In the early day of HIV, many on the left were saying that it wasn't a gay disease and that it would imminently run through the heterosexual population to devastating effect - that didn't happen. Doesn't mean that moneypox won't be disastorous for heterosexuals, but falsely saying a primarily gay disease isn't a primarily gay disease has precedent.
Re: War Against Democracy, I believe the circle is squared by asserting that the legislatures of red states have been gerrymandered to the point that they are no longer democracies, so abortion restrictions are ipso facto anti-democratic.
> Metaculus lists the chance of Elon Musk becoming CEO of Twitter by 2025 as 10%. I don’t know how to square this with Polymarket, unless they think that Twitter might get delisted for other, non-Musk-related reasons.
I mean, if Musk is forced to buy Twitter, he doesn't have to make himself CEO?
That also is fairly plausible. It has been said that Tesla's shareholders see the twitter thing as bad because Musk spending time being CEO of another company would be a distraction, and thus bad for Tesla stock.
If he owns it in the same way that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post (i.e. through a holding company, and not CEO for even a single day), that might make Tesla shareholders feel a little better about it not being a distraction.
Which of course might factor into Musk choosing to do that idk maybe
Yeah, some important context is: back when everyone thought the Twitter deal was almost certainly on, prediction markets only gave about a 50% chance to Musk being CEO. So this is all consistent. (Also note that if Musk were to be CEO, he would almost certainly only be an interim CEO while he looks for a permanent one.)
Would love to see a number of predictions about the medium-term (say, 5 years) consequences of Dobbs in terms of number of abortions, availability of abortion pills, births, moves between states, and the like. So far have not seen any such “bundle of predictions” from Scott or the usual suspects, so I launched a mini forecasting contest to get answers.
The string of "aaaaaaaaaaaa" in the center of that URL really bugs me, that URL cannot possibly be using its negentropy very efficiently. Compression please! This is what url shorteners are for!
On the other hand, that URL already looks like the kind of thing that is going to redirect 10 times before getting me to my final destination, which is a problem that irritates me almost as much as the fact that the URL itself clearly sucks
Please fix all of these problems for the sake of my aesthetics <3
Roe was reversed, not "repealed". Only laws can be repealed. Dobbs neither enacted nor invalidated any law. If anything it did the opposite: it walked back the limits that Roe had placed on legislation.
Normally I wouldn't be so pedantic about this, but the idea that SCOTUS made policy in Dobbs is so mistaken and so central to wrong narratives of the decision that I can't ignore it.
I agree it was reversed not repealed as a matter of semantics, but in what *practical* -not merely technical or pro forma- sense do you think that they didn't "make policy". I suppose you could say that they simply abolished a preexisting policy of courts preventing legislatures from regulating abortion in certain ways, getting rid of policy rather than making it, but that seems pedantic.
To me, the difference between courts making policy and courts saying that it isn't up to courts to make policy (but only to interpret existing policy as enshrined in laws) seems non-pedantic. The former looks like usurpation of power whereas the latter looks like a return to the rule of law.
Courts have always made policy as long as there has been judicial review because the constitution is a vague document. The idea of just doing what the book says is meaningless. The book is vague for two reasons 1. Because all documents dealing with something as broad as law-making by necessity are vague and 2. It was written vaguely deliberately.
I would use the "If you can be bad, you can also be good" argument from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/if-you-can-be-bad-you-can-also-be here. If the Supreme Court said that the Constitution included a right to have Donald Trump as President and therefore we had to overturn all elections in his favor, people would protest that the Constitution doesn't really say that, and that would be an extremely valid complaint. Given that it's clearly possible to fail at "just by the book" interpretation, I think it's also possible to succeed, and that some courts do that better than others.
Oh we can certainly allow that some interpretations are better and some worse (though I still don't think this amounts to "just doing what the book says"), but it's all a matter of interpretative degree. My concern is that if we take Wasserschweinchen's argument down this path- it basically just amounts to "I don't think Roe v Wade was rightly decided, so overturning it was good". Now that's a fair statement of opinion- which is fine- but it's just a statement of opinion. Wasserschweinchen seemed to think that they were laying out a clear boundary between legitimate exegesis of the law and eisegesis of the law. One lawful and the other lawless. But the thing is that judicial supporters of Roe v Wade don't think they're "making law from the bench" or "doing judicial activism" or whatever, they really think that an earnest study of the vague, and expansive pronouncements of the constitution, plus a proper respect for the slow development of the law through precedent(1) implies that abortion must be legal.
(1)- Some will object to this part- but remember the framers new that they were creating law that would be interpreted through precedent- because America had a a common law system.
I think a semantic argument about what constitutes "making policy" doesn't seem like a good idea, so let's just say I think there's a huge difference between, on the one hand, clarifying a vague existing law where the intent is unclear and, on the other hand, making up a new law where the legislators clearly had no intent for such a law to exist. And I think that for judges to usurp the power to do the latter seems dangerous.
But that's a partisan spin on what happened, not an objective description.
Whether the constitution protects abortion is an open, subjective question. So far, 7 justices have said yes, and 6 have said no; the 6 win because they came later, but coming later doesn't make them more objectively correct.
Just because the court says 'the Constitution has nothing to say on this issue, it's up to the legislature' does not mean they are following the rule of law and not making policy. If the justices were to say 'actually the Constitution says it's fine to establish a state religion', obviously that would not be an objectively correct following of the rule of law, and would amount to making policy.
The constitution was written when a bunch of states had state religions. The constitution said 'Congress shall make no law regarding' them. The continental congress was corrupt and incompetent, this did not and has not changed, and even men who later repealed their state religions didn't want Congress involved.
Especially the men who voted out their state religions did not want Congress involved.
I disagree with that. I think it's clear both from the text and the historical interpretation of that text that the US constitution does not say anything about abortions, and I think the amount of people who would be happy if it did establish a right to abortions but who think it doesn't is testament to that.
Equating "the legislature" with "the people" isn't entirely untrue, but it's an idealized reflection of reality. The difference between a power-grab and a relinquishment of power is, however, very real, and *fundamental* to politics.
In Dobbs SCOTUS has relinquished a power that it had taken for itself and handed it back to the legislature. If Dobbs had stated that the unborn are owed Constitutional protections, that would have been a power-grab (regardless of its moral merits), or at least it would have been an alternate assertion of the power that was seized in Roe.
In accounting, minus negative $100 is the same as $100; but not in life. There's a big difference between an organization doing nothing and an organization enacting, promulgating and enforcing a law (or court decision, or whatever), even if the two have the same impact on policy. There was literally some actual person somewhere whose job was making sure states followed Roe. There were police of some kind able to apply force of some kind whose job it was to help that person. When a state overstepped Roe, actual people did actual stuff to other actual people to make them behave differently. Now, those people don't have that job anymore.
I just think it's really important to keep in mind that laws are laws because actual people go out and enforce them on other people. Because of that, there's a concrete distinction between making policy and not making policy, even if in both cases you're the one deciding the final policy people will have to follow. If you're making policy, somebody has to go out and do something to somebody else for it to happen. Not making policy happens on its own, you can just sit at home and twiddle your thumbs. In this case, the SC isn't making policy (for the most part, I guess, I suppose there are parts of Dobbs that are enforceable).
Wait, is that true? I thought legal activists would bring lawsuits in federal court against states that enacted laws that restricted abortions further than would Roe would allow. I don't know that there was an actual Roe Compliance Office in the Justice Department somewhere. I could of course be wrong.
He's speaking more generally. When a state got sued, and the courts overturned an abortion restriction, there were people with guns who would be involved in forcing (if necessary) the states to follow the court order. These are the same people who enforce every court order, not a special Roe Force or whatever.
Well, in this case it's a weird meta-level because Roe was saying that abortion couldn't be made illegal, so it involves people enforcing other people *not* enforcing; which decision involves "less enforcement" gets muddy when there's multiple levels of government in hierarchy
Sure, in the big picture. But the discussion is about whether the Supreme Court set policy or not; and the Supreme Court changed from a posture of enforcing to a posture of not enforcing.
My claim is that, if you say, "I'm not going to deal with this anymore", you're not making policy, even though policy on the ground changes as a result. You're stepping back and letting somebody else make policy.
Post hoc ergo proctor hoc is not a fallacy here. The court acted. Policy on the ground radically changed as they knew it would. They understood very well that they were doing. They meant it to happen. Maybe they don't make policy but they made a certain policy happen. The policy they personally desired.
Roe was such an obvious power grab without any basis in the constitution that I'm shocked nobody voted against their policy preferences to overturn it. I think abortion should be entirely legal and in many cases subsidized but Roe was still a terrible decision.
Agreed on both points. Unfortunately, pretty much all of the personal autonomy decisions: Griswold, Lawrence, Oberfell, Loving are, as Thomas pointed out (well, he left out Loving since his own marriage...) are on similarly power-grabbed sand. I want amendments or at least legislation protecting them, but I don't expect that to happen.
My claim here is against the people implying there's an obviously and objectively 'correct' interpretation of the Constitution here. My position is that it's ambiguous and subjective, and any interpretation will be guided by some type of larger value system, whether that is admitted or not.
I may be confused, help me understand your position
Are you making a fully general argument against all laws of any kind, on the grounds that they will be interpreted by potentially biased individuals?
If you are making a less sweeping point, what evidence or argument would you consider valid on the constitutionality of a law? Does it matter if it is genuinely believed by someone who is unhappy with the implied policy outcome?
Is an either originalist or textualist interpretation of law a "larger value system", or did you mean that phrase in a different sense?
I've never seen you post before, but unless you're going around saying the same thing about all supreme court decisions, and not merely the ones you disagree with, then you're not being principled.
Letting the states decide their own laws as they see fit, not being externally constrained except in the *very few* cases that a law is deemed contrary to the constitution. The original mindset of the constitution was indeed federalist, emphasizing how few those cases should be.
To the globalist mindset, the existence of fifty states is an unfortunate anachronism; those states ought to be completely fungible, and it should be as impossible to tell any difference between the states as it is to tell apart fifty McDonalds hamburgers, if putting geographical trifles aside. People of that mindset will want to expand the SCOTUS power to more directly dictate law/policy to the other states (and they will also be desiring a *particular composition* of the SCOTUS body at the same time, of course)
The mindset of federalism is much better at approaching Scott's ideal of "the Archipelago". One state will decide to treat the theft of $900 of goods as "misdemeanor" instead of as "felony", while other states will not see it that way. There's a lot of such details that add up. The blessing of the Archipelago is that you *can* decide do you wish to live in that state, or in some other state - that you are not choosing between 50 identical hamburgers - as the SCOTUS does not have the power to force all states to view a $900 theft as a misdemeanor, nor as a felony.
Reversing Roe likewise means that SCOTUS is abolishing a judicial fiat in favor of Archipelago democracy. It boggles the mind how many people view a case of disimposing a judicial policy, as a case of imposing a judicial policy.
I can buy that 'repealed' is a technical term of art that only applies to legislation, not all government policies.
But the idea that the word 'policy' only refers to legislation, and not other government decisions with large consequential effects on the populace, is I think a linguistic bridge too far. Under that usage, for example, nothing the president ever does could be described as 'policy', which is clearly at odds with common usage.
Granting rights is a policy, removing rights is a policy.
> Under that usage, for example, nothing the president ever does could be described as 'policy', which is clearly at odds with common usage.
Agreed (with this part), I'd use 'policies' with regard to both legislature and executive - in many democracies those functions are anyway separated but also intertwined.
As for the judiciary, it's different. Decisions obviously can have great political implications, but they are not policy and shouldn't be political - in a healthy system. In a less healthy system, courts sometimes (or more generally) become political players.
That's more of a general consideration, I'm not intending to make a statement about the Supreme Court decision. (Also, please feel free to let me know, if you know of a stable democracy, where political or politicized courts are normal and you think it has been working well.)
>(Also, please feel free to let me know, if you know of a stable democracy, where political or politicized courts are normal and you think it has been working well.)
The US?
I mean, I get it, I agree with you about how the courts *should* work.
But, come on. 'We will elect conservative judges that will overturn Roe' has been a major political rallying cry of Republican candidates for decades.
It literally doesn't matter what an 'objective' reading of the constitution would say on the issue (not that such a thing is possible). The Republicans who ran on that platform could appoint judges selected for believing the Constitution objectively sides with Republican policies, or selected for being willing to lie about what the Constitution says and reliably side with Republicans anyway, and the outcome would be indistinguishable.
What the Constitution says doesn't affect the outcome of the rulings, so long as the selection of Justices is this over-determined to produce a specific outcome.
When the process is built and operated to achieve a political end, and that political end is explicitly promised to constituents by the politicians operating it, the outcome is a political policy.
Are you saying: in the US courts have traditionally been politicized, and it generally is and has been working well?
The second part of your statement would also be consistent with: courts are normally not political, but currently in US they are. (or even have been for a while)
What I would say is, the US in general has been working well, comparatively. Courts in the US have always seen varying levels of politicization, and that is at a high point right now, alongside all other kinds of measures of polarization.
I'm not saying politicization makes US courts wok better; quite the opposite. I'm just saying it does exist here, and can be recognized in this decision.
"What the Constitution says doesn't affect the outcome of the rulings, so long as the selection of Justices is this over-determined to produce a specific outcome."
I think if the constitution explicitly had a right to abortion, pro-life people would've tried to change the constitution rather than tried to appoint justices that would blatantly ignore the constitution. The latter would make all constitutional rights meaningless, which conservatives don't want.
Sure, I'm not saying that it's impossible for the Constitution to affect this in counter-factual worlds.
My point is that in current reality, whether or not there is a 'correct' answer and what it is doesn't matter to the outcome. In a different world where the Constitution was 100% unambiguous on this, yes that would be enough to force politicians to pursue this by other means. In our world, it is ambiguous enough that the outcome gets swamped by political machinations.
I presume she would say it won't survive "in a spiritual sense". In effect I think she means: "if the Republican party does this, it will have permanently became something I really don't like".
I think she's deliberately being a bit rhetorically ambiguous and conflating the two - the motte is "we'll become something worse" and the bailey is "we'll lose popular support".
Liz Cheney is a regular person, and regular people don't say what they mean.
My interpretation is that she's literally saying the party will cease to exist, but she's exaggerating. The actual meaning is that the party will get less popular. But even that isn't meant as a serious prediction; the *actual* actual meaning is that she's expressing disapproval.
Grrr... Yeah, that sounds like a plausible interpretation. _I_ would take "will cease to exist" as meaning "go the way of the Whigs" - disband, leave the political scene. But Cheney is, after all, a politician, so expecting literal truth is not plausible, unfortunately.
It's hard to measure if the party has become "something I really don't like". I think the main fear is that the Republican party is becoming more opposed to democracy, that it is trying to win by illegal means.
So maybe "If Trump is the 2024 republican candidate and the democrats win the 2024 election, will the 2024 republican candidate claim the election was rigged?"
And "If Trump is the 2024 republican candidate and the democrats win the 2028 election, will the 2028 republican candidate claim the election was rigged?"
can this be the moment a sane third party is born that doesn't turn gynecological health into a national circus and only talks about actual problems and effective solutions
You can push any of your own assumption on abortion under the banner of "common sense" but it will have very little effect if you dont spend like 5 seconds to acknowledge that what you call common sense might just be a really nice name for your own ideological bias.
Nope, not calling common sense and medical reality ideological bias. Not as a stem cell biologist and 1st gen Irish immigrant where we were filling mass graves with children until the 70s.
There is a broadly supported consensus of easily accessible abortion in the first trimester and exceptions later for special cases, with about 70% popular support (about 15% disagree from either side). Political parties are incentivises against this compromise though, because those 30% are the ones who vote on abortion issues in primaries.
That was not my point though. Any framing of a debate in term of "my side is the side of common sense, the other side is dumb/evil/fanatic" is moot. Policy debates should not appear one-sided.
If one side is trying to actively dismantle democracy in favor of theocracy and counts actual fascists among its members without denouncing them, it's probably no great loss if their arguments go unheard.
I'm curious where you got this "theocracy" idea. I don't see why restrictions on abortion would have to be justified solely on the basis of religion any more than bans on adult murder would have to be.
Sure, Christianity may agree that abortion is wrong, but it also agrees that adult murder is wrong - do we live in a theocracy because murder is illegal? "Huh, 'thou shalt not kill' is in the Ten Commandments, I guess we have to legalize all murder now to avoid being a theocracy." Separation of church and state doesn't just mean you always do the *opposite* of whatever the dominant religion says - it's perfectly fine for the church and state to agree on stuff.
>If one side is trying to actively dismantle democracy in favor of theocracy and counts actual fascists among its members without denouncing them, it's probably no great loss if their arguments go unheard.
…restricted, rather. And I'm fine with that, but we shouldn't be second-guessing doctors. If we do that we wind up with a lot more maternal deaths and a guaranteed violation of 1A (Jewish law requires D&E if the mother's life is in danger unless the baby is at least half-out of the womb, for example; other methods are also admissible, but abortion is actually required to save the mother's life).
Also, I think the idea in Roe that the bar should be viability is silly; it should be the probable existence of a brain or ability to feel pain, or something else neurological. Viability is a bar that is likely to get earlier as time goes on; neurological bars are unlikely to ever change.
How would you describe it when doctors are unable to save the life of a mother because abortion is banned? Even if it's explicitly allowed for that purpose (not a guarantee), the prosecutor may decide differently.
If my religion says that I must kill my wife if I discover her infidelity to preserve the honor of my family, are homicide laws a violation of my first amendment rights?
