I get the figure of speech. It’s more about being extremely delighted in reference to the broader political and international context - things that are slightly more important than the empirical accuracy of a gambling website.
I've edited it to "I couldn’t be more delighted by their progress," but under slight protest. At every moment, millions of people are dying of war and preventable disease, but you still ought to be able to say you're delighted by specific things sometimes without adding "...aside from the broader political and international context, of course".
No . . . it's my fortieth birthday! But despite the specter of impending mortality I'm still able to spare a little happiness for Polymarket's victory : )
Please explain how critically important today is while neither your nor my life changes at all, beyond having to deal with a few more hysterical whiners than usual for a few weeks
Please explain how critically important the day that we discovered a dinosaur killer asteroid will hit Earth in 2028 is, while neither your nor my life changes at all, beyond having to deal with a few more hysterical whiners than usual for a few weeks.
I was hoping Harris would win, but Trump winning isn't the end of the world. There are upsides:
- the baseless lawfare against Elon Musk in retaliation for allowing rightists on Twitter will stop instead of intensifying, which could lead to more advances from Musk's companies
- while Trump's somewhat volatile, this can be an asset in international relations; he managed to drive a wedge between Beijing and Pyongyang when no-one else could, he's willing to drive re-armament of the West, and there are potential outcomes of WWIII where I'd be worried Harris might balk at doing the needful, so while I'm slightly more worried about him in the chair than Harris (largely due to his age) it's not drastically worse.
I'm very curious to understand the world model that makes you think that Trump - who consistently said that the US shouldn't help Ukraine or Taiwan, would be more willing to engage in a war with China over Taiwan.
(Also the wedge he alledgedly drove between China and North Korea is completely non-existant. NK is just as protected by China today as it ever was, and Trump's diplomatic openings toward NK didn't change anything to the NK nuclear program.)
(As a non-American who mostly cares about how the US election will impact my own country and our allies, I think that international relations is the main field were Harris was completely superior to Trump in all regards)
>I'm very curious to understand the world model that makes you think that Trump - who consistently said that the US shouldn't help Ukraine or Taiwan, would be more willing to engage in a war with China over Taiwan.
I don't particularly think that*. I do think that if he did engage in such a war, and there was a small nuclear exchange ending with Beijing run out of nukes but refusing to surrender, Trump (or Vance) would be certain to call the bluff and methodically burn Chinese cities until the PRC either surrendered or suffered total state failure; I am less certain that Harris has the sheer bloodymindedness necessary to do that, which both in the event gives them a chance to either build more nukes to kill Westerners, or lick their wounds to *try again* in 10 years, and also back-chains to make the PRC leaders less hesitant to pull the trigger in the first place (though this is counterbalanced by the greater chance of coming in at all).
As I said, I *am* slightly more worried about him in the chair than Harris, and like you was hoping for a Harris win on this alone, but there *are* complexities there.
*I think the disparity in chance of coming in is not all that big, in the end, because Trump wants to look "tough on China" (and "tough" in general) and that ties his hands if the PRC does something outrageous like attack Taiwan. But, you are correct, the disparity is in Biden/Harris' favour because Trump is less predictable.
> I do think that if he did engage in such a war, and there was a small nuclear exchange ending with Beijing run out of nukes but refusing to surrender, Trump (or Vance) would be certain to call the bluff and methodically burn Chinese cities until the PRC either surrendered or suffered total state failure
China has perhaps 500 nukes, the US has 5k. However, nuclear war is not a pissing contest where the US will comfortably win by these numbers alone.
A few megatons dropped on the Bay Area would likely be devastating to the US economy, and I don't think that you can be confident that US missile defense will avoid that outcome. Perhaps half of their nukes will hit US cities. The fact that they run out of nukes sooner than the US might not be all that critical, if two shooters manage to hit each other a few times, the fact that one of them has a larger clip and can hit his opponent more often does not prevent him from also bleeding to death.
Furthermore, while there are solid game theoretical reasons to pre-commit to retaliating against nuclear strikes on your cities in kind, I think there are limits to this kind of vengeance. If you launch your own ICBMs after detecting the enemy launches, you can still claim that your goal is to save your deterrence capabilities before your ICBMs are destroyed. You can also claim that one of your goals is to prevent the enemy from launching further nuclear attacks.
The morality of such a counterattack might be debatable, but it looks very different if you delay your response and nuke back at leisure, conditional on how the diplomacy is going.
It is the difference between returning fire when being shot at (which would generally be self-defense) and walking over to some incapacitated enemy and shooting them in the head (which is generally considered murder).
Still furthermore, the US has nuke parity with Russia. If it spends half of its nukes glassing China without getting hit too badly, Russia will be the leading nuclear power in a world where nuclear war has been normalized.
Lastly, I am highly doubtful that the mere threat of nuclear annihilation will force anyone to surrender. For Japan, it was more like the last straw as their conventional war did not go very well either. Do not expect the CCP to roll over unless you offer them a favorable deal. Likewise, do not expect total state failure. The CCP rose to power in what was initially a protracted war. You can diminish their state capabilities greatly, but the CCP will likely still rule over what remains of their population. Take Gaza: the IDF has bombing the shit out of Hamas for a year now, and they are still not defeated.
For the limited effects of strategic air power, see also:
As others have said Trump speaks in poetry, not in prose.
Or to put it differently, he should be taken seriously, but not literally.
You can view these as apologia, and make snarky comments. Or you can view them as ways to understand the man and the policies he's likely to implement.
Think of him as Nixon. You don't have to like the man, or his policies. But you're the idiot, not him, if you would rather mock, misquote, and make jokes than attempt to understand what's going on.
And at the end of the day, Nixon actually went to China -- regardless of what the Pauline Kaels of the world thought of him.
I don't understand how anyone thinks Harris was superior to Trump on foreign policy. What has she done? Given charge of border security, she was slow to visit the US-Mexico border, and ended up doing almost nothing about it. https://theweek.com/in-depth/1023057/kamala-harris-vice-presidential-track-record One may consider this immigration policy instead of foreign policy, but I don't see how one may consider immigration policy NOT to impact foreign policy.
The most experience I can find of her foreign relations seems to be having visited 21 countries and met with more than 150 world leaders. I cannot find any reference to anything she has DONE with those leaders. It does show she hasn't really impressed them, as foreign leadership goes through other people to contact the US, such as secretary of state or national security advisor. https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/08/politics/kamala-harris-foreign-diplomacy/index.html
My impression is that she has been hidden away so that she can do as little damage as possible, while showing how modern-thinking the US is by having a woman as a vice-president.
In contrast, Trump seems decisive in foreign affairs, though time will tell how good his policies prove to be. He initiated serious trade issues with China (including effectively a trade war), moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. and started (though it ended up falling through) talks with North Korea.
The largest problem I have with Trump's foreign policy is his having pulled out unilaterally from the Iran nuclear deal. I do believe it was a bad deal, but the US had already agreed to it under a previous administration, and this tarnishes any future foreign deals since any future president could undo them.
The claim isn't based on Harris's track record since she doesn't have much of one one way or the other. She's mostly assumed to be a generic Democrat.
Trump seems a lot softer on China now than he did during his first term, flip flopping on the Tiktok ban and sounding very hesitant to support Taiwan against Chinese aggression.
Meanwhile he's been consistently soft on Russia going back way further than that, including the incident he was originally impeached for where he held up Congressionally mandated aid to Ukraine for his personal political advantage.
And a large chunk of the senior foreign policy leaders of his first administration came out against him, including Secretaries of State and Defense and at least one Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. That alone says pretty bad things about the quality of his leadership.
>while showing how modern-thinking the US is by having a woman as a vice-president
<mildSnark>
Suggestion to the Democratic party for 2028: How about asking Kemi Badencoch if she'd like to run a larger country? Yeah, there is that phrase about "natural-born citizen", but I'm sure that can be worked around... :-)
The wise man would say that the stochasticism built into the US electoral system, the fact that any deal might be revoked 4 years later, means you damn well better make a *win-win* deal, and *stick to it*, because legalistic arguments about how you are technically allowed to do x or y because the treaty says so, are not going to work for you...
You do realize that there were many peace treaties signed in the Middle East under Trump, don't you? Also Trump didn't send billions in aid the terrorist nation of Iran like Obama or implicitly support Iran's nuclear program like Biden.
If you don't think Iran is a terrorist state, then no need to discuss any further.
Have you heard with full CONTEXT when Trump said he the US shouldn't help Taiwan? Ukraine I am sure he has said. What he will actually do, well, do you like to gamble :-)
Trump has consistently said that Ukraine is not worth WW3. Do you disagree?
Beyond that is pretty much projection of what people want to project.
Does this mean he'd give Putin a blank check? Well I guess, if you assume he's a Russian agent, then ...
Does this mean he can see a situation where there's no winning strategy (pull out of Vietnam in 1967, not in 1975)? Possibly.
Does this mean he thinks that giving Ukraine permission to use their fighter jets and cruise missiles, to force Putin to negotiate? Also possibly. I full expect Trump's character is such that he would love to both try negotiating a deal with Putin AND having Ukraine unleash thunder on Putin if the deal is not accepted.
Mainly what this means is exactly what the words say -- that Trump is not going to risk nuclear war on the US for the sake of Ukraine (or Taiwan for that matter, and probably not for any country in Europe given the way they have behaved over the past 20 years or so).
If you think that's a scandal, that the US SHOULD be willing to destroy civilization for the sake of virtue signaling, let me ask why you haven't already left the US, given the death camps and genocides that are supposedly surely coming? If not, then maybe you're a little too invested in playing word games with zero consequences, and your opinion about something that actually matters deserves to be utterly ignored?
I disagree in the sense that giving up Ukraine is a signal that one can in fact annex another country. We give up Ukraine to avoid WW3, and Russia decides Georgia has insulted them and ought to be invaded and annexed. That's OK; they're a lot smaller country than Ukraine. Same thing in Belarus, but they're landlocked, so less important. Then Poland, Moldova, and Romania, because they're a natural progression, like Manifest Destiny. Then Germany, since it's long overdue, after all.
Russia invaded Ukraine, you recall, because they were about to join NATO. The REASON for the war is the reason to defend them, and though WW3 would not be a desirable outcome, if one is not willing to risk it then Russia will have license to do as they want. Mutually assured destruction PREVENTS world wars, unless one side decides it must not enter such a war, which means the other side wins.
I'm especially enjoying the turning on Merrick Garland, the former Martyr of Justice who had been so egregiously cheated of his rightful spot on the Supreme Court.
I enjoy even more that the "but he is a convicted felon, 34 FELONIES" stuff went nowhere.
