I don't know who exactly is the patron saint of elections, but this article from "America" magazine from 2020 does suggest likely candidates (ha!) to invoke.
"St. Barsabbas and St. Matthias. Perhaps the saintly duo we need to invoke most this Election Day, they are the only pair of running mates ever canonized. Both followed Jesus throughout his ministry, without seeking reward or to be counted among the Twelve. In the end, St. Barsabbas lost to St. Matthias when lots were cast to replace Judas Iscariot after he betrayed Jesus. Still, St. Barsabbas went on to proclaim God’s word among the people and do good. Little is known of St. Matthias after his election. We hope, through these saints’ intercession, whoever wins might receive the same grace to recede from public office and avoid making the daily headlines."
Imagine being voted in to replace Judas. That's a tough act to follow and a hard row to hoe!
Personally, I'd go for St. Thomas More but yeah, probably too conservative for the majority on here. Might be a good pick for JD Vance, though 😁
"St. Thomas More, patron saint of politicians. Another martyr for the faith, St. Thomas More was once one of the richest and most powerful politicians in England—until he refused to bow to the will of the tyrant Henry VIII and recognize Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. “I am the king’s good servant, but God’s first,” he said before he was executed. Let us pray that politicians on both sides of the aisle act with integrity in office and render unto God the things that are God’s. (Side note: St. Thomas More would also put Donald J. Trump to shame in a war of insults. He once called Martin Luther “a pimp, an apostate, a rustic, and a friar.”)"
Thomas More wrote the proto-communist "Utopia", so he hardly seems particularly 'conservative'. The Soviets back in the day had a statue of him (along with Thomas Muntzer) in Red Square, i believe (might have the details wrong).
> But the simple story seems wrong. Other real-money markets rose approximately in tandem with Polymarket. For example, Smarkets got to Trump 59% on 10/16, and peaked at 64% on 10/30. Kalshi followed a similar path. Both tracked Polymarket, not Nate Silver or Metaculus (neither of whom ever went above Trump 55% since Harris joined the race).
Isn't it possible it was just arbitrage? If Polymarket's offering 60-40 odds, and Smarkets is offering 50-50 odds, you buy Trump on Smarkets (driving up price) and Kamala on Polymarket. If Polymarket's underlying market cap is much larger, this means Trump goes up on Smarkets without a visible impact on Polymarket.
(Also, IIRC, around this same time, Musk tweeted about it, which also disrupts the pool of people doing the betting.)
(I used to be a professional gambler, and) I agree this is likely.
There's another step where traditional bookies are used to looking at markets as their market-makers - they aren't bothering to make complicated forecasting models for non-sports events, so they follow the wise money. In this case, they're following the dumb money. They don't care much if someone tries to arb with them as long as they think their odds are accurate, but their signal for the latter is incorrect.
For whatever it's worth, I have 4 figures on Harris at 38c.
Edit: Oh, and I think the lesson for this is that increased liquidity isn't purely good for prediction markets. You need the ecology too - people who have understanding of the market.
I've read papers on this being the case for sports betting markets (home/away bias exists, increased liquidity increases the bias), and I think their value rises after this incident.
In principle yes, you can have one mispriced market, and then all other markets can be driven by arbitrage towards it (which should also bring that mispriced market down). But you need an explanation for why one whale has more pricing power than "everyone else in the world who thinks the odds haven't changed and can bet". E.g. Betfair has a trading volume in the hundreds of millions of dollars on this market. As I write, Trump is at 57-60 on Kalshi, Betfair and Polymarket.
>In principle yes, you can have one mispriced market, and then all other markets can be driven by arbitrage towards it (which should also bring that mispriced market down).
Agreed, but with a caveat...
The natural policy conclusion from this is "The markets need more liquidity.". And that sounds reasonable, and matches the first order expectations for how markets should behave...
But - this _also_ matches the policy conclusion, infamous from government programs: "What we are doing isn't working. Lets make the program bigger, and do more of this."
Well, perhaps it wasn't clear, but I was merely describing an argument to explain why I don't find it convincing. Given the amount of money traded on these markets, I don't find "well, there was insufficient liquidity" very convincing at all. I think many people were pricing information not contained in polls. Of course an individual could do so "wrongly", but I just mean that there exists plenty of relevant information that isn't accounted for in polling averages etc, and obviously prediction markets should incorporate this information, and appealing to "but the polling averages haven't moved, so how come the market has" assumes its own conclusion.
Well, it looks like the markets were correct where e.g. 538 was wrong (at least, as far as I've seen, both ended up making close predictions but 538 with the edge to Harris & the markets giving the edge to Trump)... although, as Scott notes, it's hard to really tell too much from one trial.
Still, they don't look as bad as Scott evidently thought they would.
(That's what you get for voting for someone who supports price controls, Scott: you are cursed to have bad takes for the next four years! oooOoOoo! 👻)
Yeah, agree you can't learn anything really from n=1 purely from the predictions and the outcomes. If you predict 50-50 and one of the sides win (which of course they must), does it even mean anything to say you were wrong? (I don't think so, and similarly a 60-40 prediction isn't wrong/right by virtue of the outcome).
So to make a claim of rightness/wrongness you need to make a statement about some external factor. Call the information set used by polling-based models I_A. Call the information set captured by the betting markets as I_B (of which I_A is a subset. Then it can totally be true that:
E(Trump wins | I_A) = 0.5
E(Trump wins | I_B) = 0.65
There is nothing contradictory here. It is however a bit silly for the person possessing I_A to look at the betting market and say "they could not possibly have any additional information". That's just a really high benchmark!
In this specific case, i am not entirely sure what information bettors were using, but I think there was available public information from the early voting data that looked promising for Republicans and inconsistent with polling. I suspect betting markets were picking this up to at least some degree.
>(That's what you get for voting for someone who supports price controls, Scott: you are cursed to have bad takes for the next four years! oooOoOoo! 👻)
>Given the amount of money traded on these markets, I don't find "well, there was insufficient liquidity" very convincing at all.
Many Thanks, sorry for misinterpreting your views!
>I think many people were pricing information not contained in polls.
Agreed, and that is a sensible thing for them to do. Amongst other data, everything that each candidate says is an additional datum, and can validly drive an update.
>appealing to "but the polling averages haven't moved, so how come the market has" assumes its own conclusion.
No worries, I'm pretty sure the problem was just I worded my original comment too cryptically. It sounds like we agree on the merits. (Like you, I also would not argue for "well we need more liquidity". If spreads are large, you can arguably say that. But that wasn't the first order issue here).
I think there was a co-equal effect of Harris suddenly doing an interview surge. According to the biased diet of my twitter algo they were seriously bad - Dana Bash: "She didn't close the deal". Wild comment for a CNN person to make in the last stretch of the election
GPT says the first interview was Oct 7 on CBS, which famously included an answer they later edited after it went viral
If you're temperamentally biased towards Trump, and that happens, you're thinking Harris' internal polling was a disaster and it was a failed Hail Mary. Then betting up Trump only for the polls to not move, resulting in a rebound. This may explain the rise and fall of the odds, and may have changed perceptions among more online bettors more durably than for the public. They may have transferred their perception of a big late flame out to "it'll strengthen the polling bias that understates R support"
Another possible contributing factor is people betting on Trump not because it's positive-EV in pure financial terms but because they're hedging against the circumstance where he wins and makes a bunch of other things worse. No idea if significant numbers of people did this, but I thought about it. It seems to be a potential weakness of the predictive accuracy of (some) prediction markets in general.
Yeah, a quick google search finds articles reporting businesses being boarded up *now* in DC and Portland. Portland is well known as an antifa hotspot. Maybe both cities expect to be descended upon by MAGA types if Harris wins. But I suspect the free market is telling you something here.
Also, two separate individuals tried to assassinate Trump these last few months. An experiment by Professor Eric Kaufmann found that 1/3 of Democrats admitted that they would have preferred Trump be killed! (See here: https://unherd.com/newsroom/third-of-democrats-wish-donald-trump-had-been-killed/) Lots of people on the left openly compare Trump to Hitler. You do not have to like the guy one iota to think that there is a non-trivial risk of left wing violence if Trump wins.
The first guy definitely wasn't, since he was under 18 the last election, and only voted in the midterm elections. Don't know much about the second guy, except that he was very critical of Trump's view of Ukraine.
The first shooter, Crooks, was registered as a Republican but his social media history was supporting Biden and specifically his covid lockdown and soft on immigration policies.
The second shooter, Routh was not even registered as a Republican. He was a registered as an independent since 2012. He did claim to have voted for Trump in 2016 after voting for Bernie in the Democratic primary.
The likely truth is, as with with most people who tried to assassinate presidents in the past 150 years, they don't really have coherent politics, they're just nuts.
Undoubtedly the free range anxiety over trump centers him as a totem of wrath, but trying to inflict coherence on these people is a mistake.
To a fairly large degree, agreed. We're dealing with people who (a) seem to have unstable but strongly held views over time, (b) by virtue of their actions are selected from some extreme tail of the population.
I think the stat in the Kaufmann article I linked is more meaningful than the precise political ideology of the two wannabe assassins.
The Kaufmann assassination dilemma always strikes me as interesting.
Surely no-one who takes Trump's threat seriously (including relative moderates) wants the man to continue to be alive. But obviously wishing someone dead and wishing they become the victim of political violence are two different things. It's difficult to untangle whether people who don't wish he'd been killed: 1) genuinely wished Trump good health (i.e. hopes he lives a long and healthy life for purely altruistic reasons); 2) would like him to die, but were afraid of being seen to be condoning political violence; or 3) would like him to die, but were afraid of the potential escalation and destabilisation of a successful attempt.
I suspect 2) and 3) make up the vast majority. So the people who wish he'd been killed: a) Are less afraid of being seen to be condoning political violence; b) Are less afraid of escalation and destabilisation (either because they don't believe it will happen, or because they embrace it).
I don't know how to interpret this in terms of predicting greater future violence, to be honest.
Also, there’s a non-trivial chance that Trump looks like he’s losing, so some supporters riot, but after three days of counting he actually wins. That’s a really bad outcome because it makes it look stolen, but it’s completely possible even with a completely correct count and the riots having no effect on the counting.
Are you really saying that fake money betting markets are more trustworthy than real money betting markets?
Seems extremely counter intuitive, I don’t really see an argument for this. Large whales can influence the price of prediction markets so we should use fake money games instead and disregard them entirely?
Was going to post about people arbing polymarket against other venues but it seems like someone did below. What you mentioned in your blog as “people arbitraging the wrong way” isn’t really an arb but just a bet on the other side when the odds were favorable. An arb seeks to make “free money” due to a spread/odds discrepancy on different venues.
If Trump win, prediction markets are the future of forecasting
Is Trump lose then they are a massive scam and we should never look at them again 😆
"Are you really saying that fake money betting markets are more trustworthy than real money betting markets? Seems extremely counter intuitive, I don’t really see an argument for this."
The argument is:
1. This has been true in the past whenever people study this question.
2. We know why Polymarket and the fake-money markets are different: it's because one whale contigently bet on Polymarket. Unless we want to abandon our faith in the wisdom of crowds in favor of the wisdom of one rich French guy, we should assume the other markets are the well-calibrated ones.
3. It's just inherently harder for one guy with $75 million to screw up a fake money market.
(also, I wouldn't call the two best non-real-money predictors - Nate Silver and Metaculus - "fake money markets". Nate Silver is just a guy. Metaculus is a wisdom-of-crowds engine that weights people's responses by their history of being right in the past. These are different structures from prediction markets and it's not obvious which one should be better.)
I can't help but wonder if this would have been avoided if the highest-liquidity prediction market was legal in the United States. Did this stop it from getting corrected quickly?
Yes and no. If it was legal in more places, it would have more liquidity, but the example shows that just adding more liquidity does not help in itself. Rather than one French guy distorting the market by betting $75m, you might well have one American guy distorting the market by betting $750m.
That's only true if the whale turns out to be wrong. Even if the odds favor the whale being wrong, if it turns out the whale is right, "smart" bets still lose.
Of course, in the long run, the odds will even out, so that the actually smart bets will end up winning. But anything can happen in single bets.
> Unless we want to abandon our faith in the wisdom of crowds in favor of the wisdom of one rich French guy, we should assume the other markets are the well-calibrated ones.
Wait, I thought that the whole point of real-money prediction markets was to move money from from dumb people to smart people, and use wealth as a proxy for forecasting ability.
The Platonic Ideal of a prediction market, sure. In our world, it's "people who want to get rich/think they see an opportunity to make money", and whether that's the stock market or plain old betting on slow horses and fast women, there's always plenty of people to lose their shirts because they think they have a sure thing or a system that will definitely beat the house.
So people betting on prediction markets with real money will attract all sorts, not just the rational smart superforecasters. And then that turns such markets into lotteries. Because we humans can't resist thinking there is indeed such a thing as a free lunch and dollar bills just lying around on the ground waiting to be picked up.
"use wealth as a proxy for forecasting ability"
I do remain slightly amazed and slightly humbled by the simple, trusting, American belief that "Joe made a lot of money, so he must be really, really smart! And the bigger the fortune, the smarter the guy! So I should trust his opinion on the price of eggs" (fair enough, Joe probably knows about things like that) "and what colour to paint my front door" (maybe ask an interior designer instead?)
From cursory reading about the great American fortune-makers of the past, what they had in abundance was not so much massive intellects as massive ruthlessness, the ability to spot the main chance earlier than anyone else, and the drive to spend every possible moment making money. A slice of luck helped them along, as well.
This is true, but it happens too slowly, and in too small numbers, for it to make a difference in big markets like Harris v Trump. The vast majority of the money bet on such markets is not money made from prior bets in prediction markets but comes from elsewhere. I expect this to remain true for a while.
This is an "in the long run we're all dead" situation I think. On average the money will flow in that direction, but while it's flowing the market numbers can be pretty far off from the true odds.
It's also true that there's a lot of random chance in "who gets wealthy", but you never hear about those who lost because of random chance. It's quite probable (based on histories of the successful) that there are more who failed because of taking a risky high-stakes bet than who succeeded. What's not clear is how they differed from the average. A reasonable guess is that there are many different patterns that occasionally succeed, but much more often fail. And that following the advice of those who succeeded because of that kind of pattern is opting for a pathe with a very high chance of failure.
So my guess is "If you're going to take advice of a guy who's super successful, check and make sure it isn't mainly luck that made him successful.". Here I'm counting inherited wealth as a kind of luck, though that's not quite fair, as some families do seem to inculcate skills.
I suppose it's possible. Are you suggesting that crypto whales are the kind of people who hop on a bandwagon just for the sake of being on the winning side, and don't actually care as much about which candidate is better? Maybe that that kind of "back a winner" instinct correlates with being able to make a lot of money on crypto?
I'm not super tied into that culture but my impression is that crypto people seem to at least pretend to have real political preferences, beyond just who they think is more likely to come out on top. But maybe you know better.
I wish we had clearer terminology here. Pro-<candidate> usually mean that someone _prefers_ that <candidate> wins, but what we are talking about here is really whether someone _predicts_ that a candidate wins. Maybe we should talk about expects-Trump and expects-Harris in this context, rather than pro-Trump and pro-Harris?
Any suggestions for better terms? Expects-<candidate> seems clumsy, even to me...
> It's just inherently harder for one guy with $75 million to screw up a fake money market.
Why do you think this? I'm not an expert but I bet $75M could buy a lot of bots and/or Mechanical Turks. Maybe you want to say "one guy with $75M is less likely to _want_ to screw up a fake money market"? But again that's unclear, since modelling Theo as a rational actor maximizing his own utility doesn't seem like a great fit.
Or maybe this is exactly why we shouldn't call Silver/Metaculus "fake money markets", since they aren't susceptible to Sybil attacks the way every fake-money market must be.
It seems like polymarket and real money markets had it right all along. It was a landslide victory, and not close to 50-50 as these gamified markets and the pollers suggested.
It also wasn’t just one wealthy French guy. JPM and hedge funds were allegedly trading on polymarket. Polymarket feed was also integrated into Bloomberg terminal and other trading software.
REAL prediction markets are legit. This proves it.
By what standard does 295 electoral votes and 51.7% of the popular vote count as a "landslide"? I count only two Presidential elections in the past hundred years with the winner scoring lower than Trump/2024, both of them involving a guy named "Dubya".
Everybody who said this election was "too close to call", or "leaning Trump but really too close to call", was approximately as right as everyone else who made such claims. Everybody who claims their predictions were better than those, is deluding themselves.
I think it's clear that polls are not as good a source of information as we'd like, probably because of incredibly low response rates that introduce a bunch of biases. But still, if your expectations of the election were "what Nate Silver says" or "what the RCP polling aggregator says," you had a pretty good picture of reality.
We know people gamble with real money markets. So to believe they're better-calibrated, you need to assume savvy investors with deep pockets are watching them like a hawk, and can tell the difference between stupid gambling and insider trading.
Not even the efficient market hypothesis protects helps much here, AFAICT. If it's extremely difficult to tell whether a big bet is stupid gambling or insider trading, the rational thing to do might just be not to participate since you have opportunities to make better returns elsewhere.
This reasoning sort of applies just as much to the NYSE as prediction markets, tho: to the extent the market is not efficient, it's an issue of scale & liquidity.
$1 million in damage or ten hospitalisations is not that high a threshold but I don't exactly expect CNN to have a running counter so it'll be difficult to get accurate figures.
Remember 2016 and "you're more concerned about glass than lives?" from the knuckleheads out smashing windows of businesses and setting bins on fire, eve of the election result, leaving the ordinary workers who came in to work the next morning to clean the mess up after them (and maybe lose a day's pay if the business really did have to close).
But they were punching Nazis (insert eye roll here) so that made it all okay!
I think it's less likely for the prediction market to resolve that there were election riots if there are left-wing election riots, which is important in placing your bets.
Why is it so unlikely he'd run again and win? I could understand wanting a new candidate if he loses, and maybe the democrats would find some way to bar him from running again, but 0.1%?
I would have just gone with "Trump in power for more than 10 years total", or "Trump in power against the current Constitution".
Wait, hold on, I just read the actual resolution criteria and they say the child question ("Trump in power beyond 2028") resolves No if Trump loses the 2024 election. Huh. I'm now as confused as Scott.
Okay, that is confusing. The real question seems to be "Trump is indeed fascist dictator who will declare himself president for life if he wins", not "if he loses in 2024, will he run again in 2028? and get elected?"
I presume (and am too lazy to check, plus sometimes it's more fun not to know) that the market is badly named and is meant to only apply to winning this time and exceeding a normal term. Because otherwise, as you say, the odds should be much higher. But also because by a literal reading, this election is for POTUS for Jan 2025-Jan 2029, which last I checked goes beyond 2028.
Good point on the actual term timeline! I'd bet a lot of people would be claiming a win even if Trump was peacefully on his way out of office Jan 6 2029.
I had read the odds of 2029 Trump in power as pretty reasonable, given that he is getting fairly old, and probably won't be up for running for election again if he loses this time. There is also a pretty solid chance that if he loses this election he gets jailed for something or other if he remains any credible threat to the administration's power. So less than 1% seemed pretty reasonable to me.
Also, it is not straightforward to translate bets into actual probabilities. I came across this article a couple weeks back, when the odds started doing weird things
but tl;dr there is a region where probabilities/bets are linear, but when extreme things happen you should actually expect the prices to not reflect probabilities
Another major problem is that Musk and similar folks have been promoting these betting markets, which means conservatives are over-represented in them. In theory, you'd think that this would result in these people being taken advantage of, but I think in practice there's not enough people who are willing to bet in these markets (at least not in large quantities) to withstand this sort of systemic monetary bias in messing up the odds. Even if it is, in theory, easy money, in practice, I am not even willing to bet on these markets even if I am certain I will win. I think there's a lot of folks like me, which further limits liquidity if you end up with hive mind style situations. I'm more willing to participate when only fake money is on the line, as I don't actually like RL gambling at all.
There's also just the general fact that the moment people started trying to use these markets to predict the future, it was obvious that it could be used for various manipulative purposes and as such, were going to stop being useful for these purposes. Once the mainstream media started regularly posting about this stuff and Elon Musk started trumpeting about it on Twitter, it was obvious to me that we were in the territory where it was no longer going to be based on anything coherent and would no longer be reliable (or well, even less reliable than it was before).
Speaking of statistics, Nate Silver recently showed that the polls are herding really badly (to the tune of 1 in 9.8 trillion odds of them being genuine poll numbers and not tweaked ones), so there is a very high level of uncertainty.
A lot of people think this election is going to be close, but it could well not be. Ann Selzer released a poll in Iowa - one of only a handful of polls that happened in that state - showing Harris +3 in Iowa. She was right the last two times.
If she's right again, this probably won't actually be a close election.
A question I haven't seen asked: what's the main mechanism of the poll herding? Publication bias (they do polls which show divergence, then decide not to publish); systematic weighting or sampling issues (their methodology and prior assumptions about likely voters or demographic turnout gives less room for variance); ad hoc weighting tricks (they do polls, but shift the weighting on an ad hoc basis so that polls skew less); or just total bullshitting/making up the numbers?
In brief, he suggests that there's some self-censorship going on (a file drawer effect of not publishing outliers), but the more fine-tuned way to herd is to selectively apply weighting factors, particularly with respect to turnout models. For example, Silver writes:
> [Nate] Cohn discovered that in 2012, the racial composition of PPP’s polls was correlated in an unusual way with President Obama’s performance among white voters in their surveys. If Obama was performing especially poorly among whites in one PPP poll, it tended to have a higher share of nonwhite voters, which boosted Obama’s result. And if Obama was doing relatively well among whites, PPP projected less nonwhite turnout, keeping his lead in check. As a result, PPP’s polls tended to show an unusually steady race between Obama and Mitt Romney.
Polling firms don't always disclose their weighted or unweighted results in enough detail to show how the sausage is made, however. It's still sadly common practice to report a post-processed (weighted and likely-voter-modelled) 'topline' with some basic demographic crosstabs, whereas weighting itself can go two or three levels deep.
Thanks... What a shitshow. The irony is that if everyone just collected a bunch of raw data and published it, aggregators would surely get far more accurate estimates by applying a standardised weighting scheme.
Unfortunately, there's a conflict of economic incentives here. There's a difference between a poll and a prediction, but polling firms that take on private clients are essentially selling prediction services.
Outside of the election period, their bread and butter is companies commissioning surveys into whether their sales will go up if they use the red or blue logo for their new product. They want the answer, and "going with the polling firm that had the best election result" is a reasonable but inaccurate proxy for finding the best polling firm.