"What do people here think of a referendum (either national or state-by-state)? If voters were asked:
"What is the maximum number of weeks into pregnancy that an elective abortion should be allowed?"
then sorting the results and picking the median value gives a length such that half the electorate thinks it is too long (too lenient) and half the electorate thinks it is too short (too stringent)."
_Personally_ I prefer that abortion be allowed up to birth (if an unwanted fetus is sucking nutrients out of her bloodstream, I support her right to put a stop to it). But I think picking a median length from the preferences of the electorate has the best chance of finally getting broad acceptance.
Let me guess - broad consenses are only instantiations of 'common sense' when you agree with them, right? When there was a broad consensus that segregation was good.....?
In a first-past-the-post system, 3+ national parties is at best an unstable equilibrium (see the UK's LibDems or Canada's NDP in the past 20 years).
Add in the incredible inertia for a two-party system here in America too. Unless and until you change the voting system to approval, STAR, or RCV*, pining for a third party is useless.
* theoretically, I prefer RCV. But it's too opaque for a society with concerns about electoral integrity--we absolutely need election results within 12 hours of poll closing. It might be due to incompetence, but RCV just takes too long, and the idiocy of not reporting results all the way to the final round even when the winner hits 50% leads to terrible punditry (e.g. Collins vs. Gideon in 2020-ME-Sen. Even Wikipedia says
"Gideon underperformed Biden by 10.6%, the second-worst underperformance by a Democratic Senate candidate in the country"
yeah, cuz people voted third-party knowing that their votes would eventually find their way to Gideon, but Collins hit 50% with 6.6% remaining in the 3rd/4th highest finishers so ME ended the counting)
Two thumbs up for your take on RCV. I voted against it in NYC for this very reason. Look at the Oakland mayoral election several years back, when Don Perata was way ahead after the first round vote, but ended up losing. Can you imagine what would have happened if he were Trump? People don't get the math re RCV. In contrast, approval voting is easy to understand.
PS: That being said, multiple parties in the US would be a disaster. There would be ethnically based parties, an Antifa party, an alt-right party, etc. A recipe for political violence.
Eh, I think the forced coalition building might just make some strange bedfellows that would mellow people out. If Jewish and Arab nationalists can form coalitions in the Knesset, I think we'd be able to too.
Please don't use the broader term RCV when specifically criticizing instant runoff (IRV). Condorcet methods are also a form of RCV and avoid many of the flaws of IRV.
The algorithm may be, but the principle is not. To understand an IRV result, you have to understand its algorithm. But the idea that the candidate who would beat every opponent in a two-way race wins doesn't require knowing how to efficiently compute it.
yes, that's exactly what I was saying. The LibDem 2010/NDP 2011 results were fleeting for the third-party because two-party dominance is mathematically favored by FPTP (regional parties are a different matter)
You point to Canada and UK in the past 20 years, but what about before that? Why should I care that the equilibrium is so unstable, it'll only last a century? The parties themselves change faster than that.
Duverger's law is a purely theoretical argument. It sounds good, but it's not true. The only FPTP country that follows it is USA. Every other FPTP country in the world has more than 2 parties (not including regional parties).
If people consider life to begin at conception, how is the destruction of human life not an "actual problem"? YOU don't think it is, but you don't get to decide what everyone else belives and values.
Not fantasy; science fiction. Specifically, the "uterine replicator" from Lois Bujold's "Vorkosigan Saga".
Otherwise, no. The only thing that will be recognized as an "effective solution" by a decisive majority of the population, is something that ensures no woman is ever compelled to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term while simultaneously ensuring that no fetal heartbeat is ever forcibly ended. And we don't have the technology to do that, even on the vaguest horizon.
If what you mean is, "actually solve the problem *I* think is obviously important, while completely ignoring that thing a hundred million or more people think is a huge problem but I think is obviously frivolous", then yeah, you just need a way to impose your will against the opposition of a hundred million or more other people. But that's going to cause problems of its own, possibly much bigger ones.
The fact that different markets predict different incompatible things is a big strike against the hope of accurate prediction through prediction markets.
Also, I always find it funny when rationalists say things like "and rush to the prediction markets without thinking very hard about how Bayesian updating works."
You know most people don't think about Bayesian updating at all right ?
"The fact that different markets predict different incompatible things is a big strike against the hope of accurate prediction through prediction markets."
Agreed.
On a somewhat related note: Do any markets have predictions for GOP taking the senate and/or the house _contingent on some inflation measure_ (perhaps CPI, perhaps just gasoline prices)?
"The fact that different markets predict different incompatible things is a big strike against the hope of accurate prediction through prediction markets."
No - the whole point is that in a money-based prediction market, when a smart rationalist comes along and realizes a discrepancy like this, they can make unlimited free money with arbitrage until the discrepancy is gone.
No, there are financial instruments that would allow you to perform a risk-free arbitrage in this case. One reason for inefficiency is because these markets are in their infancy in terms of technical complexity as well as size.
Umm... This doesn't sound like a disagreement. If the markets are running efficiently, discrepancies should be reduced quickly. Discrepancies are evidence of friction or inefficiencies.
The lack of arbitrage in this case is because Metaculus is not a real-money prediction market. I haven't used PredictIt myself but I understand it also has quite a bit of friction built in via fees and bet limits.
The fact that we don't have any really excellent prediction markets around (yet?) is certainly evidence that they're hard to implement well, but I'm not ready to give up.
With prediction markets that absolutely exist, the very limited amount of money available will leave most rationalists with butt firmly planted in couch rationally deciding that it's not worth their bother. With hypothetical prediction markets that allow for really large financial gains, I've elsewhere explained my reasons for suspecting that https://xkcd.com/1570/ will apply.
I was sketching a proof by the law of excluded middle: either these obvious inefficiencies in the market will disappear quickly, or some quant will make infinite free money. And people don't tend to make infinite free money in the real world, implying that these obvious inefficiencies will disappear quickly.
"With hypothetical prediction markets that allow for really large financial gains, I've elsewhere explained my reasons for suspecting that https://xkcd.com/1570/ will apply."
The reason that's true for the stock market is that a few thousand of the smartest people alive are constantly doing everything they can to squeeze every last cent of alpha out of the market, so there are little to no easy ways to beat the stock market. My point is that this is not yet true for prediction markets.
Financial markets have a tough time predicting things like inflation and earnings. Those market participants have an abundance of information and financial incentive to get those predictions right. It’s often unclear to me what outcomes prediction markets will deliver beyond a quantitative retort to propagandist-level bullshit.
There’s also a whole gamut of regulations and implementation hurdles that rationalists don’t think apply to them.
One possible reason that the Dobbs case had a stronger impact on decision vs. the draft release may be that the draft was from Alito, but the decision itself included the Thomas concurrance, where he pretty much said that contracraction, gay marriage and sodomy laws will be next.
"Laws"? Do you mean the supposed constitutional protection for those things? I don't think Thomas's opinion implied they were going to somehow make those things illegal, just that there may not be any constitutional justification for striking down laws that restrict those things.
Even less than that: his concurrence questioned making the decisions on those topics based on substantive due process, but that other, sounder bases could exist to protect those rights.
Note that in Chicago v. McDonald he did not sign on to the controlling opinion but penned his own stating that he would have upheld the right using the Privileges and Immunities clause rather than the Due Process clause.
The Thomas concurrence has been getting a fair amount of press, so that might be affecting polling and prediction markets. However, it shouldn't be a surprise to people who have been paying attention to the courts: Thomas has long been writing dissents or concurrences in which he argues for abolishing the Substantive Due Process doctrine and replacing it with a strengthened reading of the Privileges and Immunities clause instead. His concurrence in Dobbs is straight out of this template, and as with all the other times he's brought it up, he's still the only justice who's in favor of it.
One possibility on Dobbs is that a number of investors assumed that the polls, which were moved very little (if at all) by the leak, would not move as a result of Dobbs - ie they assumed that voters had already updated for Dobbs and the actual opinion wouldn't affect voting intention.
This was quickly shown to be wrong; there has been noticeable movement in the polls after Dobbs.
It's worth pointing out that Dobbs was just one of a slate of very conservative rulings by the court that all came together. It was also before Thomas specifically called out contraception, gay marriage, and sodomy as next on the chopping block.
Plausibly someone on the left could look at the leaked ruling and think 'well, yeah, we knew the right to privacy stuff was shaky; this sucks and we'll have to fight in the legislature, but maybe this is the worst of it.'
The big slate of conservative rulings all together, plus fears about the upcoming ruling on election boards, paints a more dire picture of a highly activist, highly conservative court that's ready to spend decades dismantling liberal victories of the last century.
" It was also before Thomas specifically called out contraception, gay marriage, and sodomy as next on the chopping block."
Re contraception: I'm willing to predict that if SCOTUS overturns Griswold, there will be enough outrage to do something to SCOTUS. My guess would be packing the Court, but there might be other possibilities (term limits - maybe really short ones?). One way or another, reneging on a freedom that 65% of reproductive-age women in the country actively use would amount to firmly grasping the third rail.
I think court packing is a dangerous distraction, it's a slippery slope to complete anarchy. Why would the other team accept the new justice count and not just pack further next time they are in? It's insane from a game-theoretical perspective.
A sensible reform is term limits. Here's a bill that proposes a mechanism: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/hr5140. I think this should get more attention (hence why I'm posting here) and I think this would go a long way towards restoring the supreme court's legitimacy.
The TLDR: 18-year terms, so you get one appointment reflecting the new congress configuration each 2-year election cycle (I'd prefer 10-year terms but the 2-year cadence is a nice property). There's a "seniority" mechanic so the older justices aren't fired/retired, they stay on as "Senior Justices", but the youngest 9 make up the group that actually decides opinions. This gets around concerns that you can't fire the old justices.
And finally, there is a phase-in mechanism where existing lifetime appointees are excluded from the "seniority" mechanism, so they get to serve out their terms. So you have an awkward period where every 2 years we choose new Junior Justices, but they are just on the bench until a lifetime justice dies/retires. But at the time of a vacancy, there is already a successor pre-selected. I think this mechanic is chosen because of concerns about the constitutionality of changing the appointment from lifetime to 18-year for existing appointees, the concern being SCOTUS would strike down the bill if it would cause them to lose their own jobs.
I'd rather not implement the phase-in mechanism and move immediately into replacing the justices, rather than waiting a generation to clear out the lifetime appointees. But if it's not constitutional to do that then so be it, let's fix the system for our children. (I think it would probably be easier to get the Red Team on board with the phase-in to reform next-generation, but harder to get the Blue Team on board with deferring reform. Realistically the Red Team is not going to agree to Supreme Court reform in any circumstance, having just achieved their multi-decade strategy to reverse Roe, so perhaps the more realistic political strategy is to play to the Blue Team, make this a central plank of the election campaign, and win a landslide to get this past the filibuster. I do wish that we could make this change in a way that pragmatists on both sides could agree upon though.)
>I think court packing is a dangerous distraction, it's a slippery slope to complete anarchy. Why would the other team accept the new justice count and not just pack further next time they are in? It's insane from a game-theoretical perspective.
Keep in mind that from the perspective of many liberals (myself included), McConnell already pulled the pin on this game-theoretic grenade by stealing an appointment from Obama.
Whether or not that's 'as bad as' packing the court, it was an escalation beyond the previous equilibrium that changed the makeup of the court unilaterally; if the other side doesn't respond in kind, they're just continuing to cooperate while the other side slams 'defect' over and over.
Personally I agree with the assessment that the blocking of Garland's appointment was a clear escalation; it was absolutely a breach of longstanding protocol/convention. But responding in kind would mean the Democrats will now block any Republican nomination when they have control of one chamber, even if that means one or two (or more!) years of vacancy.
I think it would be a substantial further escalation to pack the court. Furthermore, I don't understand why it is expected to make any lasting difference; if the Blue Team packs the court, the next time the Red Team is in control they will follow the precedent and pack even more justices (or perhaps more likely unpack the court to remove the most recent packed justices). It in no way solves the problem, unless the goal is to take some short-term victories like reversing Dobbs, while pretending to ignore that a few years later that reversal would be reversed again. This further delegitimizes the institution. What's the endgame here?
If you're playing iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with a known defector, then of course, defect. But in this case we can also elect to change the rules of the game to reduce/remove the utility premium from defection; I think that is the rational approach here.
Perhaps delegitimization is a reasonable strategy if one wants deeper reforms like term limits, but can't achieve that without bipartisan agreement on the illegitimacy of the court? I think we should be trying to come up with a new structure that is more democratically sound and more resistant to bad-faith political maneuvering, rather than reaching for the nuclear option, regardless of how satisfying that option might feel in the moment. The lesson "don't create any powers that one isn't happy to hand to the worst imaginable opponent from the other party" should have been well-learnt for Democrats in the Trump presidency.
>But responding in kind would mean the Democrats will now block any Republican nomination when they have control of one chamber, even if that means one or two (or more!) years of vacancy.
If that opportunity had come up at a opportune time, sure; but if the situation where that's possible doesn't happen to arise for 30 years, then it's the same as not responding.
'Taking whatever opportunity presents itself to change the balance of the court in your favor' is another way of looking at 'responding in kind' here.
>I think it would be a substantial further escalation to pack the court.
Agreed for some values of 'substantial'.
>Furthermore, I don't understand why it is expected to make any lasting difference; if the Blue Team packs the court, the next time the Red Team is in control they will follow the precedent and pack even more justices
The worst case scenario based on that prediction is that the Red Team loses control of the court now and regains it in 3/5/7/9/11/whatever years, when they control both the Presidency and Congress.
Whereas the current situation is that they control it now, and continue to control it that entire time, and possibly play tricks again to keep control next time they might lose it 'legitimately' in several decades.
Option 1 seems like a strict improvement for Blue Team no matter what. We've seen what controlling the court for even one session can accomplish, now that the gloves are off.
>What's the endgame here?
A lot of proposals for packing the court are not about just simply adding justices, but also reforming the way they are appointed or how cases are heard. For instance, getting rid of lifetime appointments and having a new justice retire/appointed every 2 years, or having a much larger bench and having each case heard by a random subset of justices, or etc.
Creating a new normal that's more robust and fair may be more resilient to future repeal if it is popular with the populace. It may also restore legitimacy if the public considers it a reformation on the current disliked state of affairs.
>The lesson "don't create any powers that one isn't happy to hand to the worst imaginable opponent from the other party" should have been well-learnt for Democrats in the Trump presidency.
I see no evidence that Democrats setting precedent is needed for Republicans to do things. Republicans are an equal political party here; anything Democrats could conceivably 'create precedent' for by doing first, Republicans could just do first themselves whenever it's convenient.
So I fundamentally reject this notion of 'creating precedent', at least under the current circumstances where Republicans don't seem constrained by it. Possibly a new normal will arrive in some period of time where neither side is defecting, but right now it seems irrelevant to the reality.
>Perhaps delegitimization is a reasonable strategy if one wants deeper reforms like term limits, but can't achieve that without bipartisan agreement on the illegitimacy of the court?
There is an issue: It is the real acted out precedent that is king. Building legitimate institutions is hard and difficult, but anything you do in the attempt forms a precedent.
Think about Sulla. Sulla's reforms and content of the laws he wrote had little lasting influence on Roman state apparatus. After he died, many had noticed effectiveness of his methods of changing the laws to his preference.
The equivalent 'defect' move is holding a seat open, or possibly finding another mild way to escalate.
Court-packing is very different, because it means that future presidents (with pliant Senate majorities) will be able to have a majority on the court that they directly appointed. Think about what 2020-election-season Trump could have done with 18 of 27 seats on the Supreme Court packed with sycophants. Even if 4 of those had turned out to be able to put country above party, the other 14 would still have been a majority willing to overturn an election. The Supreme Court is currently conservative, but it's not reactionary or populist and therefore is one of the strongest protective elements the democratic system still has.
I think term limits are reasonable. I would also want them shorter than 18 years. I _don't_ think that they will restore the supreme court's legitimacy.
As Justice Barrett has denied, the court is indeed acting as political hacks, making public policy and trying to construe the words of the constitution to somehow read their preferred policy into it. Now, as a (gritting my teeth) policy making body, it seems disproportionate for the power of any Justice to last longer than e.g. the two consecutive terms that a President can serve.
What I would _prefer_ to see is a less polarized Congress, that can actually set policies that a broad consensus of the nation can support and abiding by explicit Constitutional limits. (I would also prefer to see public policies set by referenda, preferably phrased as laws with adjustable parameters so the median voter winds us setting the value - not winner-take-all party contests) Ideally, the only time SCOTUS should get involved is if Congress or a state legislature passes a law which violates the clear language of the Constitution, and must be struck down, or when an unavoidable conflict between Constitutional rights and/or powers occurs, and someone _has_ to rule on which takes precedence. But ideally, these would be rare.
I admit, I'm ambivalent about this. "No man's life, liberty, or property is secure while Congress is in session." On the other hand, congresscritters have hamstrung themselves to the point where they seem incapable of even routine acts of governance, such as passing budgets.
"Ideally, the only time SCOTUS should get involved is if Congress or a state legislature passes a law which violates the clear language of the Constitution, and must be struck down, or when an unavoidable conflict between Constitutional rights and/or powers occurs, and someone _has_ to rule on which takes precedence."
That's exactly what happened in this case, no? A state legislature passed a law restricting abortion, and the court ruled that it did not violate the clear language of the Constitution, which says nothing about abortion, so they did not intervene and strike down the law.