This was supposed to be damning, but it also came from the set of people who in other instances demanded we should scrap terms like "felon" because they were de-humanising:
" People with criminal justice histories are referred to in an array of dehumanizing labels, such as “inmates,” “criminals,” “prisoners,” “convicts,” “delinquents,” “felons,” and “offenders.”
...Dehumanizing labels stereotype and marginalize people rather than support them while they rebuild their lives. Individuals with justice system involvement are not defined by their conviction history. The words we use to reference people should reflect their full identities, and acknowledge their capacity to change and grow.
Be mindful of how you speak about The Fortune Society’s mission, the people we serve, our dedicated staff, and board members. We encourage you to use humanizing language — your example will inspire others.
Person or individual with justice system involvement; Person or individual impacted by the justice system; Person or individual affected by the justice system"
Throughout history and across the world, dehumanizing language has facilitated the systemic, inhumane treatment of groups of people. This is certainly the case for people impacted by the U.S. criminal legal and immigration systems, and that’s why it’s so important to use language that actively asserts humanity. Many people and organizations are moving away from using terms that objectify and make people’s involvement with these systems the defining feature of their identities. But many others—politicians, media outlets, and more—still use harmful and outdated language like “convict,” “inmate,” “felon,” “prisoner,” and “illegal immigrant.”
There are better alternatives — alternatives that center a person’s humanity first and foremost. These include “person who was convicted of a crime,” “person who is incarcerated,” “person convicted of a felony,” and “person seeking lawful status.” These words and phrases matter. Choosing people-first language is a step toward asserting the dignity of those entangled in these dehumanizing systems.
...Calling a person who was convicted of a crime a “criminal,” “felon,” or “offender” defines them only by a past act and does not account for their full humanity or leave space for growth. These words also promote dangerous stereotypes and stoke fear, which stigmatize people who have been convicted of crimes and make it harder for them to thrive.
“Until this carceral state and the people of this country begin to understand the power of the words that seek to dehumanize the incarcerated or justice-impacted people, there will never be a real and substantive conversation about criminal justice reform,” said Wright. “Our humanity is maintained and respected by not referring to us in those impersonal and definitive terms, but by acknowledging our intrinsic value as human and not by defining us by the worst day or act in our lives.”
So if someone vents about how Trump is a felon, kindly remind them gently that such terms are discriminatory and dehumanising and they should refer to him instead as "a person with justice system involvement" 😁
If they say "how can a convicted criminal be worthy of, or fit for, the presidency?", remember:
"Individuals with justice system involvement are not defined by their conviction history. The words we use to reference people should reflect their full identities, and acknowledge their capacity to change and grow." Don't uphold the carceral state or define people by the worst day or act in their lives!
None of those restrictions on language apply to straight white males. Trump is obviously that. So you can call him a felon, fascist, mis-gender him, dead-name him, anything you want.
And I'm not being a sarcastic asshole.
This is the actual stated truth. The less like a straight white male you are, the more you can claim people be careful their language around you.
This makes me nothing but sad. The most dangerous thing about Trump, to my mind, is that he dehumanizes people every chance he gets. Dehumanization is the first step toward quite a few historical evils.
I don't like these arguments from hypocrisy, because the person who's making them is being equally hypocritical.
IE I interpret you as saying "The Democrats believe Trump should be stigmatized for being a felon, but they don't believe random robbers should be stigmatized as felons, therefore they're hypocritical".
But you're also implicitly saying "I believe random robbers should be stigmatized as felons, but Trump shouldn't be stigmatized as a felon", which is also hypocritical.
I’m very worried about an increase in lawfare now that the people who endorse it are getting into power! (Especially the guy who turned my porn site x.com into a set of political ads.)
Don't know what you're talking about, there's plenty of good porn there still... Though, people are getting more serious about moving to Bluesky now that Musk has been, uh, more emboldened.
My main delight is that it's a blow against a) legacy media and b) cancel culture.
If you pay attention to events closely, you'll see that most news outlets (e.g., top sites on Google when you search a news story), are grossly distorted on any vaguely culture war topic, and distorted in favour of the radical left. To me, the clearest insurance was the coverage of Depp v. Heard. It was really disgusting to see people defend an abuser (Heard) like that, having actually watched 100% of the court footage.
Similarly I've had horrible experiences of cancel culture.
You saw it in how the Democrats ran the election. One of their core strategies was slandering their opponents and calling them bigots, sexists, extremists, fascists, racists, etc... E.g., they characterize JD Vance as an extremist despite him almost not getting the VP nomination due to being too democrat leaning (see the leaked JD Vance dossier). I'm sick of the hypocritical gaslighting, so to me, the election result feels like a breath of fresh air.
What is sad is that so many have been sold on the propaganda that Trump is Hitler. I've had democrats friends talking about how "they want to kill the guy." Fyi, voicing death wishes about a president is a federal crime.
It is insane and sad. They spout how they want to literally kill their political opponent, while complaining that the republicans are the divisive party?!
This was one of several sufficient reasons for me to vote for Trump.
I cannot image Scott Alexander, who I used to have tremendous respect for and still respect, somehow thinks there is a balance of power in this country.
Outside of elections this country is run by Democrats and their allies. I guess Scott can't see how incredibly stilted political speech in this country when most (though not all) of the allowed speech is what he agrees with.
The closeness of North Korea and China is vastly exaggerated. People act as if North Korea is a Chinese proxy. Whereas NK had a far closer relationship with the Soviet Union.
No, I don't think North Korea is a Chinese proxy. It *is* a Chinese ally, and the PRC has covered for them time and again since 1991. The *only* time the PRC backed off a kerfuffle, TTBOMK, is when Trump played the madman card.
Hey, you score 10 out of 10 for ineffectiveness and vacuity! Your comment is absolutely guaranteed to lead to no change at all in OP's view of the situation, and to increase their difficulty understanding the point of view of people who are less distressed than they are or in fact not at all. It is completely free of content, just a big fart of meanspiritedness.
How can your feedback possibly be valuable? Do you think OP hasn't noticed that more than half the country just voted against his views? Or that he discounts all those millions of your-views-suck votes because he's been waiting to get a read from Martin Blank, mean teen extraordinaire?
Deiseach did a good job of providing the same feedback, but with decent manners, mention of several issues that are now likely to be decided in a way she thinks is fair, and a bit of rueful acknowledgment that she couldn't help enjoying watching the other side absorbing just how badly it had lost.
Setting aside what counts as an intelligent and civilized response, let's think about effectiveness in convincing OP he might actually be wrong about some things. Deiseach may conceivably have given him a glimpse of the interior of an intelligent person who is not amoral but has arrived at conclusions very different from his. You, on the other hand, have probably strenthened OP's view that the opposing side is made up of meanspirited tinyminds who can't even argue an issue well. Fuck you too, buddy.
Banned for one week. The main reason it's only one week is that it's election week and everybody is crazy now and I assume they'll calm down soon enough.
Have you ever posted on wireheading? (I am in the middle of Ringworld Engineers) Is it feasible? Is it any better than the best available drug? What do you think of it philosophically?
Nobody REALLY knows how good wireheading is, because it's never been really developed. OTOH, there were rats that though it was better than sex or eating, even when they were starving.
On the *other* other hand, when I'm waked up from a sound sleep, and want to go back to sleep, offers of sex or food would not tempt me at bit. And yet sleeping is not an ecstatic experience. It's mostly a non-experience. But when you are tired and get in bed lying there feels great, and sleeping looks, in your anticipation, like a wonderful thing. It's actually kind of a ripoff. You think sleeping is going to be 8 hours of wonderfulness. In reality, giving in to the craving to fall asleep is wonderful, but only lasts 5 mins. or so. So I'm not sure we can know that the wireheaded rats experienced hours of something that is far pleasanter than sex or eating. Maybe it was sort of a ripoff for them -- a powerful illusion, at the moment of choosing wireheading, that they were about to experience something wonderful.
Heh. Sometimes I think even orgasms are sort of a rip-off, because they're so brief. You try to hang on to the physical ecstasy but it shrinks down to nothing in a few seconds.
Short version: I would be sad if everybody was turned into blissed-out lumps of jelly, but it seems like there are probably ways to do it that are better than that.
The Deep Utopia post is good, and you could write more on that and probably will. I'm a Christian, and it ties in nicely with the hard question of "What does God want us to do, besides not breaking moral law and besides giving Him due credit via prayer and worship?" Aquinas said "To be happy," and the Westminster Confession says "To glorify God," but neither of those is an answer till it's fleshed out (which Aquinas does a bit). Whether one is religious or not, it's clear humans are built in such a way as to help figure out an answer, and that the answer is going to be different vocations for different people. Actually, one good subquestion is what the best life is if you're a quadraplegic of normal IQ and we can't use technology to hook up your nerves and give you back your arms and legs or add to your IQ. That's a good question because it's simpler than for most people.
My understanding of climate change (stay with me) is that the more authoritative estimates of costs per degree of warming are about 1% of GDP
Meanwhile it seems that this is being revised upwards according to catastrophe bias. One new study cited news headlines and public pronouncements of prominent climate scientists as the source of their priors, which did not match the actual costs literature. Their study's lowest cost estimate was 6x higher than the previous highest one, and I get the impression that no insiders really challenged them and many said approving things, while their study generated a powerful round of news headlines
Here we have an information ecosystem that appears to be giving a popular estimate of costs 10x higher than the literature, and the popular perception is now altering the literature
The implications of this across the century in terms of miscalibrated policy costs must be in the range of $50 trillion dollars. If prediction and forecast markets can gain the prestige to replace popular headlines as information touchstones then this is an event super worth celebrating
1) an extremely precise definition of what exactly you’re assessing (which has no reason to stay the same, and the devil is in the details),
2) a model of the overall economy,
3) another precise model about what kind of climate impacts to expect.
And more importantly, there’s the fact that the result is an abstract figure with a mostly academic interest – making 1) close to what we actually care about is a difficult task.
All in all, I think these points can easily explain a 10x difference.
And if there’s a prediction market for the costs of climate change, I expect these points to heavily affect the price in as well.
I agree it's a difficult task to satisfactorily set up a prediction market on what the consensus academic position on global costs per degree of warming is and what it will be in x years
However, compared with the existing information ecosystem I consider it to be an easy task to radically improve on it. For instance in "Sea-level rise and its possible impacts given a ‘beyond 4°C world’ in the twenty-first century" by Nicholls et al, there is a reference figure of the exposed population in the high case, if all flood control infrastructure construction is halted until 2100
This figure is 187 million, and is how the news headlines describe the study results. However, in the low case with maximum adaptation costing I believe .02% of global GDP, the population displaced in 2100 is 5000-10,000, and this more closely resembles the median estimate than the headlines. Prediction markets have the potential to publicly elicit this kind of information to a much greater degree vs the existing system of incentives
>My understanding of climate change (stay with me) is that the more authoritative estimates of costs per degree of warming are about 1% of GDP
I hope you are abridging here, because that relation can be linear for only a very short range. Or are you saying a temperature rise of 50°C would incur a cost of 50% of GDP?
