easily decoded

avoided the g this weekend, but I love how the service advisories still often refer to forest hills - despite the fact that service past court square is officially 100% cut.

so is nate silver gay or what

― jordan s (J0rdan S.), Friday, October 31, 2008 2:10 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://out.com/Out100/slideshow.asp?slideshow_title=Out100&theID=270#Top

i'm going to delete my ilx login while playing a youtube of the smashmouth concert at the end of 'rat race'

there are no remaining questions left to be answered

wow!

for some reason I would have never guessed this

Oh Natepaws.

at first it seems kinda douchey otoh I don't really see the harm in nate silver making a buck however the hell he wants to, it's not like he's joining goldman sachs

hey he's the mind behind the 7th or 8th most accurate baseball statistical forecasting model.

still a better deal than the fuckin freakeconomics dude

wonder what the most livable hood is when you make $1k/hr?

http://skreened.com/render-product/k/q/m/kqmtifiksakkytlonaus/drunk-nate-silver.american-apparel-unisex-fitted-tee.white.w760h760.jpg

His book is really boringly written sadly. Not sure how much of this I'll be able to get through.

a statistician? boring? no way!

haha I find the fivethirtyeight and his baseball writing pretty good actually. This is just dragging. And anyway this book is about as much real statistics as Malcolm Gladwell's are social psychology or sociology or whatever.

yes, his baseball stuff was always engaging and readable.

fortunately I don't give a damn about everything he's done since, so never considered picking up this book.

alex have you read black swan? has its own problems writing style-wise (massive ego, abuse of footnotes) but boring not one of them

http://blogs.reuters.com/jackshafer/2013/07/22/nate-silver-and-a-general-theory-of-media-exodus

Silver's doing a live Q&A on Deadspin right now. Love this one...

So you didn't quite fit into the culture at the New York Times. How excited are you to work alongside Colin Cowherd and Rick Reilly?

site is live - http://fivethirtyeight.com/

... why can't they just have one unified RSS feed

The place really looks great compared to how bad grantland looked at launch

The books in my office — I have about 500 — are arranged by color. It’s quite aesthetically pleasing. It’s not all that convenient, however, when I have to track down a book. I have to remember its color, or I have to scan through every row and column of the shelf. The color-coding system is perhaps a little better as an organizational method than shelving the books at random, but not a lot better. Still, with 500 books, it’s a manageable problem. In the worst case, I might spend a few minutes looking for a book. I’m willing to make that trade in exchange for having a prettier bookshelf.

http://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/natebookcase.jpeg?w=610

why would you do this

It does look kinda cool tbh

I hope at the very least it's alphabetized within color, jesus christ

If you're doing this for visual effect (and why else would you do it) what possible sense can there be in wrapping around from the end of one shelf to the beginning of the next shelf? See the yellow books in the picture. They are not even visually contiguous.

I used to arrange my CDs (jewel boxes) like this. It made it surprisingly easy to find them.

http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/full-width/images/2014/03/blogs/democracy-america/20140322_usp505.jpghttp://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/full-width/images/2014/03/blogs/democracy-america/20140322_usp505.jpghttp://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/full-width/images/2014/03/blogs/democracy-america/20140322_usp505.jpg

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-it-costs-to-live-in-broad-city/

this site is so bad

i don't think i've looked at it since the week it launched?

these guys need to put up some election tracking graphs already and make it front and center

pretty sure it would bring in more pageviews than their impression of slate

this guy, jeez

It's no prob because I'm glad it's getting more visibility but you're kind of stealing this take from me.https://t.co/mqMzD84Onh

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 5, 2021

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIZCkaAWYAIawJJ?format=jpg&name=medium

Dumb, but Clara Jeffrey is an idiot as well, and two can play at that game

We are living through a mass trauma event, arguably the most far-reaching in human history, so cut yourself and everybody else some slack.

— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) November 23, 2021

looool

literally her pinned tweet rn, not like I went digging for it

the worst person you know, etc

"suppose you think"

do you think this, Nate?