Yes. I liked the _policy_ of Roe v Wade, but I agree with Alito's reading of the words of the Constitution (or, in this case, the absence of words). Personally, I'd ideally prefer to see legislation explicitly declaring abortion legal, and I'd like to see amendments explicitly protecting bodily autonomy and privacy, but these aren't going to happen. If Congress had sense, they would at least explicitly declare contraception legal (hey, if they can have an FDA, they can control interstate commerce in drugs), and prevent a challenge to Griswold - but they are too polarized to even do _that_.
> I think court packing is a dangerous distraction, it's a slippery slope to complete anarchy. Why would the other team accept the new justice count and not just pack further next time they are in? It's insane from a game-theoretical perspective.
Sure, they can do that. The end result would be that the American people's voting habits would actually determine the composition of the Supreme Court, not a decades long act of complex political gamesmanship. Personally, the latter seems better to me.
The other side is going to pack it when they get in *anyway*, the only question is whether your side will be able to at least do some good work in the interim. But really, when the other side packs the Supreme Court, they'll then have it change the election laws so that their side will rule forever. So the only way democracy can even survive, is for our side to pack the court *first*, and change the rules so that the people will freely elect our side every time from now on and we don't have to worry about what will happen if the other side wins. Everybody knows that the tide has turned, demographics is destiny, the people *really* support our side for ever and ever and it's only by way of undemocratic bogus elections that the other side can ever win.
Not really, but both sides will be increasingly tempted to believe versions of that.
I think you're right in identifying that there is some threshold past which this mentality takes hold. That's what I'm afraid of and why I believe court packing is dangerous; we all but ensure that mentality takes over if we pack the court. I don't think this mentality is inevitable though. (Perhaps I'm naively optimistic here.)
I'd observe that the Trump administration did not abolish the filibuster, nor pack the court, even when it would have been highly advantageous to do so (for example Trump's appointments getting blocked by cloture votes, continuing the sharp escalation of blocked appointments in Obama's presidency). The Red Team strategy for Supreme Court reform has instead been a multi-decade plan operating mostly inside the existing framework (though as noted above, breaching longstanding convention in the Garland nomination). So I don't think it's rational _now_ for Blue Team to think that the Red Team is going to pack the court. They already won this battle without doing so!
However, the thing one might be afraid of on either side is that the tools are there to whoever has the will to use them; simply abolish the filibuster, and then do whatever one wants to the Supreme Court. One could, in extremis, change the laws so drastically that the next party in power couldn't change them back (though note, this is not what the Democrats propose with their mainstream court packing proposals AIUI). I think this kind of instability points to the need for constitutional reform, to implement more stable systems. But lacking that, we need to proactively shore up these institutions to maintain the sort of bipartisan legitimacy that would hinder a radical government from tearing them down.
If one thousand people toss a coin five times, roughly thirty of them will get five heads in a row. How do you, or Samotsvety, distinguish between predictors who were right through sheer chance, and those who were right thanks to their ability to accurately predict the future?
That's why you go with a range of the successful ones instead of just one, and try to go with the ones with longer records. Superforcasting mentions that this does work, in that people who did well in one cycle of predictions tend to do well on the next (though presumably with some mean reversion).
The part they don't tend to emphasize is that the people who scored best in their competitions were mostly the ones who spent the most time researching the questions. It's not clear that there's a whole lot of "talent" involved beyond being generally smart and well read and having a basic understanding of probabilities.
Five bits of information are not enough to tell the good ones reliably. Two things can help here. One is, obviously, more predictions. The other one is if they successfully bet on what are generally considered low odds. If three millions of people roll a twenty sided dice five times in a row, about one of them will roll the 20 five times.
Related, I think forecasters can only be judged against each other. They generally do not work on repeatable things like roulette outcomes which lend themselves to frequentist probability modelling, but on generally non-repeatable ones like elections. Still, using Bayesian probability, one can keep score between them. There will always be some probability remain that a given superforcaster is just mediocre but was amazingly lucky in the past, but as long as it is small, who cares.
Vaguely related, I have been wondering something similar about fond performance. So your bank suggest a fond to you and it has been increasing in value for the last decade. Obviously. If the fond had badly tanked in year eight they would hardly try to convince you to buy it. I am unsure how serious I should take such a "survivor bias". Probably, one would look at a random sample of the fonds the bank ran ten years ago and see how they have performed in general. If nine out of ten have tanked, then odds are that the fond they are pushing on you was just lucky so far.
Day 1: you get a letter in the mail! "Buy Stock X! It's going up today!" Oh, a scam. You crumple it up and throw it in the bin. Just out of interest, that evening you check out Stock X's performance - it's up.
Day 2: Another letter! "Sell Stock Y! It's going down today!" Again, intrigued, you check the price - once again, the prediction was correct.
...
Day 10: the scammer checks the stock market reports, crosses the names of people who received the incorrect prediction off his list, and writes a new letter asking for a sign-up fee for his infallible stock prediction newsletter.
One could use this approach to do a Sybil attack and create lots of smurf accounts on the forecasting platform, then claim fame from the one that got lucky.
But it doesn't work when your identity is pre-registered and you only have one account to work with, as presumably all of these superforecaster teams would function. So it doesn't really work in the context that Scott is describing.
Put differently, Scott is proposing adding a forecasting scorecard to existing identities (which even if pseudonymous, involve the "proof of work" of writing content and engaging with a community over a long period of time). I don't think many people would be interested in following predictions from anonymous Metaculus accounts that don't have much/any "proof of social work" beyond their predictions.
On the prediction markets and Dobbs, why isn't the answer that prediction markets aren't that great? I think there have been other posts on this that I haven't read, but sometimes it feels like if there was a PredictIt thing "the Sun will rise tomorrow" and it was only at 98%, people on here would all be freaking out about the small-but-real-possibility of the world suddenly ending.
Separately on trump, I think it makes sense to distinguish between "trump's political career is over" and "trump is indicted or becomes universally unpopular or some other type of major repudiation". The latter is what he seems to wriggle out of. For the former, my prediction is he'll probably lose the 2024 nomination (if he runs).
It's worth understanding what ways they fail in. That they overestimate tail risks is a known failure mode, this one is slightly weirder (but does have reasonable explanations)
You can prove that theoretical ideal prediction markets should be near perfect in various ways. When an existing prediction market is bad, it's worth trying to figure out where the proof failed (ie how it's different from the theoretical ideal ones) to see if there's some easy fix. And if we *can't* figure out why it's different, then either we've learned something new about the world (eg politics) or need some new fundamental assumptions about math/economics/whatever.
Without knowing anything about this theoretical proof, what I'm reacting to is the discussion about Jan 6 and trump's chances, which isn't about "how is Predictit falling short of a theoretical prediction market" or something, it's just taking its predictions at face value as being indicative of trump's chances.
I suspect it would be an interesting experiment to have "Will the Sun rise tomorrow?" questions posted on prediction markets. It would be illustrative to observe the rate of various bump-and-dump schemes, irrational financial panics and such.
Someone does have "this prediction will resolve as true at the end of the year" on manifold right now. Iirc it's currently at 97%, which is probably roughly the risk free interest rate
> Liz Cheney says the Republican Party “can’t survive” nominating Trump in 2024. This is exactly the kind of prediction I anticipate people walking back if they were asked to make it formally. Let’s say “conditional on Trump as 2024 nominee, Republicans won’t get >40% of the vote in either of the 2028 or 2032 presidential elections”. Would Liz Cheney - or anyone else - really take that bet, at any odds?
Yes, there are people who would happily take that bet at unfavorable odds.
This ties into the "motivation for formal forecasting" that you mention earlier. The point of forecasting is often not to passively make accurate guesses about where the future will go. It's to influence the future to go where you want it to go, by providing confident leadership in that direction.
When that's your model, it's not really relevant whether you end up winning or losing money on the bet. The point was to make the bet.
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On a mostly-unrelated note, "will Twitter be delisted by July 31[, 2022]?" is obviously mispriced at $0.01 yes, $0.99 no - yes should be lower and no should be higher. Is that a possibility on polymarket?
>"The point of forecasting is often not to passively make accurate guesses about where the future will go. It's to influence the future to go where you want it to go, by providing confident leadership in that direction."
Thank you for this. It's one of those insights that is crystal-clear and self-evident now that I've heard it, but it never occured to me before. I guess I never thought about prediction/forecasting as a rhetorical device.
Yes, but the idea is that in even a marginally efficient market, with enough traders and volume, the market would accept the premium from the person making the motivated bet, but then immediately price back down to the true predictive price. All it takes is a single actor with enough capital who is motivated by making money (as opposed to influencing politics), and they will happily accept other people's bad bets all day long. If I know the true chance of something happening is 80%, but others don't want it to happen, so they start shorting the market down to 75%, 70%, 65%, etc. to influence policy, I will simply buy everything below $0.80 and make a profit. The only way this strategy could work is if the total amount of money of the influencers is greater than the total amount of money of the profiteers, and it would be hard to maintain that when you're constantly handing over all your money to the profiteers.
But the more inefficient you make the market with your non-truth-valuing bets, the more traders you invite in to proft from those inefficiencies. If you are able to spend enough money to cause a long term shift in the market in a way you find ideologically favorable, then the market is probably too small and unimportant to be of meaningful practical significance in the first place.
Regarding the Dobbs thing, maybe some people thought if the leak and pressure campaign had made SCOTUS change its final decision, it would have been a scandal on itself that favored Republicans. Or maybe they thought the final decision would drag out longer and that it happened relatively fast, or at that particular moment, favored Democrats in some way. Or they expected more immediate riots or some other immediate reaction that didn't happen and viceversa. But I guess it's just the markets being wrong.
The concern focuses on the magnitude of the change. Updating some on actual public dynamic is expected, as it removes some uncertainty. However, in this case the actual public dynamic is pretty much in the fat part of the bell curve of possible expected responses, so you’d expect a smaller update than the initial update from the leak. Instead, there was actually a much larger update.
This kind of reasoning would be more impressive if presented before actual event (that is, between leak and official SCOTUS decision). Like, "I predict the prediction markets will update by x percentage points before a particular date".
Suppose predictors thought there is 75% chance leak was true and 50% chance Democrats would fail to use the decision to energize their base. I thought the general reaction from the leak was blase.
Re: Twitter, you can look to the stock price itself, and think of it like:
- X% odds Musk wins, or only has to pay a $1B, resulting in Twitter being a ~$20 stock (some uncertainty around the $20 figure, but this is roughly the midpoint of downsides people are using).
- (1-X) % odds Twitter wins and forces Musk to buy the company at somewhere between $46-54.20, with probably a midpoint at around $50.
The current stock price is $32.65, so if you solve for X, you get something like a 57% chance of a Musk victory from the market.
This is sensitive to some assumptions around:
1) The downside (is Twitter a $20 stock, or a $35 stock without Musk).
2) What's the distribution of outcomes around an outright Twitter victory vs. a recut deal at like $46.
3) The possibility of a large cash settlement by Musk to get out of the deal, worth like $10-15B or something (in which case Musk wouldn't own Twitter, but Twitter would trade at well north of the downside price).
So still no perfect answer here, but another datapoint to track.
On the Polymarket question, the current view in the arb space is that a trial is likely to be decided by the end of the year FWIW. Delaware Court of Chancery moves quickly when necessary, and they need to leave time for appeals.
I don't think that the court will force Musk to buy twitter. It makes no sense to force a company to unwilling owner. Even if we have past precedent, this one is too big and damaging for the company that judges will not go for it even if it is according to the law.
So, more likely we are talking about what Musk has to pay to get out of the deal – $1B or more?
Alternatively Musk actually still wants Twitter. He just wants it repriced but plays the hard game. If so, he might have some chance to get it cheaper. Some say that it is impossible because the contract is iron-clad. But again if the issue was so simple as just looking what the contract says, then yes. But it is not, judges will think about the total benefit and maybe it is the optimal outcome that Musk gets Twitter but for less amount considering that all tech stocks have fallen now.
Maybe - I don't really know what the answer is, and anyone who tells you with confidence is confused. I was mostly just flagging the merger arb way of tracking the stock price as a way of ballparking the odds.
I refuse to believe Musk would be foolish enough to get into this so deep and then think he can just walk away. Not impossible, but opportunistically trying to get a cheaper price strikes me as much more plausible.
It makes sense and is a good bet. At the same time I personally don't feel that I know what he thinks. He is an autist and it's not only autists who are bad reading other people, other people are bad reading what autists think too and that is one of the reasons what causes people to dislike autists on purely unconscious level.
And maybe that's what makes him so good in business deals. Poker style negotiations come naturally to him despite seemingly frivolous messages on twitter. His opponents misread him and lose.
Well, the news are that he is going to buy twitter for the original price.
It could mean either that he changed his mind or that he never changed the mind but that the negotiations to get lower price failed. Whatever, I just stay with my conviction that it is better not to try to read the mind of autists and discussions about his motives are less useful.
Levine noted that there is no outcome where the court forces Musk to buy Twitter for anything less than $54.20. Either they compel specific performance, and execute the deal at the agreed price, or they call a MAE and Musk gets away with a $1B breakup fee. (Or theoretically they dissolve the agreement and he pays $0).
The alternative is that they settle, in which case the price could be any number < $54.20. Obviously Musk would rather settle closer to $1b, and Twitter would rather settle closer to $54.20, but it could be any number in between based on what the judge signals they are willing to do.
So I think this is a bit over-simplistic unfortunately. You need to integrate over the probability distribution of settlement values, and so I think that means there is more probability density around a $10-20b settlement, rather than a small probability density at $50/share. IOW I think P(Musk pays <=$1B) must be a lot lower than your binary outcome analysis suggests.
I wouldn't predict too much what the court can or cannot say. Those predictions usually go wrong because judges are more politically or culturally affected than we like to think.
And this is Musk, he could get away for publicly calling his critic a pedophile arguing that it was just a normal online quarrel that nobody takes at face value and the court agreed.
But even if that doesn't happen, conditional of Musk actually wanting to buy Twitter but playing hard to renounce the deal, if it looks that the court was going to agree that the deal cannot go forward but Musk has to pay some penalty ≥ $1B but <<$54.2, it could force Twitter to agree to a revised deal with <$54.20.
To be clear the claim (by Levine, IANAL) is that under Delaware law, there are only those two (three really, including "Musk pays $0") outcomes that the court can decide. The court cannot just invent novel injunctive relief in this sort of contractual dispute. (Of course, the parties can settle for any amount at any time, the court doesn't decide this path.)
> if it looks that the court was going to agree that the deal cannot go forward but Musk has to pay some penalty ≥ $1B but <<$54.2
What mechanism under Delaware contract law are you proposing that the judge would use to compel this? Levine has a detailed analysis of the contract where he shows his working. What is your concrete counter-claim for how this would happen?
That's my point – I am not basing my judgement on what I know about the law. I am basing it on the principle of reason. I don't know what will happen in the court. Maybe the court will ask the parties to settle or whatever. I am saying that most likely the court won't make legally sound but economically devastating decision that goes against public interest, such as forcing unwilling (if he really is unwilling) Musk to buy the company anyway. It could happen in any other case but not in a case of $44B deal.
Similar thing happened when FDA approved Aduhelm and many predicted that it will bankrupt Medicare because the law requires Medicare to cover this approved drug (which would cost tens of billions $) and there is no way out unless the law is changed. I said that it will not happen, Medicare will cover to some extent but something will be done to prevent irrational use of money. And that really happened, Medicare will only cover this drug for trial participants which is a small population. Either the predictors didn't understand the law or maybe the system allows the way out, whatever. It was clear that Aduhelm is not effective drug, EMA rejected its registration and FDA scientific committee did not recommend it. FDA granted registration for political reasons and everybody else can see it and at least in the current US the voice of reason will ultimately prevail.
The obvious solution is not novel injunctive relief but standard expectation damages. There are reasons why this is unlikely, but it is not novel. There are probably courts that would be likely to award those damages. Delaware courts are not those courts.
Courts have a fair amount of discretion, a wide array of doctrines to invoke, the ability to create new doctrines, the ability to read contracts in interesting ways, and the general catch-all of "equity" at their disposal to get the result they want. I don't expect the Delaware court to dig deep into this toolbox, but saying that there are only two options feels like tempting the court to get creative.
On Roe, it’s important to consider that the 95% chance was for allowing Mississippi’s abortion ban — not for striking Roe.
The decision could have easily been like Roberts’ concurrence, allowing 15-week abortion bans but upholding Roe. Or many other compromise options available to the court. But instead they went all the way.
As a side note, my site ElectionBettingOdds.com aggregates odds like Senate chances, volume-weighting together different markets like PredictIt and Polymarket (hover over the candidate images to see the exact market breakdowns.)
There may be no 'Dobbs mystery'. The metaculus question resolved to yes if any law banning abortions before the viability line was upheld. It was obvious based on oral arguments there was at least a 6-3 majority to get rid of that standard, and as we saw in the Chief's concurrence he wanted to come up with a different one under which to uphold the Mississippi law. There were a lot of less Democratic energizing outcomes between 'upholding Missisipi's 15 week ban' and returning the question to the states completely.
Perhaps 538's model had an effect pre-June 30 because of the model's results being leaked to some people, although I don't know anything about 538's predictions leaking. There could've also been some "insider trading" on 538's side. I don't know much about that either, but the amount of volume is small enough that, I think, a few players could move the market a couple percentage points (at 30c per share, a single user can buy up to 2833 shares). This could explain why there was less Metaculus movement.