Yeah, the IAM model estimates are fairly linear out to about 4 degrees and look quite troubling by about 10 degrees. Luckily the IPCC projections for high emissions temperature levels tend to level out at about *6-7 degrees
This does assume that decarbonization is sure to happen by 2100 so you could argue that there could be a worst case emissions scenario not covered. The high emissions scenarios do include global coal increasing by 6x at that point though
edit: 6-7 degrees rather than 4 degrees with the 6x coal scenario
How much it costs is going to depend on where you live, and for some folks the costs are going to be intolerable. Your argument seems to assume that the costs are evenly distributed over the world population in some "fair" manner. This clearly is not going to happen. It's already killing people now and then. (Death spikes during heat waves, unexpectedly strong storms killing people, etc.)
Definitely one weakness with global cost estimates is that it doesn't account for marginal costs. This is something politicians are accounting for and the IPCC constantly mentions
There is a problem with that. They don't account for the marginal cost of climate policy. Just as Sub-Saharan Africa will have high costs from warming they will, by my lights, have higher costs than that from being blocked from developing with coal and gas
My general take is that we live in a world where the large majority of weather related deaths are from temperature, and a large multiple of those are from cold temperatures, including in Africa. Economic costs are not being balanced correctly against avoiding warming costs
Hmmm, this seems a bit like criticizing people (or systems) when they turn out to be right here... If the election had been close but happened to land on Trump then I would agree with you, but this election was sufficiently lopsided that I think giving a call of pure 50% is very slightly embarrassing, and I'm very curious to hear from pollsters where they think things went wrong.
Theo's 'Neighbor' theory is just one, and your right that with only one data point it's a bit ridiculous to say that he was definitely right, but I also think it's very important to note that Theo didn't just armchair reason his way to success. He tested his theory by commissioning a private poll with his own methodology, and it probably cost ~$100k, that's a huge structural advantage real money prediction markets have over reputation based ones. They offer profit incentives for spending money to gather *new* evidence, instead of just optimally summarizing existing evidence.
Great analysis. What i am left wondering at the end of it: you are correct that prediction markets predicting the correct result does not entail that their model is right. is there any kind of empirical testing or a certain way prediction markets could perform that would cause you to conclude they are efficient? Or is this just a question that is immune to empirical testing bc we’ll never know the actual probability curve for the election?
Before the election, Silver emphasized that 50% was a mean outcome, but not a modal outcome. Given that polling errors would likely be correlated, he noted that a landslide win would be fairly likely, with an over 40% chance that a single candidate would take all 7 swing states. See e.g. https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1848060370268938538.
He also gave it around a 25% chance that Trump would win the popular vote. And it looks like he's doing to win it by a decent margin.
Not knocking Nate Silver at all here, but being able to predict that if there is a large polling error it would be correlated doesn't mean it's not unfortunate that there was a large polling error.
Using the posts framing, I would say that Nates model would put this result at a little less than 20% probably, or somewhere between 2 and 3 coin flips coming up heads (between 2-3 bits of evidence). Not a ton of evidence, but enough to shift my credence towards polymarket, especially since my prior against it was way less than 90% (though I did think before the election it was off)
Yeah, I think Nate’s model was right based on public information, but my gut tells me that based on this result and the herding that a lot of pollsters never published pro-Trump polls or were systematically overestimating Harris’s likely voters, making assumptions that her turnout would be similar to Biden’s in 2020. Without better polling firms, we will continue to see surprising election results.
I think this is right, but one thing that makes it hard to systematically resolve this is that the social landscape is always shifting, and pollsters are always trying to resolve the problems of earlier polls. There's always polling error election after election, but the direction isn't consistent, otherwise pollsters would correct for it. If there were methodological information which allowed private pollsters to construct more accurate polls, the public pollsters would have access to it too.
Desertopa said "There's always polling error election after election, but the direction isn't consistent, otherwise pollsters would correct for it."
You may be being sincere here but if you look at the RealClearPolitics average going back to 2004, the error is almost always, 5 out 6 times, in favor of Democrats:
2004 Bush R +1.5 +2.4 => 1.1
2008 Obama D +7.6 +7.3 => 0.3
2012 Obama D +0.7 +3.9 => -3.2
2016 Clinton D +3.2 +2.1 => 1.1
2020 Biden D +7.2 +4.5 => 2.8
2024 Harris D +0.1 -3.3 => 3.4
Yes, small sample size applies, but remember these are averages of polls for each year (at least 9 polls in the average each year) AND these polls were informed by many other polls a week or two before. (It is surprising how organizations polls in early to mid October, but NOT the week before the election.)
So the idea the polls will self-correct sound a lot like the argument that "of course the legacy media is NOT biased, if they were people wouldn't trust them and would not listen to them."
Well people don't trust them (see the latest Gallup polls on this this) and they have a lot less less power and influence than they did in 1980 but they continue to be highly biased.
TWO
Desertopa said "If there were methodological information which allowed private pollsters to construct more accurate polls, the public pollsters would have access to it too."
It's not access to special methodology that allows private polls to be more accurate. I believe they are more accurate for two reasons:
1) Money - polls are expensive. A candidate or party is willing to spend the enormous amount of money to get the best possible information
2) Focus - public polls are usually meant to drive readers / viewers to a news organization and so want as many crosstabs as possible and just need to get to close to the results. Private polls are going to be more focused so they can get more data points and spend more time of getting exactly the right information.
If we include midterm elections though, we don't see this sort of systematic skew. Are polling averages systematically biased towards Democrats in presidental elections, but not in midterm elections? Maybe, but it's not at all clear that we should expect that to be the case.
As far as the accuracy of private versus public polls, in statistics, getting an adequate sample size for high precision is much, much easier than getting a sufficiently representative sample for high accuracy. Public polls aren't inhibited in their ability to get enough data points to be sufficiently accurate, the real issue is whether their sample sets actually reflect the overall voting population, which is a matter of methodology.
Maybe money and focus can produce accurate polls, but candidates and parties do not produce accurate polls. Their internal polls are much worse than public polls. You are trying to explain something false.
Yes, I think the "coin" analogy is extremely misleading. We didn't get a single binary output - we got the fact that the country overwhelmingly preferred Trump, and if that doesn't result in _some_ kind of signal that should be measurable by prediction markets, then honestly, what use are they?
If the markets predict a 50/50 chance that Kasparov will win a chess game against Carlsen, then the game starts and it turns out that Kasparov's been dead for 3 years and "forfeits" ... we wouldn't say "shucks, guess the markets lost this coin flip". Forecasters should start to ask questions about how they can maybe notice the next time a player is dead and factor that into their predictions.
Last figures I saw showed him with a little under 51% of the vote and Harris with about 47.5%.
He won a bunch of swing states ... by something like 51%-49% in each case.
In what world is any of that an overwhelming preference?
He did better than Harris, for sure. The electoral-college system, which can turn a bunch of near-50:50 results into a landslide either way, will deliver him a nice big count of EVs, for sure. But what about this suggests that the US electorate had so strong a preference for Trump that pollsters and pundits who said "it looks really close" are as wrong as a chess prognosticator who didn't notice that one player is dead?
Hmm, I think you and the other replies here are making a basic logic mistake. Prediction markets are not trying to estimate the % of the country that prefers a candidate. They are trying to estimate the % chance that candidate will _win the election_. The two values both have a % in them, but please don't get them confused.
So, I admit that I made the same mistake when I said America "overwhelmingly preferred Trump", which is more a statement about the former than the latter. What I should have said is that "Trump was overwhelmingly likely to win this election". Knowing what we know now, that is a correct statement. After all, Trump didn't win "a bunch" of swing states - he won ALL of them, because his 51-47 "coin" was "flipped" millions of times for each one. The election didn't hinge on which way the wind was blowing on Tuesday. Carlsen's victory against his dead opponent didn't hinge on whether he got enough sleep the night before.
Since this was a historically strong and certain election result, you have two possibilities:
- Prediction markets should been able to predict the result ahead of time with at least a little confidence.
- Prediction markets can't distinguish a country's 51-47 preference, and are thus useless for predicting the outcome of US elections.
I think we'd prefer the second wasn't true, but at the moment it's not looking good.
I have no idea what gives you the impression that I don't understand the difference between "x% votes for X" and "x% chance that X wins".
The claim I was commenting on was your statement that "the country overwhelmingly preferred Trump". He only got ~51% of the popular vote! If he'd had a couple of percent less he wouldn't have won the Electoral College either! That isn't what an overwhelming preference looks like.
Anyway, you've now retracted that, so fair enough. But I still don't buy that "Trump was overwhelmingly likely to win this election". I mean, I guess it depends on what that means. He _did_ win the election (unless there was some huge fraud that no one has caught a glimpse of, I guess, but I don't see any reason to believe that and mention it only because worrying about election fraud on the basis of no evidence is kinda Trump's brand), and probably for almost all elections it's true that if you could rewind the world by 24 hours and run the election again you'd almost always get the same result. But I don't see that that's a useful sense of "overwhelmingly likely to win".
The relevant question is: _given the available information_, was it overwhelmingly likely that Trump would win? I don't see why we should believe that. It was, in fact, pretty close. All the polling indicated that it would likely be very close. Polls have systematic errors and they're really hard to predict. If you think it was "a historically strong and certain election result" in some sense that implies "someone competent would have called it confidently in advance", I think you're under the influence of hindsight bias or something of the kind.
I _do_ think that prediction markets can't reliably predict a 3.5-point electoral preference, at least not if what you want them to do is to say "90% that X wins" in 90% of cases where X wins by 3.5 points or something like that. So far as I know, nothing can do that. I don't know of any reason to think anything should be able to do it.
(Whereas chess prognosticators _are_ able to predict that Magnus Carlsen will win a chess game against a corpse. It's a silly analogy.)
"Hmm, I think you and the other replies here are making a basic logic mistake. Prediction markets are not trying to estimate the % of the country that prefers a candidate. They are trying to estimate the % chance that candidate will _win the election_."
Then why are you talking about how the American people "overwhelmingly" prefer Trump?