I swear to god, even if the hypotheticals were good, this style of dropping "just thinking bout things" tweets to drive engagement are a plague. Too heavy to address in a twitter response, too fucking dumb to write a thinkpiece with that as the premise

what's the difference between "making people wear masks and vaccinate is literally the holocaust" and what he's doing? oh he's just asking hypothetically, what if a guy thought this

"during hour 55 of a $20k buy-in poker tourney recently, i found myself reflecting on the suffering of america's children..."

fired from his own website lol

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/nate-silver-leaves-538-abc-news-disney-layoffs-1235401689/

this guy is turning into a case study

https://i.imgur.com/Ao8F2pn.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/lxZQnCm.jpg

i mean 'capitalism is perfect because of social darwinism' is an incredible take

Ah yes, capitalism, which has famously existed for thousands of years

OK but the bump of this thread has made me go "wha?" At the poll results.

Like, that is... what? An 8-way tie for first place and a 42-way tie for last place? With nothing in between?

that's the sort of thing that happens when only eight people vote

I fuckin knew you guys weren't bumping this to talk about nate silver's 'most livable neighborhood in nyc' ranking

as i have resided in carroll gardens for 17 years and not died, i pronounce it 'livable'

Just thinking about this poll though, by this division of neighborhoods one could reside at, say, the corner of Bergen St. and Court St. and be at the nexus of Carroll Gardens/Gowanus and Cobble Hill/Boerum Hill, meaning you would be at the intersection of two top 10 neighborhoods that are really four neighborhoods and you'd be a major VIP.

THIS IS NOT REAL 😱@NateSilver538

📺: https://t.co/RDDbISuhxe

Use code WSOP24 to save $20 on an annual PokerGO subscription. pic.twitter.com/tkBPZJcC0f

— PokerGO (@PokerGO) June 7, 2024

haha wrecked

Clemenza, if you're reading: I think this excerpt from Nate's appearance on The Ezra Klein Show this week nicely summarizes his journey over the past few years (and why many people who used to like him now find him insufferable):

We’ve known each other a long time; we’re old-school bloggers. My read of you is that somewhat over the 2016 election, then specifically over the pandemic — and your experience with online liberalism in the pandemic — you became much more disillusioned with the people who once felt to you like your group, your coalition, your tribe. There’s been kind of an alienation for you. Is that a fair read?

Yeah, I’d say it’s — no. 1 was the 2016 aftermath. I thought a lot of the liberal and centrist news media kind of were in denial about their own role in the “but her email” stuff and then picked scapegoats for Trump’s victory that were not the real reasons that he won. Russian bot farms have approximately nothing to do with why Donald Trump won the 2016 election. And the Russia stuff in general was treated with an order of magnitude of more importance than it probably objectively had. And blaming Facebook and the tech industry for that — I thought that was irresponsible. And the discussion over the polls in 2016, where there was some revisionist history. The polls actually showed a pretty close race — we had Trump with a 30 percent chance. And it was the conventional wisdom that assumed he was dead in the water.

Part 2 was the pandemic, absolutely. And, “orange man bad,” I think, was often the reason people believed a lot of what they believed. Because in some ways the move to shut down society kind of went against the values of traditional liberalism. There’s a transfer of welfare from younger people and people who are not able to work from home to wealthy suburbanites and older people who you’re protecting their health, but you’re undermining the education of millions of school kids around the country, and essential workers are still putting themselves at risk that you deem unacceptable for people who are able to work with laptops to take. So I thought it was very self-serving, and I thought expertise was co-opted and corrupted by political partisans.

And then the third was the Biden stuff.

It seemed to me that it happened for you before the Biden stuff. My sense was that you ended up in a lot of fights on Twitter with liberals who had a much lower risk tolerance than you did. You began to see habits of what you call “the village.”

Yeah, and that’s been a term that’s been used by others. But the village is basically media, politics, government, the progressive establishment, The New York Times, Harvard University ——

The establishment, “the regime.”

Yeah.

You’ve also called it the indigo blob in different ways. You began to see it as a set of aligned cognitive tendencies that you disagreed with. What were they?

So one of them is the failure to do what I call decoupling. It’s not my term. Decoupling is the act of separating an issue from the context. The example I gave in the book is that if you’re able to say, “I abhor the Chick-fil-A’s C.E.O.’s position on gay marriage” — I don’t know if it’s changed or not, but he was anti-gay marriage at least for some period of time — “but they make a really delicious chicken sandwich.” That’s decoupling. Or, you can say, you know, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, separate the art from the artist kind of thing. That tendency goes against the tendency on the progressive left to care a lot about the identity of the speaker, in terms of racial or gender identity and in terms of their credentials.