Like Scott wrote, this speculation is partly motivated by the initial Roe vs. Wade leak (May 2) only slightly moving the PredictIt market, even though everybody seemingly interpreted the leak as being definitive. Also, if people are already taking the leak as fact, why is there a second jump upon the official release? Maybe more people entered the market after the release?
The Matt Levine article was hard to get through. I liked how he said Musk has "a hobby of pretending to take companies private" and then pointed to .. one other example (the only example). The 420 fiasco. And it's a very inaccurate characterization of that deal, if you look into the details.
Matt seems to think that there is little difference between "pretending to do something" and "doing something without 100% commitment in the face of unforeseen circumstances". He is wrong, and the article suffers for the inaccuracy.
Levine has had a hate-on for musk for years and always tries to portray him in the least favorable light that is at least arguably consistent with the facts.
> Metaculus lists the chance of Elon Musk becoming CEO of Twitter by 2025 as 10%.
There is effectively a 0% chance of Musk ever becoming Twitter's CEO. Twitter is a time suck with likely very little impact on human existence. Not so for Tesla and SpaceX. I could only see Musk becoming CEO if every one of his other companies crashed and burned. Becoming Twitter's owner doesn't mean he'd be CEO.
> But taken seriously, this implies that a memo by the Supreme Court Justices saying “we are reversing Roe” only implied a 33% chance they would really do it. But we saw earlier that the prediction markets were saying there was a 95% chance they would! So why the big update when it happened?
Because courts are swayed by outside influence. For instance, FDR threatened the court and they quickly got back in line.
> 23% by December 30, but probably a trial would drag on long past then, so I don’t think that’s the final chance.
The Chancery court operates pretty quickly with cases resolved in months - from how Levine talks about the issues I don't see any difficult legal questions that would require significantly more time than average.
If I'm reading the dates correctly, a similar case (attempted cancelled merger with specific performance remedy) took a little over a month to resolve.
Is there not new information in the reaction to Dobbs? I haven't looked at the polling in-depth but public reaction to "The Supreme Court is going to reverse Roe" in Spring and "The Supreme Court has reversed Roe" in June seem qualitatively different to me
Yes, but markets should have expected that the public response would change once the actual decision happened. The magnitude of the reaction to the decision itself seemed pretty predictable, and not particularly extreme in either direction.
Maybe it's some kind of 4D chess logic, where there was some expectation of a low probability of 2020-style rioting / looting / burning cities that would have been very beneficial for Republicans already priced in, and when that didn't happen, the new price reflected that lack of a low-probability, high-magnitude event.
On the Dobbs shift, I agree that the markets are probably just dumb but I can tell a story where the large update makes sense because everyone was expecting Democrats to be moderately angry about the ruling and instead they were very angry, so the markets moved with this new information.
I'm inclined to concur with this. I read a few conservative news blogs, and I definitely saw an expectation there that anger over overturning Roe was already at its peak after people had had time to digest news of the leak and thus was already baked into polling numbers that still strongly favored Republicans. Moreover, many thought the anger would burn itself out and would largely be old news by November.
A big spike in motivation to vote among Dems showed up in polling shortly after the Dobbs opinion was officially announced, providing new info contradicting the former expectation and casting substantial doubt on the latter.
"But taken seriously, this implies that a memo by the Supreme Court Justices saying “we are reversing Roe” only implied a 33% chance they would really do it."
This should really be 25% instead of 33%. The total drop in the chance of Republicans taking the senate was 20%, and only 5% (a quarter of that) happened when the draft opinion was announced.
PredictIt if you like politics. Manifold if you're okay answering silly questions for fake stakes. Metaculus if you're willing to deal with a learning curve.
Kalshi is also beginner-friendly and uses real money (if that's what you're looking for).
There are a couple of potentially interesting Covid questions, e.g. it has a ~50% chance that the 7-day average of Covid cases will reach 200,000 by September 22 (https://kalshi.com/events/CASESURGE-22SEP22/markets/CASESURGE-22SEP22-A200). So there's an opportunity to make a decent amount of money if you have a strong feeling in either direction.
Worth pointing out that the Dobbs ruling wasn't the only thing that happened that week in SC news. There was a spate of conservative rulings on various issues (gun, religion, etc) all around that time, as well as Thomas specifically calling out gay marriage, sodomy, and contraception as next on the chopping block.
Plausibly people could have looked at the leak and said 'we knew the right to privacy stuff was shaky, the court might do this even if it was fairly reserved and neutral and non-activist'. Then updated on that when they saw all those rulings plus the Thomas opinion at once.
Anyone else find it laughable that this is heralded as some great thing that will bring about unity etc....by (at least the same *kind* of) people who claim that civil war, genocide etc. in post-colonial africa was a result of different types of africans being made to live in the same country together?
"Democrats are angry about the overturning of Roe. Republicans are happy, but angry people vote and happy people mostly don’t. "
Agreed. Purely from a GOP tactical point of view, I'm surprised that the right wing majority in SCOTUS didn't find some way to delay the decision until after the midterm elections.
Well, we will see how the vote turns out. _Personally_, my ox is gored more by inflation than by forced birth laws. On the third hand, I've read claims that only about half of the inflation we've had is under Biden's (more or less - or the government generally) control. And the abortion ruling can be viewed as frozen politics from the previous administration, so none of the midterm elections directly bear on it.
Probably because either 1) the Supreme Court is actually rather independent from political parties (unlikely) or 2) they actually believe what they profess.
Can they? They heard the case during the judicial term of 2021-2, so I'm guessing it must be decided by the end of that term, which was the end of June.
I don't know. They have a lot of discretion, so I suspect they probably had some options available. If nothing else, they can (and must! given the number of attempted appeals to SCOTUS) choose which cases they wish to hear at all - and there have been enough abortion cases brewing that I strongly suspect they could have picked one in the next judicial term.
edit: re must choose which cases they wish to hear at all:
"Each Term, approximately 7,000-8,000 new cases are filed in the Supreme Court."
"Plenary review, with oral arguments by attorneys, is currently granted in about 80 of those cases each Term, and the Court typically disposes of about 100 or more cases without plenary review. "
Re long term human survival can we finally build some undersea habitats with nuclear power and algae farming that could survive even the worst case nuclear war (assuming it's not directly targeted).
Is this a serious question? Charging right ahead as if it is regardless :)
No. No we don't have the ability to create a closed ecosystem for humans yet. They are doing the best they can on the International Space Station, seeing how launch costs are in the thousands of USD per kg, but still many things needs to be sent up every few weeks/months, notably food. Same with nuclear submarines; they have nuclear power, generate freshwater and oxygen from seawater etc, but end up limited by food stores. An independent, self-sustaining undersea habitat would face a different set of constraints from either, but is not something we currently know how to make. A floating habitat might be easier on the food front, but still very challenging when it comes to any other physical goods for manufacturing and repair. Much easier to just build on land.
Oh, I'm all for it! And I'm sure it's possible, it's just that we don't know how to pull if off as of yet. I'd love to visit a city under the sea, or even live there for a while.
Why would the habitats not be directly targeted in a worst-case nuclear war?
We've already discussed at length(*) the reasons that a worst-real-case nuclear war would not actually threaten long-term human survival. If you're going to imagine some far-fetched hypothetical scenario where nuclear war would actually threaten long-term human survival, then those scenarios pretty much all involve at least one party being literally omnicidal or two parties being very broadly genocidal, in which case they're going to target the undersea habitats.
Space colonies, too, unfortunately. And if you have spaceships good enough to build space colonies, genocidal nuclear warfighters *definitely* have nuclear missiles good enough to reach them.
A random small town in Colorado is probably, and e.g. Argentina definitely, good enough for surviving not-explicitly-omnicidal nuclear wars. Literally omnicidal nuclear wars, you probably can't hope to survive one without fleeing the solar system entirely. But they would require extensive preparation, current arsenals being grossly inadequate for such a task, so maybe stop anyone trying to make the preparations by any means necessary (including non-omnicidal nuclear war).
I'm specifically grateful for the examples of contradictions and otherwise not so clever behaviour on prediction markets. They help build a realistic expectation - much more useful to me than thinking of prediction markets as *heavenly new tools that solve everything* (which would be shattered anyway soon).
That's not being fair to prediction markets. The vast majority of them are very, very tiny in terms of users and trading volume. If they were 100x or even maybe 10x bigger, basic arbitrage opportunities like this would certainly disappear.
I didn't want to be unfair to prediction markets. Without Scott I wouldn't even know about them, so if I'm actively engaging with how they work (or don't), I think that's on the plus side, if you're in favour.
You mean I should read everything that Scott writes on Mantic Mondays through a lense of: those are only toy markets, not resembling too much the real thing?
Crypto trading volume is about $100 billion a day. Foreign exchange markets trade over $6 trillion a day. You will never find basic arbitrage opportunities like this in those markets because there are millions of investors and hundreds of companies trying to find these inefficiencies at all times.
However, for legal and other reasons, it's not feasible for quant firms to make real money on prediction markets right now, so these kinds of things are expected. But as soon as prediction markets cross the threshold of being legal, fast enough, and large enough to sustain millions of dollars in income for a few smart people, then these obvious inefficiencies would vaporize.
Your're talking about future potential of prediction markets. I guess I'm more sceptical than you're, but that's in fact not my question. What I'm currently interested in (at least in the context of my statement above) is: if I look at the current predictions in the different prediction markets, how serious should I take them? In other words, how much trust to put into their accuracy - right now?
This results in interesting question: if many quants with real money notice many "easy" arbitrage opportunities and dutifully take advantage on them, the prediction markets would get larger, the prices would eventually converge more closely with the available information.
But at that point, why would anyone engage if there are no longer easy profits to be made? How many people have disposable income to bet on Trump questions and how many of them are not already betting on them on traditional bookmakers or betting exchanges?
Sports betting is pretty big and people still bet on that, although maybe that's more inherently interesting.
One unique advantage for prediction markets is that you can use them to hedge otherwise bad outcomes, i.e. if a certain politician winning an election would be really bad for you, you can bet on them winning and then either they lose or you make money, softening the blow a bit.
"Republicans are happy, but angry people vote and happy people mostly don’t."
My first reading of this sentence was that Republicans are angry that people vote and happy that people mostly don't. Granted, (not that I know that much about US politics) that does sound like something some people might actually say.
My theory on the effect of Dobbs is this: the leak might have happened weeks ago, but the "Well actually this will help Dems in the midterms" think-pieces didn't start coming out until the official release.
Prediction market participants are just as susceptible to being sucked in by a narrative as anyone else.
RE: Senate odds, maybe it's more sophisticated than just Dobbs. The Republicans meaningfully injured their chances by nominating a few really bad candidates for swing-state Senate seats (Oz, Walker) in primaries that occurred prior to that spike. You have to win actual elections every now and then, with actual candidates.
> But taken seriously, this implies that a memo by the Supreme Court Justices saying “we are reversing Roe” only implied a 33% chance they would really do it. But we saw earlier that the prediction markets were saying there was a 95% chance they would! So why the big update when it happened?
Because the news was likely disseminated to more people when the decision happened due to protests etc. I think it's simply just more people. not that the same individuals updated.
Also, it's possible that some people did indeed think 33%. There isn't perfect knowledge.
Traditional markets have a phenomenon called post earnings drift. It takes them time to digest earnings surprises, between weeks to months depending on the sophistication of the participants. This effect is contrary to the efficient market hypothesis.
This is in the largest most liquid markets in the world. I would expect smaller prediction markets to have some inefficiencies like this too. After all stock markets are predicting the long term earnings of stocks, just like prediction markets are predicting the payout.
The research is nicely reviewer in "Positional Options Trading 2020" which I am reading now.
Earth to January 6 committee: if you're looking to influence what Republicans think of Trump, try to come out as honest and maybe even somewhat sympathetic, try to look as if you're doing your best trying to do the right thing, as opposed to wanting to see how many people's lives you can destroy because you don't like their politics. I wonder if nobody ever told them how they would look, or if they just did not care. I'd guess the second.
> This is a weird pattern, isn’t it? If the Roe reversal really improved Democrats’ chances by 15%, why did it take until the reversal happened for people to update? Why not update as soon as the draft came out? Sure, things could have changed between the draft and the decision. But taken seriously, this implies that a memo by the Supreme Court Justices saying “we are reversing Roe” only implied a 33% chance they would really do it. But we saw earlier that the prediction markets were saying there was a 95% chance they would! So why the big update when it happened?
The one big update that did happen is on the level of public response to the decision. It definitely surprised me somewhat; I was expecting the public response to the ruling to be smaller because the public response to the leak was small. The level of public response is information that was only really available after the ruling actually came out, and that's information that's really key in determining how big an impact the ruling will have on elections. So taking that into account, I think the pattern is fully compatible with bettors updating rationally.
>I was expecting the public response to the ruling to be smaller because the public response to the leak was small.
This got me thinking. Like, it is not like prediction market traders are disinterested aliens observing the situation on Earth from Mars. Everyone else also reacts to the same thing as the predictors.
It could have been even a strategic decision: Maybe the media campaign PR persons thought it would be beneficial somehow to agitate their base about the Roe reversal only after the decision was certain.
It could have been simply a response: maybe the relevant pro-choice activists were also surprised by the mild public response to the leak. They gauged the public sentiments and obtained results not unlike Metaculus prediction. (Who knows, maybe some staffers are tasked with checking the prediction markets and betting odds?) Maybe they drafted a better media campaign to be launched at the next opportune moment.
This is ofc only speculation. It could have been many things.
In the early day of HIV, many on the left were saying that it wasn't a gay disease and that it would imminently run through the heterosexual population to devastating effect - that didn't happen. Doesn't mean that moneypox won't be disastorous for heterosexuals, but falsely saying a primarily gay disease isn't a primarily gay disease has precedent.
He didn’t say it wasn’t devastating among gays. I think we shouldn’t nitpick to much. It creates friction in conversation.
"that didn't happen"
It did, just not in the most developed countries.
Re: War Against Democracy, I believe the circle is squared by asserting that the legislatures of red states have been gerrymandered to the point that they are no longer democracies, so abortion restrictions are ipso facto anti-democratic.
very hood way to go get 'em
Schrödingers Musk - The scent that's both alluring and revolting...until you smell it.
Elon owning twitter still leaves room for another CEO. CEO is actually a bad question.
> Metaculus lists the chance of Elon Musk becoming CEO of Twitter by 2025 as 10%. I don’t know how to square this with Polymarket, unless they think that Twitter might get delisted for other, non-Musk-related reasons.
I mean, if Musk is forced to buy Twitter, he doesn't have to make himself CEO?
That also is fairly plausible. It has been said that Tesla's shareholders see the twitter thing as bad because Musk spending time being CEO of another company would be a distraction, and thus bad for Tesla stock.
If he owns it in the same way that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post (i.e. through a holding company, and not CEO for even a single day), that might make Tesla shareholders feel a little better about it not being a distraction.
Which of course might factor into Musk choosing to do that idk maybe
Sure, but he has a lot more to financially gain by pumping up Twitter's value than by keeping Tesla's value higher.
Yeah, some important context is: back when everyone thought the Twitter deal was almost certainly on, prediction markets only gave about a 50% chance to Musk being CEO. So this is all consistent. (Also note that if Musk were to be CEO, he would almost certainly only be an interim CEO while he looks for a permanent one.)
5% chance Musk appoints Trump Twitter CEO.
Would love to see a number of predictions about the medium-term (say, 5 years) consequences of Dobbs in terms of number of abortions, availability of abortion pills, births, moves between states, and the like. So far have not seen any such “bundle of predictions” from Scott or the usual suspects, so I launched a mini forecasting contest to get answers.
Contest entry form for anyone who wants to try their luck: https://forms.gle/UEejKBaBvwJQxn5k7
(Edited to fix some weird thing Microsoft did)
The link doesn't work for me (I think because it's an Outlook link?)
Fixed it, please try again!
The string of "aaaaaaaaaaaa" in the center of that URL really bugs me, that URL cannot possibly be using its negentropy very efficiently. Compression please! This is what url shorteners are for!
On the other hand, that URL already looks like the kind of thing that is going to redirect 10 times before getting me to my final destination, which is a problem that irritates me almost as much as the fact that the URL itself clearly sucks
Please fix all of these problems for the sake of my aesthetics <3
Nobody was more freaked out than I was when I pasted it in. It started out as a simple Google Forms URL, and somehow this website converted it?
Not a chance, if it was converted it was not substack that did it. That URL has microsoft's fingerprints all over it.
Let me try again, pasting right from the original: https://forms.gle/UEejKBaBvwJQxn5k7
Oh, that one looks normal. Thanks for pointing it out. I’ll try to edit the first one.
Roe was reversed, not "repealed". Only laws can be repealed. Dobbs neither enacted nor invalidated any law. If anything it did the opposite: it walked back the limits that Roe had placed on legislation.
Normally I wouldn't be so pedantic about this, but the idea that SCOTUS made policy in Dobbs is so mistaken and so central to wrong narratives of the decision that I can't ignore it.
I agree it was reversed not repealed as a matter of semantics, but in what *practical* -not merely technical or pro forma- sense do you think that they didn't "make policy". I suppose you could say that they simply abolished a preexisting policy of courts preventing legislatures from regulating abortion in certain ways, getting rid of policy rather than making it, but that seems pedantic.