The alleged overwhelmingness of Trump-preference, has little to do with the expected probability that a candidate will win an election; it's the *ratio* of actual Trump-preference to error margin in our measure of Trump-preference that matters. If 50.01% of the population of each swing state is committed to voting for Trump, and 49.99% for Harris, and the Orbital Brain Scanners allow us to predict this with +/-0.001% accuracy, then we will be justifiably very confident that Trump will win, If the actual preference is 60/40 in Trump's favor, but people so thoroughly and bafflingly lie to pollsters that the polls all have +/-20% error bars, then the smart money will be "meh, leaning Trump but still pretty much a toss-up".
And Trump winning with 60% of the vote, in that hypothetical, doesn't make the smart money wrong. Trump winning with 51% of the vote, *definitely* doesn't.
Erm, yes, did you read the end of the comment you replied to? It is entirely conceivable that our inconveniently complex world is such that prediction markets can't distinguish voter preferences well enough to say anything useful.
In this world, prediction markets for election results might as well not exist. To repeat, this election was a very strong result (only really beaten by Obama's and Clinton's landslide victories, which, as I recall, didn't require superforecasters to see coming). If you claim that it's STILL not strong enough for prediction markets (what you call the "smart money") to move away from 50-50, then I ask again: what use are they?
>Last figures I saw showed him with a little under 51% of the vote and Harris with about 47.5%.
>He won a bunch of swing states ... by something like 51%-49% in each case.
>In what world is any of that an overwhelming preference?
Agreed! What I wish I had would be a two-dimensional plot of voters' views on something like:
Would like Harris to be POTUS: -10 ... 10
Would like Trump to be POTUS: -10 ... 10
showing the density of the distribution throughout this space
( Personally, I'd put Harris at -10 and Trump at -9, marginally lesser evil. )
The most important thing for anyone to remember is that, whatever one's view, there are a _lot_ of people who disagree, and (for Americans), these are your countrymen. You need to live with them.
Just for reference, in 2020 Biden got 51.3% of the popular vote compared to Trump’s 46.8% and no one was saying the country overwhelmingly preferred Biden. That would’ve been silly. 51% isn’t an overwhelming anything. Biden won by 7 million votes. So far, Trump is leading by 4.6 million votes. Biden also won more electoral votes in ‘20 than Trump will have won in ‘24.
EDIT: This last claim I made, about Biden receiving more electoral votes in ‘20 than Trump would in ‘24, now appears to be false. It now appears Trump will secure 312 electoral votes to Biden’s 306.
Yes. I’m wrong. You’re right. Some people probably said Biden’s narrow victory indicated that “the country overwhelmingly preferred” Biden, though I can’t find instances of that wording. Maybe you can. I just don’t think whoever you found who made that same claim could reasonably substantiate it. And given that Trump won by an even narrower margin, I don’t think the claim can be substantiated in his case either.
What do you mean? We got almost exactly what Nate Silver predicted. Off from the polls by about 2 points in every state. That seems to vindicate Nate Silver more than the people who said it would be an easy win for one side.
I thought it was going to be Harris, my basic reasoning was: all the polls are herding, this is probably because they're terrified of another "Hillary 2016: 90% chance" moment, and so they're disproportionately throwing out Democrat leaning outliers.
I noticed that the vibes were good on the republican side but I figured the argument there was: polls are about equal, but they always underestimate Trump so he's actually winning in a landslide. I figured the polling companies were now taking that into account (taking it into account too much, even, as above).
Can I ask what kind of things you saw which made it obvious to you?
It's the early vote. Compare a state like Florida or Texas on targetsmart to 2020. They had equal suburban and rural votes but were missing MILLIONS of urban votes (I'm not exaggerating) compared to 2020. It's when the early vote started coming in mid october betting sites across the board started to shift. This quixotic lone bettor theory scott posits is a tad dubious and I think there is a simpler explanation. Nevada is a prime example of early voter data (which makes up 80% of total vote) being borne out directly in the final results as most basic analysis would have lead one to conclude. (Ralston the main figure on early vote data from Nevada is super partisan and jumped through hoops to explain how kamala could "still" win. But even he was pessimistic in his framing. He also analyzed without the broader context of early voter data from other states which brought everything more into frame).
Yeah, it's those missing urban votes I'd like to see explained. Why didn't they turn out? I am being slightly mean here, but she proposed legal weed and free money so black men could legally deal drugs without risk of prison, why didn't that work?
Did she just not click with black/Asian/Latino-Hispanic voters? Why not? Is her weakness her background, that her father was not US black but Jamaican black, and her mother Indian, so she's not 'authentically' black by the US context and not Indian 'enough' for those voters? Obama had the same problem, but he was married to Michelle, née Robinson, whose father was a precinct captain in Chicago and so those contacts aided his career. Harris is married to a white Jewish lawyer in San Francisco and doesn't have that family network behind her.
I believe it was mainly covid and mail ballots( and only secondly the hispanic vote shift). people locked down at home easy to reach by political ads, have less to do, not out having fun. take NJ for example. Everyone was mailed a mail ballot and they won huge. This time they weren't and they had to request it and it barely stayed blue. they have a huge swath of low propensity urban voters and were able to juice the turnout in this demo far beyond normal levels due to covid and using the emergency provisions provided by covid to make last minute changes to local election law and procedure. They will say it was only to counteract the reduced turnout forecasted on election day from covid concerns, but In reality I don't think anyone really doubts in many cases they used their expanded powers to get the most bang for the buck possible. A lot of these measure were rolled back in 2024 such as in NJ. Trump mentioned this exact line of reasoning on Rogan btw as an example of how they "cheated".
Are you saying that if we made voting easier and more convenient the DEM party would keep their advantage? How's making voting easy and convenient not a desirable property of a democratic society?
Ideally you want informed people to vote and people who essentially vote randomly or based on irrelevant information to not vote. If identity and party politics weren't relevant to voting, I think everyone would agree with this. Since identity and party are relevant, and ease of voting typically skews towards Democrats, the calculus is more complicated.
some ppl say a basic filter would be helpful like having to wait in line to vote on eday, or having id , or passing a basic civics test , or filing tax retunrs, or anything to show a minumum level of investmnet to the society you going to determine and influence with your vote. i think everyone is happy with the opportunity to vote being universal and free, but the level of ease is another question. it becomes political quickly because of how these measures would benefit one side or the other. the but as far as the theory of a functioning healthy democracy i think its an open question .
I think it might not be mail-in ballots. I *think* California sends everyone a mail ballot (I got one this year without requesting it, though I'm not sure that's not just because I requested it last time). But California went from +29% Dem last time to only +18% Dem this time. Obviously it's still really blue, but an 11 point shift is huge.
just so u know the vote is only half in in california and they count the mail ballot last which are more blue so the shift isnt going to be that big in the end but still a shift. dont we explain that by mexicans and asians shifting? those were very real changes that happened this election in the electorate, but volume of vote was still also down in the most densly populated areas for other reasons.
Well, an 11 pt shift is only 5.5 pct of voters changing their vote. So not necessarily that huge.
Note also that the Senate election shows a much less dramatic shift. The last several elections in CA since 2012 had the R candidate get 37.5, 43.8, 45.8, 39, and 42 this year. (I skipped 2016, when two Democrats made the final).
I think that Trump's magic as a politician is just making the entire news cycle so damn toxic that most people just tune out. From exit polls, racism was 4% of people's main concern, while the economy was 40%. Trump distracting everyone with culture wars crap, and media taking the bait every time, made most normal people tune out of politics. And since Dem voters skew younger and less conscientious, lower turnout hurts Dems a lot more. Plus Dems were the incumbent after COVID, so they were already perceived to be worse on the economy.
Sorry, but I think the reason people didn't vote for Kamala seems to be pretty simple, though only in retrospect. The voters were presented with two worldviews:
Trump is a dangerous, convicted felon who will amass power and never leave office, just as he did in 2020.
VS
Trump will solve the economic problems of this country and actually manage illegal immigration, just as he did in his prior term in office.
More voters merely believed the second instead of the first.
She attended HBU and was a member of a *very* popular and social - across generations and geography - sorority there. That sorority was very much over the moon about her becoming VP, and many of them wore pink and green to vote in 2020.
How much influence black women have over the vote of black men, I do not know.
Well, as someone who "didn't vote for Harris, just against Trump", I think she wasn't at all inspiring as a candidate. And political promises are easy to make, but which one's will be carried out?
I also think there's an inherent bias against women as leaders in the US, but Harris wouldn't have inspired me no matter what race or gender she had. And distasteful as I find it, many are inspired by Trump.
Well, he does seem to claim that, but the studies he claims to rely upon is behind a sealed door. I won't subscribe to see if there's a pig in that poke.
You “couldn’t be more delighted”?
It's a figure of speech, I assume wireheading would work.
I get the figure of speech. It’s more about being extremely delighted in reference to the broader political and international context - things that are slightly more important than the empirical accuracy of a gambling website.
I've edited it to "I couldn’t be more delighted by their progress," but under slight protest. At every moment, millions of people are dying of war and preventable disease, but you still ought to be able to say you're delighted by specific things sometimes without adding "...aside from the broader political and international context, of course".
This isn’t any old day…
No . . . it's my fortieth birthday! But despite the specter of impending mortality I'm still able to spare a little happiness for Polymarket's victory : )
Happy birthday!
Happy birthday!
Happy birthday! <3
Happy Birthday!
Happy birthday, Scott!
Happy Birthday!
Happy birthday!
I write this 44 minutes after you posted it, which is numerologically significant to me more than you, but HAPPY BIRTHDAY. :D
Have a Happy Birthday buddy!
Happy birthday!
Happy Birthday!
Happy birthday 🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳
Many happy returns! (And I hope you get a good night's sleep.)
Happy Birthday!
Happy birthday!
Happy Birthday!
Please explain how critically important today is while neither your nor my life changes at all, beyond having to deal with a few more hysterical whiners than usual for a few weeks
Please explain how critically important the day that we discovered a dinosaur killer asteroid will hit Earth in 2028 is, while neither your nor my life changes at all, beyond having to deal with a few more hysterical whiners than usual for a few weeks.
This is such a dumb argument.
A delightful birthday to you!
This reminds me of this prozd sketch from youtube https://youtu.be/_AnDFT2l_h0
I was hoping Harris would win, but Trump winning isn't the end of the world. There are upsides:
- the baseless lawfare against Elon Musk in retaliation for allowing rightists on Twitter will stop instead of intensifying, which could lead to more advances from Musk's companies
- while Trump's somewhat volatile, this can be an asset in international relations; he managed to drive a wedge between Beijing and Pyongyang when no-one else could, he's willing to drive re-armament of the West, and there are potential outcomes of WWIII where I'd be worried Harris might balk at doing the needful, so while I'm slightly more worried about him in the chair than Harris (largely due to his age) it's not drastically worse.
I'm very curious to understand the world model that makes you think that Trump - who consistently said that the US shouldn't help Ukraine or Taiwan, would be more willing to engage in a war with China over Taiwan.