In this other world that I call “the river,” the kind of gambling, risk-taking world, all that matters is that you’re right. It doesn’t matter who you are; it matters that you’re right and you’re able to prove it or bet on it in some way.

And that’s very against the kind of credentialism that you have within the progressive Democratic left, which I also call the “indigo blob” because it’s a fusion of purple and blue. There’s not a clear separation between the nonpartisan centrist media and the left-leaning progressive media rooting for Democrats. Different parts of The New York Times have both those functions.

And as someone who’s more on the nonpartisan side — even though, again, I would prefer to see Kamala Harris than Donald Trump — I think people are exploiting the trust that institutions have earned for political gain.

Also, it's not in the transcript, but in the podcast itself, Nate admits that if Biden hadn't dropped out, he probably would've voted for the Libertarian candidate this year.

Thanks. I've gotten glimmers of what you mean in the couple of weeks I've been subscribing, but there's still a lot I like about his approach to polling. And in most cases--not all; however each case hits me, that's how it hits me--I'm a separate-the-art-from-the-artist person too, so that's not an issue for me. Most people aren't, so I understand why that becomes a problem.

bring it over here guys

So this is where I admit that I liked Maria Konnikova's The Biggest Bluff enough to subscribe to the podcast she does with Silver. I can't square how he does so well at gambling because the way he cherry picks data is inexcusable.

Eliminated his built-in convention bounce for Harris, and has things back to where, as far as I can tell, everyone has the election: virtually dead-even. Even the Princeton Consortium guy (who got attention in 2016 for saying Clinton was 95% certain--really high, I remember that much) has it at 50/50. I have to believe the debate matters, especially if it ends up being the only one.

(Looked up Princeton Consortium on a whim--had no idea if they were still around.)

I want to issue an immediate mea culpa about Silver, being one of the two or three people who's been defending him recently--not him personally, but the credibility of his projections (which, if you've been following, swung wildly towards Harris after the changeover, and has swung wildly back to Trump in the last week or so). I don't care at all about Nate Silver the person--how arrogant he is, what he Tweets, his gambling adventures, etc. I'm only interested in the polling he does.

I came across a new Salon piece today, though, which had this:

Silver's now being scrutinized for a potential conflict of interest after joining the crypto-based gambling company Polymarket as an advisor in July, and pushed his model while promoting election betting opportunities.

“Feels like it should be a bigger deal that Nate Silver is employed by Polymarket, a site that allows you to bet on political outcomes, and also runs a “prediction model” that has the ability to directly affect betting behavior,” journalist Brett Meiselas wrote on X.

That does seem huge to me, and I don't think I've seen mention of it here yet. (Someone did joke about him shorting Trump so he could recoup gambling losses.) More than "potential"--that's a flat-out conflict of interest if true.

https://www.salon.com/2024/09/06/nate-silver-faces-backlash-for-pro-model-skewing/

uhh yeah given Nate's reputation I always thought it was weird that no one questioned that

This is a big red flag too:

Silver’s model gives Trump a greater chance of winning than most forecasts, which has earned him fans in MAGA World. Those new boosters include former President Trump, who used Silver's model as evidence that he wasn’t losing as badly as polling averages suggested.

That is full circle from 2012, when, as I said the other day, Republicans threw daily fits about him continuing to insist that Obama had the election well in hand (leading directly to the "Unskewed Polls" site).

Nate Silver doesn’t do polling, though, he does analysis of polls and election markets. And the weighting of polls can be done statistically, but how those weights are assigned has always had a taste of secret sauce.

He’s not alone in the betting. This resurfaced after a couple of years. Whatever happened to these guys?
https://www.politico.com/minutes/congress/11-1-2022/

The main difference between 2012 and systems like IEM is they were specifically modeled after stock market prediction. The dominant model is now unabashedly sports betting because it’s ubiquitous in the US. What’s evident now is that for the oddsmakers, it was always based on sports betting. It’s just that you couldn’t admit you were a habitual sports gambler in much of the US because it was an underground market.