To me, the difference between courts making policy and courts saying that it isn't up to courts to make policy (but only to interpret existing policy as enshrined in laws) seems non-pedantic. The former looks like usurpation of power whereas the latter looks like a return to the rule of law.
Courts have always made policy as long as there has been judicial review because the constitution is a vague document. The idea of just doing what the book says is meaningless. The book is vague for two reasons 1. Because all documents dealing with something as broad as law-making by necessity are vague and 2. It was written vaguely deliberately.
I would use the "If you can be bad, you can also be good" argument from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/if-you-can-be-bad-you-can-also-be here. If the Supreme Court said that the Constitution included a right to have Donald Trump as President and therefore we had to overturn all elections in his favor, people would protest that the Constitution doesn't really say that, and that would be an extremely valid complaint. Given that it's clearly possible to fail at "just by the book" interpretation, I think it's also possible to succeed, and that some courts do that better than others.
Oh we can certainly allow that some interpretations are better and some worse (though I still don't think this amounts to "just doing what the book says"), but it's all a matter of interpretative degree. My concern is that if we take Wasserschweinchen's argument down this path- it basically just amounts to "I don't think Roe v Wade was rightly decided, so overturning it was good". Now that's a fair statement of opinion- which is fine- but it's just a statement of opinion. Wasserschweinchen seemed to think that they were laying out a clear boundary between legitimate exegesis of the law and eisegesis of the law. One lawful and the other lawless. But the thing is that judicial supporters of Roe v Wade don't think they're "making law from the bench" or "doing judicial activism" or whatever, they really think that an earnest study of the vague, and expansive pronouncements of the constitution, plus a proper respect for the slow development of the law through precedent(1) implies that abortion must be legal.
(1)- Some will object to this part- but remember the framers new that they were creating law that would be interpreted through precedent- because America had a a common law system.
I think they don't oppose judicial activism so long as it favors good policies, which the constitution should not get in the way of.
I think a semantic argument about what constitutes "making policy" doesn't seem like a good idea, so let's just say I think there's a huge difference between, on the one hand, clarifying a vague existing law where the intent is unclear and, on the other hand, making up a new law where the legislators clearly had no intent for such a law to exist. And I think that for judges to usurp the power to do the latter seems dangerous.
But that's a partisan spin on what happened, not an objective description.
Whether the constitution protects abortion is an open, subjective question. So far, 7 justices have said yes, and 6 have said no; the 6 win because they came later, but coming later doesn't make them more objectively correct.
Just because the court says 'the Constitution has nothing to say on this issue, it's up to the legislature' does not mean they are following the rule of law and not making policy. If the justices were to say 'actually the Constitution says it's fine to establish a state religion', obviously that would not be an objectively correct following of the rule of law, and would amount to making policy.
The constitution was written when a bunch of states had state religions. The constitution said 'Congress shall make no law regarding' them. The continental congress was corrupt and incompetent, this did not and has not changed, and even men who later repealed their state religions didn't want Congress involved.
Especially the men who voted out their state religions did not want Congress involved.
State religions were creatures of state, not federal, government. Were any still established at the time the 14th Amendment was ratified?
1833 Massachussetts disestablished its state religion, 14th was after the Civil War, so no, I don't think so.
'Congress shall make no law regarding an establishment of religion' is 1st Amendment, when about half the states had state faiths.
I disagree with that. I think it's clear both from the text and the historical interpretation of that text that the US constitution does not say anything about abortions, and I think the amount of people who would be happy if it did establish a right to abortions but who think it doesn't is testament to that.
The Nineth Amendment is relevant to the individual right to Family Planning Choices
https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment9.html
See also
https://bachrachtechnology.com/wp/blog-bayesian-analysis-family-planning-choices/
I think abstracting things to "family planning" just confuses matters.
Doesn't seem pedantic at all to me. One limits the options of the people to choose their laws. The other one allows them to choose as they please.
Equating "the legislature" with "the people" isn't entirely untrue, but it's an idealized reflection of reality. The difference between a power-grab and a relinquishment of power is, however, very real, and *fundamental* to politics.
In Dobbs SCOTUS has relinquished a power that it had taken for itself and handed it back to the legislature. If Dobbs had stated that the unborn are owed Constitutional protections, that would have been a power-grab (regardless of its moral merits), or at least it would have been an alternate assertion of the power that was seized in Roe.
In accounting, minus negative $100 is the same as $100; but not in life. There's a big difference between an organization doing nothing and an organization enacting, promulgating and enforcing a law (or court decision, or whatever), even if the two have the same impact on policy. There was literally some actual person somewhere whose job was making sure states followed Roe. There were police of some kind able to apply force of some kind whose job it was to help that person. When a state overstepped Roe, actual people did actual stuff to other actual people to make them behave differently. Now, those people don't have that job anymore.
I just think it's really important to keep in mind that laws are laws because actual people go out and enforce them on other people. Because of that, there's a concrete distinction between making policy and not making policy, even if in both cases you're the one deciding the final policy people will have to follow. If you're making policy, somebody has to go out and do something to somebody else for it to happen. Not making policy happens on its own, you can just sit at home and twiddle your thumbs. In this case, the SC isn't making policy (for the most part, I guess, I suppose there are parts of Dobbs that are enforceable).
Wait, is that true? I thought legal activists would bring lawsuits in federal court against states that enacted laws that restricted abortions further than would Roe would allow. I don't know that there was an actual Roe Compliance Office in the Justice Department somewhere. I could of course be wrong.
He's speaking more generally. When a state got sued, and the courts overturned an abortion restriction, there were people with guns who would be involved in forcing (if necessary) the states to follow the court order. These are the same people who enforce every court order, not a special Roe Force or whatever.
Okay, thanks. I thought for a second my conception of federal/state government relations was way off.
Well, in this case it's a weird meta-level because Roe was saying that abortion couldn't be made illegal, so it involves people enforcing other people *not* enforcing; which decision involves "less enforcement" gets muddy when there's multiple levels of government in hierarchy
Sure, in the big picture. But the discussion is about whether the Supreme Court set policy or not; and the Supreme Court changed from a posture of enforcing to a posture of not enforcing.
My claim is that, if you say, "I'm not going to deal with this anymore", you're not making policy, even though policy on the ground changes as a result. You're stepping back and letting somebody else make policy.
Thank you, fixed.
Post hoc ergo proctor hoc is not a fallacy here. The court acted. Policy on the ground radically changed as they knew it would. They understood very well that they were doing. They meant it to happen. Maybe they don't make policy but they made a certain policy happen. The policy they personally desired.
Regardless of how you look at it, they invalidated one interpretation of the constitution and replaced it with another.
Roe was such an obvious power grab without any basis in the constitution that I'm shocked nobody voted against their policy preferences to overturn it. I think abortion should be entirely legal and in many cases subsidized but Roe was still a terrible decision.
Agreed on both points. Unfortunately, pretty much all of the personal autonomy decisions: Griswold, Lawrence, Oberfell, Loving are, as Thomas pointed out (well, he left out Loving since his own marriage...) are on similarly power-grabbed sand. I want amendments or at least legislation protecting them, but I don't expect that to happen.
10 justices said universal abortion bans are unconstitutional, 8 said they are constitutional.
The only reason the 8 beats the 10 is temporal gerrymandering, which is no measure of correctness.
I'm not claiming any different.
My claim here is against the people implying there's an obviously and objectively 'correct' interpretation of the Constitution here. My position is that it's ambiguous and subjective, and any interpretation will be guided by some type of larger value system, whether that is admitted or not.
I may be confused, help me understand your position
Are you making a fully general argument against all laws of any kind, on the grounds that they will be interpreted by potentially biased individuals?
If you are making a less sweeping point, what evidence or argument would you consider valid on the constitutionality of a law? Does it matter if it is genuinely believed by someone who is unhappy with the implied policy outcome?
Is an either originalist or textualist interpretation of law a "larger value system", or did you mean that phrase in a different sense?
I've never seen you post before, but unless you're going around saying the same thing about all supreme court decisions, and not merely the ones you disagree with, then you're not being principled.
The "larger value system" is called federalism.
Letting the states decide their own laws as they see fit, not being externally constrained except in the *very few* cases that a law is deemed contrary to the constitution. The original mindset of the constitution was indeed federalist, emphasizing how few those cases should be.
To the globalist mindset, the existence of fifty states is an unfortunate anachronism; those states ought to be completely fungible, and it should be as impossible to tell any difference between the states as it is to tell apart fifty McDonalds hamburgers, if putting geographical trifles aside. People of that mindset will want to expand the SCOTUS power to more directly dictate law/policy to the other states (and they will also be desiring a *particular composition* of the SCOTUS body at the same time, of course)
The mindset of federalism is much better at approaching Scott's ideal of "the Archipelago". One state will decide to treat the theft of $900 of goods as "misdemeanor" instead of as "felony", while other states will not see it that way. There's a lot of such details that add up. The blessing of the Archipelago is that you *can* decide do you wish to live in that state, or in some other state - that you are not choosing between 50 identical hamburgers - as the SCOTUS does not have the power to force all states to view a $900 theft as a misdemeanor, nor as a felony.
Reversing Roe likewise means that SCOTUS is abolishing a judicial fiat in favor of Archipelago democracy. It boggles the mind how many people view a case of disimposing a judicial policy, as a case of imposing a judicial policy.
By this logic, they're responsible for all existing government policy that they haven't prevented from existing
I can buy that 'repealed' is a technical term of art that only applies to legislation, not all government policies.
But the idea that the word 'policy' only refers to legislation, and not other government decisions with large consequential effects on the populace, is I think a linguistic bridge too far. Under that usage, for example, nothing the president ever does could be described as 'policy', which is clearly at odds with common usage.
Granting rights is a policy, removing rights is a policy.
> Under that usage, for example, nothing the president ever does could be described as 'policy', which is clearly at odds with common usage.
Agreed (with this part), I'd use 'policies' with regard to both legislature and executive - in many democracies those functions are anyway separated but also intertwined.
As for the judiciary, it's different. Decisions obviously can have great political implications, but they are not policy and shouldn't be political - in a healthy system. In a less healthy system, courts sometimes (or more generally) become political players.
That's more of a general consideration, I'm not intending to make a statement about the Supreme Court decision. (Also, please feel free to let me know, if you know of a stable democracy, where political or politicized courts are normal and you think it has been working well.)
>(Also, please feel free to let me know, if you know of a stable democracy, where political or politicized courts are normal and you think it has been working well.)
The US?
I mean, I get it, I agree with you about how the courts *should* work.
But, come on. 'We will elect conservative judges that will overturn Roe' has been a major political rallying cry of Republican candidates for decades.
It literally doesn't matter what an 'objective' reading of the constitution would say on the issue (not that such a thing is possible). The Republicans who ran on that platform could appoint judges selected for believing the Constitution objectively sides with Republican policies, or selected for being willing to lie about what the Constitution says and reliably side with Republicans anyway, and the outcome would be indistinguishable.
What the Constitution says doesn't affect the outcome of the rulings, so long as the selection of Justices is this over-determined to produce a specific outcome.
When the process is built and operated to achieve a political end, and that political end is explicitly promised to constituents by the politicians operating it, the outcome is a political policy.
> The US?
Are you saying: in the US courts have traditionally been politicized, and it generally is and has been working well?
The second part of your statement would also be consistent with: courts are normally not political, but currently in US they are. (or even have been for a while)
What I would say is, the US in general has been working well, comparatively. Courts in the US have always seen varying levels of politicization, and that is at a high point right now, alongside all other kinds of measures of polarization.
I'm not saying politicization makes US courts wok better; quite the opposite. I'm just saying it does exist here, and can be recognized in this decision.
"What the Constitution says doesn't affect the outcome of the rulings, so long as the selection of Justices is this over-determined to produce a specific outcome."
I think if the constitution explicitly had a right to abortion, pro-life people would've tried to change the constitution rather than tried to appoint justices that would blatantly ignore the constitution. The latter would make all constitutional rights meaningless, which conservatives don't want.
Sure, I'm not saying that it's impossible for the Constitution to affect this in counter-factual worlds.
My point is that in current reality, whether or not there is a 'correct' answer and what it is doesn't matter to the outcome. In a different world where the Constitution was 100% unambiguous on this, yes that would be enough to force politicians to pursue this by other means. In our world, it is ambiguous enough that the outcome gets swamped by political machinations.
Thanks for clarifying, I was wondering if that's what you meant.
I presume she would say it won't survive "in a spiritual sense". In effect I think she means: "if the Republican party does this, it will have permanently became something I really don't like".
I thought this interpretation was so obvious that I assumed Scott's paragraph on testing this 'prediction' was just a humorous aside.
I think she's deliberately being a bit rhetorically ambiguous and conflating the two - the motte is "we'll become something worse" and the bailey is "we'll lose popular support".
Liz Cheney is a regular person, and regular people don't say what they mean.
My interpretation is that she's literally saying the party will cease to exist, but she's exaggerating. The actual meaning is that the party will get less popular. But even that isn't meant as a serious prediction; the *actual* actual meaning is that she's expressing disapproval.
Thank you, an accurate description i believe. A "Bullseye" if you will.
Grrr... Yeah, that sounds like a plausible interpretation. _I_ would take "will cease to exist" as meaning "go the way of the Whigs" - disband, leave the political scene. But Cheney is, after all, a politician, so expecting literal truth is not plausible, unfortunately.
It's hard to measure if the party has become "something I really don't like". I think the main fear is that the Republican party is becoming more opposed to democracy, that it is trying to win by illegal means.
So maybe "If Trump is the 2024 republican candidate and the democrats win the 2024 election, will the 2024 republican candidate claim the election was rigged?"
And "If Trump is the 2024 republican candidate and the democrats win the 2028 election, will the 2028 republican candidate claim the election was rigged?"
can this be the moment a sane third party is born that doesn't turn gynecological health into a national circus and only talks about actual problems and effective solutions
nope probably not but what a nice fantasy
You can push any of your own assumption on abortion under the banner of "common sense" but it will have very little effect if you dont spend like 5 seconds to acknowledge that what you call common sense might just be a really nice name for your own ideological bias.
Nope, not calling common sense and medical reality ideological bias. Not as a stem cell biologist and 1st gen Irish immigrant where we were filling mass graves with children until the 70s.
There is a broadly supported consensus of easily accessible abortion in the first trimester and exceptions later for special cases, with about 70% popular support (about 15% disagree from either side). Political parties are incentivises against this compromise though, because those 30% are the ones who vote on abortion issues in primaries.
That was not my point though. Any framing of a debate in term of "my side is the side of common sense, the other side is dumb/evil/fanatic" is moot. Policy debates should not appear one-sided.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided
If one side is trying to actively dismantle democracy in favor of theocracy and counts actual fascists among its members without denouncing them, it's probably no great loss if their arguments go unheard.
a) I agree with you. I do not favor silencing debate.
b) "counts actual fascists among its members without denouncing them"
is probably true for any political party with millions of members (for a fairly broad definition of "fascist")
I'm curious where you got this "theocracy" idea. I don't see why restrictions on abortion would have to be justified solely on the basis of religion any more than bans on adult murder would have to be.
Sure, Christianity may agree that abortion is wrong, but it also agrees that adult murder is wrong - do we live in a theocracy because murder is illegal? "Huh, 'thou shalt not kill' is in the Ten Commandments, I guess we have to legalize all murder now to avoid being a theocracy." Separation of church and state doesn't just mean you always do the *opposite* of whatever the dominant religion says - it's perfectly fine for the church and state to agree on stuff.
Peggy Nienaber (msn.com/en-us/news/politics/snip/ar-AAZjBfA). Adrian Vermuele.
Furthermore, do you believe that the bans on abortion were passed for secular reasons, or were they creations of the religious right?
The same could be said about those trying to actively dismantle democracy in favor of Marxism who count actual communists among their members.
>If one side is trying to actively dismantle democracy in favor of theocracy and counts actual fascists among its members without denouncing them, it's probably no great loss if their arguments go unheard.
Less of this
There is a broadly supported consensus of illegal abortion after the first trimester. Roe required that it be legal in the second trimester.
…restricted, rather. And I'm fine with that, but we shouldn't be second-guessing doctors. If we do that we wind up with a lot more maternal deaths and a guaranteed violation of 1A (Jewish law requires D&E if the mother's life is in danger unless the baby is at least half-out of the womb, for example; other methods are also admissible, but abortion is actually required to save the mother's life).
Also, I think the idea in Roe that the bar should be viability is silly; it should be the probable existence of a brain or ability to feel pain, or something else neurological. Viability is a bar that is likely to get earlier as time goes on; neurological bars are unlikely to ever change.
Nobody is "second guessing doctors". Doctors don't get to decide what is or isn't ethical.
How would you describe it when doctors are unable to save the life of a mother because abortion is banned? Even if it's explicitly allowed for that purpose (not a guarantee), the prosecutor may decide differently.
If my religion says that I must kill my wife if I discover her infidelity to preserve the honor of my family, are homicide laws a violation of my first amendment rights?
a) Name a religion that says that.
b) With regard to abortion, I must point out there are two lives at stake here. The law should not interfere with the process of triage.
Re: consensus
I suggested
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-226/comment/6852843
"What do people here think of a referendum (either national or state-by-state)? If voters were asked:
"What is the maximum number of weeks into pregnancy that an elective abortion should be allowed?"
then sorting the results and picking the median value gives a length such that half the electorate thinks it is too long (too lenient) and half the electorate thinks it is too short (too stringent)."