(Also the wedge he alledgedly drove between China and North Korea is completely non-existant. NK is just as protected by China today as it ever was, and Trump's diplomatic openings toward NK didn't change anything to the NK nuclear program.)
(As a non-American who mostly cares about how the US election will impact my own country and our allies, I think that international relations is the main field were Harris was completely superior to Trump in all regards)
>I'm very curious to understand the world model that makes you think that Trump - who consistently said that the US shouldn't help Ukraine or Taiwan, would be more willing to engage in a war with China over Taiwan.
I don't particularly think that*. I do think that if he did engage in such a war, and there was a small nuclear exchange ending with Beijing run out of nukes but refusing to surrender, Trump (or Vance) would be certain to call the bluff and methodically burn Chinese cities until the PRC either surrendered or suffered total state failure; I am less certain that Harris has the sheer bloodymindedness necessary to do that, which both in the event gives them a chance to either build more nukes to kill Westerners, or lick their wounds to *try again* in 10 years, and also back-chains to make the PRC leaders less hesitant to pull the trigger in the first place (though this is counterbalanced by the greater chance of coming in at all).
As I said, I *am* slightly more worried about him in the chair than Harris, and like you was hoping for a Harris win on this alone, but there *are* complexities there.
*I think the disparity in chance of coming in is not all that big, in the end, because Trump wants to look "tough on China" (and "tough" in general) and that ties his hands if the PRC does something outrageous like attack Taiwan. But, you are correct, the disparity is in Biden/Harris' favour because Trump is less predictable.
Americans say the most insanely bloodthirsty things and then wonder why the rest of the world fears them
I hope to live to see this evil empire (and I don't mean China) fall
"I am less certain that Harris has the sheer bloodymindedness necessary to do that"
FWIW the prediction markets disagree with you: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/mantic-monday-judgment-day
"They could have picked better questions (I’m not sure why “Trump in power beyond 2028” needs to be conditional), but some of these are interesting:
China more likely to invade Taiwan under Trump (25%) than Harris (17%), and Harris is more likely to fight back (75%) than Trump (54%).
Russian prospects in Ukraine better under Trump (75%) than Harris (40%)
Iranian nukes more likely under Trump (49.5%) than Harris (45%)"
> I do think that if he did engage in such a war, and there was a small nuclear exchange ending with Beijing run out of nukes but refusing to surrender, Trump (or Vance) would be certain to call the bluff and methodically burn Chinese cities until the PRC either surrendered or suffered total state failure
China has perhaps 500 nukes, the US has 5k. However, nuclear war is not a pissing contest where the US will comfortably win by these numbers alone.
A few megatons dropped on the Bay Area would likely be devastating to the US economy, and I don't think that you can be confident that US missile defense will avoid that outcome. Perhaps half of their nukes will hit US cities. The fact that they run out of nukes sooner than the US might not be all that critical, if two shooters manage to hit each other a few times, the fact that one of them has a larger clip and can hit his opponent more often does not prevent him from also bleeding to death.
Furthermore, while there are solid game theoretical reasons to pre-commit to retaliating against nuclear strikes on your cities in kind, I think there are limits to this kind of vengeance. If you launch your own ICBMs after detecting the enemy launches, you can still claim that your goal is to save your deterrence capabilities before your ICBMs are destroyed. You can also claim that one of your goals is to prevent the enemy from launching further nuclear attacks.
The morality of such a counterattack might be debatable, but it looks very different if you delay your response and nuke back at leisure, conditional on how the diplomacy is going.
It is the difference between returning fire when being shot at (which would generally be self-defense) and walking over to some incapacitated enemy and shooting them in the head (which is generally considered murder).
Still furthermore, the US has nuke parity with Russia. If it spends half of its nukes glassing China without getting hit too badly, Russia will be the leading nuclear power in a world where nuclear war has been normalized.
Lastly, I am highly doubtful that the mere threat of nuclear annihilation will force anyone to surrender. For Japan, it was more like the last straw as their conventional war did not go very well either. Do not expect the CCP to roll over unless you offer them a favorable deal. Likewise, do not expect total state failure. The CCP rose to power in what was initially a protracted war. You can diminish their state capabilities greatly, but the CCP will likely still rule over what remains of their population. Take Gaza: the IDF has bombing the shit out of Hamas for a year now, and they are still not defeated.
For the limited effects of strategic air power, see also:
https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/
Concentrating on stuff that Trump says is an exercise in futility. He is often contradicting himself.
In the previous term, his administration's policy was only tangentially related to his utterances.
As others have said Trump speaks in poetry, not in prose.
Or to put it differently, he should be taken seriously, but not literally.
You can view these as apologia, and make snarky comments. Or you can view them as ways to understand the man and the policies he's likely to implement.
Think of him as Nixon. You don't have to like the man, or his policies. But you're the idiot, not him, if you would rather mock, misquote, and make jokes than attempt to understand what's going on.
And at the end of the day, Nixon actually went to China -- regardless of what the Pauline Kaels of the world thought of him.
I don't understand how anyone thinks Harris was superior to Trump on foreign policy. What has she done? Given charge of border security, she was slow to visit the US-Mexico border, and ended up doing almost nothing about it. https://theweek.com/in-depth/1023057/kamala-harris-vice-presidential-track-record One may consider this immigration policy instead of foreign policy, but I don't see how one may consider immigration policy NOT to impact foreign policy.
The most experience I can find of her foreign relations seems to be having visited 21 countries and met with more than 150 world leaders. I cannot find any reference to anything she has DONE with those leaders. It does show she hasn't really impressed them, as foreign leadership goes through other people to contact the US, such as secretary of state or national security advisor. https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/08/politics/kamala-harris-foreign-diplomacy/index.html
My impression is that she has been hidden away so that she can do as little damage as possible, while showing how modern-thinking the US is by having a woman as a vice-president.
In contrast, Trump seems decisive in foreign affairs, though time will tell how good his policies prove to be. He initiated serious trade issues with China (including effectively a trade war), moved the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. and started (though it ended up falling through) talks with North Korea.
The largest problem I have with Trump's foreign policy is his having pulled out unilaterally from the Iran nuclear deal. I do believe it was a bad deal, but the US had already agreed to it under a previous administration, and this tarnishes any future foreign deals since any future president could undo them.
> Given charge of border security,
She wasn't. She was in charge or improving economy in countries where immigrants come from, to stop them from *needing* to immigrate
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyzGkEV3p2g
The claim isn't based on Harris's track record since she doesn't have much of one one way or the other. She's mostly assumed to be a generic Democrat.
Trump seems a lot softer on China now than he did during his first term, flip flopping on the Tiktok ban and sounding very hesitant to support Taiwan against Chinese aggression.
Meanwhile he's been consistently soft on Russia going back way further than that, including the incident he was originally impeached for where he held up Congressionally mandated aid to Ukraine for his personal political advantage.
And a large chunk of the senior foreign policy leaders of his first administration came out against him, including Secretaries of State and Defense and at least one Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. That alone says pretty bad things about the quality of his leadership.
>while showing how modern-thinking the US is by having a woman as a vice-president
<mildSnark>
Suggestion to the Democratic party for 2028: How about asking Kemi Badencoch if she'd like to run a larger country? Yeah, there is that phrase about "natural-born citizen", but I'm sure that can be worked around... :-)
</mildSnark>
The wise man would say that the stochasticism built into the US electoral system, the fact that any deal might be revoked 4 years later, means you damn well better make a *win-win* deal, and *stick to it*, because legalistic arguments about how you are technically allowed to do x or y because the treaty says so, are not going to work for you...
You do realize that there were many peace treaties signed in the Middle East under Trump, don't you? Also Trump didn't send billions in aid the terrorist nation of Iran like Obama or implicitly support Iran's nuclear program like Biden.
If you don't think Iran is a terrorist state, then no need to discuss any further.
Have you heard with full CONTEXT when Trump said he the US shouldn't help Taiwan? Ukraine I am sure he has said. What he will actually do, well, do you like to gamble :-)
But Taiwan? If so, please send a link.
Trump has consistently said that Ukraine is not worth WW3. Do you disagree?
Beyond that is pretty much projection of what people want to project.
Does this mean he'd give Putin a blank check? Well I guess, if you assume he's a Russian agent, then ...
Does this mean he can see a situation where there's no winning strategy (pull out of Vietnam in 1967, not in 1975)? Possibly.
Does this mean he thinks that giving Ukraine permission to use their fighter jets and cruise missiles, to force Putin to negotiate? Also possibly. I full expect Trump's character is such that he would love to both try negotiating a deal with Putin AND having Ukraine unleash thunder on Putin if the deal is not accepted.
Mainly what this means is exactly what the words say -- that Trump is not going to risk nuclear war on the US for the sake of Ukraine (or Taiwan for that matter, and probably not for any country in Europe given the way they have behaved over the past 20 years or so).
If you think that's a scandal, that the US SHOULD be willing to destroy civilization for the sake of virtue signaling, let me ask why you haven't already left the US, given the death camps and genocides that are supposedly surely coming? If not, then maybe you're a little too invested in playing word games with zero consequences, and your opinion about something that actually matters deserves to be utterly ignored?
"Ukraine is not worth WW3"
I disagree in the sense that giving up Ukraine is a signal that one can in fact annex another country. We give up Ukraine to avoid WW3, and Russia decides Georgia has insulted them and ought to be invaded and annexed. That's OK; they're a lot smaller country than Ukraine. Same thing in Belarus, but they're landlocked, so less important. Then Poland, Moldova, and Romania, because they're a natural progression, like Manifest Destiny. Then Germany, since it's long overdue, after all.
Russia invaded Ukraine, you recall, because they were about to join NATO. The REASON for the war is the reason to defend them, and though WW3 would not be a desirable outcome, if one is not willing to risk it then Russia will have license to do as they want. Mutually assured destruction PREVENTS world wars, unless one side decides it must not enter such a war, which means the other side wins.
ive also learned to use the word lawfare this past week xD
I am enjoying, and yes it is Schadenfreude, the news that the cases against Trump will now have to be dropped since he's President-Elect.
Politico has a typically calm and even-handed article on it:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/11/07/trump-legal-failures-blame-column-00187945
I'm especially enjoying the turning on Merrick Garland, the former Martyr of Justice who had been so egregiously cheated of his rightful spot on the Supreme Court.
I enjoy even more that the "but he is a convicted felon, 34 FELONIES" stuff went nowhere.
This was supposed to be damning, but it also came from the set of people who in other instances demanded we should scrap terms like "felon" because they were de-humanising:
https://fortunesociety.org/wordsmatter/
" People with criminal justice histories are referred to in an array of dehumanizing labels, such as “inmates,” “criminals,” “prisoners,” “convicts,” “delinquents,” “felons,” and “offenders.”