There was a period where Musk was gleefully posting about the surge in Trump's numbers on Polymarket, and kept making the hilarious joke about how it would be epic if Trump got to 69.420%. I'm sincerely curious why this isn't discussed more.
So in any analysis of Polymarket's behavior, it would seem appropriate to fold in that there's a good chunk if people doing meme-stock stuff rather than making rational bets..?
Isn't the overrepresentation of conservatives a potential opportunity for profit? You can buy close Democratic-favored races at a discount. I actually made a little money doing that last time.
Kalshi should bring smarter money to the game eventually but hasn't been live for long enough yet. Should prediction markets remain fully legal for a few more years I expect them to start to have decent predictive power. Until then it's mostly people having fun and betting on their ingroup, even the larger checks.
I don't see trump winning but I would be surprised if Republicans rioted when he loses.
I have a feeling the election will elicit minimal drama. 2020 was an entirely different climate than today and Republican coded people were frothing at the mouth in a way that just isn't happening in 2024.
I believe Republicans are not necessarily scared; they might just be somewhat more apathetic. In 2020 people on the right seemed to feel like caged animals which was thanks to the insane behavior democrat coded people displayed on social media. After Elon's acquisition of twitter people that are republican coded had a space where they could let off steam without being labeled "white supremacist misogynist monster/devil/nazi". This has had a dampening effect on right wing extremism imo.
Interesting. This is the opposite of my own intuition, mostly based on what I've seen on Twitter I think. I don't have much reason to be confident though. Do you have anything concrete to point to that makes you believe this?
Don't agree with Shelby's thesis, but some concrete evidence Republicans are less prepared to riot is that QAnon is gone. The "Trust the Plan" WWG1WGA network which organized Jan 6 on old Twitter doesn't seem to exist now. But that's more because all those accounts were banned before Musk bought the company.
I guess a Stop the Steal plan would happen on TruthSocial this time around.
Yes but I think many had moved on by then. QAnon was dead by then. Many had moved to Truth Social. Instead of QAnon drops they started reading that website that Tucker Carlson writer wrote that "book report" about here.
I endorse this, based upon my social group being largely very far to the Right. There was a sense, in 2020, that all was lost: insane identilingus-performin', pearl-clutchin' wokies had grasped the reins of power and would prosecute Trump & indeed conservatives as a whole, open the borders & let in floods of new Democratic voters, etc. etc., and there was nowhere one could even speak of it. (If you're on the left, you probably have no idea how bad the censorship on e.g. YouTube got—I can remember a couple experiments that seemed real suggestive re: posting the exact same comments and videos but with the perspective switched, and the left-wing versions staying up or even being promoted, the right-wing versions quietly disappearing...)
"What’s the world where Trump wins but there are still election riots?"
I'd guess "riots when the result of the election is long unclear, Trump gets handed the election in the end after months of recounts, court proceedings, and riots"?
That's what Nate Silver's 80,000 simulations came up with:
"At exactly midnight on Tuesday, we ran our simulation model for the final time in this election cycle. Out of 80,000 simulations, Kamala Harris won in 40,012 (50.015%) cases. She did not win in 39,988 simulations (49.985%). Of those, 39,718 were outright wins for Donald Trump and the remainder (270 simulations) were exact 269-269 Electoral College ties: these ties are likely to eventually result in Trump wins in the U.S. House of Representatives."
There's also the chance of riots if he tries to, well, actually follow through on his campaign promises. Like performing an ideological purge of government agencies, or sending in the military to forcefully stop protests.
I'd treat any riots after Jan 20 as something different from an election riot, to me that phrase means a riot over the outcome (whether disputing or being mad about it) not that any policy of his would lead to rioting within the next 4 years (highly likely IMO)
Why are threats or thoughts of "exile" (emigration) put next to threats of suicide?
Are the two felt to be akin in America? Elsewhere, emigration is something that some people do, and considering emigration seriously (landing on your feet takes years of preparation) if politics goes seriously south is doubly normal.
I suppose there are deeply traditional societies where exile is the last step before death penalty, in that it cuts you out from all ties to the gods of the place and from ties of reciprocity. But still, emigration != exile.
What people forget is it's actually hard to emigrate from the US for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Believe it or not most of the world is more anti immigrant than America.
Oh I agree with you and Matthias on that, my comment was simply on his last statement "People who want to emigrate typically just do it." In that THAT is patently false.
Snoop can't even visit Canada except for corruption. Generally Canada as a rule denies even visitors if they have any criminal record and they are renown for their strict adherence to it.
What, you never heard "Going to America is like going into the grave"?
The types who make the florid declarations about emigrating like to present themselves as refugees packing up and fleeing in the night before the Gestapo/secret police/insert bad guys of your choice kick in their front door, and they (present themselves as being) convinced that this time for sure, they (or their neighbours, LGBT+ friends, minorities, etc.) will be rounded up and imprisoned in camps, if not executed out of hand. Just like 2016, where it didn't happen either, but this time for sure! It's on page 4562 of the Project 2025 manifesto that Trump will implement on Day One!
Mostly it's all self-dramatisation, and for those really thinking of it, they are unlikely to be able to emigrate to Canada/Australia/Western Europe, because they're not in a position to get visas as needed workers (some of the examples I've seen online have been of the "I'm neurodivergent disabled queer non-binary and my partner is the same, we have degrees in underwater basket weaving but I/they are unable to work due to our disabilities, where in Europe will take us in?" kind and then they get the dispiriting answers from Europeans that "sorry, my country has rigid standards about economic migrants").
Hence why they need to portray themselves as refugees/asylum seekers, as there's little to no chance of them getting into a different country otherwise.
I think this stance maybe gives too much attention to the terminally online whiners. My partner is an academic and I'm an engineer, we live in the EU now. Getting a job and blue card was trivial (aside from the paperwork itself; disgusting). I certainly never vagueposted threats to leave on the internet, but Trump's first term was a factor when we were picking destination countries, and we're considering extending our stay instead of aiming to return to the US next year which was our original plan. A lot of people in similar boats here have this discussion all the time to the point where it's gotten incredibly tedious at dinners recently, along with weighing pros and cons of where to live.
It's not really a decision that can be distilled into a single issue, but elections and politics *do* make a huge difference. Some people do have the luxury of choice and they tend to be the ones you want to keep around. While it's true that there's a salary cut, when I drilled down into everything (cost of living etc) the real dollar difference isn't that significant and the benefits are significant. For the highly educated young people who don't have families yet, the ability and willingness to uproot and move to a different country is there.
Don't get me wrong, people will always want to go to America. I'm not trying to claim some massive brain drain. Just that there is a slightly increased willingness to consider other places to live, which isn't something I personally would have done ten years ago.
Ah, but you're an engineer. That's a proper job and you can do it. The terminally online ones are the ones threatening to flee the country, and they're also the ones with no marketable skills.
Bingo. Also you are missing the large number of people that simply don't qualify for a work visa but aren't rich (or old) enough to qualify for a retirement visa even though their social security / pension income is more than adequate to support them in that nation.
Or the fact immigration with a criminal record is difficult and given the near majority of Americans have one because the US criminalized everything.
>Still, this serves as a challenge to prediction market fans to figure out what went wrong and whether it will happen again
I doubt it. This is the first election with nearly this much scale, but it was still illiquid enough that one megawhale could bleed alpha and nobody would call him on it. By 2028, if Theo comes back for round 2 Jane Street or somebody will happily be a counterparty. These are just growing pains.
> Thankfully, San Francisco has ranked-choice voting, so voters will be able to freely choose their favorite among this diverse group of candidates.
Yeah, that's not how ranked-choice voting works (although it may be how most voters think ranked-choice voting works thanks to some of the... misleading messaging surrounding it).
Yeah, it's really important for people to understand the story here:
Smart people noticed that there are some really good voting systems that use ranked choice ballots (such as Borda count) and started agitating for 'ranked choice voting'.
The two main parties noticed that these methods would break their duopoly on power, but found a different, very shitty voting method that used ranked ballots BUT ALSO still preserved their duopoly (IRV).
The two parties made a huge bipartisan push to call IRV 'ranked choice voting' and back it as the only officially recognized form of voting reform, implementing it in small areas on a test basis.
Most smart people saw that they were doing 'ranked choice voting' like they wanted, were, fooled, and either went away o r actively supported these 'reforms'.
Thus, public energy for vote reform has been captured by a false flag in IRV, and we need to be aware of that and keep advocating for *real* vote reform, like Borda or Approval voting.
Arrow and his Impossibility Theorem would like a word. No mechanism satisfies extremely basic and inarguable criteria. Which is to say, *every possible mechanism* can produce really weird outcomes. The universe / math is weird. Them's the breaks.
I am officially ambivalent on RCV as a whole, but I would note that the countries with some form of RCV that I can think of off-the-top of my head use something like what you call IRV (which I would simply call preferential voting, i.e. you rank your preferences). Not the Borda count or Approval voting. Probably indicative of something, and it's not that IRV is a "false flag".
Presumably you (conceptually) start flipping coins at some stage in the process. I must admit I fail to grasp how that will improve things (and related theorems apply in such cases anyway afaik).
I don't know of many used in practice (IIRC Iowa caucuses do things via coinflip sometimes?) but a bigger problem is that arrow's theorem only applies to ordinal voting systems (based on ranking) and not to cardinal ones (where you give scores to each candidate).
'Can' and 'does' are importantly different things here.
Yes, it is possible to model a perfectly balanced situation in which Approval voting does not produce a perfect outcome along every possible metric.
But if you look at 1000 real-world Plurality elections and 1000 real-world Approval elections, the Approval elections will be vastly better on average on most of the metrics, and you almost certainly will not see any of the bad corner cases come up for Approval at all.
Arrow's Theorem is academically interesting and illustrates philosophical consideration that it's important to keep in mind. But it doesn't mean that no system is better than any other system in practice - our system is still shit, and there are still much, much, much better ones readily available.
The theorem you actually want is one of the various theorems named for Gibbard, and these theorems apply specifically to systems using rank-ordered ballots, not to systems in general. There are a lot of pop-sci misunderstandings about this.
I'm pretty sure I meant Arrow's theorem, because the relevant framework is ordinal preferences. Arrow's theorem has very broad applicability within that framework. (Yes, there are more specific theorems that apply to narrower circumstances, e.g. Gibbard-Satterthwaite).
Arrow's theorem is about (the impossibility of) preference aggregation from individual ordinal preferences to a social preference ordering. It is very general - definitely not subsumed by GS.
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem says less than it sounds like it does. One problem is the "Non-Dictatorship" assumption, which uses a screwy definition of "dictator" that is very different from what the name describes in common usage. A simple majority vote in a two-candidate race fails Arrow's non-dictatorship assumption because if the election is decided by one vote, then anyone on the winning side could have changed the outcome by switching their vote and thus is a "dictator".
All the proofs of AIT that I've seen rely very heavily on this, basically showing that in multi-candidate races it's possible for the same voter to be the tipping-point voter deciding that A comes in first, B comes in second, and so on.
This isn't a correct characterisation of Arrow's theorem as I was taught it.
First, the theorem applies only to situations with more than 2 options being ranked.
Second, the non-dictatorship condition is that "the social welfare function should not be dictated by the preferences of a single voter. This means that there is no single voter (a "dictator") whose preferences always determine the collective decision, regardless of the preferences of other voters."
Aka, the non-dictatorship condition does not say that there can never under any situation be a pivotal voter. Of course pivotal voters can exist. (Indeed, they must be able to exist). If merely that was the claim, then the other conditions in the theorem wouldn't be needed!
> A simple majority vote in a two-candidate race fails Arrow's non-dictatorship assumption because if the election is decided by one vote, then anyone on the winning side could have changed the outcome by switching their vote and thus is a "dictator".
Where did you get this idea? It's gibberish. The non-dictatorship assumption says that there is no one for whom the outcome of the election is always identical with their vote, regardless of how anyone else may have voted.
You might notice that this is exactly what you'd expect of the term "dictator".
In your example, if voter 23 switches his vote from A to B, B will win. But voter 23 is not a dictator, because if voter 23 switches his vote from A to B while voters 1, 40, and 42 switch their votes from B to A, A will win. The existence of a set of votes in which the winner is not voter 23's favored candidate means that voter 23 is not a dictator.
Yes, I was very confidently wrong here. I got the idea from reading badly-explained outlines of proofs of Arrow, where the non-dictatorship principal seemed to be getting used via the concept of "partial dictator", which was being used to show that the tipping point voter for A over B was inherently a "dictator" for A over C.
On rereading the proof later, I found that one of the later steps I didn't understand was actually showing a contradiction if the tipping point voter wasn't always a dictator for A over B, and that this bridged the gap for that cotter being an actual dictator.
Not very often if there are two major candidates and then a bunch of minor candidates who attract low vote shares. It only gets messy when you have multiple candidates who could conceivably win if they got into the final two (i.e. "three cornered electorates"). Admittedly the design of Alaska's ranked choice method was pretty weird, and they managed to design something that ~ maximizes the chance of these edge cases.
I'd be surprised if EA luminary Scott isn't familiar with the platform of EA dark money front Center for Election Science, which (correctly) advocates for approval voting. But maybe?
They're not anti-inductive like a stock market (at least not until the betting markets have a lot more money in them), but they *do* have a natural equilibrium at 50-50 they tend towards.
Both parties will track their own odds and try to change their policies and marketing to capture more people. If they're both doing this with perfect frictionless efficiency, the system will naturally balance with them both at a 50% chance of winning. Any deviation from 50/50 is evidence of an inefficiency somewhere.
Unfortunately, hearing that the first estimate was “over a million” doesn’t give me a good guess of whether the true answer in the end was in fact over a million or not. If the first estimate was “over three million” I would be fairly confident that the final value was over a million, and if the first estimate was “over a hundred thousand”, then unless there was new damage discovered later I would be pretty confident that the final total was actually over a million.
But a first estimate that pegs it basically at the threshold is one of those really ambiguous pieces of information.
What's going on with Robinhood's events contracts? How are they able to set up a betting market in the US where others are unable to get regulatory approval? Is it simply Robinhood figuring it's better to ask for forgiveness than approval? (Robinhood has Trump at 58%/Harris at 43% as I'm typing this)
Also, the 0.1% odds of Trump gaining power post-2028 conditional on Harris winning seems low. The odds of an 82-year old Trump deciding to run again, winning the Republican nomination, and then winning the general are low, but surely orders of magnitude larger than 0.1%
I still fail to grasp how these markets are supposed to deliver more signal than noise in accurately predicting future events. The claimed reason for their existence is their predictive power, but that looks more and more like a fig leaf covering another vehicle for rando degenerate gamblers to get a fix.
> more like a fig leaf covering another vehicle for rando degenerate gamblers to get a fix
Considering that there are morons betting millions of dollars on a 50-50 election, maybe the current gambling industry isn't enough to remove dumb money from circulation.
edit: But then again, if the gambling industry and the stock market isn't enough to drain the wealth of these people, would prediction markets even help? Where the hell are people finding all of this money?
>Considering that there are morons betting millions of dollars on a 50-50 election, maybe the current gambling industry isn't enough to remove dumb money from circulation.
<mildSnark>
Does this count as a drainage problem? A dumb money swamp? :-)
To me it's no different than a poll. Just one more data point that's fun to consider, but ultimately meaningless.
Polling predictive power is low.
Anecdotal predictive power is low.
Betting market predictive power is low.
A fortune teller's prediction power is low.
Election models prediction power is low.
Our ability to predict the future is absolutely pathetic. Add to that the secrecy and forces deliberately trying to make that prediction difficult and it's not rocket science that the election will favor big money masquerading around as if it favors the poor. Whoever put on the better mask will win. To that end, Trump's McDonald's and Garbage man stunts were absolutely a master class.
QAnon is still around, a quick scroll through /r/qult_headquarters suggests that most of them are coalescing around "Trump and/or the military will cancel the elections due to fraud and unleash the storm."
(Also, apparently Elon Musk has been tweeting Q stuff recently?)
Totally agree. I think he's run a much better campaign this time around. I imagine it helps to not have to run the country and campaign at the same time.
To that end, I think the reason many sitting presidents win reelection is because their record is supposed to be their campaign. With Harris, not too many of us are fond of her record.
* No abortion bill (but it'll happen next time I swear!!! Rofl)
* Bad border policy
* Didn't end Trump tax breaks
* Bad middle east policy
* Bad Ukraine policy
* Humiliating Afghanistan withdrawal
At the end of the day they're both awful, but at least Trump is funny.
But, but, ... Harris compensates for that by supporting censorship of online speech!
( I do view her as the marginally greater evil - but there are _excellent_ reasons to vote against Trump too. We'll see the first round results in a day or so. )
I realized I said "at the end of the day" again and sounded like a total goof so I deleted my last reply.
I agree, there's great reasons to vote against either of them. I'd love to see the candidacy problem improve over time, but we're definitely trending in the wrong direction
I don't find the arguments against betting markets' well-calibratedness in this election very convincing. Typical "limits to arbitrage" arguments (liquidity constraints on parties who might take the other side, potential costs of short-term mark-to-market losses) don't apply well to a high-profile market that will most likely resolve a day or two from now. A few weeks ago it was plausible to make the argument that bettors were waiting to see what the whale would do but as of this writing it's a day before the election and Polymarket is still showing Trump at 61.1%.
Glad to see you're changing your minds about prediction markets. I would add that while, as I've argued before, conditional prediction markets will be biased towards the wealthy ( https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/conditional-prediction-markets-will ) that doesn't mean prediction markets for non-societal things (such as supernovae) aren't still useful.
As for voting systems, I don't think you should be too happy with San Fransisco's ranked choice voting since it often creates "center squeeze". I think that instead we should transition to a non-deterministic voting system: https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9040107
It's not *just* sortition, there's a whole host of non-deterministic voting systems.
Nitpick: deterministic *voting systems* don't have randomness, deterministic *elections* have them. Since the randomness comes from logistical errors, not from the system itself. Non-deterministic elections will also have random logistical errors, but on top of that the voting systems also uses randomness deliberately as a mechanistic feature. This makes it so that non-deterministic voting systems give us stronger reasons to vote in elections: https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/reasons-to-vote-in-non-deterministic
Well, I've argued for sortition before, but not because I think it's a good system. The advantage is that it disrupts centers of power. Actually, I think the current system would, on the average, pick better candidates, abysmal as they are. For sortition to be a good choice, though, you'd need to eliminate the "single executive" and replace it with an executive council. Probably of 3 people, and certainly either 3 or 5. More and it takes too long to reach a decision, even and you're likely to get persistent deadlocks. And with 1, a single bad pick yields an abominable outcome. (And giving that it's sortition, you need to expect an occasional really bad pick.)
While sortition is the procedure people think of when they hear "non-deterministic systems", there are a myriad of other ones too, which have their own advantages: https://substack.com/home/post/p-149343554 . For a procedure to be non-deterministic it doesn't need to have a random mechanism every step of the way, just one is enough. Which means we can design procedures that combine a lot of the advantages of deterministic and non-deterministic systems.
Somewhat agreed. I'm a bit skeptical that any of the conventional choices of voting systems for candidates can do all that well, given that it starts from a set of candidates who _want_ the job, which inherently selects for power-hungry people...
>What’s the world where Trump wins but there are still election riots? The Democrats riot?
(Edited to)
>This market is priced higher than Manifold’s chance that Trump loses, suggesting a ~5% chance that the *Democrats* riot (or that Republicans win but riot anyway).
I'd suspect that this isn't as strongly correlated with Trump loss as you're assuming it is. I personally know someone who thinks the prospect of a second Trump term is so bad that open revolt is the correct response, and I'm a (lapsed) member of some internet circles who think they'll literally be executed if Trump takes power (and thus cannot be deterred from violence).
EDIT: Regarding "Republicans win but riot anyway", I imagine that if Trump wins the election but is assassinated before taking office some Republicans would likely riot.
Also, if Trump wins, but only after three days of counting showing a democratic lead, there could be pro-Trump riots during the period when it looks like Harris might win.
I wonder if stock markets in the early days had these same problems of not reflecting reality, and single individuals swaying the market. Maybe we can draw lessons about how this got sorted out.
I made close to that with 100 shares of NVidia bought in 2021 for about $22,000, now worth about $140,000. That doesn't mean I'll do as well in the next five years.
Stock markets NOW have these same problems. Short-term speculators can move markets, and so can long-term investors, and no one knows exactly how much companies will end up making, though everyone makes guesses.
I know it's not actually a fiction, but this was a good Scott-in-fiction-voice, which I've missed. One can only reread the extant corpus so many times. "Truth forever on the scaffold..."
Gonna be annoyed if Breed loses, it's been a pleasantly positive few years of moderate normalcy. National federal stuff is a Big Deal(tm), but it's local elections that'll have the most immediate impact on my life after <s>tomorrow</s> today...very much a You Don't Change Horses In The Middle Of A Stream feeling for me. I remember what it was like during the worst of The Troubles during/post-covid here. Curfew for our safety, boarded up businesses, riots, crime and disorder and filth and woe around every corner and under every rock...it's still Not Great, Bob, but stuff's gotten better. A little less homelessness, more cops, fewer public disorders, more housing. Less of a ghost town downtown. Been a couple years now since I saw human excrement on public transit, which was definitely A Thing one had to be vigilant about for awhile. Maybe it's all just reversion to mean - but given some of the other nuts contending who I'm sure will turn that trendline back around, I am not one to complain. Lot of value in steady marginal improvements! Mayor isn't even where most of the local govt power resides here, anyway, versus the Board of Supervisors...so electing some maverick trust fund baby to "throw the bums out" is largely a Reversed Stupidity signalling game. Not surprising for SF, just disappointing.
I don't know enough about Breed to properly evaluate her, but my impression was that she was a conventional SF Democrat (so an amount of corruption/incompetence baked in, sorry guys). However, I also remember a few years back the very lefty types fulminating against her for being 'the wrong sort of Black' i.e. insufficiently far-left to give in on every single demand about every progressive issue under the sun.
If she has managed to clean up SF even a little, and is aggravating the Popular Left Front of the People's Autonomous Democratic Socialist Communist Republic of Wokistan types, then I have to revise my opinion of her upwards.
However, my opinion of the Board of Supervisors remains unchanged over the years since I first became aware of them: these *are* the People's Popular Front types and they're nuts.