_Personally_ I prefer that abortion be allowed up to birth (if an unwanted fetus is sucking nutrients out of her bloodstream, I support her right to put a stop to it). But I think picking a median length from the preferences of the electorate has the best chance of finally getting broad acceptance.
Let me guess - broad consenses are only instantiations of 'common sense' when you agree with them, right? When there was a broad consensus that segregation was good.....?
In a first-past-the-post system, 3+ national parties is at best an unstable equilibrium (see the UK's LibDems or Canada's NDP in the past 20 years).
Add in the incredible inertia for a two-party system here in America too. Unless and until you change the voting system to approval, STAR, or RCV*, pining for a third party is useless.
* theoretically, I prefer RCV. But it's too opaque for a society with concerns about electoral integrity--we absolutely need election results within 12 hours of poll closing. It might be due to incompetence, but RCV just takes too long, and the idiocy of not reporting results all the way to the final round even when the winner hits 50% leads to terrible punditry (e.g. Collins vs. Gideon in 2020-ME-Sen. Even Wikipedia says
"Gideon underperformed Biden by 10.6%, the second-worst underperformance by a Democratic Senate candidate in the country"
yeah, cuz people voted third-party knowing that their votes would eventually find their way to Gideon, but Collins hit 50% with 6.6% remaining in the 3rd/4th highest finishers so ME ended the counting)
Two thumbs up for your take on RCV. I voted against it in NYC for this very reason. Look at the Oakland mayoral election several years back, when Don Perata was way ahead after the first round vote, but ended up losing. Can you imagine what would have happened if he were Trump? People don't get the math re RCV. In contrast, approval voting is easy to understand.
PS: That being said, multiple parties in the US would be a disaster. There would be ethnically based parties, an Antifa party, an alt-right party, etc. A recipe for political violence.
Eh, I think the forced coalition building might just make some strange bedfellows that would mellow people out. If Jewish and Arab nationalists can form coalitions in the Knesset, I think we'd be able to too.
Please don't use the broader term RCV when specifically criticizing instant runoff (IRV). Condorcet methods are also a form of RCV and avoid many of the flaws of IRV.
Condorcet methods are even less transparent than IRV, and thus even worse by the “idiot masses’ subjective feeling of electoral integrity” criterion
The algorithm may be, but the principle is not. To understand an IRV result, you have to understand its algorithm. But the idea that the candidate who would beat every opponent in a two-way race wins doesn't require knowing how to efficiently compute it.
Yes, but Cletus from Kentucky is going to be confused about it and march on the Capitol and try to kill the VP
Whereas everyone understands approval voting from legislature roll call votes/YouTube/Facebook reactions and star rating from movie reviews
Eh, anything more complex than FPTP is going to confuse the Cleti
I'm not opposed to approval voting as an initial reform, I just don't want Condorcet RCV taken off the table because of flaws with IRV.
The NDP came in second in 2011, mate. (That's mostly because the BQ collapsed, and they lost most of those new seats to the Libs in 2015, but still.)
yes, that's exactly what I was saying. The LibDem 2010/NDP 2011 results were fleeting for the third-party because two-party dominance is mathematically favored by FPTP (regional parties are a different matter)
You point to Canada and UK in the past 20 years, but what about before that? Why should I care that the equilibrium is so unstable, it'll only last a century? The parties themselves change faster than that.
Duverger's law is a purely theoretical argument. It sounds good, but it's not true. The only FPTP country that follows it is USA. Every other FPTP country in the world has more than 2 parties (not including regional parties).
First-past-the-post voting is really hell on third parties.
If people consider life to begin at conception, how is the destruction of human life not an "actual problem"? YOU don't think it is, but you don't get to decide what everyone else belives and values.
Not fantasy; science fiction. Specifically, the "uterine replicator" from Lois Bujold's "Vorkosigan Saga".
Otherwise, no. The only thing that will be recognized as an "effective solution" by a decisive majority of the population, is something that ensures no woman is ever compelled to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term while simultaneously ensuring that no fetal heartbeat is ever forcibly ended. And we don't have the technology to do that, even on the vaguest horizon.
If what you mean is, "actually solve the problem *I* think is obviously important, while completely ignoring that thing a hundred million or more people think is a huge problem but I think is obviously frivolous", then yeah, you just need a way to impose your will against the opposition of a hundred million or more other people. But that's going to cause problems of its own, possibly much bigger ones.
The fact that different markets predict different incompatible things is a big strike against the hope of accurate prediction through prediction markets.
Also, I always find it funny when rationalists say things like "and rush to the prediction markets without thinking very hard about how Bayesian updating works."
You know most people don't think about Bayesian updating at all right ?
"The fact that different markets predict different incompatible things is a big strike against the hope of accurate prediction through prediction markets."
Agreed.
On a somewhat related note: Do any markets have predictions for GOP taking the senate and/or the house _contingent on some inflation measure_ (perhaps CPI, perhaps just gasoline prices)?
"The fact that different markets predict different incompatible things is a big strike against the hope of accurate prediction through prediction markets."
No - the whole point is that in a money-based prediction market, when a smart rationalist comes along and realizes a discrepancy like this, they can make unlimited free money with arbitrage until the discrepancy is gone.
No, there are financial instruments that would allow you to perform a risk-free arbitrage in this case. One reason for inefficiency is because these markets are in their infancy in terms of technical complexity as well as size.
Agreed
"arbitrage until the discrepancy is gone."
Umm... This doesn't sound like a disagreement. If the markets are running efficiently, discrepancies should be reduced quickly. Discrepancies are evidence of friction or inefficiencies.
Yes?
The lack of arbitrage in this case is because Metaculus is not a real-money prediction market. I haven't used PredictIt myself but I understand it also has quite a bit of friction built in via fees and bet limits.
The fact that we don't have any really excellent prediction markets around (yet?) is certainly evidence that they're hard to implement well, but I'm not ready to give up.
"The lack of arbitrage in this case is because Metaculus is not a real-money prediction market."
Good point! Yup, one can't very well build financial instruments on top of play money...
*Unlimited* free money? Tell me more.
With prediction markets that absolutely exist, the very limited amount of money available will leave most rationalists with butt firmly planted in couch rationally deciding that it's not worth their bother. With hypothetical prediction markets that allow for really large financial gains, I've elsewhere explained my reasons for suspecting that https://xkcd.com/1570/ will apply.
I was sketching a proof by the law of excluded middle: either these obvious inefficiencies in the market will disappear quickly, or some quant will make infinite free money. And people don't tend to make infinite free money in the real world, implying that these obvious inefficiencies will disappear quickly.
"With hypothetical prediction markets that allow for really large financial gains, I've elsewhere explained my reasons for suspecting that https://xkcd.com/1570/ will apply."
The reason that's true for the stock market is that a few thousand of the smartest people alive are constantly doing everything they can to squeeze every last cent of alpha out of the market, so there are little to no easy ways to beat the stock market. My point is that this is not yet true for prediction markets.
Financial markets have a tough time predicting things like inflation and earnings. Those market participants have an abundance of information and financial incentive to get those predictions right. It’s often unclear to me what outcomes prediction markets will deliver beyond a quantitative retort to propagandist-level bullshit.
There’s also a whole gamut of regulations and implementation hurdles that rationalists don’t think apply to them.
One possible reason that the Dobbs case had a stronger impact on decision vs. the draft release may be that the draft was from Alito, but the decision itself included the Thomas concurrance, where he pretty much said that contracraction, gay marriage and sodomy laws will be next.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobbs_v._Jackson_Women%27s_Health_Organization#Concurrences
"Laws"? Do you mean the supposed constitutional protection for those things? I don't think Thomas's opinion implied they were going to somehow make those things illegal, just that there may not be any constitutional justification for striking down laws that restrict those things.
Even less than that: his concurrence questioned making the decisions on those topics based on substantive due process, but that other, sounder bases could exist to protect those rights.
Note that in Chicago v. McDonald he did not sign on to the controlling opinion but penned his own stating that he would have upheld the right using the Privileges and Immunities clause rather than the Due Process clause.
The Thomas concurrence has been getting a fair amount of press, so that might be affecting polling and prediction markets. However, it shouldn't be a surprise to people who have been paying attention to the courts: Thomas has long been writing dissents or concurrences in which he argues for abolishing the Substantive Due Process doctrine and replacing it with a strengthened reading of the Privileges and Immunities clause instead. His concurrence in Dobbs is straight out of this template, and as with all the other times he's brought it up, he's still the only justice who's in favor of it.
Interesting, I did not know that. Thanks!
One possibility on Dobbs is that a number of investors assumed that the polls, which were moved very little (if at all) by the leak, would not move as a result of Dobbs - ie they assumed that voters had already updated for Dobbs and the actual opinion wouldn't affect voting intention.
This was quickly shown to be wrong; there has been noticeable movement in the polls after Dobbs.
It's worth pointing out that Dobbs was just one of a slate of very conservative rulings by the court that all came together. It was also before Thomas specifically called out contraception, gay marriage, and sodomy as next on the chopping block.
Plausibly someone on the left could look at the leaked ruling and think 'well, yeah, we knew the right to privacy stuff was shaky; this sucks and we'll have to fight in the legislature, but maybe this is the worst of it.'
The big slate of conservative rulings all together, plus fears about the upcoming ruling on election boards, paints a more dire picture of a highly activist, highly conservative court that's ready to spend decades dismantling liberal victories of the last century.
" It was also before Thomas specifically called out contraception, gay marriage, and sodomy as next on the chopping block."
Re contraception: I'm willing to predict that if SCOTUS overturns Griswold, there will be enough outrage to do something to SCOTUS. My guess would be packing the Court, but there might be other possibilities (term limits - maybe really short ones?). One way or another, reneging on a freedom that 65% of reproductive-age women in the country actively use would amount to firmly grasping the third rail.
How many states actually have an interest in banning contraception though?
I think I can rule out the state originally in Griswold, Connecticut. I _hope_ no state tries it, but Texas or Florida wouldn't surprise me...
I think court packing is a dangerous distraction, it's a slippery slope to complete anarchy. Why would the other team accept the new justice count and not just pack further next time they are in? It's insane from a game-theoretical perspective.
A sensible reform is term limits. Here's a bill that proposes a mechanism: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/hr5140. I think this should get more attention (hence why I'm posting here) and I think this would go a long way towards restoring the supreme court's legitimacy.
The TLDR: 18-year terms, so you get one appointment reflecting the new congress configuration each 2-year election cycle (I'd prefer 10-year terms but the 2-year cadence is a nice property). There's a "seniority" mechanic so the older justices aren't fired/retired, they stay on as "Senior Justices", but the youngest 9 make up the group that actually decides opinions. This gets around concerns that you can't fire the old justices.
And finally, there is a phase-in mechanism where existing lifetime appointees are excluded from the "seniority" mechanism, so they get to serve out their terms. So you have an awkward period where every 2 years we choose new Junior Justices, but they are just on the bench until a lifetime justice dies/retires. But at the time of a vacancy, there is already a successor pre-selected. I think this mechanic is chosen because of concerns about the constitutionality of changing the appointment from lifetime to 18-year for existing appointees, the concern being SCOTUS would strike down the bill if it would cause them to lose their own jobs.
I'd rather not implement the phase-in mechanism and move immediately into replacing the justices, rather than waiting a generation to clear out the lifetime appointees. But if it's not constitutional to do that then so be it, let's fix the system for our children. (I think it would probably be easier to get the Red Team on board with the phase-in to reform next-generation, but harder to get the Blue Team on board with deferring reform. Realistically the Red Team is not going to agree to Supreme Court reform in any circumstance, having just achieved their multi-decade strategy to reverse Roe, so perhaps the more realistic political strategy is to play to the Blue Team, make this a central plank of the election campaign, and win a landslide to get this past the filibuster. I do wish that we could make this change in a way that pragmatists on both sides could agree upon though.)
>I think court packing is a dangerous distraction, it's a slippery slope to complete anarchy. Why would the other team accept the new justice count and not just pack further next time they are in? It's insane from a game-theoretical perspective.
Keep in mind that from the perspective of many liberals (myself included), McConnell already pulled the pin on this game-theoretic grenade by stealing an appointment from Obama.
Whether or not that's 'as bad as' packing the court, it was an escalation beyond the previous equilibrium that changed the makeup of the court unilaterally; if the other side doesn't respond in kind, they're just continuing to cooperate while the other side slams 'defect' over and over.
Personally I agree with the assessment that the blocking of Garland's appointment was a clear escalation; it was absolutely a breach of longstanding protocol/convention. But responding in kind would mean the Democrats will now block any Republican nomination when they have control of one chamber, even if that means one or two (or more!) years of vacancy.
I think it would be a substantial further escalation to pack the court. Furthermore, I don't understand why it is expected to make any lasting difference; if the Blue Team packs the court, the next time the Red Team is in control they will follow the precedent and pack even more justices (or perhaps more likely unpack the court to remove the most recent packed justices). It in no way solves the problem, unless the goal is to take some short-term victories like reversing Dobbs, while pretending to ignore that a few years later that reversal would be reversed again. This further delegitimizes the institution. What's the endgame here?
If you're playing iterated Prisoner's Dilemma with a known defector, then of course, defect. But in this case we can also elect to change the rules of the game to reduce/remove the utility premium from defection; I think that is the rational approach here.
Perhaps delegitimization is a reasonable strategy if one wants deeper reforms like term limits, but can't achieve that without bipartisan agreement on the illegitimacy of the court? I think we should be trying to come up with a new structure that is more democratically sound and more resistant to bad-faith political maneuvering, rather than reaching for the nuclear option, regardless of how satisfying that option might feel in the moment. The lesson "don't create any powers that one isn't happy to hand to the worst imaginable opponent from the other party" should have been well-learnt for Democrats in the Trump presidency.
>But responding in kind would mean the Democrats will now block any Republican nomination when they have control of one chamber, even if that means one or two (or more!) years of vacancy.
If that opportunity had come up at a opportune time, sure; but if the situation where that's possible doesn't happen to arise for 30 years, then it's the same as not responding.
'Taking whatever opportunity presents itself to change the balance of the court in your favor' is another way of looking at 'responding in kind' here.
>I think it would be a substantial further escalation to pack the court.
Agreed for some values of 'substantial'.
>Furthermore, I don't understand why it is expected to make any lasting difference; if the Blue Team packs the court, the next time the Red Team is in control they will follow the precedent and pack even more justices
The worst case scenario based on that prediction is that the Red Team loses control of the court now and regains it in 3/5/7/9/11/whatever years, when they control both the Presidency and Congress.
Whereas the current situation is that they control it now, and continue to control it that entire time, and possibly play tricks again to keep control next time they might lose it 'legitimately' in several decades.
Option 1 seems like a strict improvement for Blue Team no matter what. We've seen what controlling the court for even one session can accomplish, now that the gloves are off.
>What's the endgame here?
A lot of proposals for packing the court are not about just simply adding justices, but also reforming the way they are appointed or how cases are heard. For instance, getting rid of lifetime appointments and having a new justice retire/appointed every 2 years, or having a much larger bench and having each case heard by a random subset of justices, or etc.
Creating a new normal that's more robust and fair may be more resilient to future repeal if it is popular with the populace. It may also restore legitimacy if the public considers it a reformation on the current disliked state of affairs.
>The lesson "don't create any powers that one isn't happy to hand to the worst imaginable opponent from the other party" should have been well-learnt for Democrats in the Trump presidency.
I see no evidence that Democrats setting precedent is needed for Republicans to do things. Republicans are an equal political party here; anything Democrats could conceivably 'create precedent' for by doing first, Republicans could just do first themselves whenever it's convenient.
So I fundamentally reject this notion of 'creating precedent', at least under the current circumstances where Republicans don't seem constrained by it. Possibly a new normal will arrive in some period of time where neither side is defecting, but right now it seems irrelevant to the reality.
>Perhaps delegitimization is a reasonable strategy if one wants deeper reforms like term limits, but can't achieve that without bipartisan agreement on the illegitimacy of the court?
There is an issue: It is the real acted out precedent that is king. Building legitimate institutions is hard and difficult, but anything you do in the attempt forms a precedent.
Think about Sulla. Sulla's reforms and content of the laws he wrote had little lasting influence on Roman state apparatus. After he died, many had noticed effectiveness of his methods of changing the laws to his preference.
The equivalent 'defect' move is holding a seat open, or possibly finding another mild way to escalate.
Court-packing is very different, because it means that future presidents (with pliant Senate majorities) will be able to have a majority on the court that they directly appointed. Think about what 2020-election-season Trump could have done with 18 of 27 seats on the Supreme Court packed with sycophants. Even if 4 of those had turned out to be able to put country above party, the other 14 would still have been a majority willing to overturn an election. The Supreme Court is currently conservative, but it's not reactionary or populist and therefore is one of the strongest protective elements the democratic system still has.
I think term limits are reasonable. I would also want them shorter than 18 years. I _don't_ think that they will restore the supreme court's legitimacy.
As Justice Barrett has denied, the court is indeed acting as political hacks, making public policy and trying to construe the words of the constitution to somehow read their preferred policy into it. Now, as a (gritting my teeth) policy making body, it seems disproportionate for the power of any Justice to last longer than e.g. the two consecutive terms that a President can serve.