...Dehumanizing labels stereotype and marginalize people rather than support them while they rebuild their lives. Individuals with justice system involvement are not defined by their conviction history. The words we use to reference people should reflect their full identities, and acknowledge their capacity to change and grow.
Be mindful of how you speak about The Fortune Society’s mission, the people we serve, our dedicated staff, and board members. We encourage you to use humanizing language — your example will inspire others.
WORDS TO AVOID
Offender, Inmate, Felon, Criminal, Convict, Prisoner, Delinquent
PHRASES TO USE INSTEAD
Person or individual with justice system involvement; Person or individual impacted by the justice system; Person or individual affected by the justice system"
https://www.vera.org/news/words-matter-dont-call-people-felons-convicts-or-inmates
Throughout history and across the world, dehumanizing language has facilitated the systemic, inhumane treatment of groups of people. This is certainly the case for people impacted by the U.S. criminal legal and immigration systems, and that’s why it’s so important to use language that actively asserts humanity. Many people and organizations are moving away from using terms that objectify and make people’s involvement with these systems the defining feature of their identities. But many others—politicians, media outlets, and more—still use harmful and outdated language like “convict,” “inmate,” “felon,” “prisoner,” and “illegal immigrant.”
There are better alternatives — alternatives that center a person’s humanity first and foremost. These include “person who was convicted of a crime,” “person who is incarcerated,” “person convicted of a felony,” and “person seeking lawful status.” These words and phrases matter. Choosing people-first language is a step toward asserting the dignity of those entangled in these dehumanizing systems.
...Calling a person who was convicted of a crime a “criminal,” “felon,” or “offender” defines them only by a past act and does not account for their full humanity or leave space for growth. These words also promote dangerous stereotypes and stoke fear, which stigmatize people who have been convicted of crimes and make it harder for them to thrive.
“Until this carceral state and the people of this country begin to understand the power of the words that seek to dehumanize the incarcerated or justice-impacted people, there will never be a real and substantive conversation about criminal justice reform,” said Wright. “Our humanity is maintained and respected by not referring to us in those impersonal and definitive terms, but by acknowledging our intrinsic value as human and not by defining us by the worst day or act in our lives.”
So if someone vents about how Trump is a felon, kindly remind them gently that such terms are discriminatory and dehumanising and they should refer to him instead as "a person with justice system involvement" 😁
If they say "how can a convicted criminal be worthy of, or fit for, the presidency?", remember:
"Individuals with justice system involvement are not defined by their conviction history. The words we use to reference people should reflect their full identities, and acknowledge their capacity to change and grow." Don't uphold the carceral state or define people by the worst day or act in their lives!
Great stuff on The Fortune Society. Much appreciated!
You must have missed the memo.
None of those restrictions on language apply to straight white males. Trump is obviously that. So you can call him a felon, fascist, mis-gender him, dead-name him, anything you want.
And I'm not being a sarcastic asshole.
This is the actual stated truth. The less like a straight white male you are, the more you can claim people be careful their language around you.
This makes me nothing but sad. The most dangerous thing about Trump, to my mind, is that he dehumanizes people every chance he gets. Dehumanization is the first step toward quite a few historical evils.
How do they feel about "bloody-handed murderer"? Specificity is useful!
I don't like these arguments from hypocrisy, because the person who's making them is being equally hypocritical.
IE I interpret you as saying "The Democrats believe Trump should be stigmatized for being a felon, but they don't believe random robbers should be stigmatized as felons, therefore they're hypocritical".
But you're also implicitly saying "I believe random robbers should be stigmatized as felons, but Trump shouldn't be stigmatized as a felon", which is also hypocritical.
I’m very worried about an increase in lawfare now that the people who endorse it are getting into power! (Especially the guy who turned my porn site x.com into a set of political ads.)
I thought that was about a game where Martians attack and invade Earth, and we defend against them.
Don't know what you're talking about, there's plenty of good porn there still... Though, people are getting more serious about moving to Bluesky now that Musk has been, uh, more emboldened.
My main delight is that it's a blow against a) legacy media and b) cancel culture.
If you pay attention to events closely, you'll see that most news outlets (e.g., top sites on Google when you search a news story), are grossly distorted on any vaguely culture war topic, and distorted in favour of the radical left. To me, the clearest insurance was the coverage of Depp v. Heard. It was really disgusting to see people defend an abuser (Heard) like that, having actually watched 100% of the court footage.
Similarly I've had horrible experiences of cancel culture.
You saw it in how the Democrats ran the election. One of their core strategies was slandering their opponents and calling them bigots, sexists, extremists, fascists, racists, etc... E.g., they characterize JD Vance as an extremist despite him almost not getting the VP nomination due to being too democrat leaning (see the leaked JD Vance dossier). I'm sick of the hypocritical gaslighting, so to me, the election result feels like a breath of fresh air.
What is sad is that so many have been sold on the propaganda that Trump is Hitler. I've had democrats friends talking about how "they want to kill the guy." Fyi, voicing death wishes about a president is a federal crime.
It is insane and sad. They spout how they want to literally kill their political opponent, while complaining that the republicans are the divisive party?!
Fyi, voicing death wishes about a president isn't a federal crime (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Freedom_of_speech_and_of_the_press, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threatening_the_president_of_the_United_States#Watts_v._United_States, etc.).
Agreed. It is some sort of mass delusion. That word, I don't think it means what you think it means.
The only silver lining is this behavior is giving me greater insight into human beings and our history.
This was one of several sufficient reasons for me to vote for Trump.
I cannot image Scott Alexander, who I used to have tremendous respect for and still respect, somehow thinks there is a balance of power in this country.
Outside of elections this country is run by Democrats and their allies. I guess Scott can't see how incredibly stilted political speech in this country when most (though not all) of the allowed speech is what he agrees with.
The closeness of North Korea and China is vastly exaggerated. People act as if North Korea is a Chinese proxy. Whereas NK had a far closer relationship with the Soviet Union.
No, I don't think North Korea is a Chinese proxy. It *is* a Chinese ally, and the PRC has covered for them time and again since 1991. The *only* time the PRC backed off a kerfuffle, TTBOMK, is when Trump played the madman card.
It's one thing to be in mourning because your preferred candidate lost; it's insufferable to expect everyone else to join you.
Hey, you score 10 out of 10 for ineffectiveness and vacuity! Your comment is absolutely guaranteed to lead to no change at all in OP's view of the situation, and to increase their difficulty understanding the point of view of people who are less distressed than they are or in fact not at all. It is completely free of content, just a big fart of meanspiritedness.
On the contrary I think I provided some valuable feedback to him about what contempt some others hold his views.
Fuck this dude and people like him trying to police everyone else's lives and feelings.
How can your feedback possibly be valuable? Do you think OP hasn't noticed that more than half the country just voted against his views? Or that he discounts all those millions of your-views-suck votes because he's been waiting to get a read from Martin Blank, mean teen extraordinaire?
Deiseach did a good job of providing the same feedback, but with decent manners, mention of several issues that are now likely to be decided in a way she thinks is fair, and a bit of rueful acknowledgment that she couldn't help enjoying watching the other side absorbing just how badly it had lost.
Setting aside what counts as an intelligent and civilized response, let's think about effectiveness in convincing OP he might actually be wrong about some things. Deiseach may conceivably have given him a glimpse of the interior of an intelligent person who is not amoral but has arrived at conclusions very different from his. You, on the other hand, have probably strenthened OP's view that the opposing side is made up of meanspirited tinyminds who can't even argue an issue well. Fuck you too, buddy.
Banned for one week. The main reason it's only one week is that it's election week and everybody is crazy now and I assume they'll calm down soon enough.
Have you ever posted on wireheading? (I am in the middle of Ringworld Engineers) Is it feasible? Is it any better than the best available drug? What do you think of it philosophically?
Nobody REALLY knows how good wireheading is, because it's never been really developed. OTOH, there were rats that though it was better than sex or eating, even when they were starving.
On the *other* other hand, when I'm waked up from a sound sleep, and want to go back to sleep, offers of sex or food would not tempt me at bit. And yet sleeping is not an ecstatic experience. It's mostly a non-experience. But when you are tired and get in bed lying there feels great, and sleeping looks, in your anticipation, like a wonderful thing. It's actually kind of a ripoff. You think sleeping is going to be 8 hours of wonderfulness. In reality, giving in to the craving to fall asleep is wonderful, but only lasts 5 mins. or so. So I'm not sure we can know that the wireheaded rats experienced hours of something that is far pleasanter than sex or eating. Maybe it was sort of a ripoff for them -- a powerful illusion, at the moment of choosing wireheading, that they were about to experience something wonderful.
What a crypto-buddhist comment.
Heh. Sometimes I think even orgasms are sort of a rip-off, because they're so brief. You try to hang on to the physical ecstasy but it shrinks down to nothing in a few seconds.
It's been tried a couple times in humans, summarized here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_stimulation_reward#History
Yes, but "tried a couple of times" is not similar to "really developed". It could probably be optimized in several different ways.
Not in any really specific way, but you can see some thoughts that I mostly agree with on https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-deep-utopia .
Short version: I would be sad if everybody was turned into blissed-out lumps of jelly, but it seems like there are probably ways to do it that are better than that.
The Deep Utopia post is good, and you could write more on that and probably will. I'm a Christian, and it ties in nicely with the hard question of "What does God want us to do, besides not breaking moral law and besides giving Him due credit via prayer and worship?" Aquinas said "To be happy," and the Westminster Confession says "To glorify God," but neither of those is an answer till it's fleshed out (which Aquinas does a bit). Whether one is religious or not, it's clear humans are built in such a way as to help figure out an answer, and that the answer is going to be different vocations for different people. Actually, one good subquestion is what the best life is if you're a quadraplegic of normal IQ and we can't use technology to hook up your nerves and give you back your arms and legs or add to your IQ. That's a good question because it's simpler than for most people.
My understanding of climate change (stay with me) is that the more authoritative estimates of costs per degree of warming are about 1% of GDP
Meanwhile it seems that this is being revised upwards according to catastrophe bias. One new study cited news headlines and public pronouncements of prominent climate scientists as the source of their priors, which did not match the actual costs literature. Their study's lowest cost estimate was 6x higher than the previous highest one, and I get the impression that no insiders really challenged them and many said approving things, while their study generated a powerful round of news headlines
Here we have an information ecosystem that appears to be giving a popular estimate of costs 10x higher than the literature, and the popular perception is now altering the literature
The implications of this across the century in terms of miscalibrated policy costs must be in the range of $50 trillion dollars. If prediction and forecast markets can gain the prestige to replace popular headlines as information touchstones then this is an event super worth celebrating
I don’t think it’s as clear-cut as that?