I love the apocalyptic tone this starts off with. I sort of wish we had something similar for our own upcoming election, but it really is "Tweedledum or Tweedledee?" and we did have our own Civil War over politics back in 1922, plus all the years of The Troubles, so "it's dull boring business as usual" is probably the best to hope for.
Random remarks:
(a) Americans and fuel prices. I know Americans are hugely dependent on cars, that the mileages involved are vastly greater than in my own country, and 'no car, no job' is a genuine thing. Also you run your homes on cheap heating and air conditioning and big appliances, so you need cheap heating oil and cheap(er) electricity. But I always laugh about the "oh my gosh, will gasoline prices come down to $4 per gallon?" stuff I see.
$4 per gallon works out to something like €3.67 per litre.
EDIT: Pardon my dyscalculic backside, that would be €3.67 per 3.785 litres, which is €1.71 per litre, or $1.86 per litre as below on current exchange rates.
Looking up online prices right now, I'm told that the price of petrol in Ireland in October went down to $1.86 per litre. That would come out to $7.04 per gallon, and that's a price *reduction*, remember. Looking up online again, the current average price of gasoline in the USA is $3.10 per gallon. Oh, the poor suffering Americans with petrol that costs half what it does here!
(b) Prediction markets. I'm not gonna say "I told you so", but yeah. The big hope was for real money to come in, so that these markets could finally have teeth and then the glorious dawn of rational decision-making on policy via the wisdom of crowds and the impeccable rightness of the market would burst upon the world. And then real money did come in, and oh gee would you look at that, it turns out that gambling to make a profit isn't that glorious dawn after all.
Maybe prediction markets will work as hoped in the most optimistic scenario, but you're going to have to root out a lot of the shadier aspects of human nature to make that happen.
Best wishes and may the candidate of your choice (as to least worst) win, be that Mx 49% or Mx 51%! And as the saying goes over here, "Go mbeirimid beo ar an am seo arís (may we all be alive this time next year)".
I think the prediction markets are a supplement to polls (where people lie) and academia (which is heavily biased to one side). I don't think they're a glorious dawn of rational decision-making. Just like most of us read multiple news sources nowadays, you look at the prediction markets, the polls, and any commentators you like (or don't).
I honestly don't understand how the price of gasoline (petrol?) can be that different around the world. Is this not an arbitrage opportunity like in prediction markets? Sure, shipping would raise the price somewhat, but more than double seems like mispricing.
Then again, maybe the monthly spend is how it all evens out. I currently spend about $120-150 a month on gasoline in Michigan, which is 3-4 tanks of gas.
That's true, but I think it can't explain that much difference. Michigan has about $.48 per gallon, which is about one sixth of the current price. Even if taxes in Ireland were $2 per gallon, I would think that would be a price difference of over $4 per gallon, which should be equalized somehow.
Unless the tax was something like $4 per gallon already ($1 per liter).
Yeah. European gas taxes are (from an American perspective) absolutely bonkers.
For the record, there's also ~$0.20/gallon federal tax (much more on diesel), so taxes in the us range from ~$1.00 (California) down to ~$0.40, plus (highly variable) local taxes. Where I went to grad school, there were two stations, one officially in town and the other, across the street, only in the county. The in-town one had ~$0.15 higher prices because there was a huge city-level gas tax.
Did I eff up the division? Correct me if so, I'm still counting on my fingers to do addition (no joking there, it's no fun not being Numbers person when all the little figures spin around and reverse and I can't grasp them at all with any cerebral tentacle).
3.67€ / 3.785L = 0.97 €/L. That might have been a copy/paste error? Because you continue to use the incorrect 1.71€ = $1.86 as the online price for gas in Ireland next which would be quite the coincidence if you got the division wrong in that exact way:
> or $1.86 per litre as below on current exchange rates.
>Looking up online prices right now, I'm told that the price of petrol in Ireland in October went down to $1.86 per litre.
But the gist of your comment is of course correct - Americans pay far less for gas than Europeans and always have, which they promptly compensate for with pedestrian-killing, real-estate-stealing gas guzzlers.
I don't know if that's a good time or a bad time for the run, but it does indicate where Trump should appoint Musk - Online Czar! There are Czars for everything, there surely should be one for the Internet especially with our new forthcoming AI overlords 😁
Honestly I've never watched it. I heard the song on a podcast and thought the lyrics were hilarious. I only listen to most YouTube stuff while I'm reading other stuff.
I have bet a bottle of decent red wine that Trump wins, against a friend betting a bottle that Kamala wins. On the agreed condition that we share the bottle at a good restaurant after the event. On behalf of most, perhaps all, Europeans I encourage Trump and Harris voters to make similar bets in the few hours remaining, and to share the bottle afterwards.
Since the rest of the world needs a united US. For world stability’s sake we need a unipolar world with the US as top dog, and we cannot get that unless you guys over there find a way to bond, despite your differences. Be it over a bottle of red wine, or something else.
> What’s the world where Trump wins but there are still election riots?
Well, how about a world where the last time Trump won 1) there were riots, 2) none of the persons arrested for rioting were convicted, and then 3) the city of Washington eventually paid the arrestees a $1.6 million settlement?
Does that sound like the sort of world where it's reasonable to believe a Trump victory will result in riots?
Re #3, your link says that police "detained them without access to food, water, or restrooms for up to 16 hours." Do you not believe that police should be held responsible for illegal actions? Note also that some of the plaintiffs, such as journalists, were probably wrongly arrested. Finally, note also that $1,600,000 is a rather small settlement, esp divided among numerous plaintiffs.
The other was filed by a local attorney, but I can't find information about it yet. But it does seem that your assumption that most of the people who acted violently ended up getting paid.
I know very little about markets, but the Polymarket presidential election market has now about $2B in it. The French trader guy allegedly invested tens of millions (the largest number, which is somewhat speculative, is $75M, but that's split between multiple markets), so maybe 2-3% of total market volume. Can that really cause a 15% swing in the prediction?
And there was a swing in Nate Silver‘s model as well. It‘s just that the markets‘ swing was bigger. They probably thought the Harris effect is over, Trump has momentum now, which is what I would have thought. (Or does Silver‘s model include a momentum component itself?)
I agree with this view. It is extremely unlikely that one person holding 2-3% of the market in a liquid market could swing the price by this amount. Conversely, if you think it does, then you should have very little belief in stock markets, because an individual agent holding 2-3% of a company's shares is completely banal.
I think that betting on election outcomes is something that should not be banned. To me there is no better proxy for confidence than a wager. It's an incredible data point in my opinion. Enough wealthy people feel like X is the winning candidate that they're willing to risk their own money on that outcome.
Where I think legislation could potentially help: disclosure. The information, "how many people are betting, how much are they betting, and from what country does their account originate?" is very important when considering the data point.
The other thing I love about it is that it's incredibly democratized. If you truly believe that the odds are wrong, you stand to make a fortune and should absolutely do so.
What has been telling about the market is that while a lot of people claim Harris is going to win in a landslide, much fewer have been willing to "put your money where your mouth is".
"Whether or not you agree with Trump that those deals are extortionary and unfair, it makes sense that Iran is more likely to go nuclear if those deals are discontinued."
Compare: "Whether or not you agree with Churchill that giving Germany the Sudetenland is extortionary and unfair, it makes sense Germany is more likely to go to war if the deal is not made."
Or if you prefer: "Well, if you give the bully your lunch money today, rather than stand up to him; it makes sense he's less likely to take your lunch money tomorrow."
Yes, and they saw that as a threat and attacked Pearl Harbor.
Do you not see a parallel in Iran? If all we talk about is regime change, they're going to do everything possible to develop a nuclear shield. North Korea did the same thing.
As a threat to their war efforts. There's definitely a parallel, but you're reversing cause and effect in both cases.
Japanese expansion was a matter of opportunism and aggression, as is Iran's. If you decide to put yourself in the way of that to defend yourself and others, it's the same as putting yourself in front of any bully. You'll probably get punched.
But be mindful that stepping aside doesn't reform the bully, you're just letting them go ahead.
This isn't hypothetical. Just look at the difference in the Middle East between more sanctions on Iran (under Trump) and not enforcing those sanctions (under Biden).
I thought the Iran nuclear deal collapsed in 2017 and has not been replaced, as of this week the Iranians have said that the only thing holding them back from nuclear weapons is the supreme leader’s fatwa.
I think Iran are actively developing nuclear weapons. Intelligence leaks confirm this was definitely true in the past. Recently it was widely observed that Iran's disclosed enrichment levels make no sense otherwise.
There is no such fatwa. That was just something Iran said to credulous Westerners.
If I was Iranian, I would support nuclear armament immediately. I would demand it. After seeing what happened to Iraq and Libya, I would consider nuclear weapons vital for the security of my nation. And I wouldn't be wrong.
Some more clarification on the Kalshi ruling. The history of this is the CFTC decided to ban them, Kalshi challenged the ban in court and won, and the CFTC is appealing the decision.
That appeal is going ahead regardless, so the ultimate fate of Kalshi and real-money prediction markets in the US remains unclear. What this smaller question was about was whether Kalshi could offer election markets in the meantime while the appeal is pending.
By default, as Kalshi won the lower court case, they should be allowed to offer those markets. But there are particular circumstances where courts can "stay" rulings and prevent them going into effect. Most relevantly, this can happen if the losing party would suffer irreparable harm.
As an example, imagine someone wants to euthanize his pet dog, and his ex-wife is suing for custody of the dog so he can't kill it. The lower court rules in favour of the dog-killer and says he's clear to put down Fido. The ex-wife appeals this ruling. In this scenario she might be able to secure a stay, putting the original judgement on hold until the appeal goes through. That's because if the decision isn't stayed the ex-husband can just go ahead and kill the dog, effectively denying her right to appeal - she might win, but she can't bring the pet back to life. That's irreparable harm.
What this ruling was about was really nothing about the merits of the case for or against Kalshi - that will be litigated in the appeal. It was just finding that there's no irreparable harm that would result from allowing the lower court judgement in Kalshi's favour to go into effect while we're waiting for the appeal to play out.
I'm usually the one reassuring everyone around me. But this time I think there are valid reasons to be worried that this is not the case. Four more years of open borders plus the promised citizenship amnesty would plausibly mean a one party country (what people are calling the Californisation of the US).
When a Soviet ambassador was criticised for USSR being a one-party state in the good-old "ideology is dead" days of the 1960s/70s, he replied: "What of it? After all, USA is also a one-party state. Although the US, with typical US extragavanza, maintains two of them".
No they did not. The dominant party lost their majority, but not their plurality. The government of South Africa is led by the ANC, and the government of Japan will include the LDP (it is mathematically impossible to form a majority without them).
I don't believe, like Musk and Rogan have been suggesting is possible, that a Harris victory will surely create a one-party system. However, I do worry that (conditional on the Californisation conspiracy being true), that it would significantly intensify the tribalism/identity-group-patronage politics we are seeing more of these days in the US. Democrats, to keep the coalition they build, will need to continue to give increasing favors to their favored groups -- and in a zero sum world, that means to the exclusion of the disfavored groups. That could have all sorts of nasty long-term effects to our politics. Of course I'm not confident about the second/third order effects of a Trump presidency either.
Normally what has happened is that when one party collapses, the remaining party collapses in feuds and splits in two. I've got a vague feeling that once a third party replaced the collapsed one, but I can't remember any details.
OTOH, plurality wins voting systems can't really host more than two dominant parties.
>it would significantly intensify the tribalism/identity-group-patronage politics we are seeing more of these days in the US. Democrats, to keep the coalition they build, will need to continue to give increasing favors to their favored groups -- and in a zero sum world, that means to the exclusion of the disfavored groups. That could have all sorts of nasty long-term effects to our politics.
In keeping with the legal terminology of "protected" groups, and extending the reuse of chemical terminology that led to contrasting transpeople with cispeople, should the disfavored groups be called "deprotected"?
Immigrants are not automatic Democrats for life (although I imagine if one party is running on "we hate you, we want to revoke your citizenship and deport you," that certainly tips the odds).
I'm not advocating open borders, but if it happened, the parties would adapt their platforms, immigrants would gradually shift to more nativist positions as they get settled, and in 4 or 8 years the parties would be back to a 50-50 win chance.
But immigrant registrations are in completely different proportions to non-immigrant in California. Immigrants have not shifted to nativist positions in general. And I wouldn't expect them to. People bring their own backgrounds and experience to inform their voting.
I don’t understand what you are imagining. Are you imagining a world where citizenship processes are sped up so that people can go from immigrant to citizen in under four years, rather than the ten or so now? On *top* of a massive speed up in immigration, and a greater tilt of immigrants towards one party?
This has been the policy the user @fentasyl (aka datahazard) is good at catching up with this -- he just graphs official government statistics; and leaks today suggest they will try and accelerate it in the next two months. Hasn't this admin flown 5% of the population of Haiti into the US already? And border enforcement whistle blowers aplenty saying their job has been to welcome people into the US. The current scandal is that the whitehouse was coordinating with a bunch of NGOs in order to facilitate illegal border crossings.
"where citizenship processes are sped up so that people can go from immigrant to citizen in under four years"
Leading democrats (Shumer, Harris, Pelosi) have been saying that amnesties and fast-tracking naturalisation are policies they want to pursue. This admin's actions agree with this, with (iirc) fast-tracking of naturalisation, and actual attempts at amnesties that have been struck down by the courts.
"and a greater tilt of immigrants towards one party"
If you're illegally in the US, and have no right to be here, you are at the mercy of your political sponsors, no? Inanycase this seems to be the assumption of the whitehouse -- fentasyl had a bunch of graphs showing that illegal immigrants where being disproportionally settled in Republican areas -- this could be about avoid Democrat areas since they don't want to lose votes, but could also be about hoping these Republican areas turn blue.
Philly voter here. I don't follow news and am pretty undecided still. Heading to the polls during lunch. Obviously both major party candidates are disturbing authoritarians who appear to be united in their support for e.g. police immunity for misconduct, which seems most adjacent to the actual authoritarian history I am aware of (in Taiwan). Due to religious commitments to live simply to support those in need, I am unlikely to vote for the candidate with a golden toilet. But I don't know if I should vote third party. There is still enough democracy in America that I want "major party candidates will get my vote if and only if they either support good AI safety policy or oppose qualified immunity" to be a true way for a craven politician to gain advantage for themselves.
I am open to comments that might weigh substantially in the balance. I decline to be persuaded to cowardice -- pitches should be made that a candidate is the best on the ballot, not that I should choose a lesser candidate for fear of what may come.
To clarify: the campaign was designed by professionals, who determined that statements on the issues I care about would cost them more votes than it would earn them. It is not coincidence, and if anything I should read the silence as antipathy. "Does not want my vote enough to speak their conscience" is the best case, but the default is closer to "opposition to change is so well known to be their default course that no public statement has any upside".
>You are the last undecided voter in the state of Pennsylvania. Everyone else has made up their mind but you. One of your friends is subsisting off unemployment checks right now - does that make you a little more sympathetic to the social safety net? But your tax bill last year was scandalous - does that mean there should be smaller government? For days, reporters have knocked on your door, stopped your car, grabbed you on your way to work. “How will you vote, last undecided voter in Pennsylvania?” they ask, and you do not know. Nineteen years ago, in middle school, a bully with a Confederate flag t-shirt harassed you. Three months ago, on Twitter, a social justice warrior called your sister a “Karen”. Have you updated on these events? How much should they guide you? When you were twenty-three, two thugs cornered you in the park and took your money. When you were only nine, you watched a documentary about global warming and spent the whole night crying about the polar bears. Does it all add up? Do you know, deep inside, which is the right decision? You walk into the voting booth. You open your ballot. Two roads; two paths before you. It is Election Day 2020, and everything that has happened in your life has brought you to this moment.
I mean, he certainly didn't overstate how annoying it is. I thought the barrage of ads was annoying but these last few days it's been spam phone calls and texts, extreme persistence, and 100% of this behavior that might reasonably be termed harassment is from precisely one political party. I am striving to avoid that behavior influencing me, but I'll admit if I was left alone, or had fewer people criticize my history of sometimes voting third party, I would have been able to sleepwalk through this and vote for the candidate where I happen to know someone who used to work at GiveWell and left to join their campaign staff.
This is the easy case: both candidates have been in administration (Harris has repeatedly said she wouldn't do anything different from Biden) -- so just pick which four years you think went better. (Well, correcting for covid.)
You think Harris somehow prevented a global pandemic? Or you don't think it affected you?
"I apologize that my comment about golden toilets was too obscure."
Ah. For what it's worth, as far as I know, Donald Trump doesn't have a gold toilet (iirc that was fake news). But either way making your voting decisions on the basis of how someone's bathroom is decorated, is irresponsible so I hope you don't do that.
"Due to religious commitments to live simply to support those in need, I am unlikely to vote for the candidate with a golden toilet."
Maybe it's more relevant to check poverty statistics during each administration to see which vote is most likely to support people? I haven't done this so I don't know what you'd find. But given your stated priorities it seems like a good way to go.
In January 2020 I was in Taiwan. They avoided the pandemic with good policy. America has the best public health infrastructure in the world. The reason there were lockdowns was the result of bad policy and incompetent administration. I understand this is controversial in America, but I figured I'd speak plainly. I have no reason to suspect a *huge* gap between Biden and Trump in this regard, but I also don't "adjust for" it, in the sense of disregarding it.
And yes, I believe if you wish to be a servant to the people, you should care about them enough that you do not accumulate billions while your brothers and sisters, made in the image of God, perish in the cold. Side note: The fake news bit is that the toilet isn't *solid* gold, it's merely gilded.
I think that Harris would have tried. Telephone Xi and say, with suitably diplomatic phrasing, “Bad news tends to flow to the top slowly in an authoritarian regime like yours. But the reality it isn’t in either of our interests for this virus to turn into a global pandemic. You need to get a handle on this before that happens, and we will be happy to send you the CDC’s best virologists to help you out.”
It’s likely that COVID-19 was too transmissible to be contained in China no matter what Trump did. (The successes under Obama were with much less easily transmitted diseases.) But the reason that it matters who is President is that while some events are out of the President’s control, in other cases what the President can change the outcome. A President who is OK with a million Americans dying in a pandemic might make a similar choice in a situation where avoiding a million American deaths was more easily achievable.
> We reject these, and - in a country with a hundred living Nobel laureates - near-invariably pick a pair of mediocrities, extremists, or lunatics.
If you set up a system so that no competent individual can get anything done without compromising their integrity, this is exactly the outcome you should expect.
You’d have to either be evil, insane, or else willing to take massive personal sacrifice and endure hatred of all the institutions in order for a small chance of changing this state of affairs.
“All of these involve foreign policy going worse under Trump than Harris. Is this unfair?”
I actually think the worst case scenario is China invades Taiwan and the US responds militarily. That sounds like it will almost certainly start WWIII and I and many Americans would rather we don’t start WWIII over Taiwan. We’d be better off doing what we do with Ukraine, and help with intelligence and supplies.
I went ahead and ran conditional probability to see which candidate is more likely to get us in this worse case scenario. I got 13.5% for Trump and 12.75% for Harris. That’s actually extremely similar and I find both numbers uncomfortably high.
"That sounds like it will almost certainly start WWIII and I and many Americans would rather we don’t start WWIII over Taiwan"
Compare: "Britain started WW2 by declaring war on Germany over Poland".
I think if China is willing to open up WW3 over Taiwan, then WW3 with the Russia-NK-Iran-China axis is just a matter of time; and the more ground surrendered without a fight is more advantage given to that axis when there is a fight, as well as inviting our descendants to be ashamed of our terrible decisions (like we look upon pre-WW2 western leaders today).
I think if you're worried about this, then voting for the candidate more likely to place sanctions on China right now is a good start.
You seem to read "the US responds militarily" as "the US attacks China". I think the first is quite likely, and the second implausible. I expect that the US would ensure that TMSC was destroyed, and that certain people were evacuated. That's likely to involve a military response, even with the advance preparation that's already in place.
I checked the resolution criteria and this is what it listed. “The United States will be considered to have responded with military forces if there is an offensive physical attack on Chinese infrastructure, ships, military personnel, or civilians, in direct retaliation to the full-scale invasion, and this attack is ordered by a member of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff or the President. Cyberattacks will not be considered offensive physical attacks, but covert operations to e.g. assassinate Chinese nationals, will count”
Destroying TMSC and evacuations should not count on that definition, unless we destroy TMSC after China occupies it. I would consider what is described in the evaluation criteria as a bad outcome.
> Destroying TMSC and evacuations should not count on that definition, unless we destroy TMSC after China occupies it.
TSMC (and a number of other businesses / factories) have active explosives and plans to blow them up in all their fabs / factories in the case of Chinese invasion.
I was not aware of that (though, given how fragile a semiconductor fab is, I had assumed that any significant fight would wreck it anyway). Many Thanks!
Theo didn't manipulate anything--he's a whale doing whale things. The markets DID correct, it just took longer than it would have done on the NYSE. This is exactly as we should expect for a nascent market with smallish liquidity; no institutionalized research, market makers or trading desks; and significant barriers to entry (crypto-only; non-U.S.; excluded from most fund objectives). I think the lesson here is get that dry powder into your Polymarket account and be ready to strike whenever a Theo places a bet. Unlike on Wall Street, retail has a real opportunity to play the arb game on prediction markets--for now at least.
Neither side supports freedom. Both sides support fascism, in the sense of Mussolini. Nobody (well, nobody with any power) on the face of this planet supports communism as defined by Marx.
The major difference is that the Democrats support a social safety net, and the Republicans oppose one.
>“Polymarket said there was a 66% chance he would win, but he lost, so it must have been rigged!”
You'd think that, when Trump won at ~33% odds from Nate Silver, people would know better than to say stuff like this, but here we are. How soon we forget.
(If elected, I promise I will make XCOM part of our school curriculum so that every student learns how often you miss a 66% shot.)
All the XCOM games (and tactics games generally) play very fast and loose with probability. Basically, they're always cheating in one way or another. What they display is only relatively correct (you hit higher probability shots more than lower probability ones), but not absolutely correct or even consistent.
It varies by the game. The EU/EW RNG is honest on Classic difficulty or above, as far as I know. XCOM2 is not (which is a large part of why I never got into it -- the other part being that it took my least-favorite mission type and made it the centerpiece of the game).
I wonder if there's a fan database somewhere of "which game RNGs are honest and how the dishonest ones cheat".