(there is no way Silver wasn’t betting on baseball, though)

(that was a rhetorical question re: McElwee and company. they were all betting hard in the midterms, making straw donations to candidates funded by SBX/Sam Bankman-Fried, etc. Richie Torres remains at large and very annoying)

Yeah the Thiel-Polymarket connection raises lots of questions. I think Silver probably has enough self-respect to safeguard the sanctity of his model, but anything beyond that — like his commentary over the weekend that maybe Shapiro would have been a better pick than Walz — I think starts to look even more suspect than it already did. He's always had a tendency toward punditry that goes beyond the statistical mechanics of his models, and now that punditry absolutely should be seen in light of his employers.

is this the same self-respecting Nate Silver who reportedly half-assed a book recently and it has notes indicating he used some chatgpt to clean up his prose

In the bestselling The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver showed how forecasting would define the age of Big Data. Now, in this timely and riveting new book, Silver investigates “the River,” the community of like-minded people whose mastery of risk allows them to shape—and dominate—so much of modern life.

These professional risk-takers—poker players and hedge fund managers, crypto true believers and blue-chip art collectors—can teach us much about navigating the uncertainty of the twenty-first century. By immersing himself in the worlds of Doyle Brunson, Peter Thiel, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Altman, and many others, Silver offers insight into a range of issues that affect us all, from the frontiers of finance to the future of AI.

Most of us don’t have traits commonly found in the River: high tolerance for risk, appreciation of uncertainty, affinity for numbers—paired with an instinctive distrust of conventional wisdom and a competitive drive so intense it can border on irrational. For those in the River, complexity is baked in, and the work is how to navigate it. People in the River have increasing amounts of wealth and power in our society, and understanding their mindset—and the flaws in their thinking— is key to understanding what drives technology and the global economy today.

Taking us behind the scenes from casinos to venture capital firms, and from the FTX inner sanctum to meetings of the effective altruism movement, On the Edge is a deeply reported, all-access journey into a hidden world of power bro­kers and risk-takers.

The review I heard was very aggravated by the fact he calls this group "the River" while also referring to hold-em poker repeatedly, which also has a river, which is almost the complete opposite conceptually

It used to be you used to have all the vices to be powerful, now it’s just gambling and lying? Whatever happened to starting the day with a couple pints of hard cider like the founding fathers?

Or owning slaves?

is this the same self-respecting Nate Silver who reportedly half-assed a book recently and it has notes indicating he used some chatgpt to clean up his prose

lol yes, but I still have some confidence he'll protect "the model" from outside interference. Not saying his self-respect goes beyond that — he is taking Peter Thiel's money after all — but that's his thing, his pride and joy, his baby boy.

The whole veneration of "risk taking" is such broke-brain Silicon Valley BS obviously, because it's defining "risk" in narrow and dumb ways. Basically "talking your way into using other people's money to try to build something, hype it up and sell it before anyone realizes it's not very useful or doesn't really work." As opposed to the risk of, like, wage-slaving for a major corporation in 2024 with minimal benefits and no job security.

as opposed to the risk of a construction job, where you can get injured and die

And often as an undocumented migrant worker who went through hell just to get that chance, yeah.

old large corporations, governments, other institutions take risks all the time. it's just under a mitigated model where you're not gambling the entire enterprise should the effort fail to produce viable results

I should at least skim the book to see if he mentions Elizabeth Holmes (bluffing, had nothing in her hand), Elon Musk (bluffed for years on Tesla being about to do something viable, eventually delivered a low pair despite assuring regulators he had pocket kings or w/e), or VC pharma grifts like Vivek (had Uno cards but was playing poker, regulators tell him he wasn't playing Uno but he'd already walked away with the pot)

I think Silver probably has enough self-respect to safeguard the sanctity of his model

this is very "the cybertruck incinerated my wife and dog but i still think it has a lot to offer"

is it? I don't think tipsy is suggesting the model has any worth, just that Silver thinks it does.

Yeah I just don't see any upside for him in juking the model. I mean you could hypothesize a scenario where he owes Russian mobsters millions of dollars in gambling debts and that kind of thing, sure. But absent that, this is his whole thing, it's his brand and identity. He has a whole lot invested in it.

I don't know if it got cross-posted here but Silver tweeted something about how he was betting on professional darts and just picking dudes who looked cool, then noticed someone was seemingly adjusting the odds on a betting site based on how he was betting. A pretty apt metaphor for people just following his lede re: the odds if ever there was one

Sincere question: do poll numbers, whether your poll or as an aggregator like Silver, necessarily affect voters in the way that you want them to if you're looking to do that? If Silver says, for example, Trump has a 55% chance of winning, does that depress turnout on the other side (because it looks hopeless) or does it motivate turnout (because of the urgency of losing)? Are the two reactions more or less a wash?