What I would _prefer_ to see is a less polarized Congress, that can actually set policies that a broad consensus of the nation can support and abiding by explicit Constitutional limits. (I would also prefer to see public policies set by referenda, preferably phrased as laws with adjustable parameters so the median voter winds us setting the value - not winner-take-all party contests) Ideally, the only time SCOTUS should get involved is if Congress or a state legislature passes a law which violates the clear language of the Constitution, and must be struck down, or when an unavoidable conflict between Constitutional rights and/or powers occurs, and someone _has_ to rule on which takes precedence. But ideally, these would be rare.
I admit, I'm ambivalent about this. "No man's life, liberty, or property is secure while Congress is in session." On the other hand, congresscritters have hamstrung themselves to the point where they seem incapable of even routine acts of governance, such as passing budgets.
"Ideally, the only time SCOTUS should get involved is if Congress or a state legislature passes a law which violates the clear language of the Constitution, and must be struck down, or when an unavoidable conflict between Constitutional rights and/or powers occurs, and someone _has_ to rule on which takes precedence."
That's exactly what happened in this case, no? A state legislature passed a law restricting abortion, and the court ruled that it did not violate the clear language of the Constitution, which says nothing about abortion, so they did not intervene and strike down the law.
Yes. I liked the _policy_ of Roe v Wade, but I agree with Alito's reading of the words of the Constitution (or, in this case, the absence of words). Personally, I'd ideally prefer to see legislation explicitly declaring abortion legal, and I'd like to see amendments explicitly protecting bodily autonomy and privacy, but these aren't going to happen. If Congress had sense, they would at least explicitly declare contraception legal (hey, if they can have an FDA, they can control interstate commerce in drugs), and prevent a challenge to Griswold - but they are too polarized to even do _that_.
> I think court packing is a dangerous distraction, it's a slippery slope to complete anarchy. Why would the other team accept the new justice count and not just pack further next time they are in? It's insane from a game-theoretical perspective.
Sure, they can do that. The end result would be that the American people's voting habits would actually determine the composition of the Supreme Court, not a decades long act of complex political gamesmanship. Personally, the latter seems better to me.
The other side is going to pack it when they get in *anyway*, the only question is whether your side will be able to at least do some good work in the interim. But really, when the other side packs the Supreme Court, they'll then have it change the election laws so that their side will rule forever. So the only way democracy can even survive, is for our side to pack the court *first*, and change the rules so that the people will freely elect our side every time from now on and we don't have to worry about what will happen if the other side wins. Everybody knows that the tide has turned, demographics is destiny, the people *really* support our side for ever and ever and it's only by way of undemocratic bogus elections that the other side can ever win.
Not really, but both sides will be increasingly tempted to believe versions of that.
<mild snark>
"... for our side to pack the court *first*, and ..."
So, for crisis stability, what we need is for both sides to have a credible second strike capability? :-)
</mild snark>
I think you're right in identifying that there is some threshold past which this mentality takes hold. That's what I'm afraid of and why I believe court packing is dangerous; we all but ensure that mentality takes over if we pack the court. I don't think this mentality is inevitable though. (Perhaps I'm naively optimistic here.)
I'd observe that the Trump administration did not abolish the filibuster, nor pack the court, even when it would have been highly advantageous to do so (for example Trump's appointments getting blocked by cloture votes, continuing the sharp escalation of blocked appointments in Obama's presidency). The Red Team strategy for Supreme Court reform has instead been a multi-decade plan operating mostly inside the existing framework (though as noted above, breaching longstanding convention in the Garland nomination). So I don't think it's rational _now_ for Blue Team to think that the Red Team is going to pack the court. They already won this battle without doing so!
However, the thing one might be afraid of on either side is that the tools are there to whoever has the will to use them; simply abolish the filibuster, and then do whatever one wants to the Supreme Court. One could, in extremis, change the laws so drastically that the next party in power couldn't change them back (though note, this is not what the Democrats propose with their mainstream court packing proposals AIUI). I think this kind of instability points to the need for constitutional reform, to implement more stable systems. But lacking that, we need to proactively shore up these institutions to maintain the sort of bipartisan legitimacy that would hinder a radical government from tearing them down.
If one thousand people toss a coin five times, roughly thirty of them will get five heads in a row. How do you, or Samotsvety, distinguish between predictors who were right through sheer chance, and those who were right thanks to their ability to accurately predict the future?
That's why you go with a range of the successful ones instead of just one, and try to go with the ones with longer records. Superforcasting mentions that this does work, in that people who did well in one cycle of predictions tend to do well on the next (though presumably with some mean reversion).
The part they don't tend to emphasize is that the people who scored best in their competitions were mostly the ones who spent the most time researching the questions. It's not clear that there's a whole lot of "talent" involved beyond being generally smart and well read and having a basic understanding of probabilities.
Five bits of information are not enough to tell the good ones reliably. Two things can help here. One is, obviously, more predictions. The other one is if they successfully bet on what are generally considered low odds. If three millions of people roll a twenty sided dice five times in a row, about one of them will roll the 20 five times.
Related, I think forecasters can only be judged against each other. They generally do not work on repeatable things like roulette outcomes which lend themselves to frequentist probability modelling, but on generally non-repeatable ones like elections. Still, using Bayesian probability, one can keep score between them. There will always be some probability remain that a given superforcaster is just mediocre but was amazingly lucky in the past, but as long as it is small, who cares.
Vaguely related, I have been wondering something similar about fond performance. So your bank suggest a fond to you and it has been increasing in value for the last decade. Obviously. If the fond had badly tanked in year eight they would hardly try to convince you to buy it. I am unsure how serious I should take such a "survivor bias". Probably, one would look at a random sample of the fonds the bank ran ten years ago and see how they have performed in general. If nine out of ten have tanked, then odds are that the fond they are pushing on you was just lucky so far.
There's a classic scam that goes like this:
Day 1: you get a letter in the mail! "Buy Stock X! It's going up today!" Oh, a scam. You crumple it up and throw it in the bin. Just out of interest, that evening you check out Stock X's performance - it's up.
Day 2: Another letter! "Sell Stock Y! It's going down today!" Again, intrigued, you check the price - once again, the prediction was correct.
...
Day 10: the scammer checks the stock market reports, crosses the names of people who received the incorrect prediction off his list, and writes a new letter asking for a sign-up fee for his infallible stock prediction newsletter.
One could use this approach to do a Sybil attack and create lots of smurf accounts on the forecasting platform, then claim fame from the one that got lucky.
But it doesn't work when your identity is pre-registered and you only have one account to work with, as presumably all of these superforecaster teams would function. So it doesn't really work in the context that Scott is describing.
Put differently, Scott is proposing adding a forecasting scorecard to existing identities (which even if pseudonymous, involve the "proof of work" of writing content and engaging with a community over a long period of time). I don't think many people would be interested in following predictions from anonymous Metaculus accounts that don't have much/any "proof of social work" beyond their predictions.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/04/book-review-superforecasting/
On the prediction markets and Dobbs, why isn't the answer that prediction markets aren't that great? I think there have been other posts on this that I haven't read, but sometimes it feels like if there was a PredictIt thing "the Sun will rise tomorrow" and it was only at 98%, people on here would all be freaking out about the small-but-real-possibility of the world suddenly ending.
Separately on trump, I think it makes sense to distinguish between "trump's political career is over" and "trump is indicted or becomes universally unpopular or some other type of major repudiation". The latter is what he seems to wriggle out of. For the former, my prediction is he'll probably lose the 2024 nomination (if he runs).
It's worth understanding what ways they fail in. That they overestimate tail risks is a known failure mode, this one is slightly weirder (but does have reasonable explanations)
You can prove that theoretical ideal prediction markets should be near perfect in various ways. When an existing prediction market is bad, it's worth trying to figure out where the proof failed (ie how it's different from the theoretical ideal ones) to see if there's some easy fix. And if we *can't* figure out why it's different, then either we've learned something new about the world (eg politics) or need some new fundamental assumptions about math/economics/whatever.
Where would I find that proof?
Without knowing anything about this theoretical proof, what I'm reacting to is the discussion about Jan 6 and trump's chances, which isn't about "how is Predictit falling short of a theoretical prediction market" or something, it's just taking its predictions at face value as being indicative of trump's chances.
I suspect it would be an interesting experiment to have "Will the Sun rise tomorrow?" questions posted on prediction markets. It would be illustrative to observe the rate of various bump-and-dump schemes, irrational financial panics and such.
Someone does have "this prediction will resolve as true at the end of the year" on manifold right now. Iirc it's currently at 97%, which is probably roughly the risk free interest rate
Don't forget the Lizardman Constant.
> Liz Cheney says the Republican Party “can’t survive” nominating Trump in 2024. This is exactly the kind of prediction I anticipate people walking back if they were asked to make it formally. Let’s say “conditional on Trump as 2024 nominee, Republicans won’t get >40% of the vote in either of the 2028 or 2032 presidential elections”. Would Liz Cheney - or anyone else - really take that bet, at any odds?
Yes, there are people who would happily take that bet at unfavorable odds.
This ties into the "motivation for formal forecasting" that you mention earlier. The point of forecasting is often not to passively make accurate guesses about where the future will go. It's to influence the future to go where you want it to go, by providing confident leadership in that direction.
When that's your model, it's not really relevant whether you end up winning or losing money on the bet. The point was to make the bet.
-----
On a mostly-unrelated note, "will Twitter be delisted by July 31[, 2022]?" is obviously mispriced at $0.01 yes, $0.99 no - yes should be lower and no should be higher. Is that a possibility on polymarket?
>"The point of forecasting is often not to passively make accurate guesses about where the future will go. It's to influence the future to go where you want it to go, by providing confident leadership in that direction."
Thank you for this. It's one of those insights that is crystal-clear and self-evident now that I've heard it, but it never occured to me before. I guess I never thought about prediction/forecasting as a rhetorical device.
Yes, but the idea is that in even a marginally efficient market, with enough traders and volume, the market would accept the premium from the person making the motivated bet, but then immediately price back down to the true predictive price. All it takes is a single actor with enough capital who is motivated by making money (as opposed to influencing politics), and they will happily accept other people's bad bets all day long. If I know the true chance of something happening is 80%, but others don't want it to happen, so they start shorting the market down to 75%, 70%, 65%, etc. to influence policy, I will simply buy everything below $0.80 and make a profit. The only way this strategy could work is if the total amount of money of the influencers is greater than the total amount of money of the profiteers, and it would be hard to maintain that when you're constantly handing over all your money to the profiteers.
But the more inefficient you make the market with your non-truth-valuing bets, the more traders you invite in to proft from those inefficiencies. If you are able to spend enough money to cause a long term shift in the market in a way you find ideologically favorable, then the market is probably too small and unimportant to be of meaningful practical significance in the first place.
Musk - Twitter lawsuit is about making him pay the deal price - market price.
this might not even involve him getting control of Twitter. might be - most likely - a negotiated solution. and can drag on for years
The deal price is now far above market price, that's part of the problem.
Regarding the Dobbs thing, maybe some people thought if the leak and pressure campaign had made SCOTUS change its final decision, it would have been a scandal on itself that favored Republicans. Or maybe they thought the final decision would drag out longer and that it happened relatively fast, or at that particular moment, favored Democrats in some way. Or they expected more immediate riots or some other immediate reaction that didn't happen and viceversa. But I guess it's just the markets being wrong.
Dobbs decision alone is one thing.
the sequence of public and political reactions to it is as important.
updating based on actual pubic political dynamic is sensible
The concern focuses on the magnitude of the change. Updating some on actual public dynamic is expected, as it removes some uncertainty. However, in this case the actual public dynamic is pretty much in the fat part of the bell curve of possible expected responses, so you’d expect a smaller update than the initial update from the leak. Instead, there was actually a much larger update.
mostly true
This kind of reasoning would be more impressive if presented before actual event (that is, between leak and official SCOTUS decision). Like, "I predict the prediction markets will update by x percentage points before a particular date".
Suppose predictors thought there is 75% chance leak was true and 50% chance Democrats would fail to use the decision to energize their base. I thought the general reaction from the leak was blase.
Re: Twitter, you can look to the stock price itself, and think of it like:
- X% odds Musk wins, or only has to pay a $1B, resulting in Twitter being a ~$20 stock (some uncertainty around the $20 figure, but this is roughly the midpoint of downsides people are using).
- (1-X) % odds Twitter wins and forces Musk to buy the company at somewhere between $46-54.20, with probably a midpoint at around $50.
The current stock price is $32.65, so if you solve for X, you get something like a 57% chance of a Musk victory from the market.
This is sensitive to some assumptions around:
1) The downside (is Twitter a $20 stock, or a $35 stock without Musk).
2) What's the distribution of outcomes around an outright Twitter victory vs. a recut deal at like $46.
3) The possibility of a large cash settlement by Musk to get out of the deal, worth like $10-15B or something (in which case Musk wouldn't own Twitter, but Twitter would trade at well north of the downside price).
So still no perfect answer here, but another datapoint to track.
On the Polymarket question, the current view in the arb space is that a trial is likely to be decided by the end of the year FWIW. Delaware Court of Chancery moves quickly when necessary, and they need to leave time for appeals.
I don't think that the court will force Musk to buy twitter. It makes no sense to force a company to unwilling owner. Even if we have past precedent, this one is too big and damaging for the company that judges will not go for it even if it is according to the law.
So, more likely we are talking about what Musk has to pay to get out of the deal – $1B or more?
Alternatively Musk actually still wants Twitter. He just wants it repriced but plays the hard game. If so, he might have some chance to get it cheaper. Some say that it is impossible because the contract is iron-clad. But again if the issue was so simple as just looking what the contract says, then yes. But it is not, judges will think about the total benefit and maybe it is the optimal outcome that Musk gets Twitter but for less amount considering that all tech stocks have fallen now.
Maybe - I don't really know what the answer is, and anyone who tells you with confidence is confused. I was mostly just flagging the merger arb way of tracking the stock price as a way of ballparking the odds.
I refuse to believe Musk would be foolish enough to get into this so deep and then think he can just walk away. Not impossible, but opportunistically trying to get a cheaper price strikes me as much more plausible.
It makes sense and is a good bet. At the same time I personally don't feel that I know what he thinks. He is an autist and it's not only autists who are bad reading other people, other people are bad reading what autists think too and that is one of the reasons what causes people to dislike autists on purely unconscious level.
And maybe that's what makes him so good in business deals. Poker style negotiations come naturally to him despite seemingly frivolous messages on twitter. His opponents misread him and lose.
Well, the news are that he is going to buy twitter for the original price.
It could mean either that he changed his mind or that he never changed the mind but that the negotiations to get lower price failed. Whatever, I just stay with my conviction that it is better not to try to read the mind of autists and discussions about his motives are less useful.
We will see if the deal goes through.
Levine noted that there is no outcome where the court forces Musk to buy Twitter for anything less than $54.20. Either they compel specific performance, and execute the deal at the agreed price, or they call a MAE and Musk gets away with a $1B breakup fee. (Or theoretically they dissolve the agreement and he pays $0).
The alternative is that they settle, in which case the price could be any number < $54.20. Obviously Musk would rather settle closer to $1b, and Twitter would rather settle closer to $54.20, but it could be any number in between based on what the judge signals they are willing to do.
So I think this is a bit over-simplistic unfortunately. You need to integrate over the probability distribution of settlement values, and so I think that means there is more probability density around a $10-20b settlement, rather than a small probability density at $50/share. IOW I think P(Musk pays <=$1B) must be a lot lower than your binary outcome analysis suggests.
I wouldn't predict too much what the court can or cannot say. Those predictions usually go wrong because judges are more politically or culturally affected than we like to think.
And this is Musk, he could get away for publicly calling his critic a pedophile arguing that it was just a normal online quarrel that nobody takes at face value and the court agreed.
But even if that doesn't happen, conditional of Musk actually wanting to buy Twitter but playing hard to renounce the deal, if it looks that the court was going to agree that the deal cannot go forward but Musk has to pay some penalty ≥ $1B but <<$54.2, it could force Twitter to agree to a revised deal with <$54.20.
To be clear the claim (by Levine, IANAL) is that under Delaware law, there are only those two (three really, including "Musk pays $0") outcomes that the court can decide. The court cannot just invent novel injunctive relief in this sort of contractual dispute. (Of course, the parties can settle for any amount at any time, the court doesn't decide this path.)
> if it looks that the court was going to agree that the deal cannot go forward but Musk has to pay some penalty ≥ $1B but <<$54.2
What mechanism under Delaware contract law are you proposing that the judge would use to compel this? Levine has a detailed analysis of the contract where he shows his working. What is your concrete counter-claim for how this would happen?
That's my point – I am not basing my judgement on what I know about the law. I am basing it on the principle of reason. I don't know what will happen in the court. Maybe the court will ask the parties to settle or whatever. I am saying that most likely the court won't make legally sound but economically devastating decision that goes against public interest, such as forcing unwilling (if he really is unwilling) Musk to buy the company anyway. It could happen in any other case but not in a case of $44B deal.
Similar thing happened when FDA approved Aduhelm and many predicted that it will bankrupt Medicare because the law requires Medicare to cover this approved drug (which would cost tens of billions $) and there is no way out unless the law is changed. I said that it will not happen, Medicare will cover to some extent but something will be done to prevent irrational use of money. And that really happened, Medicare will only cover this drug for trial participants which is a small population. Either the predictors didn't understand the law or maybe the system allows the way out, whatever. It was clear that Aduhelm is not effective drug, EMA rejected its registration and FDA scientific committee did not recommend it. FDA granted registration for political reasons and everybody else can see it and at least in the current US the voice of reason will ultimately prevail.