It does. I thought on Veteran it was fair except for a few bonuses when you're losing, but I misremembered, apparently - it also gives you a flat multiplier to your accuracy. Here's the full breakdown:
Quoting Kipling? Yeah, that's the other reason you're popular with conservative intellectuals. You may be a technophilic liberaltarian, but you have an appreciation of the Great Western Tradition, and they pick up on that.
I was thinking of making this comment in a “mock outraged” tone, but, upon reflection, it’s actually worth being earnest about it.
What would a conservative intellectual (in your model) consider as the Great Western Tradition worth appreciating?
I’m asking because I wonder how much overlap there is with what my own (Western European) country would call the Great Western Tradition.
Having two Great Western Traditions with little overlap would be quite peculiar. Yet Chesterton or Kipling seem to be fairly obscure figures there, even to the literate.
Its a bit hard, actually, because there are so many to choose from! But here's my best shot off the top of my head: St. Augustine, Locke, Aristotle, Malory, Goethe, Aquinas (though honestly, who can really read the whole "Summa"?), Ovid, Virgil, Homer, Herodotus, the Gospels, Coleridge, Byron, Blake, Melville, and Pascal.
I'm sure I'm missing quite a lot of authors. Personally I'd argue for C. S. Lewis, Chesterton, and Tolkien but I don't think most conservative intellectuals would consider them part of the Western Canon.
I see, thank you. The Western Canon is indeed pretty big, but I was curious what would come to your mind under that name (and especially what the overlap would be with what would be called “Western Canon” in my country).
I agree with most of the Classics (except Boethius and maybe Epictetus but only on the principle that “there may be other names worth mentioning”).
Dante, Sheakspeare, the Russians, Goethe, Milton: no objection there.
Aequinas: probably, yes. There are few better people representing the Medieval period.
But then – then it becomes the list of great English writers (and Pascal, I guess). They’re fine representatives of the Western Canon, certainly – but their over-representation makes the “Western” claim ring a bit hollow.
(Honestly, I’m not sure what fraction of the Western population could write a remotely fair list without an encyclopedia. Let alone if we don’t tell them we’re looking for some kind of balance… how far we have fallen, that “the West” will only denote the Romans and the Greeks, and our language. Zweig would know better, and I suspect his contemporaries as well.)
Here are a few more ideas for the list (ordered mostly by nationality because it’s easier – so weak is the “Western” glue that attaches us): Hobbes, Hume, Smith, Cervantes, Boccace, Petrarques, Erasmus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Lessing, Hegel, Corneille, Rousseau, Dumas, Hugo.
I definitely have an English language bias, but what can I say: it's the only language I know! I would not disagree with any of your additions to the list (except maybe for Hegel, but I suppose he is too influential to avoid including). Out of your additions I am not familiar at all with Lessing or Corneille. So that's a bit of data for you on differences in perspective.
Kipling has a lot going for him. Read some of his poetry, read it aloud. I'm very far from the "right" side, but I've got a lot of appreciation for him. If nothing else, read "Boots". (That's a simple one, though not my favorite.) https://allpoetry.com/poem/8445289-Boots-by-Rudyard-Kipling
<quote> This market is priced higher than Manifold’s chance that Trump loses, suggesting a ~5% chance that the Democrats riot (or that Republicans win but riot anyway).</quote>
Is it 100% conditional on a Trump loss? Otherwise this isn't correct is it?
The argument I've heard, and that makes sense to me, about Taiwan being more likely to be invaded under Trump is that he's more likely to end up with a large war in the middle east; if US resources like aircraft carriers are deployed in the middle east, that means they're not deployed in Taiwan, and so necessarily Taiwan's defense suffers.
I think you have to consider the argument that the Abraham accords were the impetus for Hamas to start planning to blow things up. The Abraham accords were death to them. The Palestinian cause that they represented was being completely sidelined. There are the economic concepts of leading and lagging indicators, and I am often surprised at how people don’t take this into consideration when they assign events to a cause. It is similar to the theory that 9/11 would never have happened had Gore been elected president.
"the argument that the Abraham accords were the impetus for Hamas to start planning to blow things up"
Hamas has been blowing things up since their inception. If you're referring to triggering a wider conflict, then I don't think it makes sense because they and Hezbollah have been digging those tunnels for long before the Accords, and they only seem to have one purpose (that is, this wider conflict).
I imagine it's more likely to be Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran receiving lots of money; the US pressure to have more crossings for Gazans into the towns near Israel, and for Israel to stop enforcing the Gaza buffer zone; and the general perception that the US would do its best to protect Hamas's position in Gaza; and the US feeding its allies corrupted information (fed to it by the Iran via the Iran Experts Initiative https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/iran-spy-ring-robert-malley-lee-smith ) downplaying the plans of Hamas and exaggerating the strength of Iran and Hezbollah.
I never meant to imply that Hamas has not been causing all kinds of trouble for a long time and that the tunnel network has been built out over decades, I guess. But the set up for October 7 and the intensity of it was clearly meant to set things off in a big way. I find it difficult to believe that the prospect of upsetting closer diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel was not a consideration for them.
"I find it difficult to believe that the prospect of upsetting closer diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel was not a consideration for them."
Totally agree. But to be exact I think it was a "when" consideration over timing of the attack; and not an "if" consideration over whether or not to carry out the attack.
> There are the economic concepts of leading and lagging indicators, and I am often surprised at how people don’t take this into consideration when they assign events to a cause.
They do! Their consideration or lack thereof just has no causal relationship to reality.
Back in the Bush II years, I'd hear conservatives blame his recession on Clinton, on the grounds that a president's economic policies don't show their effects until after the president leaves office. It's not an entirely unreasonable argument! But I never heard it deployed to blame the recession of Bush I on Reagan.
The left wing is no different in that respect. Right or left, lagging effects will be acknowledged only and exactly to the extent that doing so assigns blame to the hated Other Side and credit to the virtuous Our Side.
But the world is different now from how it was eight years ago. Eight years ago, easy money policies and tariffs couldn't provoke inflation but now they could. Eight years ago, the biggest Middle East situation was figuring out how to wind down involvement in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, but there’s some other stuff going on there now.
Yeah. And the proper action is to invest heavily in alternative energy sources, so the Middle East becomes economically irrelevant. We need to stop burning oil anyway. With enough solar/wind/nuclear power it becomes reasonable to synthesize the oil we still end up needing.
After we do that, we can make rational decisions about what to do in the Middle East.
The U.S. is the largest oil producer in the world, producing about a quarter of oil produced. If we use less oil as we use other sources of energy, we could export to places that still need it, and the U.S. would use a smaller percentage of world oil. This would also make the Middle East less relevant.
"easy money policies and tariffs couldn't provoke inflation but now they could."
I'm under the impression that the current spending is unprecedented; hence inflation.
"Eight years ago, the biggest Middle East situation was figuring out how to wind down involvement in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, but there’s some other stuff going on there now."
The biggest ME situation then as now was Iran. But the propaganda from the whitehouse that this wasn't the case was considerable. Best source for this is Ben Rhodes, Obama's top advisor, talking about how they spent his admin lying and covering up the reality of the ME. (I think this is the article, but it's now paywalled from me. Good luck.) https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html
I think the reason people make this argument is that the middle east is much closer to disaster at the moment; whereas before it was only necessary to avoid causing trouble, now it's necessary to take active effort to avoid war. Republican administrations don't have a great history in brokering agreements that lead to peace (compared to, say, the JCPOA, or normalization with Cuba). I'm not optimistic about the prospects of either Harris or Trump to avoid a larger war in the middle east, though.
A reason I find more persuasive, though that I've not heard many people talk about, is that if Trump wins, then Biden will be in an incredibly weak position to act in the lame duck period; that is an opportunity for an invasion of Taiwan, and also an opportunity for a larger Israeli war against Iran, which would make the US less able to respond to an invasion of Taiwan. Conversely, if Harris wins, then she and Biden will be in a relatively strong position to act, since there's not much break in continuity. People always try to get away with stuff in the lame duck period.
Biden is currently a lame duck. I don't see what is special about the period between the election and inauguration. If China would attack under a Harris presidency but not a Trump one, then this would make sense. But if China would attack under a Trump presidency but not a Harris one, then they would have to attack between November and January, and leave Trump with the fallout from it.
My point is more about whether China would be more likely to attack under a Biden lame duck leading to a Trump presidency (since Biden would be relatively more weak) than a Biden lame duck leading to a Harris presidency (since Biden would be relatively less weak). Though I suppose we're about to find out how the Trump version of events goes.
These two months are very special if (and only if) the Biden-Harris admin is actually very extremist (that is, anti-Israel, pro-Iran, pro-China, and so on) and has only been held back by wanting to be re-elected. This two months will be largely forgotten by the electorate so it is a period when they can potential be unleashed from their constraints.
I, personally, expect to see harsh measures taken against Israel in these two months of some form or another as I believe that people in the current admin dislike Israel but have been restricted by the American public's general affinity for Israel.
This is what happened when Obama lost. His administration had UN security council resolution 2334 passed which called for the ethnic cleansing of all Jews in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem; specifically it said that there should be no Jews (irrespective or nationality) living anywhere across the 48 ceasefire lines (including in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem) -- and had no problem with the 20% of Israeli citizens who are not Jewish living there -- or anyone of any other background who may have moved there no matter how recently -- it was a straight call for ethnic cleansing. At the time, the administration claimed that they had nothing to do with it and didn't agree with it but didn't want to veto it; but later it turned out that they drafted it. This was indefensible, but they knew they could get away with it in these two months without hurting future democrat candidates.
Based on this, I'm half expecting some similarish security council resolution, possibly related to Gaza or Lebanon.
If they had come down against Israel, they might have won Michigan. Michigan had a big protest during the primary, with just over 100,000 voters voting "uncommitted". Trump won Michigan in the general election by about 80,000 votes.
Of course, coming down on Israel might have lost voters elsewhere, but we know for sure now that their actions on Israel didn't win them the election.
In any case, I think it's a lot of hubris to think one can influence policy just by saying what you want done or you will withhold your vote. How many of those "undecided" voters stayed home or voted for Trump? AFAIK, no one knows, but I find both improbable.
"before it was only necessary to avoid causing trouble, now it's necessary to take active effort to avoid war"
That's what happens when you remove stabilizing forces from Afghanistan and Iraq and unlock huge amounts of money to Iran who then use it (as everyone knew they would) to fund their proxies in Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon.
"Peace" agreements like the JCPOA caused the current situation.
"and also an opportunity for a larger Israeli war against Iran, which would make the US less able to respond to an invasion of Taiwan."
Iran has been waging a war against Israel for the past year, and has only been able to do that because they know the US will protect them. The US's policy of protecting Iran has emboldened it into firing hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel. This will continue until the moment the US tells Iran that Israel is free to respond however they like -- the US will not hold them back; then I would expect everything to get a lot quieter very quickly. (Based on prior experience of Iran preferring to sacrifice its proxies readily but being very reluctant to brave attacks on Iran proper.)
Also, keep in mind that China-NorthKorea-Russia-Iran are a coordinated axis who are constantly supporting and re-enforcing each other. Weakening Iran, weakens this axis. Also, supporting Israel in the middle east means you can move a lot more forces closer to Taiwan, deterring China, while having the important diplomatic plausible deniability that they're only there to support Israel and US bases across the Middle East.
I don't know if this is right. Lots of surprises this year. But imagining that this administration or the Obama one has contributed to peace in the world or the Middle East... well, if you're holding that opinion I'd be interested how you'd explain all the current wars in the middle east, the violent takeover of Afghanistan (under Biden), the complete disintegration of Syria (under Obama), the war in Ukraine (under Biden), including the mobilization of North Korea, the invasion of Crimea (under Obama), the rise of Islamic State (under Obama), and so on; as well as the complete absence of similar events in the four years when Obama and Biden were not in power?
The value function of betting for a trump victory is inherently tilted by only allowing bets outside of the USA, right? You can debate the effect of Trump's tarrifs on the US economy, although I assume most people here would agree it's negative, but surely there are very few people who think it'll be good for anyone outside of the USA. Betting for a Trump victory seems like a obvious way to hedge against the risk of a Trump victory, so you'd expect his chances to be over represented by a betting market that cannot allow Americans to participate.
In the best of worlds, supporters hope that prediction markets will eventually become as accurate and unexploitable as the stock market. But even in the stock market it's clear that prices can be inaccurate for long periods of time when there is enough betting from inexperienced bettors. Famous examples of this are meme stocks like AMC and GME. More on-point, there is currently a Trump-related meme stock, DJT, that has a market cap of 7B and was greater than 10B as of last week. This is despite the company having a last-quarter revenue of 800K (down YoY) and a net income of -16M. If you look at DJT over the past few months, it's mainly been rising and lowering with the vibes of how well Trump has been doing in the election. Sports-betting has similar problems in popular markets (or so I've heard), where betting odds are least accurate during the Super Bowl.
So even if prediction markets succeed beyond your wildest dreams, they may still be skewed towards the vibes of the user base on especially popular markets.
I don't know what it means for a price to be "inaccurate." The GameStop thing was a short squeeze, one of the well-known ways by which those who bet badly on the market lose, and as I understand it, the "inexperienced bettors" (some bagholders aside) exploited it correctly.
Still can't get over how dumb that tweet is. Even if we accept those percentages as real, that is still a 1 in 3 chance for Harris to win. "I have a 2 in 3 chance to roll 3 or above, so if I roll a 1 or 2 the dice must be loaded"
It took me a while, but I think the explanation is that they've mistaken it for a percentage share of the vote in a poll. If those /were/ reliable polling numbers, it would very much look like Trump was due a landslide victory, and anything else would be very suspect indeed.
On the one hand it's very much not clear from the screenshot what the values represent, but on the other it does look like there's a link which would explain it, if only she'd clicked through.
Honestly, I've seen worse misinterpretations of statistics.
"The mathematicians say there are simple voting systems that could practically ensure the selection of a universally-popular moderate. We reject these, and - in a country with a hundred living Nobel laureates - near-invariably pick a pair of mediocrities, extremists, or lunatics. Once their inherent badness has been magnified by a froth of propaganda, millions end out convinced that one candidate or the other wants to hunt them for sport,. . ."
(1) True, the magnification and demonization is bad. But how would we avoid it? Not by nominating moderates. The magnification and demonization process would be at work in the same way as now--- remember, the problem with it is that it takes reality and warps it, so the end point is not going to be close to the starting point. Mitt Romney's presidential run is an example-- he was terribly moderate, but Obama demonized him anyway. (Did Romney demonize Obama? I don't remember him doing that.)
(2) Do we want moderate nominees? No, I think. We indeed could change the voting rules to get them. I write as a game theory PhD, a student of Eric Maskin, the ranked-choice voting Nobelist. We could do it by having a nonpartisan primary, as some states now do, where the top two votegetters are the nominees even if both are Republicans. Our current system results in the conservative's favorite and the liberal's favorite, instead of the median voter's favorite.
But maybe we *want* more extreme candidates, instead of having two moderates run against each other in the general election. People complain about lack of choice, about the Uniparty, about mediocrity. Having two distinct choices might be better. In a lot of policy situations, going with a strong Yes or a strong No is much better than going with an incoherent compromise. In the Ukraine, for example, taking a strong "Russia, hands off" policy in 2021, or a clear "Russia, you can stay in the Donbass and we'll be happy" would both have been better than "Russia, we're very unhappy but we're not going to threaten you"; there would be no war with either of the first two policies. I like the fact that the people with strong principles in each party force a choice on the wishy washy middle, and give us a real choice.
The ultimate in the opposite was when back 80 years ago Earl Warren won both the Republican (his party) and the Democratic nominations for Governor of California, because he was so centrist.
On the Ukraine and Harris/Trump: Do keep in mind the win/win possibility. Currently, Russia occupies a big chunk of Ukraine, and there's a bloody war going on. That's been true for three years, and if Harris wins, is there any reason to think it will change? If Trump wins, he says he'll make peace, and I believe him. What he doesn't say is that his peace will result in Russia occupying a big chunk of the Ukraine, though a bit smaller than the current chunk since he's a good bargainer, just with no bloody war any more. That, however, is a win/win as far as the Ukraine and Russia go. Thus, it is possible for both Ukraine and Russia to be hoping that Trump wins.
Speaking from a European perspective, that is indeed an argument for Trump.
The Ukrainians had their shot at reconquering territory during last years’ summer offensive. It was a decent attempt and worth a try, but it failed. The Russians were too good at defense, including stacking areas with mines.
By now, this is a potentially forever-ongoing war of attrition with no end in sight. Putin has difficulties making feelers for peace, as this risks being perceived as weakness and undermine his position at home. Zelenski, exactly the same.
The US, coming in from the outside, is perhaps the only one who can break this “logic of the situation”. US can say something like this to Putin: “If you are satisfied with what you have got and make that promise credible to us, we will shut off weapons supply to Ukraine. If on the other hand you want to (or show signs of) pushing on, we will give the Ukrainians more weapons, including weapons we have so far denied them, and weapons that can reach much further into Russia.”
Such an offer gives both Putin and Zelenski an opportunity to say ok to a seize-fire (perhaps even peace), without loss of face – i.e. being defendable domestically for both of them (if presented right).
Both Trump and Harris can to this, but Harris is hampered by Biden having declared Putin a war criminal. It is difficult to negotiate with someone your former boss has declared a war criminal.
Mind you, she can still do it, but it is more difficult for her than it would be for Trump.
...if it were not for the fact that Trump attempted a coup after he lost in 2019/20, this argument would make me qua a European quite agnostic concerning the choice between Trump and Harris. But the coup attempt is like a trump card in bridge. It nulls out other considerations. Since it is very, very dangerous to elect a guy who had earlier tried to seize power by extrajudicial means.
But then, who am I (or other Europeans) to have an opinion on this. We do not have the right to vote in US elections. We can only cross our fingers that whoever is elected, turns out to be a clever and level-headed person.
As a non-Ukrainian European, I don't find the prospect of such a peace compelling. Frankly, I prefer the war of attrition to drag on.
Let's say that Trump and Putin make a deal that Russia gets Donbas, and pressure Ukraine to accept a seize-fire under this condition. Then I expect that Putin and Russia will not stop militarization. Just then there won't be daily losses of men and material. Instead Putin will build a pretty frightening army in the next 3-5 years, and will go to war with some country. There are candidates amass: apart from Ukraine (which is pretty likely to become a target again), there are countries like Georgia, Moldova, Estonia. Especially attacks on the latter two can way too easy result in a large conflict with NATO. I am very unconvinced that such a cease-fire would decrease the chances of escalation, it would just open up new battlefronts.
This is also the reason why Ukrainians are so little thrilled by the prospect of making peace with Russia. They have tried that 2014 and 2015 (and arguably 2019), and it just brought them further Russian attacks.
And that is not even accounting for countries like Syria, Libya, Mali, or the Central African Republic, where Russian troops are active and having (in the last case) a direct control over the government.
Let us agree that the Russians should ask themselves this soul-searching question: “Why is it that none of our neighbors voluntarily want to bond with us, rather than with the European Union and USA? Why is it that the only way we can make them be on our side, is through brute force?”
…And more particularly, before they invaded Ukraine, why did they not ask themselves: “What’s in it for the Ukrainians? What have they to gain by us making them our (forced) friends?”
Framed differently: The Russian elite somehow forgets, or fails to consider, that their former vassal states have agency. They are not passive chess pieces in the game Russia and USA play with each other.
…admittedly this agency has been a “problem” for the so-called West also. Did EU and the USA want all the new Central/East European countries as members of EU and members of NATO? I followed that debate rather closely in 1992 onwards, and the answer is that the great desire back then was “not to act in a way that makes us lose Russia”.
..but what can you do, when state after state knocks on your door and wants in, with the perfectly understandable reason that “we want to get into some other alliance while Russia is weak, because God knows what they will do when they sooner or later become strong again”. (Perfectly rational behavior under uncertainty.)
When they got these knocks on the door, the West could hardly say: “Eh, you know, we certainly think you are fully independent nations now, power to you…but eh…we would prefer that you preserved an independent self-image where you still belong to Russia, you know.” That’s impossible to say, for a variety of reasons. So state after state got in, and western elites were increasingly bitching to each other “who lost Russia?”
…And the answer is: No-one in the West did. The logic of the situation, in particular the perceived self-interest of the states formerly living under big-brother Russia’s shadow, did. Russia as an alliance partner for the West was lost, at least temporarily. And with the ongoing war, the chance has receded further at least 10-20 more years.
Ok, that was just some background, before commenting on your comment: The characteristic of a compromise is that no-one is fully satisfied. So of course it is not ideal to strike a deal with Russia. But it is something it is hopefully possible to live with, for all parties
….The alternative is to win. But the summer offensive last year showed that the Ukrainians are unlikely to be able to push the Russians out. Or, do you want to go completely insane and attack Russia itself, to make them let go of eastern Ukraine?? No-one in the West want to risk World War III over eastern Ukraine. For obvious & extremely good reasons!
…finally, if you put your hope in a putsch inside Russia that replaces Putin, notice 1) that Putin is good at staying in power, grant him that, and 2) there are worse autocrats than Putin lurking in the shadows of Kreml. The main opposition to Putin is from even more nationalist Russians; from the extreme nationalist right.
…so some kind of compromise is a rational thing to look for. Implying that you/the US has to speak to both parties. And to achieve that, it was not helpful that Biden came out flat-footed and called Putin a war criminal. It was an extremely poor, emotional-type political judgement. I am still somewhat shocked that an experienced politician like Biden could make such a blunder.
Thankfully, Trump is not burdened with that legacy. (Harris would have been.)
I agree with most of what you say, especially the analysis on what happened in the 90s is very good.
But for the deal, I think your analysis has a blind eye. I completely agree with everything you said from the perspective of Ukraine and the West, but it takes two to make a deal. And for Putin, why should Putin compromise with anything less than the maximum? Right now the situation is pretty much the following:
The main goal in terms of land was to take complete control over Donbas. Even with Western aid, Russia is currently not far away from that goal. If Trump stops support, then Putin just gets this next year by military strength. So Putin has no incentive to settle with anything less. If the war continues without US aid, he will get this *plus* the propaganda success of defeating the NATO in a full-fledged war. (Maybe that's not your perspective, but I don't think Putin cares about your perspective.) A treaty only makes sense for him if he gets something at least as valuable.
What more does Putin want beyond Donbas? I see a few things that he really does want:
1) He wants a different government in Ukraine.
2) He wants a formal and binding promise of the West that Ukraine (and other countries in the Russian sphere of influence) will never become part of NATO.