In any event, his connection to that betting site does seem very wrong to me. I'm just going to assume what the consensus seems to be, that it's a coin-flip right now.

probably not but I do think it drives traffic a lot which is probably what Silver really cares about

the more I think about it the worse the betting site thing looks, constantly shifting the odds does seem like it might drive gambling not to mention you really want there to be an equal amount of action on both sides which is something you could directly affect if you were the big name aggregator

to be clear though I'm not accusing Nate of doing anything uncouth here but I do think there's just way too much uncertainty baked into his model. right now it has Trump with a 42% chance of winning the popular vote which still seems crazy to me. Trump is a much worse candidate than he was in 2024 and he's running against someone who is pulling in huge amounts of small donations and is drawing pretty large and enthusiastic crowds (which Trump very much is not). I don't think there are any actual data points to support the idea that Trump's gonna do 6,000,000 votes better this time around. even in 2016, the last time Rs actually did well in a national election, Trump still lost it by 3 million. so where exactly does this 42% come from? "shit happens"?

Sorry to digress but is Park Slope still Number One?

we'll never know what's livable

xp presumably everything's aggregated from some granular level (district? state?) on up and the 42% is a statistical probability that a certain number of segments of the populace vote that way. people are phenomenally bad at understanding statistical probabilities outside of "this will almost definitely happen" to "this will almost definitely not happen" so 42% seems large unless you dig into why that's the prediction

it's also why at this point everyone is teetering over individual polls. they might mean something in specific areas, but aggregating them across the entire country is tricky. you just end up identifying supposed battlegrounds, make a best guess given known polls for those battlegrounds, and then settle on a number

idk, I feel like I'm decent with stats, it seems to me what this is saying is that there is a 42% chance that Donald Trump gets more votes and a 58% chance Kamala Harris does

I get that if you just take the polls and throw in a bunch of entropy you'd get results like that. but I do not get how that coorelates to what we're seeing in the real world. for him to make up 6 million votes he would have to be significantly more popular than he's ever been. and specifically it would have to be amongst a subset of people who didn't vote in 2020 or 2022, who don't show up to his rallies, and aren't donating money. it would requite a fundamental shift in the way Americans vote by demographic, something which has not been accounted for in any election since 2016 so far, in fact if any fundamentals have changed it's been because of Dobbs, which has caused Dems to consistently overperform their poll numbers.

so to me, if you're gonna insist that Trump is actually gonna do way way better this time, you'd at least want some real data to support that??

we'll never know what's livable

Nate still hasn't finished his 2008 Wicker Park Burrito Bracket

if you just take the polls and throw in a bunch of entropy you'd get results like that. but I do not get how that coorelates to what we're seeing in the real world

well it all depends on whether 1. you think the polls are indicative of real world results and 2. whether you think Silver's weighting of polls makes any sense

I think you've got it at the beginning, this is a weighting that seems iffy and entropy looks like hand waving. what pollsters see in the real world is an extrapolation of polls. also, the polls are already extrapolated! I don't know how many are giving the raw numbers

Fwiw I’d buy it from a different R candidate, thing is there’s just so much data on Trump right now, he’s not exactly a political wildcard. Yes a large swath of the population would vote for him even if he devoured a baby on live television. A larger swath hates his fucking guts. You really think Joe Biden gets 81 million votes vs. anyone else?

Unfortunately, to state the obvious, that large swath is disproportionately located in California, New York, and other safe states--the EC is the problem. Even Trump's nomination in 2016 was a fluke of wonky math, the way he won 20 state primaries (I checked) without ever cracking 50%--usually he was in the 30s.

well yeah exactly, I don't doubt he can win the EC in a 2016-style scenario where he still loses the popular vote

btw apparently Thiel is also an investor in Truth Social? whose stock value right now is entirely dependent on the chances of Trump's victory? idk that feels like it may be a conflict of interest

Unfortunately, to state the obvious, that large swath is disproportionately located in California, New York, and other safe states--the EC is the problem. Even Trump's nomination in 2016 was a fluke of wonky math, the way he won 20 state primaries (I checked) without ever cracking 50%--usually he was in the 30s.