The obvious solution is not novel injunctive relief but standard expectation damages. There are reasons why this is unlikely, but it is not novel. There are probably courts that would be likely to award those damages. Delaware courts are not those courts.
Courts have a fair amount of discretion, a wide array of doctrines to invoke, the ability to create new doctrines, the ability to read contracts in interesting ways, and the general catch-all of "equity" at their disposal to get the result they want. I don't expect the Delaware court to dig deep into this toolbox, but saying that there are only two options feels like tempting the court to get creative.
On Roe, it’s important to consider that the 95% chance was for allowing Mississippi’s abortion ban — not for striking Roe.
The decision could have easily been like Roberts’ concurrence, allowing 15-week abortion bans but upholding Roe. Or many other compromise options available to the court. But instead they went all the way.
As a side note, my site ElectionBettingOdds.com aggregates odds like Senate chances, volume-weighting together different markets like PredictIt and Polymarket (hover over the candidate images to see the exact market breakdowns.)
There may be no 'Dobbs mystery'. The metaculus question resolved to yes if any law banning abortions before the viability line was upheld. It was obvious based on oral arguments there was at least a 6-3 majority to get rid of that standard, and as we saw in the Chief's concurrence he wanted to come up with a different one under which to uphold the Mississippi law. There were a lot of less Democratic energizing outcomes between 'upholding Missisipi's 15 week ban' and returning the question to the states completely.
Perhaps 538's model had an effect pre-June 30 because of the model's results being leaked to some people, although I don't know anything about 538's predictions leaking. There could've also been some "insider trading" on 538's side. I don't know much about that either, but the amount of volume is small enough that, I think, a few players could move the market a couple percentage points (at 30c per share, a single user can buy up to 2833 shares). This could explain why there was less Metaculus movement.
Like Scott wrote, this speculation is partly motivated by the initial Roe vs. Wade leak (May 2) only slightly moving the PredictIt market, even though everybody seemingly interpreted the leak as being definitive. Also, if people are already taking the leak as fact, why is there a second jump upon the official release? Maybe more people entered the market after the release?
The Matt Levine article was hard to get through. I liked how he said Musk has "a hobby of pretending to take companies private" and then pointed to .. one other example (the only example). The 420 fiasco. And it's a very inaccurate characterization of that deal, if you look into the details.
Matt seems to think that there is little difference between "pretending to do something" and "doing something without 100% commitment in the face of unforeseen circumstances". He is wrong, and the article suffers for the inaccuracy.
Levine has had a hate-on for musk for years and always tries to portray him in the least favorable light that is at least arguably consistent with the facts.
> Metaculus lists the chance of Elon Musk becoming CEO of Twitter by 2025 as 10%.
There is effectively a 0% chance of Musk ever becoming Twitter's CEO. Twitter is a time suck with likely very little impact on human existence. Not so for Tesla and SpaceX. I could only see Musk becoming CEO if every one of his other companies crashed and burned. Becoming Twitter's owner doesn't mean he'd be CEO.
> But taken seriously, this implies that a memo by the Supreme Court Justices saying “we are reversing Roe” only implied a 33% chance they would really do it. But we saw earlier that the prediction markets were saying there was a 95% chance they would! So why the big update when it happened?
Because courts are swayed by outside influence. For instance, FDR threatened the court and they quickly got back in line.
> 23% by December 30, but probably a trial would drag on long past then, so I don’t think that’s the final chance.
The Chancery court operates pretty quickly with cases resolved in months - from how Levine talks about the issues I don't see any difficult legal questions that would require significantly more time than average.
https://www.courts.delaware.gov/aoc/annualreports/fy20/doc/2020StatisticalInformationReport.pdf.
If I'm reading the dates correctly, a similar case (attempted cancelled merger with specific performance remedy) took a little over a month to resolve.
https://law.justia.com/cases/delaware/court-of-chancery/2021/c-a-no-2020-0282-ksjm.html
Is there not new information in the reaction to Dobbs? I haven't looked at the polling in-depth but public reaction to "The Supreme Court is going to reverse Roe" in Spring and "The Supreme Court has reversed Roe" in June seem qualitatively different to me
Yes, but markets should have expected that the public response would change once the actual decision happened. The magnitude of the reaction to the decision itself seemed pretty predictable, and not particularly extreme in either direction.
Maybe it's some kind of 4D chess logic, where there was some expectation of a low probability of 2020-style rioting / looting / burning cities that would have been very beneficial for Republicans already priced in, and when that didn't happen, the new price reflected that lack of a low-probability, high-magnitude event.
On the Dobbs shift, I agree that the markets are probably just dumb but I can tell a story where the large update makes sense because everyone was expecting Democrats to be moderately angry about the ruling and instead they were very angry, so the markets moved with this new information.
I'm inclined to concur with this. I read a few conservative news blogs, and I definitely saw an expectation there that anger over overturning Roe was already at its peak after people had had time to digest news of the leak and thus was already baked into polling numbers that still strongly favored Republicans. Moreover, many thought the anger would burn itself out and would largely be old news by November.
A big spike in motivation to vote among Dems showed up in polling shortly after the Dobbs opinion was officially announced, providing new info contradicting the former expectation and casting substantial doubt on the latter.
Agree. That is how I perceived events to play out.
"But taken seriously, this implies that a memo by the Supreme Court Justices saying “we are reversing Roe” only implied a 33% chance they would really do it."
This should really be 25% instead of 33%. The total drop in the chance of Republicans taking the senate was 20%, and only 5% (a quarter of that) happened when the draft opinion was announced.
Which prediction market would you recommend for a beginner?
PredictIt if you like politics. Manifold if you're okay answering silly questions for fake stakes. Metaculus if you're willing to deal with a learning curve.
Kalshi is also beginner-friendly and uses real money (if that's what you're looking for).
There are a couple of potentially interesting Covid questions, e.g. it has a ~50% chance that the 7-day average of Covid cases will reach 200,000 by September 22 (https://kalshi.com/events/CASESURGE-22SEP22/markets/CASESURGE-22SEP22-A200). So there's an opportunity to make a decent amount of money if you have a strong feeling in either direction.
It also has only a ~25% chance that the 7DA of cases will reach <11,790 by December 31 (https://kalshi.com/events/CASE7DA-22/markets/CASE7DA-22-A11.7). So if you think it's much higher than that, that's another potential option.
Most of the other markets aren't that interesting to me, but you can take a look: https://kalshi.com/events
Worth pointing out that the Dobbs ruling wasn't the only thing that happened that week in SC news. There was a spate of conservative rulings on various issues (gun, religion, etc) all around that time, as well as Thomas specifically calling out gay marriage, sodomy, and contraception as next on the chopping block.
Plausibly people could have looked at the leak and said 'we knew the right to privacy stuff was shaky, the court might do this even if it was fairly reserved and neutral and non-activist'. Then updated on that when they saw all those rulings plus the Thomas opinion at once.
"If the Roe reversal really improved Democrats’ chances by 15%, why did it take until the reversal happened for people to update?"
A skeptical public distrusts leaked government documents, especially ones with a culture war payload. They are sometimes bogus.
East African Federation question also on Manifold predates the Metaculus market: https://manifold.markets/EliGaultney/will-the-east-african-federation-le
Currently at 13%.
Anyone else find it laughable that this is heralded as some great thing that will bring about unity etc....by (at least the same *kind* of) people who claim that civil war, genocide etc. in post-colonial africa was a result of different types of africans being made to live in the same country together?
"Democrats are angry about the overturning of Roe. Republicans are happy, but angry people vote and happy people mostly don’t. "
Agreed. Purely from a GOP tactical point of view, I'm surprised that the right wing majority in SCOTUS didn't find some way to delay the decision until after the midterm elections.
Well, we will see how the vote turns out. _Personally_, my ox is gored more by inflation than by forced birth laws. On the third hand, I've read claims that only about half of the inflation we've had is under Biden's (more or less - or the government generally) control. And the abortion ruling can be viewed as frozen politics from the previous administration, so none of the midterm elections directly bear on it.
That's fair.
The economy is less obviously an entirely Democrat at fault issue though, whereas abortion is 100% on Republicans.
Probably because either 1) the Supreme Court is actually rather independent from political parties (unlikely) or 2) they actually believe what they profess.
Or the situation had changed enough from when they started to consider Dobbs that they effectively locked in their timetable prematurely.
Can they? They heard the case during the judicial term of 2021-2, so I'm guessing it must be decided by the end of that term, which was the end of June.
I don't know. They have a lot of discretion, so I suspect they probably had some options available. If nothing else, they can (and must! given the number of attempted appeals to SCOTUS) choose which cases they wish to hear at all - and there have been enough abortion cases brewing that I strongly suspect they could have picked one in the next judicial term.
edit: re must choose which cases they wish to hear at all:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/courtatwork.aspx
"Each Term, approximately 7,000-8,000 new cases are filed in the Supreme Court."
"Plenary review, with oral arguments by attorneys, is currently granted in about 80 of those cases each Term, and the Court typically disposes of about 100 or more cases without plenary review. "
NYT 7/12/2022 Half of G.O.P. Voters Ready to Leave Trump Behind, Poll Finds
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/12/us/politics/trump-approval-polling-2024.html?
Are Polls predictive?
How do you forecast Covid when the virus is mutating?
Forecasting Methods depend on assumption parameters which are also time dependent
From: https://tinyurl.com/Prediction-Analysis
Extrapolative Forecasting
Theoretical Forecasting
Intuitive Prediction
Re long term human survival can we finally build some undersea habitats with nuclear power and algae farming that could survive even the worst case nuclear war (assuming it's not directly targeted).
If above water became uninhabitable
Is this a serious question? Charging right ahead as if it is regardless :)
No. No we don't have the ability to create a closed ecosystem for humans yet. They are doing the best they can on the International Space Station, seeing how launch costs are in the thousands of USD per kg, but still many things needs to be sent up every few weeks/months, notably food. Same with nuclear submarines; they have nuclear power, generate freshwater and oxygen from seawater etc, but end up limited by food stores. An independent, self-sustaining undersea habitat would face a different set of constraints from either, but is not something we currently know how to make. A floating habitat might be easier on the food front, but still very challenging when it comes to any other physical goods for manufacturing and repair. Much easier to just build on land.
Colonizing the depths of the ocean seems like something worth doing for the sake of doing it, so long as we can get our population growing again.
I think the food problem could be solved fairly easily, just make fishing trawler submarines and seaweed farms.
Oh, I'm all for it! And I'm sure it's possible, it's just that we don't know how to pull if off as of yet. I'd love to visit a city under the sea, or even live there for a while.
Why would the habitats not be directly targeted in a worst-case nuclear war?
We've already discussed at length(*) the reasons that a worst-real-case nuclear war would not actually threaten long-term human survival. If you're going to imagine some far-fetched hypothetical scenario where nuclear war would actually threaten long-term human survival, then those scenarios pretty much all involve at least one party being literally omnicidal or two parties being very broadly genocidal, in which case they're going to target the undersea habitats.
Space colonies, too, unfortunately. And if you have spaceships good enough to build space colonies, genocidal nuclear warfighters *definitely* have nuclear missiles good enough to reach them.
A random small town in Colorado is probably, and e.g. Argentina definitely, good enough for surviving not-explicitly-omnicidal nuclear wars. Literally omnicidal nuclear wars, you probably can't hope to survive one without fleeing the solar system entirely. But they would require extensive preparation, current arsenals being grossly inadequate for such a task, so maybe stop anyone trying to make the preparations by any means necessary (including non-omnicidal nuclear war).
* https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6142.msg230450.html
I'm specifically grateful for the examples of contradictions and otherwise not so clever behaviour on prediction markets. They help build a realistic expectation - much more useful to me than thinking of prediction markets as *heavenly new tools that solve everything* (which would be shattered anyway soon).
That's not being fair to prediction markets. The vast majority of them are very, very tiny in terms of users and trading volume. If they were 100x or even maybe 10x bigger, basic arbitrage opportunities like this would certainly disappear.
I didn't want to be unfair to prediction markets. Without Scott I wouldn't even know about them, so if I'm actively engaging with how they work (or don't), I think that's on the plus side, if you're in favour.
You mean I should read everything that Scott writes on Mantic Mondays through a lense of: those are only toy markets, not resembling too much the real thing?
Crypto trading volume is about $100 billion a day. Foreign exchange markets trade over $6 trillion a day. You will never find basic arbitrage opportunities like this in those markets because there are millions of investors and hundreds of companies trying to find these inefficiencies at all times.
However, for legal and other reasons, it's not feasible for quant firms to make real money on prediction markets right now, so these kinds of things are expected. But as soon as prediction markets cross the threshold of being legal, fast enough, and large enough to sustain millions of dollars in income for a few smart people, then these obvious inefficiencies would vaporize.
Your're talking about future potential of prediction markets. I guess I'm more sceptical than you're, but that's in fact not my question. What I'm currently interested in (at least in the context of my statement above) is: if I look at the current predictions in the different prediction markets, how serious should I take them? In other words, how much trust to put into their accuracy - right now?
This results in interesting question: if many quants with real money notice many "easy" arbitrage opportunities and dutifully take advantage on them, the prediction markets would get larger, the prices would eventually converge more closely with the available information.
But at that point, why would anyone engage if there are no longer easy profits to be made? How many people have disposable income to bet on Trump questions and how many of them are not already betting on them on traditional bookmakers or betting exchanges?
Sports betting is pretty big and people still bet on that, although maybe that's more inherently interesting.
One unique advantage for prediction markets is that you can use them to hedge otherwise bad outcomes, i.e. if a certain politician winning an election would be really bad for you, you can bet on them winning and then either they lose or you make money, softening the blow a bit.
Nate Silver hinted at what his forecast would show on 06/29: https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1542228065123811329?s=21&t=ipIZa8fVMgAtLYOUGD5flQ
https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1542300796284551168?s=21&t=ipIZa8fVMgAtLYOUGD5flQ
"Republicans are happy, but angry people vote and happy people mostly don’t."
My first reading of this sentence was that Republicans are angry that people vote and happy that people mostly don't. Granted, (not that I know that much about US politics) that does sound like something some people might actually say.
I also parsed it like that, this comment made me go back and re-read it. Ah, the ambiguities of the English language...
It would be too sloppy for him to have not written 'but are angry that people vote' if he meant what you read it meaning.
My theory on the effect of Dobbs is this: the leak might have happened weeks ago, but the "Well actually this will help Dems in the midterms" think-pieces didn't start coming out until the official release.
Prediction market participants are just as susceptible to being sucked in by a narrative as anyone else.
RE: Senate odds, maybe it's more sophisticated than just Dobbs. The Republicans meaningfully injured their chances by nominating a few really bad candidates for swing-state Senate seats (Oz, Walker) in primaries that occurred prior to that spike. You have to win actual elections every now and then, with actual candidates.
> But taken seriously, this implies that a memo by the Supreme Court Justices saying “we are reversing Roe” only implied a 33% chance they would really do it. But we saw earlier that the prediction markets were saying there was a 95% chance they would! So why the big update when it happened?
Because the news was likely disseminated to more people when the decision happened due to protests etc. I think it's simply just more people. not that the same individuals updated.
Also, it's possible that some people did indeed think 33%. There isn't perfect knowledge.
> Maybe people are just dumb
Traditional markets have a phenomenon called post earnings drift. It takes them time to digest earnings surprises, between weeks to months depending on the sophistication of the participants. This effect is contrary to the efficient market hypothesis.
This is in the largest most liquid markets in the world. I would expect smaller prediction markets to have some inefficiencies like this too. After all stock markets are predicting the long term earnings of stocks, just like prediction markets are predicting the payout.
The research is nicely reviewer in "Positional Options Trading 2020" which I am reading now.
Earth to January 6 committee: if you're looking to influence what Republicans think of Trump, try to come out as honest and maybe even somewhat sympathetic, try to look as if you're doing your best trying to do the right thing, as opposed to wanting to see how many people's lives you can destroy because you don't like their politics. I wonder if nobody ever told them how they would look, or if they just did not care. I'd guess the second.
> This is a weird pattern, isn’t it? If the Roe reversal really improved Democrats’ chances by 15%, why did it take until the reversal happened for people to update? Why not update as soon as the draft came out? Sure, things could have changed between the draft and the decision. But taken seriously, this implies that a memo by the Supreme Court Justices saying “we are reversing Roe” only implied a 33% chance they would really do it. But we saw earlier that the prediction markets were saying there was a 95% chance they would! So why the big update when it happened?
The one big update that did happen is on the level of public response to the decision. It definitely surprised me somewhat; I was expecting the public response to the ruling to be smaller because the public response to the leak was small. The level of public response is information that was only really available after the ruling actually came out, and that's information that's really key in determining how big an impact the ruling will have on elections. So taking that into account, I think the pattern is fully compatible with bettors updating rationally.
>I was expecting the public response to the ruling to be smaller because the public response to the leak was small.
This got me thinking. Like, it is not like prediction market traders are disinterested aliens observing the situation on Earth from Mars. Everyone else also reacts to the same thing as the predictors.
It could have been even a strategic decision: Maybe the media campaign PR persons thought it would be beneficial somehow to agitate their base about the Roe reversal only after the decision was certain.
It could have been simply a response: maybe the relevant pro-choice activists were also surprised by the mild public response to the leak. They gauged the public sentiments and obtained results not unlike Metaculus prediction. (Who knows, maybe some staffers are tasked with checking the prediction markets and betting odds?) Maybe they drafted a better media campaign to be launched at the next opportune moment.
This is ofc only speculation. It could have been many things.