3) He wants that NATO retreats from countries that are in the Russian (self-perceived) sphere of influence, like the Baltic countries.
I don't think that Trump can/will offer any of those. Perhaps Trump would be fine with saying things along 2, but I am not so sure that he can make a binding promise that lasts for more than four years. So I am not sure how much value Putin would assign to such promises.
I see a few other things that Trump could offer. Lifting the sanction. Or money. But does this counterbalance the propaganda success of Russia winning the war? For the sanctions, they have been of limited success, and with Trump in power any sanctions that also hurt the US will fall very soon anyway.
Perhaps I am a bit negative. For the propaganda success, Putin can still sell it as military victory if he agrees now to a good bargain. But for your statement "the characteristic of a compromise is that no-one is fully satisfied", I don't see why Putin should accept any deal that he doesn't find fully satisfying.
Also, on this sentence: "The Russian elite somehow forgets, or fails to consider, that their former vassal states have agency. They are not passive chess pieces in the game Russia and USA play with each other."
Yes, very true, Russian elites tend to forget this. I think they honestly still believe that the Euromaidan was a Western infiltration because the thought is so alien to them that the Ukrainians could have really wanted those things.
But even if they were aware, perhaps it is the correct action to disregard this agency? Forcing countries by brute force and fear has worked during the time of the Soviet Union as well. I mean, the very point of the Russia sphere of influence is that states in that sphere do *not* have the right to develop agency, like electing governments that do not have Russian approval.
> The main opposition to Putin is from even more nationalist Russians; from the extreme nationalist right.
That's my impression of the situation as well. The biggest critics of Putin are the ultranationalists who see him as being far too weak and passive towards Ukraine and the West. If a coup does happen (which I think very unlikely), the people in power will want to nuke Kiev, not usher in democracy.
"Framed differently: The Russian elite somehow forgets, or fails to consider, that their former vassal states have agency."
Did Czechoslovakia have agency in 1968? How about 1969? Did Hungary have agency in 1956 or 1957?
The Russian elite hasn't forgotten that agency is a thing, they have remembered that agency can be *taken away*. To the Russian elite, the "agency" of any non-Russian part of the proper Russian sphere of influence is not a fact to be accepted, but a problem to be solved. By force, by intimidation, by infiltration, by extortion - Putin is a spymaster at heart; actual invasion is probably not his first or even second or third choice here. But he and the rest of the Russian elites are never, ever going to ask themselves "what do we have to do to make the Ukrainians/Poles/whatever like us and want to team up with us?"
Do with that what you will. And be judged by what you do.
Why think he’s a good enough bargainer to get Russia to give up gains they currently hold, when he’s planning to cut off aid even if there is no bargain?
Russia would gain from peace, in money and blood, so they'd be willing to give up a little something. If they do, Putin can still declare victory because he still retains some, and Zelensky can declare victory too.
Better yet, Trump could give each side a billion dollars, and get even more territory back from Russia. We did something like that with Israel and Egypt. Part of that deal was heavy foreign aid for Egypt as well as Israel.
Teddy Roosevelt got a Nobel Peace prize for making peace between the Japanese and Russians in 1905. He pressured the Japanese to give back some but not all of what htye conquered.
I am not sure you are correct about Putin and I am not sure $1 billion each would be enough to calm the waters but giving you all of that it would be at best a postponement. The conflict would rear it’s ugly head again in the not too distant future. Maybe that’s enough. I was in Poland this summer and it is the first time I have traveled that far east in Europe.
I see. You are serious about this. How does this number compare with Russia’s monthly spend on this war? What about its monthly oil and gas revenues? Who specifically are you proposing this be offered to? What is the mechanism that insures that whoever takes the money can/will stop the war?
"We reject these, and - in a country with a hundred living Nobel laureates - near-invariably pick a pair of mediocrities, extremists, or lunatics."
The "or" does a lot of work here. Consider our 4 P and VP candidates. Harris is a mediocrity and an extremist, but not a lunatic. Walz is an extremist, maybe a mediocrity, but not a lunatic. Vance is neither an extremist, a mediocrity, or a lunatic, and in fact is a brilliant lawyer and author and impressive in all kinds of ways. Trump is definitely no mediocrity-- he is very talented and very special, one of the richest men in the country and successful at his own business. He is no extremist, either, though he pretends to be one-- he is on the left of the Republican party, and only his rhetoric is extreme. We could, however, call him a lunatic, using his own "figuratively but not literally true" style appropriately; he is a narcissist, a vain attention-lover.
Could you elaborate on why you view Harris as an extremist?
Personally, I voted against her largely because of her support for censoring online speech, which is an unconstitutional position, but not, I fear, an uncommon one (hence, unfortunately in my view, not an extremist one). What do you see in her record and/or positions that is extremist?
An extremist is "a person who holds extreme or fanatical political or religious views, especially one who resorts to or advocates extreme action", according to Google. So a popular position can't be extremist, unless it's also a fanatical position.
Anyway, though I think free speech is an important right, I don't see the case that a dispassionate observer would recoil in horror at not having the right guaranteed. For example, I think the US no longer has functional free speech, in the sense that one can get canceled for speaking freely, if not legally prosecuted for it. There can be consequences for exercising your rights.
If calls for unconstitutional censorship are extremism, then you should probably worry about the guy who called for CNBC to lose its broadcast license, especially since he just won an election.
I think views can be both common and extremist, sadly. In these terms I agree with you that she is an extremist (because of her being highly pro-censorship).
Seems to me there are two common confusions about the election markets. First, the key point (in any speculative market) is not simply 'who bid up price x so much' - thinking that if you understand their motives and knowledge you can figure out the deeper meaning. The key point is that if the high price persists, why isn't anyone going in the other direction? It isn't just one rich guy betting one way, its lots of other poor and rich folks NOT betting the other way.
OTOH, the second confusion is that a 60% chance of victory in a single event isn't as dramatic as come people seem to think. I believe some intuitively connect it to a 60% poll result - which would be very dramatic.
As i see it, for quite some time the election markets have been saying its quite close, and trump has a bit of an edge. But its hard to see how any result will point to any kind of verdict on election markets generally.
"...in a few years than because of any flaw in Mayor Breed’s policies." Are you kidding me!? She defunded the police at the peak of the pandemic and also pretty much announced that announced that misdemeanors would not be prosecuted. Then there was SFs infamous Draconian measures for pandemic which drove our businesses is into the ground. It's incredible you can get away with this statement and pretend to be any source of rational opinion.
Why are we so quick to dismiss the possibility that Theo and other Polymarket traders do have special information, and that the market is correctly priced? I'm not saying this *is* true, but surely we should be willing to *countenance* the a priori default explanation, rather than assuming it must be one of five different types of trader irrationality/liquidty failure.
I will never understand the intuition smart people have that fake-money markets are more reliable than real ones. You have a financial incentive to fix the reliability of the real-money ones!
If some random French banker had special inside information on the US election that Nate Silver, the NYT, etc, didn't, that would imply some kind of crazy story that would be the biggest scandal of the decade (Conspiracy to rig? Secret polling operation which is vastly better than any of the known polling operations?). And instead all the major news sources know who he is and don't seem to care.
I think the main reason why real-money markets have been worse than play-money ones is because play money ones give everyone about the same amount of play money (or distribute play money based on some mechanism that can't be massively gamed), whereas with real money markets some guy can just have $75 million and get more votes than everyone else combined. In theory smart people should enter the market to take the other side, but in practice most people are only willing to bet ~1% of their net worth on a single question, so if the average trader has a net worth of $500K and will bet $5K, it takes 15,000 other traders to take the other side of Theo's bet and it looks like that just didn't materialize.
If you think of prediction markets like any other financial market, it just doesn’t make sense that there would be a fifteen point mispricing in a liquid market with no bet limit. Why wouldn’t a (diversified) financial firm correct it? In comparison, think about how small the alphas are that these hedge fund guys are chasing.
I have the opposite intuition regarding the effect of bet limits (forcing an even distribution): if there’s no limit, then you only need one person to correct a systematic mispricing. As an example, everyone knows that big teams like the Dallas Cowboys always get extra action from their fans. But their lines are never mispriced, because it would literally only take one sharp to correct them. You could just keep betting indefinitely until you moved the line and your EV disappeared. With a low bet limit, however, Cowboys lines would always remain mispriced, because the market would be restricted in how it could aggregate information.
I’m not saying Theo or anyone else had inside information, but elections are notoriously difficult to predict, even given the publicly available data. Your theory of the world required that there were millions of dollars out there and nobody was taking them, versus the possibility that Nate Silver (goated as he may be) was wrong in this case.
I don't think the "why wouldn't a financial firm correct it?" question tells us anything about whether Theo had secret knowledge, because a financial firm wouldn't know if Theo had secret knowledge, and couldn't use that fact in determining whether or not to correct it. I think the more likely answer is that there no financial firm with a significant amount of assets under management is currently specced to invest in prediction markets (they might not be regulatorily allowed to).
Except we now know that Theo did have a) a specific and sensible theory about why the polls were wrong and b) his own private polling from a professional Democratic pollster to support his theory.
There are one million people with opinions of approximately this quality. Half of them had galaxy-brained theories for why the polls were wrong and Kamala would win by a landslide, half for why Trump would. The fact that the one of these guys who made it big was on the side that happened to be correct is almost meaningless.
Private polling which is moderately better publically available polling,
Private information into public polling unpublished methodology. Are possible explanations here.
Obviously, just got lucky is an explanation as well.
Fwiw Silver noticed herding among the pollsters which suggested something was up with their methodology, he came to different conclusions as to what was up with it than Theo did.
Can you tell me more about private polling being better than public? I'm sure private pollsters claim this, but I've never seen any evidence that it's consistently true. Also, if someone was better than the public, I would expect it to be a campaign's internals, but how would a random French guy have gotten access to those?
I don’t have any unique info, how much does it cost to conduct a poll?
If you had $75 million riding on it, what percentage of that could you devote to commissioning a poll with whatever methodology you think it should be conducted with?
Scott, see the link above. Theo believed that standard polls underestimated Trump's vote, but that polls which asked people what their neighbors were going to do were more accurate. Then he commissioned such polling for this cycle in certain places. Here's the story again:
This is solidly in the "got lucky" category, unless the guy had been running polls like this in previous elections to calibrate. Human behavior is far too complicated for anyone to have justified confidence in a theory as simplistic as "if you ask people who they think their neighbors are going to vote for, you'll know who people will on average vote for". I mean, among other things, different demographic groups will have differing levels of insight into how their neighbors are going to vote. And if there's a "shy Trumpist" effect that has Trump voters unwilling to admit that fact to a pollster, then that's going to have some bearing on whether they open up to their neighbors.
It would be possible to calibrate for these and other effects, in approximately the same way that conventional pollsters calibrate for sampling and response bias but perhaps with better results. It might even turn out that all of these factors cancel and the naive uncalibrated result is close enough to the actual one.
But betting seventy-five million dollars that this will work to +/-2% the first time you try it is sheer hubris, and winning your bet on what everyone else correctly recognizes as a slightly biased coin toss, is mostly just luck.
If you think 65% is a slightly biased coin toss, you have no idea what kind of edges are considered “slight” in the world of finance: nobody would ever call winning on that kind of alpha “luck”.
If you think he was wrong and it was actually 50/50, and the evidence doesn’t change your credences at all, idk what evidence would.
If the shy Trumpist is refusing to talk to pollsters, not lying to pollsters, the neighbor technique could work. The big mystery is why there is no polling error in off years, only against Trump. If neighbor polls are equally accurate in off years, that could double the data to validate them. (But I don't think he had that data.)
(One piece of evidence that polling bias is due to response rates is the convention bounce. Do conventions really temporarily swing voters? No, they make the committed voters temporarily enthusiastic, willing to talk to pollsters.)
Sorry I typed my previous response too quickly (was rushing before I had to put phone in airplane mode before flight).
Median private poll is probably worse than public poll.
Public polls have the incentive structure right, if you think there out to just screw Trump, you’re probably dumb money.
That said, there’s a lot of methodology that goes into (determining like voters, that sort of thing).
There are varying degrees to which the exact methodology being used is a black box to you.
One big advantage to having your own poll is you can in black box the methodology. If you’re really savvy, I don’t think it’s impossible have insight as to why one methodology might be better than another)
Historically, private polling is terrible. Public polling is expensive signalling, publicly committing to the predictions so that you can be judged fairly. With private polls if you screw up you lose a client, but no one else learns that you failed.
Nate Foss and I also worked on a more friendly visualization of policy outcomes conditional on Trump or Harris getting elected, see it on https://policypredictions.com/ !
You could have a decent king or queen, and all of this stuff would go away for ten or twenty years at a time, with *short* random successions at the ends, not even all of them violent.
Re-: prediction markets, and how much they should be believed;
From Fortune Magazine:
“In separate investigations completed by the blockchain firms Chaos Labs and Inca Digital and shared exclusively with Fortune, analysts found that Polymarket activity exhibited signs of wash trading, a form of market manipulation where shares are bought and sold, often simultaneously and repeatedly, to create a false impression of volume and activity. Chaos Labs found that wash trading constituted around one-third of trading volume on Polymarket’s presidential market, while Inca Digital found that a “significant portion of the volume” on the market could be attributed to potential wash trading, according to its report.”
I won't weigh into the final probabilities in the forecasts covered here and extensively covered elsewhere.
But while we all wait for results, I put together some relevant spicy base rates, in the form of a quick quiz you can take to pass the time. Q1: How often do women win major elections? https://x.com/dschwarz26/status/1853926360731017299
One thing that comes to mind is that Kamala supports free sex change operations for men in prison. I've heard it said she is the most leftwing Senator, but I don't know if that's really true or by what metric (I know Obama was, by some well-known index). It is noteworthy that her father was one of the few marxist economics professors in America.
Hmm, presumably it might make _some_ sense to generalize to other sufficiently violent crimes (maybe just murder?) if the testosterone effect is large enough...
"fewer crimes" in general sounds too broad. I would be quite surprised if embezzlement has much to do with testosterone levels...
Google claims that the clearance rate is about 50% and that about 50% of those are convicted (having trouble getting a precise URL for this), so about 6,000 murder convictions per year, roughly 99% of whom are not executed.
It might be reasonable to castrate those, if if it led them to commit fewer subsequent murders. I don't know how strong the case is for doing this. I'd put it in the "maybe worth looking into", but lower priority than trying to get the clearance rate up.
People who are never convicted aren't going to be castrated by the justice system. But once convicted, it's physically easier to execute someone (just shoot them) than to castrate them. It's true we don't currently execute most convicted murderers, it's just as true that we don't castrate most of them either. The US was entirely capable of quickly executing murderers back in the 50s.
Why stop there? Sex change surgery for all prisoners! Now all the women are men and all the men are women, so there's no controversy over who gets put in which prison with whom.
I believe that the whole sex change for prisoners thing was the result of the ACLU handing out a questionnaire to all the Democrat primary candidates in 2020, and that was one of the questions. So I don't I don't know if she really held that belief strongly, since she just filled out a bubble on a paper and didn't, like, do a whole stump speech about it.
>You could imagine Trump thinking really hard about how to carve out a role that played to Elon’s strengths while shielding him from his weaknesses, but - no, sorry, I did a bad job starting this sentence, you can’t actually imagine Trump doing that.
Yeah. This was my favourite LOL from the post. Setting up some counterfactual only to finally admit it's just too preposterous to be real. Trump is nothing if not impulsive.
Is it possible that overseas businesses owners, who stand to lose a lot from tariffs, are betting large amounts on trump as a hedge against that loss if Trump wins?
I remember a story, but I can't quite find it. In 2012 there was a whale who bet on Romney once a day on the Intrade platform, adding up to $7 million. There was a lot of discussion of whether this person was trying to manipulate the market. My memory that I can't document was that Intrade reached out and determined that it was a financial firm hedging political risk.
The journalist called up "Theo" and asked what he was doing and he said that he knew Trump would win. If he was hedging, why didn't he say so? People trying to optimize their bets should try to look like "dumb money" so that they don't move the market and can keep buying at the same price. Claiming to be hedging is one way to do that. (Looking arrogant is another.) But if you want to move the market, you want to look like you're "smart money" betting on information.
Okay fair, but where you can you see the red sun "juxtaposed against clouds and sea" in the *morning* in SF? Are you thinking of the Bay itself as "sea"?
The sun does rise over SF and it does set over DC even in our world where the sun is taken to rise in the east and set in the west. I've seen red sunrises and red sunsets myself over here, even on the south-east coast of my own country!
I suppose so, but from my point of view this whole post was a bit like someone smacking a gauge while saying "The real money markets think Trump is more likely to win than the play money markets? Well that can't be right! What's wrong with this thing?"
Turns out there was less wrong with the money markets than the play markets, by at least 8 percentage points.
Scott wrote "I think we’ve stepped back from the absolute most apocalyptic scenario: Polymarket is back down to 58% Trump - only eight points above Nate Silver - and WSJ has revealed Theo to be an ordinary degenerate gambler rather than a sinister manipulator. Still, this serves as a challenge to prediction market fans to figure out what went wrong and whether it will happen again. It also serves as yet another point in favor of non-real-money forecasts like Metaculus, Nate Silver, and Manifold, all three of which agreed with each other while disagreeing with the big real-money markets like Polymarket, Smarkets, and Betfair."
And then it turned out the real money markets were 8% more accurate than the play money ones. So I say the real money markets are vindicated, since it turns out there is no need for "prediction market fans to figure out what went wrong and whether it will happen again". I mean they may need to figure out why the real money markets were so bearish on Trump, but that's a completely different challenge.
Both markets rated the outcome as fairly likely - there is no sense in which one was 8% more accurate than the other. If the markets included something like confidence intervals around different vote shares then you’d have enough precision to make an argument like this.
Still disagree. Consider a Bayesian who starts off thinking there's 90% chance a coin is fair, but 5% chance it's biased 60-40 heads. They flip it once and it comes up heads. If I'm doing the Bayesian calculations right, my new probability that it's fair should be 94% (rather than the original 95%).
(the small update doesn't depend too much on my low starting probability; if I had started out with equal probability on the "fair" and "biased" hypotheses, my new probability should be 55/45.)
I think that exactly mirrors the current situation with the prediction markets, so I'm going to update from 95% belief that Polymarket was in the wrong here to about 94%.
I agree with you on some level, but my gut is saying that the assumption that Theo was a noise trader should be viewed with skepticism as well. The point of betting markets is that it is hard to seperate expert from non-expert opinion.
Picking a "superforcaster" must be just as hard, or harder than predicting the target market. Otherwise your process for forcasting a market would simply be to pick a superforcaster.
I'm not sure what your prior should be on Theo's skill. If Theo truly was a financial trader (one successful enough to make a 75M all-or-nothing bet) who was analyzing election data, as the articles claim, does that not to some degree match the profile of someone who can add marginal information to the market?
One set of NYT and WSJ articles written to fill word count probably should not update your priors on Theo very strongly.
"Picking a "superforcaster" must be just as hard, or harder than predicting the target market. Otherwise your process for forcasting a market would simply be to pick a superforcaster."
Not sure what you mean here - you pick a superforecaster based on past track record.
I don't know why your prior is so low that some rich guy was a degenerate gambler and put it all on red.
Maybe I am reading too far into "financial trader" which I suppose anyone is allowed to call themselves; but in my experience anyone who was trusted to run someone else's money and was then successful enough (under monitoring and risk controls) to take home 9+ figures in compensation is extremely smart.
If the guy claimed to be a crypto trader then sure, my prior is that he is an idiot. I don't know any crypto billionaires myself and will admit you are probably better at setting priors than I am, but that is my thinking.
My argument about identifying talent would be analogous to the idea that beating the stock market has to be harder (>=) than identifying a person who can beat the stock market. Becuase solving the latter problem (finding a person who can outperform) also solves the former one (outperforming).
Darn it, I should have stuck a tenner on Trump earlier in the week but I was put off by having to set up a betting account online for one bet, and too lazy to go to the physical bookie's office.
Right now it's looking like not alone will Trump take the electoral college votes but also the popular vote. So that cuts off "our election should be decided by popular vote!" set.
But congratulations to the script writers of the simulation, they've kept the third instalment of the franchise exciting. "2016" was an unexpected smash hit, but could they do it again for the sequel, "2020"? That provided plenty of fodder for fan discussion and debate until the third one, "2024", and they've done it again!
Al Stewart had The Year of the Cat, this looks like the Year of the Weird and as a weirdo myself, naturally I'm delighted 😁
I thought Harris might squeak a victory but it would be close. If Trump won, I thought it would be "he gets electoral college votes, she gets popular vote" as with Hillary in 2016.
I was not expecting Trump to get electoral college, popular vote, and all seven battleground/swing states. The election was close, but right now it's looking about Trump 51% to Harris 47.5% (according to the AP website).
Hmm - looks like more was needed than "brat girl summer", "Kamalot", coconut memes, Hotties for Harris, and "those Republicans are weird, aren't they?"
Weird JD Vance is Vice-President Elect and Tim "Those guys are weird" Walz isn't. Heh heh heh.
Now, I realise a lot of people are probably upset about this and I'm genuinely sympathetic, but as an outside observer I'm just happy I won't have to watch the cringe-inducing sight of our next Taoiseach (be that Simon Harris) having to plámás* Kamala Harris in the White House on St Patrick's Day with some hastily scrabbled together genealogy about an eight times great-grandfather who emigrated from the Ould Sod (and ended up a slaveowner in Jamaica, but let's not mention that**).
Though if Harris had won and Leo Varadkar was still Taoiseach, I'd be highly amused by him trying to make common ground with "you're half-Indian? so am I!"
Do not confuse winning the popular vote with being a popular president. It is highly likely Trump will remain divisive, hopefully in such a way that will advance the country anyway.
I do realise that, but it's a counter to the people who, in 2016, were complaining that Hillary won the popular vote ergo she should have been confirmed as president and the Electoral College was only a remnant of slave holding which should be abolished and in 2020 when Biden won the popular vote and the electoral college it was 'he has the mandate of heaven to govern as he will'.
Now in 2024 Trump has won both the electoral college and popular votes, so they can't complain that he cheated, isn't legitimate because not the popular vote, etc.
I realise that is not going to stop the complaining, and I'm sure right now someone is getting ready with the "Russian collusion they hacked the votes they bought Musk bribes! fraud! cheating!", but there's no leg to stand on for any kind of legitimate complaint.