― clemenza, Monday, 9 September 2024 23:09 (yesterday) link

Isn’t that just because he had multiple opponents in the primary? Not seeing how that’s a “fluke or wonky math” nor does it have anything to do with the electoral college or peculiarities of the American system

Because he had so many opponents, yes. Primaries/general are not the same I know, just drawing the parallel that he won the nomination consistently getting less than 50% support--often less than 40%--and also won the election with under 50% (and fewer votes than his opponent). He led a charmed life.

I wonder, if miraculously given the chance to go back, his ~10 opponents in 2016 for the nomination could put egos aside and settle on just one of them, thus sparing the world much misery. Ted Cruz, Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum...probably not.

yeah if those guys knew then what we know now...they would have done the exact same thing

btw apparently Thiel is also an investor in Truth Social? whose stock value right now is entirely dependent on the chances of Trump's victory? idk that feels like it may be a conflict of interest

I dunno. Sounds like Thiel is serving his own interests pretty clearly. Where's the conflict?

nate silver is a statistics major with terrible hair. and that's it

clemenza has seen this before with bill james -- nate is a guy who was proved correct once (by math) a long time ago, and now he thinks he knows everything just by vibes

(won't even get into how fucked-up political polls are now -- who on earth answers their phone from an unknown number and gives the caller an answer that 'we' should somehow rely upon)

i think we've all heard the story of elon playing poker and going all-in on every decent hand because he can afford to buy back in; apparently n8 considers this 'risk' and something that everyone should emulate

Question for people complaining about polls: do you write nasty letters to your meteorologist when they predict a 45% chance rain?

That reminds me of when my sister saw a forecast of 100% rain and I had to explain to her it meant a 100% chance of rain and not that it would rain all day and all night.

Used to work in a small office with an (otherwise fairly sane) man who was furious at the very idea of weather forecasting and would embark on a lengthy rant if you ever made the mistake of mentioning it

I wonder, if miraculously given the chance to go back, his ~10 opponents in 2016 for the nomination could put egos aside and settle on just one of them, thus sparing the world much misery. Ted Cruz, Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum...probably not.

― clemenza, Tuesday, 10 September 2024 03:00 (eight hours ago) link

yeah if those guys knew then what we know now...they would have done the exact same thing

― intheblanks, Tuesday, 10 September 2024 04:17 (seven hours ago) link

I tend to think none of them emerged as a particularly strong challenger to Trump and that’s why they all stayed in so long.

re: meteorology
In a previous job experience I helped support a client-facing website that did aggregate data from weather sources to do some reporting. Clients did complain when the site claimed they received half an inch of rain and they got significantly more or less. It turns out most of that reporting was just data from the National Weather Service, who mostly had rain gauges at airports. As time went on, models extrapolating precipitation based on actual and cloud formation data have become more common.

At the time, there was a program where the weather data company would subsidize the installation of a mini weather station on the complainer’s property, which then got added to their reported data. A mess because it’s a fight about who owns the station, the data, etc.

So yeah, when it’s business critical, meteorological companies, like polling companies, will figure out how to make fudged numbers more closely reflect actual observed conditions

That reminds me of when my sister saw a forecast of 100% rain and I had to explain to her it meant a 100% chance of rain and not that it would rain all day and all night.

― pisspoor bung probe prog (Tom D.), Tuesday, 10 September 2024 11:01 (two hours ago) link

a meteorologist is actually not a bad comparison of what he's doing.

My comment more about the end users. US Pol threads filled with people in denial re: polls showing an incredibly close race. I get it, polls make me anxious too.

"Filled"

oh I know it's gonna be a close race that'll be determined by a sum total of like 80,000 across 3 or 4 states, all I'm saying is a model that gives Trump nearly a coinflip at winning the popular vote is probably not accurate

It turns out most of that reporting was just data from the National Weather Service, who mostly had rain gauges at airports.

This reminds me of when I lived on the east coast; the temperature in New Jersey would always be shown as significantly higher than the temperature in NYC, and I used to joke to my wife that this was because the weathermen had stuck one thermometer in the tarmac at Newark Airport, and left another resting under a tree in Central Park.

not far off!