For such a computation, you need
1) an extremely precise definition of what exactly you’re assessing (which has no reason to stay the same, and the devil is in the details),
2) a model of the overall economy,
3) another precise model about what kind of climate impacts to expect.
And more importantly, there’s the fact that the result is an abstract figure with a mostly academic interest – making 1) close to what we actually care about is a difficult task.
All in all, I think these points can easily explain a 10x difference.
And if there’s a prediction market for the costs of climate change, I expect these points to heavily affect the price in as well.
I agree it's a difficult task to satisfactorily set up a prediction market on what the consensus academic position on global costs per degree of warming is and what it will be in x years
However, compared with the existing information ecosystem I consider it to be an easy task to radically improve on it. For instance in "Sea-level rise and its possible impacts given a ‘beyond 4°C world’ in the twenty-first century" by Nicholls et al, there is a reference figure of the exposed population in the high case, if all flood control infrastructure construction is halted until 2100
This figure is 187 million, and is how the news headlines describe the study results. However, in the low case with maximum adaptation costing I believe .02% of global GDP, the population displaced in 2100 is 5000-10,000, and this more closely resembles the median estimate than the headlines. Prediction markets have the potential to publicly elicit this kind of information to a much greater degree vs the existing system of incentives
>My understanding of climate change (stay with me) is that the more authoritative estimates of costs per degree of warming are about 1% of GDP
I hope you are abridging here, because that relation can be linear for only a very short range. Or are you saying a temperature rise of 50°C would incur a cost of 50% of GDP?
Yeah, the IAM model estimates are fairly linear out to about 4 degrees and look quite troubling by about 10 degrees. Luckily the IPCC projections for high emissions temperature levels tend to level out at about *6-7 degrees
This does assume that decarbonization is sure to happen by 2100 so you could argue that there could be a worst case emissions scenario not covered. The high emissions scenarios do include global coal increasing by 6x at that point though
edit: 6-7 degrees rather than 4 degrees with the 6x coal scenario
How much it costs is going to depend on where you live, and for some folks the costs are going to be intolerable. Your argument seems to assume that the costs are evenly distributed over the world population in some "fair" manner. This clearly is not going to happen. It's already killing people now and then. (Death spikes during heat waves, unexpectedly strong storms killing people, etc.)
Definitely one weakness with global cost estimates is that it doesn't account for marginal costs. This is something politicians are accounting for and the IPCC constantly mentions
There is a problem with that. They don't account for the marginal cost of climate policy. Just as Sub-Saharan Africa will have high costs from warming they will, by my lights, have higher costs than that from being blocked from developing with coal and gas
My general take is that we live in a world where the large majority of weather related deaths are from temperature, and a large multiple of those are from cold temperatures, including in Africa. Economic costs are not being balanced correctly against avoiding warming costs
An error: " If you previously thought (like I did) that there was a 90% chance that Polymarket was more accurate, you should update down to 88%."
You mean Metaculus.
Thanks, fixed.
Hmmm, this seems a bit like criticizing people (or systems) when they turn out to be right here... If the election had been close but happened to land on Trump then I would agree with you, but this election was sufficiently lopsided that I think giving a call of pure 50% is very slightly embarrassing, and I'm very curious to hear from pollsters where they think things went wrong.
Theo's 'Neighbor' theory is just one, and your right that with only one data point it's a bit ridiculous to say that he was definitely right, but I also think it's very important to note that Theo didn't just armchair reason his way to success. He tested his theory by commissioning a private poll with his own methodology, and it probably cost ~$100k, that's a huge structural advantage real money prediction markets have over reputation based ones. They offer profit incentives for spending money to gather *new* evidence, instead of just optimally summarizing existing evidence.
I agree that more people should criticize others who turn out to be right, and that this is an under-provided social good. See https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/against-learning-from-dramatic-events (I edited this into the post a second ago to hopefully emphasize this point).
Great analysis. What i am left wondering at the end of it: you are correct that prediction markets predicting the correct result does not entail that their model is right. is there any kind of empirical testing or a certain way prediction markets could perform that would cause you to conclude they are efficient? Or is this just a question that is immune to empirical testing bc we’ll never know the actual probability curve for the election?
It's philosophically debatable (like, *really* debatable) whether there even is a probability curve for the election.
Before the election, Silver emphasized that 50% was a mean outcome, but not a modal outcome. Given that polling errors would likely be correlated, he noted that a landslide win would be fairly likely, with an over 40% chance that a single candidate would take all 7 swing states. See e.g. https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1848060370268938538.
He also gave it around a 25% chance that Trump would win the popular vote. And it looks like he's doing to win it by a decent margin.
Not knocking Nate Silver at all here, but being able to predict that if there is a large polling error it would be correlated doesn't mean it's not unfortunate that there was a large polling error.
Using the posts framing, I would say that Nates model would put this result at a little less than 20% probably, or somewhere between 2 and 3 coin flips coming up heads (between 2-3 bits of evidence). Not a ton of evidence, but enough to shift my credence towards polymarket, especially since my prior against it was way less than 90% (though I did think before the election it was off)
Yeah, I think Nate’s model was right based on public information, but my gut tells me that based on this result and the herding that a lot of pollsters never published pro-Trump polls or were systematically overestimating Harris’s likely voters, making assumptions that her turnout would be similar to Biden’s in 2020. Without better polling firms, we will continue to see surprising election results.
I think this is right, but one thing that makes it hard to systematically resolve this is that the social landscape is always shifting, and pollsters are always trying to resolve the problems of earlier polls. There's always polling error election after election, but the direction isn't consistent, otherwise pollsters would correct for it. If there were methodological information which allowed private pollsters to construct more accurate polls, the public pollsters would have access to it too.
Two items:
ONE
Desertopa said "There's always polling error election after election, but the direction isn't consistent, otherwise pollsters would correct for it."
You may be being sincere here but if you look at the RealClearPolitics average going back to 2004, the error is almost always, 5 out 6 times, in favor of Democrats:
2004 Bush R +1.5 +2.4 => 1.1
2008 Obama D +7.6 +7.3 => 0.3
2012 Obama D +0.7 +3.9 => -3.2
2016 Clinton D +3.2 +2.1 => 1.1
2020 Biden D +7.2 +4.5 => 2.8
2024 Harris D +0.1 -3.3 => 3.4
Yes, small sample size applies, but remember these are averages of polls for each year (at least 9 polls in the average each year) AND these polls were informed by many other polls a week or two before. (It is surprising how organizations polls in early to mid October, but NOT the week before the election.)
So the idea the polls will self-correct sound a lot like the argument that "of course the legacy media is NOT biased, if they were people wouldn't trust them and would not listen to them."
Well people don't trust them (see the latest Gallup polls on this this) and they have a lot less less power and influence than they did in 1980 but they continue to be highly biased.
TWO
Desertopa said "If there were methodological information which allowed private pollsters to construct more accurate polls, the public pollsters would have access to it too."
It's not access to special methodology that allows private polls to be more accurate. I believe they are more accurate for two reasons:
1) Money - polls are expensive. A candidate or party is willing to spend the enormous amount of money to get the best possible information
2) Focus - public polls are usually meant to drive readers / viewers to a news organization and so want as many crosstabs as possible and just need to get to close to the results. Private polls are going to be more focused so they can get more data points and spend more time of getting exactly the right information.
If we include midterm elections though, we don't see this sort of systematic skew. Are polling averages systematically biased towards Democrats in presidental elections, but not in midterm elections? Maybe, but it's not at all clear that we should expect that to be the case.
As far as the accuracy of private versus public polls, in statistics, getting an adequate sample size for high precision is much, much easier than getting a sufficiently representative sample for high accuracy. Public polls aren't inhibited in their ability to get enough data points to be sufficiently accurate, the real issue is whether their sample sets actually reflect the overall voting population, which is a matter of methodology.
Maybe money and focus can produce accurate polls, but candidates and parties do not produce accurate polls. Their internal polls are much worse than public polls. You are trying to explain something false.
Yes, I think the "coin" analogy is extremely misleading. We didn't get a single binary output - we got the fact that the country overwhelmingly preferred Trump, and if that doesn't result in _some_ kind of signal that should be measurable by prediction markets, then honestly, what use are they?
If the markets predict a 50/50 chance that Kasparov will win a chess game against Carlsen, then the game starts and it turns out that Kasparov's been dead for 3 years and "forfeits" ... we wouldn't say "shucks, guess the markets lost this coin flip". Forecasters should start to ask questions about how they can maybe notice the next time a player is dead and factor that into their predictions.
"the country overwhelmingly preferred Trump"
Last figures I saw showed him with a little under 51% of the vote and Harris with about 47.5%.
He won a bunch of swing states ... by something like 51%-49% in each case.
In what world is any of that an overwhelming preference?
He did better than Harris, for sure. The electoral-college system, which can turn a bunch of near-50:50 results into a landslide either way, will deliver him a nice big count of EVs, for sure. But what about this suggests that the US electorate had so strong a preference for Trump that pollsters and pundits who said "it looks really close" are as wrong as a chess prognosticator who didn't notice that one player is dead?
Hmm, I think you and the other replies here are making a basic logic mistake. Prediction markets are not trying to estimate the % of the country that prefers a candidate. They are trying to estimate the % chance that candidate will _win the election_. The two values both have a % in them, but please don't get them confused.
So, I admit that I made the same mistake when I said America "overwhelmingly preferred Trump", which is more a statement about the former than the latter. What I should have said is that "Trump was overwhelmingly likely to win this election". Knowing what we know now, that is a correct statement. After all, Trump didn't win "a bunch" of swing states - he won ALL of them, because his 51-47 "coin" was "flipped" millions of times for each one. The election didn't hinge on which way the wind was blowing on Tuesday. Carlsen's victory against his dead opponent didn't hinge on whether he got enough sleep the night before.
Since this was a historically strong and certain election result, you have two possibilities:
- Prediction markets should been able to predict the result ahead of time with at least a little confidence.
- Prediction markets can't distinguish a country's 51-47 preference, and are thus useless for predicting the outcome of US elections.
I think we'd prefer the second wasn't true, but at the moment it's not looking good.
I have no idea what gives you the impression that I don't understand the difference between "x% votes for X" and "x% chance that X wins".
The claim I was commenting on was your statement that "the country overwhelmingly preferred Trump". He only got ~51% of the popular vote! If he'd had a couple of percent less he wouldn't have won the Electoral College either! That isn't what an overwhelming preference looks like.