They should have listened to the witches: don't try cursing Trump, he's got occult protection 😁
I don't mean to be condescending. But I will really never understand the obsession with betting in these circles. I mean, I get it on one level; gambling is fun. But at the same time, gambling also seems fundamentally irrational to me.
The interesting question in this space is "how can we fuse all the different knowledge different people have, that they might not even consciously realise they have, to make more reliable predictions more consistently than any individual could on their own?" In essence, how can we do for general human events what Kalman filters did for inertial guidance?
The betting market thing is presented as an answer to this. The individual bets aren't interesting. The overall market position allegedly is indicative of... something.
Meanwhile, on the subject of gambling: when the expected payoff is higher than the cost, and you can afford the cost, it is irrational not to bet.
Gambling is incredibly habit forming, and no cost benefit analysis is decent unless it takes that huge risk factor into account.
As far as “the overall market position allegedly is indicative of... something,” I've seen it argued convincingly here that that something is not very rewarding.
It's about "skin in the game", the notion that anyone can just throw their ideas around without consequence, but it's a different thing to actually stake something valuable on your confidence that your mental (or explicit) model is correct.
Unless you're betting a substantial percentage of your income, it seems like you can still just throw around ideas willy-nilly. Because there's not that much at stake
That's fair. I guess I'm not much of a degenerate gambler, because I'd consider non-trivial but not life-altering bets to be a solid indicator of someone at least having given their thoughts very serious consideration.
Also, I cannot let this subthread continue without someone pointing out the irony of "Chance" being against betting.
Admittedly, this isn't a prediction market case :-)
Also admittedly, while I treat
>As far as “the overall market position allegedly is indicative of... something,” I've seen it argued convincingly here that that something is not very rewarding.
the "something" as kind-of the-overall-consensus-of-the-prediction-market-community, provided that the market is efficient and is dominated by informed, thoughtful bettors, the latter condition generally requires that the wolfbane blooms and the moon is full and bright.
They're a zero-sum contest of luck and skill with the opportunity to win a bunch of money if you're willing to risk losing a bunch of money. How is that any different than e.g. a high-stakes poker game?
It's one of those irregular verbs English is so full of. The conjugation goes - I make rational tradeoffs, you engage in high risk investment, he/she/it gambles.
I think it's closer to people's intuition to say that the "luck" parts of both prediction markets and poker are gambling and the "skill" parts are not. Then factor in that luck naturally fills in whatever holes exist in your skill, and find trivially that if you go into either thing with zero skill, then yes, it's 100% luck and 100% gambling in the negative sense. OTOH, if you train your skill up as far as you can manage, there will be an asymptote beyond which it's gambling, so they're both always *partly* gambling. But the player with room to skill up still affords some control.
Do you really think that the people involved in prediction markets are a completely different demographic than general gamblers? I would imagine that the overlap is Major.
I don't imagine there's a great deal of overlap. I imagine gamblers tend to be low-income, unintelligent, and politically disinterested while I imagine prediction market people to be the opposite.
I think there is tremendous overlap. And when I say gamblers I'm including day traders. Day trading is certainly not a low-income habit and it is just as reckless as playing blackjack at a casino.
"The mathematicians say there are simple voting systems that could practically ensure the selection of a universally-popular moderate"
I have to nitpick a good bit, but.. do they? My textbooks actually argue that this crazy first part the post regional voting thing you Americans do is supposed to help with picking moderates that are accepted by wide range of voters. I mean, it sure doesn't look that way, but I'm somewhat skeptical the mathematicians can save us.
If there was a mathematician thats was capable of saying something practical; yes.
Of the 3-ish other reasonably sane voting methods they have 1 edge case that requires at least a 3 way tie and a situation thats as unlikely as a single vote changing the election ^3.
For example "instant runoff", voters provide a preference list "3,1,2", you discard the weakest candidate, so if 3 was discarded that vote becomes "1,2" until theres >50% agreement on the first slot. This has an edge case if 1/3rd of the votes are "1,2,3", 1/3rd "2,3,1", "3,1,2", because this makes a cycle. 1>2>3>1 "rock paper scissors" loops makes comparisons "non-associative", an election is an aggregation of comparison, aggregations need associativity; to simplify how its in my head `max(rock,paper)==paper` is possible, `max(1,2,3..100)` is possible, `max(rock,paper,sissors)` isn't; once a vote contains an abitery list of preferences `rock,scissors,paper`; removing rock can help sissors or paper depending on spooky details.
This is both a) extremely unlikely, less likely then a single vote deciding the eltection because you need the permutations to be in the right order b) not social-politically realistic(in the real world right wing people pick between republicans and libertarians, and not republicans then commies, then libertarians)
>This has an edge case if 1/3rd of the votes are "1,2,3", 1/3rd "2,3,1", "3,1,2", because this makes a cycle. 1>2>3>1 "rock paper scissors" loops makes comparisons "non-associative", an election is an aggregation of comparison, aggregations need associativity;
I thought that this was transitivity failing, rather than associativity
Despite the criticism, it turns out that the prediction markets had it right and the more abberant the prediction market, the more right they were. Will prediction market be able to succeed if their biggest supporters continue denouncing them whenever they break from the "expert consensus"? Isn't that the whole point?
Prediction markets are a cool idea because they're an abstraction of financial markets. A financial market is just a prediction market that can only predict the net present value of a companies future cash flows. And in financial markets, if you make lots of successful bets, you get lots of money. That means you can make bigger bets next time. In other words: if you have a successful track record, your opinion counts for more.
Theo is a professional trader, and he had eight figures to throw at a single position. In spite of his anonymity, I infer that he has an excellent track record. His opinion should count for more than other people's! He's extremely confident and usually right.
I thought this while I was reading this and now regret not posting my opinion until after it had been vindicated, but I guess this cowardice is why I'm not Theo.
These areas lean heavily African American and Asian (and a little Latino?).
The way I'm interpreting these results is just how insanely unpopular Democrat messaging* has been. The ACX voting guides for NYC included a section on proposals and only one of six got a weak "yes", the others being about things like "adding more process to process Y" or "establishing a Chief Diversity Officer".
I sincerely hope this produces some tough thinking in the local Dem party.
*But policies too. NYC is the dirtiest and least safe I've seen it since 2009.
I figured it would be a close election between Trumps personal unpopularity and the Democrats unpopular policy but it was much decisive for Trump than I initially thought. I assume that people didn’t care as much about Trumps comments or J6 or any of that other stuff. I’m not sure to what extent they warmed up to him or just thought the Democrats were so bad that he was better. Even worse, Vance will be running in 2028, and he’s going to do much better with the college educated. With Trumps endorsement, he should be able to fully win over the base and expand. The Democrats have to credibly pivot to the right(or else get some kind of economic catastrophe) because otherwise their electoral position is bleak.
It's not bad. Both Trump and JD Vance are significantly left of the previous republican party.
E.g., JD Vance supports Medicare. I think if you actually looked at them without filtering through democrat propaganda, then you wouldn't be concerned.
The real issue is that democrats went completely off the rails. But now they will be forced to reasses. The outcome was what both America and the democrats needed
I wouldn't say he is significantly left. Republicans were discussing amnesty before Trump and that backfired spectacularly and supporting Medicare is hardly some radical left wing position.
The thing is that after Trump got elected the first time, the Democrats pushed hard to the left, culminating in the summer of 2020. Of course, they got pushed back from that and in 2024, Kamala was running to the right of 2020. That wasn't a big deal because she could still do what she wanted once in office. But Trump didn't just prevent the Democrats from winning. He beat them bad. Worse, he gained heavily among the constituents that were supposed to be the future, hispanics and young people. Trump is no longer a temporary problem to the arc of history, but a realignment. That completely throws a wrench in the Democrats plans.
If you read the JD Vance dossier you can see that the republican were concerned that JD Vance was too democratic, and one cited instance of this is that he broke party lines in arguing for Medicare (back when the Republican party was still fixated on removing it).
For upset Democrats, you should know that Trump and JD Vance are actually moderate (e.g., being significantly more left than the bulk of the previous republican party). I think the current problem is that the democrats went so hard slandering Trump that now people are upset as they believe the propaganda.
He's not a fascist. In his first speech declaring victory, he talked about being a president for all, and how America needs unity.
The outcome was what America needed.
The outcome was even what the democrats needed, as now they can reassess, move away from insane policies (e.g., defund the police, and being pro illegal immigrantion), and stop belittling and bullying voters (e.g., Joe Biden calling Trump supporters Garbage).
The claim we are refuting is that he is a fascist. Talking about unity in a victory speech is clearly unfascist like behaviour.
As to "enemy within" and "dictator on day one," have you looked at the sources of those statements? If you look at those statements in context, they don't mean what democrats make them out to mean...
Unfortunately, Democrat propaganda (designed to help them win the election) has distorted your perception of Trump and the Republicans. This propaganda is now problematic as it makes a large section of America needlessly anxious and fearful.
Actually, calling for unity is also something fascists do. One state, one party, one leader, etc. But of course so do democratic leaders and the slogan on U.S. coins (even if Al Gore did once get the meaning of e plurubus unum backward).
obviously. Unless you think he will actually declare himself a dictator? If you do think that you're in for a nice surprise.
Anyway, just go watch the "dictator on day one" clip where he says this. It's 100% obviously a joke and you'll feel better after watching it. Also you should think about which source knowingly lied to you about the significance of this quote, and stop believing them about anything else.
"the enemy within"
The full quote (again, go watch the clip) is "in my opinion we have enemies on the outside, and we have the enemy within, and that in my opinion is radical left lunatics". The context for this is riots across the US supporting terrorist groups and countries that have vowed to destroy the US, at which it is common to see US flags being burned and people saying "down with the US". This isn't an extreme position. The "enemy within [America]" is being used with the same meaning as "domestic terrorists" which everyone agrees exists?
So yes. Both lies. Anything else you're worried about?
Well it looks like Theo really did have alpha: he commissionned some "neighbour polls" (asking people who they think their neighbour will vote for) which showed support for Trump several points higher than traditional polls: https://www.ft.com/content/4b302ab8-7e40-4d1a-bbe6-3d46f6811d85
Looks like prediction markets working as expected.
I'm not sure why him being "just a guy" would cause Scott to dismiss him when his underlying rationale for the bet wasn't known. But "Everyone else arbitraged the wrong direction, maybe (falsely) thinking that Theo had secret knowledge." sure seems silly in hindsight.
In D.C. Am praying. The anthropics didn’t convince me, but this did.
I don't know who exactly is the patron saint of elections, but this article from "America" magazine from 2020 does suggest likely candidates (ha!) to invoke.
(It's Jesuit, so it's liberal leaning).
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2020/11/03/13-saints-and-2-marys-pray-election-night
The ones I think most relevant here are:
"St. Barsabbas and St. Matthias. Perhaps the saintly duo we need to invoke most this Election Day, they are the only pair of running mates ever canonized. Both followed Jesus throughout his ministry, without seeking reward or to be counted among the Twelve. In the end, St. Barsabbas lost to St. Matthias when lots were cast to replace Judas Iscariot after he betrayed Jesus. Still, St. Barsabbas went on to proclaim God’s word among the people and do good. Little is known of St. Matthias after his election. We hope, through these saints’ intercession, whoever wins might receive the same grace to recede from public office and avoid making the daily headlines."
Imagine being voted in to replace Judas. That's a tough act to follow and a hard row to hoe!
Personally, I'd go for St. Thomas More but yeah, probably too conservative for the majority on here. Might be a good pick for JD Vance, though 😁
"St. Thomas More, patron saint of politicians. Another martyr for the faith, St. Thomas More was once one of the richest and most powerful politicians in England—until he refused to bow to the will of the tyrant Henry VIII and recognize Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. “I am the king’s good servant, but God’s first,” he said before he was executed. Let us pray that politicians on both sides of the aisle act with integrity in office and render unto God the things that are God’s. (Side note: St. Thomas More would also put Donald J. Trump to shame in a war of insults. He once called Martin Luther “a pimp, an apostate, a rustic, and a friar.”)"
That's the guy I'm named for.
Thomas More wrote the proto-communist "Utopia", so he hardly seems particularly 'conservative'. The Soviets back in the day had a statue of him (along with Thomas Muntzer) in Red Square, i believe (might have the details wrong).
> But the simple story seems wrong. Other real-money markets rose approximately in tandem with Polymarket. For example, Smarkets got to Trump 59% on 10/16, and peaked at 64% on 10/30. Kalshi followed a similar path. Both tracked Polymarket, not Nate Silver or Metaculus (neither of whom ever went above Trump 55% since Harris joined the race).
Isn't it possible it was just arbitrage? If Polymarket's offering 60-40 odds, and Smarkets is offering 50-50 odds, you buy Trump on Smarkets (driving up price) and Kamala on Polymarket. If Polymarket's underlying market cap is much larger, this means Trump goes up on Smarkets without a visible impact on Polymarket.
(Also, IIRC, around this same time, Musk tweeted about it, which also disrupts the pool of people doing the betting.)
This is a good point, thanks!
(I used to be a professional gambler, and) I agree this is likely.
There's another step where traditional bookies are used to looking at markets as their market-makers - they aren't bothering to make complicated forecasting models for non-sports events, so they follow the wise money. In this case, they're following the dumb money. They don't care much if someone tries to arb with them as long as they think their odds are accurate, but their signal for the latter is incorrect.
For whatever it's worth, I have 4 figures on Harris at 38c.
Edit: Oh, and I think the lesson for this is that increased liquidity isn't purely good for prediction markets. You need the ecology too - people who have understanding of the market.
I've read papers on this being the case for sports betting markets (home/away bias exists, increased liquidity increases the bias), and I think their value rises after this incident.
My condolences.
In principle yes, you can have one mispriced market, and then all other markets can be driven by arbitrage towards it (which should also bring that mispriced market down). But you need an explanation for why one whale has more pricing power than "everyone else in the world who thinks the odds haven't changed and can bet". E.g. Betfair has a trading volume in the hundreds of millions of dollars on this market. As I write, Trump is at 57-60 on Kalshi, Betfair and Polymarket.
>In principle yes, you can have one mispriced market, and then all other markets can be driven by arbitrage towards it (which should also bring that mispriced market down).
Agreed, but with a caveat...
The natural policy conclusion from this is "The markets need more liquidity.". And that sounds reasonable, and matches the first order expectations for how markets should behave...
But - this _also_ matches the policy conclusion, infamous from government programs: "What we are doing isn't working. Lets make the program bigger, and do more of this."
Well, perhaps it wasn't clear, but I was merely describing an argument to explain why I don't find it convincing. Given the amount of money traded on these markets, I don't find "well, there was insufficient liquidity" very convincing at all. I think many people were pricing information not contained in polls. Of course an individual could do so "wrongly", but I just mean that there exists plenty of relevant information that isn't accounted for in polling averages etc, and obviously prediction markets should incorporate this information, and appealing to "but the polling averages haven't moved, so how come the market has" assumes its own conclusion.
Well, it looks like the markets were correct where e.g. 538 was wrong (at least, as far as I've seen, both ended up making close predictions but 538 with the edge to Harris & the markets giving the edge to Trump)... although, as Scott notes, it's hard to really tell too much from one trial.
Still, they don't look as bad as Scott evidently thought they would.
(That's what you get for voting for someone who supports price controls, Scott: you are cursed to have bad takes for the next four years! oooOoOoo! 👻)
Yeah, agree you can't learn anything really from n=1 purely from the predictions and the outcomes. If you predict 50-50 and one of the sides win (which of course they must), does it even mean anything to say you were wrong? (I don't think so, and similarly a 60-40 prediction isn't wrong/right by virtue of the outcome).
So to make a claim of rightness/wrongness you need to make a statement about some external factor. Call the information set used by polling-based models I_A. Call the information set captured by the betting markets as I_B (of which I_A is a subset. Then it can totally be true that:
E(Trump wins | I_A) = 0.5
E(Trump wins | I_B) = 0.65
There is nothing contradictory here. It is however a bit silly for the person possessing I_A to look at the betting market and say "they could not possibly have any additional information". That's just a really high benchmark!
In this specific case, i am not entirely sure what information bettors were using, but I think there was available public information from the early voting data that looked promising for Republicans and inconsistent with polling. I suspect betting markets were picking this up to at least some degree.
>(That's what you get for voting for someone who supports price controls, Scott: you are cursed to have bad takes for the next four years! oooOoOoo! 👻)
LOL! Cute!
>Given the amount of money traded on these markets, I don't find "well, there was insufficient liquidity" very convincing at all.
Many Thanks, sorry for misinterpreting your views!
>I think many people were pricing information not contained in polls.
Agreed, and that is a sensible thing for them to do. Amongst other data, everything that each candidate says is an additional datum, and can validly drive an update.
>appealing to "but the polling averages haven't moved, so how come the market has" assumes its own conclusion.
Agreed!
No worries, I'm pretty sure the problem was just I worded my original comment too cryptically. It sounds like we agree on the merits. (Like you, I also would not argue for "well we need more liquidity". If spreads are large, you can arguably say that. But that wasn't the first order issue here).
>It sounds like we agree on the merits.
Yes, Many Thanks!
I think there was a co-equal effect of Harris suddenly doing an interview surge. According to the biased diet of my twitter algo they were seriously bad - Dana Bash: "She didn't close the deal". Wild comment for a CNN person to make in the last stretch of the election
GPT says the first interview was Oct 7 on CBS, which famously included an answer they later edited after it went viral
If you're temperamentally biased towards Trump, and that happens, you're thinking Harris' internal polling was a disaster and it was a failed Hail Mary. Then betting up Trump only for the polls to not move, resulting in a rebound. This may explain the rise and fall of the odds, and may have changed perceptions among more online bettors more durably than for the public. They may have transferred their perception of a big late flame out to "it'll strengthen the polling bias that understates R support"
Another possible contributing factor is people betting on Trump not because it's positive-EV in pure financial terms but because they're hedging against the circumstance where he wins and makes a bunch of other things worse. No idea if significant numbers of people did this, but I thought about it. It seems to be a potential weakness of the predictive accuracy of (some) prediction markets in general.
That would be like throwing money away and ought be quickly bought back down.
Looks like we don't even have much of a discrepancy to explain, though; the markets were right! 👍
<quote> What’s the world where Trump wins but there are still election riots? The Democrats riot?</quote>
Really? What's the world where the group that wins every popular vote yet controls no branches of government riots?
Yeah, a quick google search finds articles reporting businesses being boarded up *now* in DC and Portland. Portland is well known as an antifa hotspot. Maybe both cities expect to be descended upon by MAGA types if Harris wins. But I suspect the free market is telling you something here.
Also, two separate individuals tried to assassinate Trump these last few months. An experiment by Professor Eric Kaufmann found that 1/3 of Democrats admitted that they would have preferred Trump be killed! (See here: https://unherd.com/newsroom/third-of-democrats-wish-donald-trump-had-been-killed/) Lots of people on the left openly compare Trump to Hitler. You do not have to like the guy one iota to think that there is a non-trivial risk of left wing violence if Trump wins.
In all fairness, both the people who tried to murder Trump were Trump voters in the past.
The first guy definitely wasn't, since he was under 18 the last election, and only voted in the midterm elections. Don't know much about the second guy, except that he was very critical of Trump's view of Ukraine.
They were republicans but that doesn't mean they were Trump voters.
Taking Never-Trump Republicanism to new heights (depths?)
The first shooter, Crooks, was registered as a Republican but his social media history was supporting Biden and specifically his covid lockdown and soft on immigration policies.
The second shooter, Routh was not even registered as a Republican. He was a registered as an independent since 2012. He did claim to have voted for Trump in 2016 after voting for Bernie in the Democratic primary.
FWIW: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/9/18/what-we-know-about-trump-assassination-suspect-rouths-party-affiliation
The likely truth is, as with with most people who tried to assassinate presidents in the past 150 years, they don't really have coherent politics, they're just nuts.
Undoubtedly the free range anxiety over trump centers him as a totem of wrath, but trying to inflict coherence on these people is a mistake.
To a fairly large degree, agreed. We're dealing with people who (a) seem to have unstable but strongly held views over time, (b) by virtue of their actions are selected from some extreme tail of the population.
I think the stat in the Kaufmann article I linked is more meaningful than the precise political ideology of the two wannabe assassins.
The Kaufmann assassination dilemma always strikes me as interesting.
Surely no-one who takes Trump's threat seriously (including relative moderates) wants the man to continue to be alive. But obviously wishing someone dead and wishing they become the victim of political violence are two different things. It's difficult to untangle whether people who don't wish he'd been killed: 1) genuinely wished Trump good health (i.e. hopes he lives a long and healthy life for purely altruistic reasons); 2) would like him to die, but were afraid of being seen to be condoning political violence; or 3) would like him to die, but were afraid of the potential escalation and destabilisation of a successful attempt.
I suspect 2) and 3) make up the vast majority. So the people who wish he'd been killed: a) Are less afraid of being seen to be condoning political violence; b) Are less afraid of escalation and destabilisation (either because they don't believe it will happen, or because they embrace it).
I don't know how to interpret this in terms of predicting greater future violence, to be honest.
>Undoubtedly the free range anxiety over trump centers him as a totem of wrath, but trying to inflict coherence on these people is a mistake.
<mildSnark>
The extreme case of sanewashing? :-)
</mildSnark>
The democrats rioted last time Trump won.
Also, there’s a non-trivial chance that Trump looks like he’s losing, so some supporters riot, but after three days of counting he actually wins. That’s a really bad outcome because it makes it look stolen, but it’s completely possible even with a completely correct count and the riots having no effect on the counting.
Are you really saying that fake money betting markets are more trustworthy than real money betting markets?
Seems extremely counter intuitive, I don’t really see an argument for this. Large whales can influence the price of prediction markets so we should use fake money games instead and disregard them entirely?
Was going to post about people arbing polymarket against other venues but it seems like someone did below. What you mentioned in your blog as “people arbitraging the wrong way” isn’t really an arb but just a bet on the other side when the odds were favorable. An arb seeks to make “free money” due to a spread/odds discrepancy on different venues.
If Trump win, prediction markets are the future of forecasting
Is Trump lose then they are a massive scam and we should never look at them again 😆
"Are you really saying that fake money betting markets are more trustworthy than real money betting markets? Seems extremely counter intuitive, I don’t really see an argument for this."
The argument is:
1. This has been true in the past whenever people study this question.
2. We know why Polymarket and the fake-money markets are different: it's because one whale contigently bet on Polymarket. Unless we want to abandon our faith in the wisdom of crowds in favor of the wisdom of one rich French guy, we should assume the other markets are the well-calibrated ones.