I remember local tv stations would advertise things like SUPER DOPPLER to try to differentiate themselves from their peers. There were a handful of places that did have additional equipment, but 99% of the time tv meteorologists in this country would just eyeball the NWS data and maybe add some guesses, throw their own overlays over the NWS radar data, etc. Some of the larger networks or organizations contract with more specific providers. What was formerly just The Weather Channel is some mess that's now owned by IBM and they sell direct weather data, predictions, etc. Other providers (DTN comes to mind) would show up for specific slices of the market. I think at one point that one was "official weather service of the PGA" because golfers care so much about weather etc.

afaik Nate Silver and others are doing that kind of hand-waving over a bunch of independent sources in a similar way

That reminds me of when my sister saw a forecast of 100% rain and I had to explain to her it meant a 100% chance of rain and not that it would rain all day and all night.

Apparently this was the year when a bunch of people learned that the percentage is actually a geographical representation of HOW MUCH of the reporting area is expected to see rain at some point during the measurement period. So "45% chance of rain on Tuesday" means 45% of the territory will see some rain at some point on Tuesday.

Wild.

My spouse doesn't even bother going that far. If they even see the rain icon on the forecast their assumption is nothing but rain, despite how many times i've tried explaining that's not the case.

Yeah, this argument happens every year at this time in South Florida. When people hear "60 percent chance of rain," they think there's a 60 percent chance rain -- intense blinding rain, of course -- will fall on their neighborhood.

I have to re-learn that periodically, and I still don't really get it. Does 20% chance mean 20% of the land area has 100% chance?

xp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_d7xzbGgWA

Apparently this was the year when a bunch of people learned that the percentage is actually a geographical representation of HOW MUCH of the reporting area is expected to see rain at some point during the measurement period. So "45% chance of rain on Tuesday" means 45% of the territory will see some rain at some point on Tuesday.

That's not what it means in the UK.

But you guys also spell color with a u

Must be one of those American Things.

Seriously though, has anyone told the National Weather Service?

https://www.weather.gov/lmk/pops

I have to re-learn that periodically, and I still don't really get it. Does 20% chance mean 20% of the land area has 100% chance?

It's a bit more complicated but it's that multiplied by a chance of precipitation happening at all. Source:
https://www.weather.gov/media/pah/WeatherEducation/pop.pdf

To summarize, the probability of precipitation is simply a statistical probability of 0.01" inch or
more of precipitation at a given area in the given forecast area in the time period specified. Using
a 40% probability of rain as an example, it does not mean (1) that 40% of the area will be
covered by precipitation at given time in the given forecast area or (2) that you will be seeing
precipitation 40% of the time in the given forecast area for the given forecast time period.
Let's look at an example of what the probability does mean. If a forecast for a given county says
that there is a 40% chance of rain this afternoon, then there is a 40% chance of rain at any point
in the county from noon to 6 p.m. local time.

This point probability of precipitation is predetermined and arrived at by the forecaster by
multiplying two factors:
- Forecaster certainty that precipitation will form or move into the area X
- Areal coverage of precipitation that is expected

(and then moving the decimal point two places to the left)

Using this, here are two examples giving the same statistical result:
(1) If the forecaster was 80% certain that rain would develop but only expected to cover 50% of
the forecast area, then the forecast would read "a 40% chance of rain" for any given location.
(2) If the forecaster expected a widespread area of precipitation with 100% coverage to
approach, but he/she was only 40% certain that it would reach the forecast area, this would, as
well, result in a "40% chance of rain" at any given location in the forecast area

Weather forecasters need to get over themselves (100% chance)

some friends had a local news meteorology guy in their circle and we ran into him at some local outdoor fest and he dished on all the local gossip, the former coworker who got ousted during weird covid office shit, but the one thing he’d never claim to be was a weather forecaster. it’s just meteorology. they deliver forecasts, with some degree of certainty. it’s like a guy saying, whoa, a banker is not a debt holder. they just deal with loans and investment instruments. I just facilitate that stuff

pretty much everywhere...it's gonna be hot

Several years back I toured the NWS' Oxnard office which handles forecasting for the Los Angeles sprawl. It's medium-high level nerd stuff, but the tour is recommended if you think you might like it. I asked them what's the weirdest phone call they ever received (always ask this question!) and without hesitatiion they said it was the vampires -- straight-up "I am a vampire and I need to know about the sun's luminosity and local cloudcover over the next week" questions. It was noted that the NWS is happy to provide information to all folks both alive and undead and that the vampires were always poilte and very thankful for the forecasts

pretty much everywhere...it's gonna be hot

― Daniel_Rf, Wednesday, September 11, 2024 4:27 AM (eleven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

then I don't need a jacket

just for the record:

https://i.imgur.com/Kh2EHIy.png

so much smarter than everyone else that he came out the other side

lol

remember when he looked down his nose at pundits who let their "conventional wisdom" distract them from provable data?