Anyway, you've now retracted that, so fair enough. But I still don't buy that "Trump was overwhelmingly likely to win this election". I mean, I guess it depends on what that means. He _did_ win the election (unless there was some huge fraud that no one has caught a glimpse of, I guess, but I don't see any reason to believe that and mention it only because worrying about election fraud on the basis of no evidence is kinda Trump's brand), and probably for almost all elections it's true that if you could rewind the world by 24 hours and run the election again you'd almost always get the same result. But I don't see that that's a useful sense of "overwhelmingly likely to win".
The relevant question is: _given the available information_, was it overwhelmingly likely that Trump would win? I don't see why we should believe that. It was, in fact, pretty close. All the polling indicated that it would likely be very close. Polls have systematic errors and they're really hard to predict. If you think it was "a historically strong and certain election result" in some sense that implies "someone competent would have called it confidently in advance", I think you're under the influence of hindsight bias or something of the kind.
I _do_ think that prediction markets can't reliably predict a 3.5-point electoral preference, at least not if what you want them to do is to say "90% that X wins" in 90% of cases where X wins by 3.5 points or something like that. So far as I know, nothing can do that. I don't know of any reason to think anything should be able to do it.
(Whereas chess prognosticators _are_ able to predict that Magnus Carlsen will win a chess game against a corpse. It's a silly analogy.)
"Hmm, I think you and the other replies here are making a basic logic mistake. Prediction markets are not trying to estimate the % of the country that prefers a candidate. They are trying to estimate the % chance that candidate will _win the election_."
Then why are you talking about how the American people "overwhelmingly" prefer Trump?
The alleged overwhelmingness of Trump-preference, has little to do with the expected probability that a candidate will win an election; it's the *ratio* of actual Trump-preference to error margin in our measure of Trump-preference that matters. If 50.01% of the population of each swing state is committed to voting for Trump, and 49.99% for Harris, and the Orbital Brain Scanners allow us to predict this with +/-0.001% accuracy, then we will be justifiably very confident that Trump will win, If the actual preference is 60/40 in Trump's favor, but people so thoroughly and bafflingly lie to pollsters that the polls all have +/-20% error bars, then the smart money will be "meh, leaning Trump but still pretty much a toss-up".
And Trump winning with 60% of the vote, in that hypothetical, doesn't make the smart money wrong. Trump winning with 51% of the vote, *definitely* doesn't.
Erm, yes, did you read the end of the comment you replied to? It is entirely conceivable that our inconveniently complex world is such that prediction markets can't distinguish voter preferences well enough to say anything useful.
In this world, prediction markets for election results might as well not exist. To repeat, this election was a very strong result (only really beaten by Obama's and Clinton's landslide victories, which, as I recall, didn't require superforecasters to see coming). If you claim that it's STILL not strong enough for prediction markets (what you call the "smart money") to move away from 50-50, then I ask again: what use are they?
These are closely correlate because state-level outcomes are not independent but highly correlated.
>Last figures I saw showed him with a little under 51% of the vote and Harris with about 47.5%.
>He won a bunch of swing states ... by something like 51%-49% in each case.
>In what world is any of that an overwhelming preference?
Agreed! What I wish I had would be a two-dimensional plot of voters' views on something like:
Would like Harris to be POTUS: -10 ... 10
Would like Trump to be POTUS: -10 ... 10
showing the density of the distribution throughout this space
( Personally, I'd put Harris at -10 and Trump at -9, marginally lesser evil. )
The most important thing for anyone to remember is that, whatever one's view, there are a _lot_ of people who disagree, and (for Americans), these are your countrymen. You need to live with them.
Just for reference, in 2020 Biden got 51.3% of the popular vote compared to Trump’s 46.8% and no one was saying the country overwhelmingly preferred Biden. That would’ve been silly. 51% isn’t an overwhelming anything. Biden won by 7 million votes. So far, Trump is leading by 4.6 million votes. Biden also won more electoral votes in ‘20 than Trump will have won in ‘24.
EDIT: This last claim I made, about Biden receiving more electoral votes in ‘20 than Trump would in ‘24, now appears to be false. It now appears Trump will secure 312 electoral votes to Biden’s 306.
Some people were in fact saying that.
They were wrong too of course.
Yes. I’m wrong. You’re right. Some people probably said Biden’s narrow victory indicated that “the country overwhelmingly preferred” Biden, though I can’t find instances of that wording. Maybe you can. I just don’t think whoever you found who made that same claim could reasonably substantiate it. And given that Trump won by an even narrower margin, I don’t think the claim can be substantiated in his case either.
What do you mean? We got almost exactly what Nate Silver predicted. Off from the polls by about 2 points in every state. That seems to vindicate Nate Silver more than the people who said it would be an easy win for one side.
I made 10k off the election. It was really obvious that Trump would win, this was literally free money
I thought it was going to be Harris, my basic reasoning was: all the polls are herding, this is probably because they're terrified of another "Hillary 2016: 90% chance" moment, and so they're disproportionately throwing out Democrat leaning outliers.
I noticed that the vibes were good on the republican side but I figured the argument there was: polls are about equal, but they always underestimate Trump so he's actually winning in a landslide. I figured the polling companies were now taking that into account (taking it into account too much, even, as above).
Can I ask what kind of things you saw which made it obvious to you?
That was my guess too, especially as the non-herding polls leaned Harris.
It's the early vote. Compare a state like Florida or Texas on targetsmart to 2020. They had equal suburban and rural votes but were missing MILLIONS of urban votes (I'm not exaggerating) compared to 2020. It's when the early vote started coming in mid october betting sites across the board started to shift. This quixotic lone bettor theory scott posits is a tad dubious and I think there is a simpler explanation. Nevada is a prime example of early voter data (which makes up 80% of total vote) being borne out directly in the final results as most basic analysis would have lead one to conclude. (Ralston the main figure on early vote data from Nevada is super partisan and jumped through hoops to explain how kamala could "still" win. But even he was pessimistic in his framing. He also analyzed without the broader context of early voter data from other states which brought everything more into frame).
Yes, the early vote was the strongest signal. But there were other strong signals as well. Will write a substack article about this soon
Yeah, it's those missing urban votes I'd like to see explained. Why didn't they turn out? I am being slightly mean here, but she proposed legal weed and free money so black men could legally deal drugs without risk of prison, why didn't that work?
Did she just not click with black/Asian/Latino-Hispanic voters? Why not? Is her weakness her background, that her father was not US black but Jamaican black, and her mother Indian, so she's not 'authentically' black by the US context and not Indian 'enough' for those voters? Obama had the same problem, but he was married to Michelle, née Robinson, whose father was a precinct captain in Chicago and so those contacts aided his career. Harris is married to a white Jewish lawyer in San Francisco and doesn't have that family network behind her.
I believe it was mainly covid and mail ballots( and only secondly the hispanic vote shift). people locked down at home easy to reach by political ads, have less to do, not out having fun. take NJ for example. Everyone was mailed a mail ballot and they won huge. This time they weren't and they had to request it and it barely stayed blue. they have a huge swath of low propensity urban voters and were able to juice the turnout in this demo far beyond normal levels due to covid and using the emergency provisions provided by covid to make last minute changes to local election law and procedure. They will say it was only to counteract the reduced turnout forecasted on election day from covid concerns, but In reality I don't think anyone really doubts in many cases they used their expanded powers to get the most bang for the buck possible. A lot of these measure were rolled back in 2024 such as in NJ. Trump mentioned this exact line of reasoning on Rogan btw as an example of how they "cheated".
Are you saying that if we made voting easier and more convenient the DEM party would keep their advantage? How's making voting easy and convenient not a desirable property of a democratic society?
Ideally you want informed people to vote and people who essentially vote randomly or based on irrelevant information to not vote. If identity and party politics weren't relevant to voting, I think everyone would agree with this. Since identity and party are relevant, and ease of voting typically skews towards Democrats, the calculus is more complicated.
some ppl say a basic filter would be helpful like having to wait in line to vote on eday, or having id , or passing a basic civics test , or filing tax retunrs, or anything to show a minumum level of investmnet to the society you going to determine and influence with your vote. i think everyone is happy with the opportunity to vote being universal and free, but the level of ease is another question. it becomes political quickly because of how these measures would benefit one side or the other. the but as far as the theory of a functioning healthy democracy i think its an open question .
I think it might not be mail-in ballots. I *think* California sends everyone a mail ballot (I got one this year without requesting it, though I'm not sure that's not just because I requested it last time). But California went from +29% Dem last time to only +18% Dem this time. Obviously it's still really blue, but an 11 point shift is huge.
the famous scott replied to me :0
just so u know the vote is only half in in california and they count the mail ballot last which are more blue so the shift isnt going to be that big in the end but still a shift. dont we explain that by mexicans and asians shifting? those were very real changes that happened this election in the electorate, but volume of vote was still also down in the most densly populated areas for other reasons.
Well, an 11 pt shift is only 5.5 pct of voters changing their vote. So not necessarily that huge.
Note also that the Senate election shows a much less dramatic shift. The last several elections in CA since 2012 had the R candidate get 37.5, 43.8, 45.8, 39, and 42 this year. (I skipped 2016, when two Democrats made the final).
I think that Trump's magic as a politician is just making the entire news cycle so damn toxic that most people just tune out. From exit polls, racism was 4% of people's main concern, while the economy was 40%. Trump distracting everyone with culture wars crap, and media taking the bait every time, made most normal people tune out of politics. And since Dem voters skew younger and less conscientious, lower turnout hurts Dems a lot more. Plus Dems were the incumbent after COVID, so they were already perceived to be worse on the economy.
Sorry, but I think the reason people didn't vote for Kamala seems to be pretty simple, though only in retrospect. The voters were presented with two worldviews:
Trump is a dangerous, convicted felon who will amass power and never leave office, just as he did in 2020.
VS
Trump will solve the economic problems of this country and actually manage illegal immigration, just as he did in his prior term in office.
More voters merely believed the second instead of the first.
She attended HBU and was a member of a *very* popular and social - across generations and geography - sorority there. That sorority was very much over the moon about her becoming VP, and many of them wore pink and green to vote in 2020.
How much influence black women have over the vote of black men, I do not know.
Well, as someone who "didn't vote for Harris, just against Trump", I think she wasn't at all inspiring as a candidate. And political promises are easy to make, but which one's will be carried out?
I also think there's an inherent bias against women as leaders in the US, but Harris wouldn't have inspired me no matter what race or gender she had. And distasteful as I find it, many are inspired by Trump.
Voters don't seem to penalize candidates for being female and may reward them for it: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/voters-dont-penalize-candidates-for.
Well, he does seem to claim that, but the studies he claims to rely upon is behind a sealed door. I won't subscribe to see if there's a pig in that poke.