3. It's just inherently harder for one guy with $75 million to screw up a fake money market.
(also, I wouldn't call the two best non-real-money predictors - Nate Silver and Metaculus - "fake money markets". Nate Silver is just a guy. Metaculus is a wisdom-of-crowds engine that weights people's responses by their history of being right in the past. These are different structures from prediction markets and it's not obvious which one should be better.)
I can't help but wonder if this would have been avoided if the highest-liquidity prediction market was legal in the United States. Did this stop it from getting corrected quickly?
Yes and no. If it was legal in more places, it would have more liquidity, but the example shows that just adding more liquidity does not help in itself. Rather than one French guy distorting the market by betting $75m, you might well have one American guy distorting the market by betting $750m.
Yes, but if it's legal more people could make money off that whale. Lots of hedge fund etc.
That's only true if the whale turns out to be wrong. Even if the odds favor the whale being wrong, if it turns out the whale is right, "smart" bets still lose.
Of course, in the long run, the odds will even out, so that the actually smart bets will end up winning. But anything can happen in single bets.
> Unless we want to abandon our faith in the wisdom of crowds in favor of the wisdom of one rich French guy, we should assume the other markets are the well-calibrated ones.
Wait, I thought that the whole point of real-money prediction markets was to move money from from dumb people to smart people, and use wealth as a proxy for forecasting ability.
The Platonic Ideal of a prediction market, sure. In our world, it's "people who want to get rich/think they see an opportunity to make money", and whether that's the stock market or plain old betting on slow horses and fast women, there's always plenty of people to lose their shirts because they think they have a sure thing or a system that will definitely beat the house.
So people betting on prediction markets with real money will attract all sorts, not just the rational smart superforecasters. And then that turns such markets into lotteries. Because we humans can't resist thinking there is indeed such a thing as a free lunch and dollar bills just lying around on the ground waiting to be picked up.
"use wealth as a proxy for forecasting ability"
I do remain slightly amazed and slightly humbled by the simple, trusting, American belief that "Joe made a lot of money, so he must be really, really smart! And the bigger the fortune, the smarter the guy! So I should trust his opinion on the price of eggs" (fair enough, Joe probably knows about things like that) "and what colour to paint my front door" (maybe ask an interior designer instead?)
From cursory reading about the great American fortune-makers of the past, what they had in abundance was not so much massive intellects as massive ruthlessness, the ability to spot the main chance earlier than anyone else, and the drive to spend every possible moment making money. A slice of luck helped them along, as well.
> So people betting on prediction markets with real money will attract all sorts, not just the rational smart superforecasters.
Yes, and the money will flow (on average) from the 'all sorts' towards the smart superforecasters.
Except, as we're seeing, the smart superforecasters aren't there, or not in large enough numbers.
Even smart superforecasters can be swamped by sheer numbers of idiots tilting the markets this way and that.
If they're forecasting the market, then they'd still end up with the money. The market, though, won't be making great predictions.
This is true, but it happens too slowly, and in too small numbers, for it to make a difference in big markets like Harris v Trump. The vast majority of the money bet on such markets is not money made from prior bets in prediction markets but comes from elsewhere. I expect this to remain true for a while.
This is an "in the long run we're all dead" situation I think. On average the money will flow in that direction, but while it's flowing the market numbers can be pretty far off from the true odds.
Spotting the main chance requires powerful intellect
It's also true that there's a lot of random chance in "who gets wealthy", but you never hear about those who lost because of random chance. It's quite probable (based on histories of the successful) that there are more who failed because of taking a risky high-stakes bet than who succeeded. What's not clear is how they differed from the average. A reasonable guess is that there are many different patterns that occasionally succeed, but much more often fail. And that following the advice of those who succeeded because of that kind of pattern is opting for a pathe with a very high chance of failure.
So my guess is "If you're going to take advice of a guy who's super successful, check and make sure it isn't mainly luck that made him successful.". Here I'm counting inherited wealth as a kind of luck, though that's not quite fair, as some families do seem to inculcate skills.
Why are there no whales who think the french guy is wrong and correct an alleged inefficiency?
Crypto whales seem to lean pro-Trump on average, but also by definition whales come in low sample sizes so a lot of it's just luck of the draw.
Maybe they lean pro Trump because he is more likely to win?
I suppose it's possible. Are you suggesting that crypto whales are the kind of people who hop on a bandwagon just for the sake of being on the winning side, and don't actually care as much about which candidate is better? Maybe that that kind of "back a winner" instinct correlates with being able to make a lot of money on crypto?
I'm not super tied into that culture but my impression is that crypto people seem to at least pretend to have real political preferences, beyond just who they think is more likely to come out on top. But maybe you know better.
I wish we had clearer terminology here. Pro-<candidate> usually mean that someone _prefers_ that <candidate> wins, but what we are talking about here is really whether someone _predicts_ that a candidate wins. Maybe we should talk about expects-Trump and expects-Harris in this context, rather than pro-Trump and pro-Harris?
Any suggestions for better terms? Expects-<candidate> seems clumsy, even to me...
On #2, isn't that undermined by real-money markets other than Polymarket also moving in that direction?
> It's just inherently harder for one guy with $75 million to screw up a fake money market.
Why do you think this? I'm not an expert but I bet $75M could buy a lot of bots and/or Mechanical Turks. Maybe you want to say "one guy with $75M is less likely to _want_ to screw up a fake money market"? But again that's unclear, since modelling Theo as a rational actor maximizing his own utility doesn't seem like a great fit.
Or maybe this is exactly why we shouldn't call Silver/Metaculus "fake money markets", since they aren't susceptible to Sybil attacks the way every fake-money market must be.
Well, following up today…
It seems like polymarket and real money markets had it right all along. It was a landslide victory, and not close to 50-50 as these gamified markets and the pollers suggested.
It also wasn’t just one wealthy French guy. JPM and hedge funds were allegedly trading on polymarket. Polymarket feed was also integrated into Bloomberg terminal and other trading software.
REAL prediction markets are legit. This proves it.
https://x.com/hosseeb/status/1854154029796073814
By what standard does 295 electoral votes and 51.7% of the popular vote count as a "landslide"? I count only two Presidential elections in the past hundred years with the winner scoring lower than Trump/2024, both of them involving a guy named "Dubya".
Everybody who said this election was "too close to call", or "leaning Trump but really too close to call", was approximately as right as everyone else who made such claims. Everybody who claims their predictions were better than those, is deluding themselves.
I think it's clear that polls are not as good a source of information as we'd like, probably because of incredibly low response rates that introduce a bunch of biases. But still, if your expectations of the election were "what Nate Silver says" or "what the RCP polling aggregator says," you had a pretty good picture of reality.
We know people gamble with real money markets. So to believe they're better-calibrated, you need to assume savvy investors with deep pockets are watching them like a hawk, and can tell the difference between stupid gambling and insider trading.
Not even the efficient market hypothesis protects helps much here, AFAICT. If it's extremely difficult to tell whether a big bet is stupid gambling or insider trading, the rational thing to do might just be not to participate since you have opportunities to make better returns elsewhere.
This reasoning sort of applies just as much to the NYSE as prediction markets, tho: to the extent the market is not efficient, it's an issue of scale & liquidity.
> What’s the world where Trump wins but there are still election riots? The Democrats riot?
I mean, yes? It happened last time, right? It's incredibly hard to imagine it not happening this time.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/11/protests-against-donald-trumps-win-turn-violent
$1 million in damage or ten hospitalisations is not that high a threshold but I don't exactly expect CNN to have a running counter so it'll be difficult to get accurate figures.
This was my thought too, is there seriously anyone who does not expect leftwingers to "mostly peacefully protest" a Trump win??
Remember 2016 and "you're more concerned about glass than lives?" from the knuckleheads out smashing windows of businesses and setting bins on fire, eve of the election result, leaving the ordinary workers who came in to work the next morning to clean the mess up after them (and maybe lose a day's pay if the business really did have to close).
But they were punching Nazis (insert eye roll here) so that made it all okay!
> But they were punching Nazis (insert eye roll here) so that made it all okay!
How I hated that sentiment. Especially since it typically rolled prosecution, judge and executor all in one.
I think it's less likely for the prediction market to resolve that there were election riots if there are left-wing election riots, which is important in placing your bets.
Interesting! I really didn’t remember that at all. But it sounds like it didn’t meet the bar that is cited for this time.
>I’m not sure why “Trump in power beyond 2028” needs to be conditional
If Trump wins, it's the chance he illicitly holds on to the presidency beyond two terms.
If Harris wins, it's the chance he runs again and wins.
Why is it so unlikely he'd run again and win? I could understand wanting a new candidate if he loses, and maybe the democrats would find some way to bar him from running again, but 0.1%?
I would have just gone with "Trump in power for more than 10 years total", or "Trump in power against the current Constitution".
Wait, hold on, I just read the actual resolution criteria and they say the child question ("Trump in power beyond 2028") resolves No if Trump loses the 2024 election. Huh. I'm now as confused as Scott.
Okay, that is confusing. The real question seems to be "Trump is indeed fascist dictator who will declare himself president for life if he wins", not "if he loses in 2024, will he run again in 2028? and get elected?"
I presume (and am too lazy to check, plus sometimes it's more fun not to know) that the market is badly named and is meant to only apply to winning this time and exceeding a normal term. Because otherwise, as you say, the odds should be much higher. But also because by a literal reading, this election is for POTUS for Jan 2025-Jan 2029, which last I checked goes beyond 2028.
Good point on the actual term timeline! I'd bet a lot of people would be claiming a win even if Trump was peacefully on his way out of office Jan 6 2029.
I had read the odds of 2029 Trump in power as pretty reasonable, given that he is getting fairly old, and probably won't be up for running for election again if he loses this time. There is also a pretty solid chance that if he loses this election he gets jailed for something or other if he remains any credible threat to the administration's power. So less than 1% seemed pretty reasonable to me.
He will have lost 2 presidential elections and be 82 years old. He's already showing signs of decline - nearly 0% seems about right.
Trump has said he will not run again if he looses.
That causes me to have a (slight) belief that he will try to run again if he loses...though not that he'll be successful in his attempt.
Also, it is not straightforward to translate bets into actual probabilities. I came across this article a couple weeks back, when the odds started doing weird things
https://open.substack.com/pub/quantian/p/market-prices-are-not-probabilities
but tl;dr there is a region where probabilities/bets are linear, but when extreme things happen you should actually expect the prices to not reflect probabilities
Another major problem is that Musk and similar folks have been promoting these betting markets, which means conservatives are over-represented in them. In theory, you'd think that this would result in these people being taken advantage of, but I think in practice there's not enough people who are willing to bet in these markets (at least not in large quantities) to withstand this sort of systemic monetary bias in messing up the odds. Even if it is, in theory, easy money, in practice, I am not even willing to bet on these markets even if I am certain I will win. I think there's a lot of folks like me, which further limits liquidity if you end up with hive mind style situations. I'm more willing to participate when only fake money is on the line, as I don't actually like RL gambling at all.
There's also just the general fact that the moment people started trying to use these markets to predict the future, it was obvious that it could be used for various manipulative purposes and as such, were going to stop being useful for these purposes. Once the mainstream media started regularly posting about this stuff and Elon Musk started trumpeting about it on Twitter, it was obvious to me that we were in the territory where it was no longer going to be based on anything coherent and would no longer be reliable (or well, even less reliable than it was before).
Speaking of statistics, Nate Silver recently showed that the polls are herding really badly (to the tune of 1 in 9.8 trillion odds of them being genuine poll numbers and not tweaked ones), so there is a very high level of uncertainty.
A lot of people think this election is going to be close, but it could well not be. Ann Selzer released a poll in Iowa - one of only a handful of polls that happened in that state - showing Harris +3 in Iowa. She was right the last two times.
If she's right again, this probably won't actually be a close election.
We'll find out in 24 hours.
A question I haven't seen asked: what's the main mechanism of the poll herding? Publication bias (they do polls which show divergence, then decide not to publish); systematic weighting or sampling issues (their methodology and prior assumptions about likely voters or demographic turnout gives less room for variance); ad hoc weighting tricks (they do polls, but shift the weighting on an ad hoc basis so that polls skew less); or just total bullshitting/making up the numbers?
Here's my mechanism: people are so sick of polls that only the same 1,000 people are willing to respond to all the pollsters.
LOL! Could be!
A 538 article from 2014, written by Nate Silver, discusses the issue for that year's midterm elections and goes into some detail on the likely mechanisms: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/heres-proof-some-pollsters-are-putting-a-thumb-on-the-scale/
In brief, he suggests that there's some self-censorship going on (a file drawer effect of not publishing outliers), but the more fine-tuned way to herd is to selectively apply weighting factors, particularly with respect to turnout models. For example, Silver writes:
> [Nate] Cohn discovered that in 2012, the racial composition of PPP’s polls was correlated in an unusual way with President Obama’s performance among white voters in their surveys. If Obama was performing especially poorly among whites in one PPP poll, it tended to have a higher share of nonwhite voters, which boosted Obama’s result. And if Obama was doing relatively well among whites, PPP projected less nonwhite turnout, keeping his lead in check. As a result, PPP’s polls tended to show an unusually steady race between Obama and Mitt Romney.
Polling firms don't always disclose their weighted or unweighted results in enough detail to show how the sausage is made, however. It's still sadly common practice to report a post-processed (weighted and likely-voter-modelled) 'topline' with some basic demographic crosstabs, whereas weighting itself can go two or three levels deep.
Thanks... What a shitshow. The irony is that if everyone just collected a bunch of raw data and published it, aggregators would surely get far more accurate estimates by applying a standardised weighting scheme.
Unfortunately, there's a conflict of economic incentives here. There's a difference between a poll and a prediction, but polling firms that take on private clients are essentially selling prediction services.
Outside of the election period, their bread and butter is companies commissioning surveys into whether their sales will go up if they use the red or blue logo for their new product. They want the answer, and "going with the polling firm that had the best election result" is a reasonable but inaccurate proxy for finding the best polling firm.
There was a period where Musk was gleefully posting about the surge in Trump's numbers on Polymarket, and kept making the hilarious joke about how it would be epic if Trump got to 69.420%. I'm sincerely curious why this isn't discussed more.
So in any analysis of Polymarket's behavior, it would seem appropriate to fold in that there's a good chunk if people doing meme-stock stuff rather than making rational bets..?
Isn't the overrepresentation of conservatives a potential opportunity for profit? You can buy close Democratic-favored races at a discount. I actually made a little money doing that last time.
Indeed, it wasn't close at all, as it turned out. Perhaps the markets weren't so dumb after all.
Kalshi should bring smarter money to the game eventually but hasn't been live for long enough yet. Should prediction markets remain fully legal for a few more years I expect them to start to have decent predictive power. Until then it's mostly people having fun and betting on their ingroup, even the larger checks.
Yes, the eco-system of people taking advantage of the noise traders needs some time to develop.
I don't see trump winning but I would be surprised if Republicans rioted when he loses.
I have a feeling the election will elicit minimal drama. 2020 was an entirely different climate than today and Republican coded people were frothing at the mouth in a way that just isn't happening in 2024.
Republicans are also now no longer under the conclusion that they'll be tried as Democrats if they're caught.
I believe Republicans are not necessarily scared; they might just be somewhat more apathetic. In 2020 people on the right seemed to feel like caged animals which was thanks to the insane behavior democrat coded people displayed on social media. After Elon's acquisition of twitter people that are republican coded had a space where they could let off steam without being labeled "white supremacist misogynist monster/devil/nazi". This has had a dampening effect on right wing extremism imo.
Interesting. This is the opposite of my own intuition, mostly based on what I've seen on Twitter I think. I don't have much reason to be confident though. Do you have anything concrete to point to that makes you believe this?
Don't agree with Shelby's thesis, but some concrete evidence Republicans are less prepared to riot is that QAnon is gone. The "Trust the Plan" WWG1WGA network which organized Jan 6 on old Twitter doesn't seem to exist now. But that's more because all those accounts were banned before Musk bought the company.
I guess a Stop the Steal plan would happen on TruthSocial this time around.
Didn't Musk unban tens of thousands of accounts?
Yes but I think many had moved on by then. QAnon was dead by then. Many had moved to Truth Social. Instead of QAnon drops they started reading that website that Tucker Carlson writer wrote that "book report" about here.
I endorse this, based upon my social group being largely very far to the Right. There was a sense, in 2020, that all was lost: insane identilingus-performin', pearl-clutchin' wokies had grasped the reins of power and would prosecute Trump & indeed conservatives as a whole, open the borders & let in floods of new Democratic voters, etc. etc., and there was nowhere one could even speak of it. (If you're on the left, you probably have no idea how bad the censorship on e.g. YouTube got—I can remember a couple experiments that seemed real suggestive re: posting the exact same comments and videos but with the perspective switched, and the left-wing versions staying up or even being promoted, the right-wing versions quietly disappearing...)
"What’s the world where Trump wins but there are still election riots?"
I'd guess "riots when the result of the election is long unclear, Trump gets handed the election in the end after months of recounts, court proceedings, and riots"?
Wouldn't a single faithless elector just lead to 269/269 then?
But that would indeed be amusing (if inconvenient).
That's what Nate Silver's 80,000 simulations came up with:
"At exactly midnight on Tuesday, we ran our simulation model for the final time in this election cycle. Out of 80,000 simulations, Kamala Harris won in 40,012 (50.015%) cases. She did not win in 39,988 simulations (49.985%). Of those, 39,718 were outright wins for Donald Trump and the remainder (270 simulations) were exact 269-269 Electoral College ties: these ties are likely to eventually result in Trump wins in the U.S. House of Representatives."
There's also the chance of riots if he tries to, well, actually follow through on his campaign promises. Like performing an ideological purge of government agencies, or sending in the military to forcefully stop protests.
would that still resolve as yes though?
I'd treat any riots after Jan 20 as something different from an election riot, to me that phrase means a riot over the outcome (whether disputing or being mad about it) not that any policy of his would lead to rioting within the next 4 years (highly likely IMO)
Why are threats or thoughts of "exile" (emigration) put next to threats of suicide?
Are the two felt to be akin in America? Elsewhere, emigration is something that some people do, and considering emigration seriously (landing on your feet takes years of preparation) if politics goes seriously south is doubly normal.
I suppose there are deeply traditional societies where exile is the last step before death penalty, in that it cuts you out from all ties to the gods of the place and from ties of reciprocity. But still, emigration != exile.
No it's not
US cost of living is insanely high
And your earnings are also insanely high and for many people more than make up for it.
Which makes moving a tradeoff, not a strict downgrade.
> Why are threats or thoughts of "exile" (emigration) put next to threats of suicide?
Because the kind of people who make these dramatic announcement don't follow through.
People who want to emigrate typically just do it.
What people forget is it's actually hard to emigrate from the US for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Believe it or not most of the world is more anti immigrant than America.
But we tend to hear these announcements from people for whom emigrating would not be very hard, like these guys: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/22/move-to-canada-celebrities-donald-trump
Oh I agree with you and Matthias on that, my comment was simply on his last statement "People who want to emigrate typically just do it." In that THAT is patently false.
Snoop can't even visit Canada except for corruption. Generally Canada as a rule denies even visitors if they have any criminal record and they are renown for their strict adherence to it.
What, you never heard "Going to America is like going into the grave"?
The types who make the florid declarations about emigrating like to present themselves as refugees packing up and fleeing in the night before the Gestapo/secret police/insert bad guys of your choice kick in their front door, and they (present themselves as being) convinced that this time for sure, they (or their neighbours, LGBT+ friends, minorities, etc.) will be rounded up and imprisoned in camps, if not executed out of hand. Just like 2016, where it didn't happen either, but this time for sure! It's on page 4562 of the Project 2025 manifesto that Trump will implement on Day One!
Mostly it's all self-dramatisation, and for those really thinking of it, they are unlikely to be able to emigrate to Canada/Australia/Western Europe, because they're not in a position to get visas as needed workers (some of the examples I've seen online have been of the "I'm neurodivergent disabled queer non-binary and my partner is the same, we have degrees in underwater basket weaving but I/they are unable to work due to our disabilities, where in Europe will take us in?" kind and then they get the dispiriting answers from Europeans that "sorry, my country has rigid standards about economic migrants").
Hence why they need to portray themselves as refugees/asylum seekers, as there's little to no chance of them getting into a different country otherwise.
I think this stance maybe gives too much attention to the terminally online whiners. My partner is an academic and I'm an engineer, we live in the EU now. Getting a job and blue card was trivial (aside from the paperwork itself; disgusting). I certainly never vagueposted threats to leave on the internet, but Trump's first term was a factor when we were picking destination countries, and we're considering extending our stay instead of aiming to return to the US next year which was our original plan. A lot of people in similar boats here have this discussion all the time to the point where it's gotten incredibly tedious at dinners recently, along with weighing pros and cons of where to live.
It's not really a decision that can be distilled into a single issue, but elections and politics *do* make a huge difference. Some people do have the luxury of choice and they tend to be the ones you want to keep around. While it's true that there's a salary cut, when I drilled down into everything (cost of living etc) the real dollar difference isn't that significant and the benefits are significant. For the highly educated young people who don't have families yet, the ability and willingness to uproot and move to a different country is there.
Don't get me wrong, people will always want to go to America. I'm not trying to claim some massive brain drain. Just that there is a slightly increased willingness to consider other places to live, which isn't something I personally would have done ten years ago.
Ah, but you're an engineer. That's a proper job and you can do it. The terminally online ones are the ones threatening to flee the country, and they're also the ones with no marketable skills.
Bingo. Also you are missing the large number of people that simply don't qualify for a work visa but aren't rich (or old) enough to qualify for a retirement visa even though their social security / pension income is more than adequate to support them in that nation.
Or the fact immigration with a criminal record is difficult and given the near majority of Americans have one because the US criminalized everything.
>Still, this serves as a challenge to prediction market fans to figure out what went wrong and whether it will happen again
I doubt it. This is the first election with nearly this much scale, but it was still illiquid enough that one megawhale could bleed alpha and nobody would call him on it. By 2028, if Theo comes back for round 2 Jane Street or somebody will happily be a counterparty. These are just growing pains.
> Thankfully, San Francisco has ranked-choice voting, so voters will be able to freely choose their favorite among this diverse group of candidates.
Yeah, that's not how ranked-choice voting works (although it may be how most voters think ranked-choice voting works thanks to some of the... misleading messaging surrounding it).