Back in the day, his writings were mostly just wonkish stat nerd detail about why his model did X or Y, and the tradeoffs versus having it do B or C, and that was sort of nice nerdy comfort-food reading. He's always been atrocious whenever he would let himself play pundit on political strategy, or opine in any way on the material and social worlds that shape or are affected by politics. Unfortunately he's now put those things front and center, and he still stinks at all of it, classic blinkered Beltway-media centrist nonsense.

You couldn't even really see the "Stature Gap" on the broadcast I watched. She actually looked weirdly taller than him because he kept hunching.

(open for context)

I believe the saying is "like a turd in a punch bowl, it not only disinclines you to drink any more but raises very disconcerting questions about what has already been consumed"

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) September 12, 2024

No about-face on my mea culpa above or anything, but I'm still checking his projection, wanting her to do well; I think I now internally make my own adjustment to whatever Silver has. Harris has pulled back to almost even--47.6%--so that's good news.

turd in the punch bowl, indeed

"Polls and models become a vehicle for what psychologists call transference: basically, people displace all their anxieties about the election onto the forecasts and the people who design them."

Would definitely agree with that.

One case where the world's most annoying media critics Actually Have A Good Point for Once is that the handling of Trump hacked documents is extremely inconsistent with the handling of the Clinton hacked documents in 2016.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) September 23, 2024

He had a good post today on outliers.

Or if you don’t like the Silver Bulletin or 538 or RealClearPolitics averages, I’ll offer another alternative. Make your own average. Seriously, it’s not that hard. But I do have one stipulation: you have to publicly specify the rules ahead of time. I think you’ll find that when you’re forced to be consistent, to set standards that aren’t governed by your ad hoc sense of the vibes or by your partisan preferences, you’ll have a lot more sympathy for the polling aggregators — and you won’t be as surprised when one of the outliers turns out to be right.

damn the best take on outliers since malcolm gladwell

out lying in his field

https://i.imgur.com/xgyMAmG.jpeg

Straightforward question for anyone who still pays attention to Silver (but really don't want to get into yet another discussion of Silver himself):

Today, he has the "Electoral Collage Probability" at 50.2% for Trump and 49.5% for Harris; for "Predicted Electoral Votes," he has Harris at 273.6 and Trump at 264.4.

I get the idea of probability to win the EC, and how that doesn't translate into equivalent EC votes. But there's a disconnect between those two I'm not getting--how can you be slightly favoured in one but not the other?

guessing it's because Harris's most likely paths have her winning more electoral votes on average

That makes sense, although I would have thought the reverse--that Harris wins more often, but mostly by 270-268 and comes out lower on average EC votes.

(I.e., wins slightly more simulations.)

its very tricky to calculate since each state isn't really its own independent event, even if say WI and MI are tossups, they still both go the same way in basically every election, so it's more here than just aggregating probabilities...I think. Nate's models tend to take this sort of thing into account. that said I still don't buy these models are accurate, once again I must point out that Silver's model had Trump at 42% or so to win the popular vote outright a few weeks ago, which I think is nearly impossible - also he throws all those garbage R-leaning polls into the mix, which is how he whiffed so hard on 2022

loooooooooooool he is shook

https://i.postimg.cc/XvcrfZn3/72515267-b85b-41c8-a06f-12797fbe0096.jpg

I mean

https://i.postimg.cc/XvcrfZn3/72515267-b85b-41c8-a06f-12797fbe0096.jpg

repping for the three For the Boys fans out there

wicked burn reminding someone they got nominated for an oscar

The model works based on calls made by five major news organizations: ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, Fox News, and the New York Times.

Re their coverage tonight. Fox but not CNN? Can see both, neither, or just CNN, but not that--silly.

huh

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:tb2bwzxom5qv4542ru3zqcgu/bafkreih2m6gt4iywiskcjws6l5b46qh3fo3istjbt3zu2fpun2xbmefnkm@jpeg

This chump

ONE MORE TIME

https://i.imgur.com/mKKTIFT.jpeg

I wonder who the other four were?