RCV (or more specifically, instant-runoff voting) fails the favorite betrayal criterion: https://electowiki.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion
And here's a post regarding the effectiveness of favorite betrayal under IRV relative to other voting methods: https://voting-in-the-abstract.medium.com/the-effectiveness-of-dishonest-strategies-in-different-voting-methods-8fb9ff50a490
Yeah, it's really important for people to understand the story here:
Smart people noticed that there are some really good voting systems that use ranked choice ballots (such as Borda count) and started agitating for 'ranked choice voting'.
The two main parties noticed that these methods would break their duopoly on power, but found a different, very shitty voting method that used ranked ballots BUT ALSO still preserved their duopoly (IRV).
The two parties made a huge bipartisan push to call IRV 'ranked choice voting' and back it as the only officially recognized form of voting reform, implementing it in small areas on a test basis.
Most smart people saw that they were doing 'ranked choice voting' like they wanted, were, fooled, and either went away o r actively supported these 'reforms'.
Thus, public energy for vote reform has been captured by a false flag in IRV, and we need to be aware of that and keep advocating for *real* vote reform, like Borda or Approval voting.
Arrow and his Impossibility Theorem would like a word. No mechanism satisfies extremely basic and inarguable criteria. Which is to say, *every possible mechanism* can produce really weird outcomes. The universe / math is weird. Them's the breaks.
I am officially ambivalent on RCV as a whole, but I would note that the countries with some form of RCV that I can think of off-the-top of my head use something like what you call IRV (which I would simply call preferential voting, i.e. you rank your preferences). Not the Borda count or Approval voting. Probably indicative of something, and it's not that IRV is a "false flag".
Arrow's theorem is pretty meaningless in practice. Eg it Arrow's theorem only applies to deterministic voting systems.
What are the non-deterministic voting systems used in practice you have in mind?
Presumably you (conceptually) start flipping coins at some stage in the process. I must admit I fail to grasp how that will improve things (and related theorems apply in such cases anyway afaik).
I don't know of many used in practice (IIRC Iowa caucuses do things via coinflip sometimes?) but a bigger problem is that arrow's theorem only applies to ordinal voting systems (based on ranking) and not to cardinal ones (where you give scores to each candidate).
'Can' and 'does' are importantly different things here.
Yes, it is possible to model a perfectly balanced situation in which Approval voting does not produce a perfect outcome along every possible metric.
But if you look at 1000 real-world Plurality elections and 1000 real-world Approval elections, the Approval elections will be vastly better on average on most of the metrics, and you almost certainly will not see any of the bad corner cases come up for Approval at all.
Arrow's Theorem is academically interesting and illustrates philosophical consideration that it's important to keep in mind. But it doesn't mean that no system is better than any other system in practice - our system is still shit, and there are still much, much, much better ones readily available.
The theorem you actually want is one of the various theorems named for Gibbard, and these theorems apply specifically to systems using rank-ordered ballots, not to systems in general. There are a lot of pop-sci misunderstandings about this.
I'm pretty sure I meant Arrow's theorem, because the relevant framework is ordinal preferences. Arrow's theorem has very broad applicability within that framework. (Yes, there are more specific theorems that apply to narrower circumstances, e.g. Gibbard-Satterthwaite).
You're getting the theorems backwards, or something. It's entirely subsumed by the better theorem.
Arrow's theorem is about (the impossibility of) preference aggregation from individual ordinal preferences to a social preference ordering. It is very general - definitely not subsumed by GS.
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem says less than it sounds like it does. One problem is the "Non-Dictatorship" assumption, which uses a screwy definition of "dictator" that is very different from what the name describes in common usage. A simple majority vote in a two-candidate race fails Arrow's non-dictatorship assumption because if the election is decided by one vote, then anyone on the winning side could have changed the outcome by switching their vote and thus is a "dictator".
All the proofs of AIT that I've seen rely very heavily on this, basically showing that in multi-candidate races it's possible for the same voter to be the tipping-point voter deciding that A comes in first, B comes in second, and so on.
This isn't a correct characterisation of Arrow's theorem as I was taught it.
First, the theorem applies only to situations with more than 2 options being ranked.
Second, the non-dictatorship condition is that "the social welfare function should not be dictated by the preferences of a single voter. This means that there is no single voter (a "dictator") whose preferences always determine the collective decision, regardless of the preferences of other voters."
Aka, the non-dictatorship condition does not say that there can never under any situation be a pivotal voter. Of course pivotal voters can exist. (Indeed, they must be able to exist). If merely that was the claim, then the other conditions in the theorem wouldn't be needed!
> A simple majority vote in a two-candidate race fails Arrow's non-dictatorship assumption because if the election is decided by one vote, then anyone on the winning side could have changed the outcome by switching their vote and thus is a "dictator".
Where did you get this idea? It's gibberish. The non-dictatorship assumption says that there is no one for whom the outcome of the election is always identical with their vote, regardless of how anyone else may have voted.
You might notice that this is exactly what you'd expect of the term "dictator".
In your example, if voter 23 switches his vote from A to B, B will win. But voter 23 is not a dictator, because if voter 23 switches his vote from A to B while voters 1, 40, and 42 switch their votes from B to A, A will win. The existence of a set of votes in which the winner is not voter 23's favored candidate means that voter 23 is not a dictator.
Yes, I was very confidently wrong here. I got the idea from reading badly-explained outlines of proofs of Arrow, where the non-dictatorship principal seemed to be getting used via the concept of "partial dictator", which was being used to show that the tipping point voter for A over B was inherently a "dictator" for A over C.
On rereading the proof later, I found that one of the later steps I didn't understand was actually showing a contradiction if the tipping point voter wasn't always a dictator for A over B, and that this bridged the gap for that cotter being an actual dictator.
How often do these flaws in IRV actually play a significant role in real-world elections?
Not very often if there are two major candidates and then a bunch of minor candidates who attract low vote shares. It only gets messy when you have multiple candidates who could conceivably win if they got into the final two (i.e. "three cornered electorates"). Admittedly the design of Alaska's ranked choice method was pretty weird, and they managed to design something that ~ maximizes the chance of these edge cases.
I'd be surprised if EA luminary Scott isn't familiar with the platform of EA dark money front Center for Election Science, which (correctly) advocates for approval voting. But maybe?
Isn't "wildly oscillating prediction markets" exactly what you would expect if some mechanism targets the election at exactly 50/50?
Are American elections anti-inductive?
They're not anti-inductive like a stock market (at least not until the betting markets have a lot more money in them), but they *do* have a natural equilibrium at 50-50 they tend towards.
Both parties will track their own odds and try to change their policies and marketing to capture more people. If they're both doing this with perfect frictionless efficiency, the system will naturally balance with them both at a 50% chance of winning. Any deviation from 50/50 is evidence of an inefficiency somewhere.
Some people think that parties also don't try to go for (much) more than 50% of voters, because that dilutes the power of groups in the coalition.
I bet a bunch of money on Polymarket and am 80% sure who'll win
Now tell us senpai
Just read my substack article, Son Goku
Re riots: Note that under the rules stated, it would have resolved Yes in 2016.
What about 2020? Are there any numbers on the actual damage bill and number of hospitalisations?
Would it have? I just saw a story someone found about a bit of property damage in Portland, but it didn’t obviously reach $1 million.
"Portland Police Chief Mike Marshman estimates the cost of the damage at more than $1 Million." - https://web.archive.org/web/20180101230722/http://koin.com/2016/11/11/riot-cleanup-begins-more-planned/
Unfortunately, hearing that the first estimate was “over a million” doesn’t give me a good guess of whether the true answer in the end was in fact over a million or not. If the first estimate was “over three million” I would be fairly confident that the final value was over a million, and if the first estimate was “over a hundred thousand”, then unless there was new damage discovered later I would be pretty confident that the final total was actually over a million.
But a first estimate that pegs it basically at the threshold is one of those really ambiguous pieces of information.
It's worth noting that all the conventional betting markets moved in sync with Polymarket too.
I've got $100 on Harris to win at 2.70 which feels like good value even though it's primarily just an emotional hedge.
(Given the audience I should also note the kabbalistic significance of the odds before someone else does.)
What's the kabbalistic significance of the odds here?
270 is the number of electoral votes to win.
(Not actually associated with the kabbalah, but Unsong has led to people calling any weird coincidence a kabbalistic correspondence.)
>(Not actually associated with the kabbalah, but Unsong has led to people calling any weird coincidence a kabbalistic correspondence
<mildSnark>
specific gravity of mercury: 13.6
ionization energy of hydrogen: 13.6 eV
</mildSnark>
What's going on with Robinhood's events contracts? How are they able to set up a betting market in the US where others are unable to get regulatory approval? Is it simply Robinhood figuring it's better to ask for forgiveness than approval? (Robinhood has Trump at 58%/Harris at 43% as I'm typing this)
Also, the 0.1% odds of Trump gaining power post-2028 conditional on Harris winning seems low. The odds of an 82-year old Trump deciding to run again, winning the Republican nomination, and then winning the general are low, but surely orders of magnitude larger than 0.1%
>How are they able to set up a betting market in the US where others are unable to get regulatory approval?
Courts ruled political betting markets in the US legal a few weeks ago.
I still fail to grasp how these markets are supposed to deliver more signal than noise in accurately predicting future events. The claimed reason for their existence is their predictive power, but that looks more and more like a fig leaf covering another vehicle for rando degenerate gamblers to get a fix.
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/lk-99-as-a-cautionary-tale-for-prediction
> more like a fig leaf covering another vehicle for rando degenerate gamblers to get a fix
Considering that there are morons betting millions of dollars on a 50-50 election, maybe the current gambling industry isn't enough to remove dumb money from circulation.
edit: But then again, if the gambling industry and the stock market isn't enough to drain the wealth of these people, would prediction markets even help? Where the hell are people finding all of this money?
The only reason the French guy is a self-made millionaire is because he inherited the money from his billionaire dad lol
(/jokes i don't actually know how he got his money)
He was an investment banker in the US.
You know.
A morron. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHJbSvidohg)
Looking back I was snorting copium here, seems like prediction markets were probably vindicated (unfortunately)
>Considering that there are morons betting millions of dollars on a 50-50 election, maybe the current gambling industry isn't enough to remove dumb money from circulation.
<mildSnark>
Does this count as a drainage problem? A dumb money swamp? :-)
</mildSnark>
To me it's no different than a poll. Just one more data point that's fun to consider, but ultimately meaningless.
Polling predictive power is low.
Anecdotal predictive power is low.
Betting market predictive power is low.
A fortune teller's prediction power is low.
Election models prediction power is low.
Our ability to predict the future is absolutely pathetic. Add to that the secrecy and forces deliberately trying to make that prediction difficult and it's not rocket science that the election will favor big money masquerading around as if it favors the poor. Whoever put on the better mask will win. To that end, Trump's McDonald's and Garbage man stunts were absolutely a master class.
why did Trump dress up like a Garbage man?
Puerto Ricans?
Well he says useless eaters but we know from the first go round he won't.
Which actually makes me remember something, wtf happened to QAnon and where are they in this election and the past four years?
QAnon is still around, a quick scroll through /r/qult_headquarters suggests that most of them are coalescing around "Trump and/or the military will cancel the elections due to fraud and unleash the storm."
(Also, apparently Elon Musk has been tweeting Q stuff recently?)
First McDonalds, then the bin lorry: a billion doesn't go as far as it used to, these days, and everyone is working double jobs 😁
It was in response to Biden's "garbage" gaffe, and I thought it was very funny.
Please stop interfering in my country's elections, Brit.
As an American, I also found it hilarious.
Totally agree. I think he's run a much better campaign this time around. I imagine it helps to not have to run the country and campaign at the same time.
To that end, I think the reason many sitting presidents win reelection is because their record is supposed to be their campaign. With Harris, not too many of us are fond of her record.
* No abortion bill (but it'll happen next time I swear!!! Rofl)
* Bad border policy
* Didn't end Trump tax breaks
* Bad middle east policy
* Bad Ukraine policy
* Humiliating Afghanistan withdrawal
At the end of the day they're both awful, but at least Trump is funny.
But, but, ... Harris compensates for that by supporting censorship of online speech!
( I do view her as the marginally greater evil - but there are _excellent_ reasons to vote against Trump too. We'll see the first round results in a day or so. )
I realized I said "at the end of the day" again and sounded like a total goof so I deleted my last reply.
I agree, there's great reasons to vote against either of them. I'd love to see the candidacy problem improve over time, but we're definitely trending in the wrong direction
I don't find the arguments against betting markets' well-calibratedness in this election very convincing. Typical "limits to arbitrage" arguments (liquidity constraints on parties who might take the other side, potential costs of short-term mark-to-market losses) don't apply well to a high-profile market that will most likely resolve a day or two from now. A few weeks ago it was plausible to make the argument that bettors were waiting to see what the whale would do but as of this writing it's a day before the election and Polymarket is still showing Trump at 61.1%.
Glad to see you're changing your minds about prediction markets. I would add that while, as I've argued before, conditional prediction markets will be biased towards the wealthy ( https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/conditional-prediction-markets-will ) that doesn't mean prediction markets for non-societal things (such as supernovae) aren't still useful.
As for voting systems, I don't think you should be too happy with San Fransisco's ranked choice voting since it often creates "center squeeze". I think that instead we should transition to a non-deterministic voting system: https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9040107
Sortition for the win!
Though in practice even nominally deterministic voting systems have a lot of randomness in them.
It's not *just* sortition, there's a whole host of non-deterministic voting systems.
Nitpick: deterministic *voting systems* don't have randomness, deterministic *elections* have them. Since the randomness comes from logistical errors, not from the system itself. Non-deterministic elections will also have random logistical errors, but on top of that the voting systems also uses randomness deliberately as a mechanistic feature. This makes it so that non-deterministic voting systems give us stronger reasons to vote in elections: https://bobjacobs.substack.com/p/reasons-to-vote-in-non-deterministic
Well, I've argued for sortition before, but not because I think it's a good system. The advantage is that it disrupts centers of power. Actually, I think the current system would, on the average, pick better candidates, abysmal as they are. For sortition to be a good choice, though, you'd need to eliminate the "single executive" and replace it with an executive council. Probably of 3 people, and certainly either 3 or 5. More and it takes too long to reach a decision, even and you're likely to get persistent deadlocks. And with 1, a single bad pick yields an abominable outcome. (And giving that it's sortition, you need to expect an occasional really bad pick.)
While sortition is the procedure people think of when they hear "non-deterministic systems", there are a myriad of other ones too, which have their own advantages: https://substack.com/home/post/p-149343554 . For a procedure to be non-deterministic it doesn't need to have a random mechanism every step of the way, just one is enough. Which means we can design procedures that combine a lot of the advantages of deterministic and non-deterministic systems.
>Sortition for the win!
Somewhat agreed. I'm a bit skeptical that any of the conventional choices of voting systems for candidates can do all that well, given that it starts from a set of candidates who _want_ the job, which inherently selects for power-hungry people...
“Center squeeze” is a thing that happens with linearly ordered candidates. But I don’t think that’s clearly the case here.
First tweet I saw on your "suicide" link:
> If Trump wins I will kill myself. If Kamala wins I will kill myself. I will kill myself
Can you really blame them? Well okay, I can. At least stay and watch the show before you go!
Clearly a third-party candidate supporter betting on quantum immortality?
The voter will be in a superposition of states: both dead and dead.
>What’s the world where Trump wins but there are still election riots? The Democrats riot?
(Edited to)
>This market is priced higher than Manifold’s chance that Trump loses, suggesting a ~5% chance that the *Democrats* riot (or that Republicans win but riot anyway).
I'd suspect that this isn't as strongly correlated with Trump loss as you're assuming it is. I personally know someone who thinks the prospect of a second Trump term is so bad that open revolt is the correct response, and I'm a (lapsed) member of some internet circles who think they'll literally be executed if Trump takes power (and thus cannot be deterred from violence).
EDIT: Regarding "Republicans win but riot anyway", I imagine that if Trump wins the election but is assassinated before taking office some Republicans would likely riot.
Also, if Trump wins, but only after three days of counting showing a democratic lead, there could be pro-Trump riots during the period when it looks like Harris might win.
I wonder if stock markets in the early days had these same problems of not reflecting reality, and single individuals swaying the market. Maybe we can draw lessons about how this got sorted out.
There is no underlying reality that stock prices represent other than what price you can expect the next person to buy them at.
If that wasn't clear before, Gamestop made it obvious.
Talk to me again, when you made lots and lots of money on the stock market. I'm even happy with paper gains on a make-belief account, like https://www.interactivebrokers.com/campus/trading-lessons/signing-up-for-a-paper-trading-account/
I've made about 200k on the stock market.
By investing in index funds, the best bet anyone without insider knowledge or market-moving amounts of capital can make.
I made close to that with 100 shares of NVidia bought in 2021 for about $22,000, now worth about $140,000. That doesn't mean I'll do as well in the next five years.
Stock markets NOW have these same problems. Short-term speculators can move markets, and so can long-term investors, and no one knows exactly how much companies will end up making, though everyone makes guesses.
I know it's not actually a fiction, but this was a good Scott-in-fiction-voice, which I've missed. One can only reread the extant corpus so many times. "Truth forever on the scaffold..."
Gonna be annoyed if Breed loses, it's been a pleasantly positive few years of moderate normalcy. National federal stuff is a Big Deal(tm), but it's local elections that'll have the most immediate impact on my life after <s>tomorrow</s> today...very much a You Don't Change Horses In The Middle Of A Stream feeling for me. I remember what it was like during the worst of The Troubles during/post-covid here. Curfew for our safety, boarded up businesses, riots, crime and disorder and filth and woe around every corner and under every rock...it's still Not Great, Bob, but stuff's gotten better. A little less homelessness, more cops, fewer public disorders, more housing. Less of a ghost town downtown. Been a couple years now since I saw human excrement on public transit, which was definitely A Thing one had to be vigilant about for awhile. Maybe it's all just reversion to mean - but given some of the other nuts contending who I'm sure will turn that trendline back around, I am not one to complain. Lot of value in steady marginal improvements! Mayor isn't even where most of the local govt power resides here, anyway, versus the Board of Supervisors...so electing some maverick trust fund baby to "throw the bums out" is largely a Reversed Stupidity signalling game. Not surprising for SF, just disappointing.
I don't know enough about Breed to properly evaluate her, but my impression was that she was a conventional SF Democrat (so an amount of corruption/incompetence baked in, sorry guys). However, I also remember a few years back the very lefty types fulminating against her for being 'the wrong sort of Black' i.e. insufficiently far-left to give in on every single demand about every progressive issue under the sun.
If she has managed to clean up SF even a little, and is aggravating the Popular Left Front of the People's Autonomous Democratic Socialist Communist Republic of Wokistan types, then I have to revise my opinion of her upwards.
However, my opinion of the Board of Supervisors remains unchanged over the years since I first became aware of them: these *are* the People's Popular Front types and they're nuts.
I love the apocalyptic tone this starts off with. I sort of wish we had something similar for our own upcoming election, but it really is "Tweedledum or Tweedledee?" and we did have our own Civil War over politics back in 1922, plus all the years of The Troubles, so "it's dull boring business as usual" is probably the best to hope for.
Random remarks:
(a) Americans and fuel prices. I know Americans are hugely dependent on cars, that the mileages involved are vastly greater than in my own country, and 'no car, no job' is a genuine thing. Also you run your homes on cheap heating and air conditioning and big appliances, so you need cheap heating oil and cheap(er) electricity. But I always laugh about the "oh my gosh, will gasoline prices come down to $4 per gallon?" stuff I see.
$4 per gallon works out to something like €3.67 per litre.
EDIT: Pardon my dyscalculic backside, that would be €3.67 per 3.785 litres, which is €1.71 per litre, or $1.86 per litre as below on current exchange rates.
Looking up online prices right now, I'm told that the price of petrol in Ireland in October went down to $1.86 per litre. That would come out to $7.04 per gallon, and that's a price *reduction*, remember. Looking up online again, the current average price of gasoline in the USA is $3.10 per gallon. Oh, the poor suffering Americans with petrol that costs half what it does here!
(b) Prediction markets. I'm not gonna say "I told you so", but yeah. The big hope was for real money to come in, so that these markets could finally have teeth and then the glorious dawn of rational decision-making on policy via the wisdom of crowds and the impeccable rightness of the market would burst upon the world. And then real money did come in, and oh gee would you look at that, it turns out that gambling to make a profit isn't that glorious dawn after all.
Maybe prediction markets will work as hoped in the most optimistic scenario, but you're going to have to root out a lot of the shadier aspects of human nature to make that happen.
Best wishes and may the candidate of your choice (as to least worst) win, be that Mx 49% or Mx 51%! And as the saying goes over here, "Go mbeirimid beo ar an am seo arís (may we all be alive this time next year)".
> [...] so "it's dull boring business as usual" is probably the best to hope for.
Boring politics are a blessing! We in the rest of the world can thank the Americans for bearing the burden of having entertaining politics.
My adopted home of Singapore is especially boring, and I love it.
I think the prediction markets are a supplement to polls (where people lie) and academia (which is heavily biased to one side). I don't think they're a glorious dawn of rational decision-making. Just like most of us read multiple news sources nowadays, you look at the prediction markets, the polls, and any commentators you like (or don't).
I honestly don't understand how the price of gasoline (petrol?) can be that different around the world. Is this not an arbitrage opportunity like in prediction markets? Sure, shipping would raise the price somewhat, but more than double seems like mispricing.
Then again, maybe the monthly spend is how it all evens out. I currently spend about $120-150 a month on gasoline in Michigan, which is 3-4 tanks of gas.
A huge, non-market part of gas prices is taxes. Which aren't really arbitrage opportunities.
That's true, but I think it can't explain that much difference. Michigan has about $.48 per gallon, which is about one sixth of the current price. Even if taxes in Ireland were $2 per gallon, I would think that would be a price difference of over $4 per gallon, which should be equalized somehow.
Unless the tax was something like $4 per gallon already ($1 per liter).
Petrol is taxed 61% in Ireland at a glance.
I guess that would explain it. So you're getting taxed for more than we're even PAYING for the same quantity.
Yeah. European gas taxes are (from an American perspective) absolutely bonkers.
For the record, there's also ~$0.20/gallon federal tax (much more on diesel), so taxes in the us range from ~$1.00 (California) down to ~$0.40, plus (highly variable) local taxes. Where I went to grad school, there were two stations, one officially in town and the other, across the street, only in the county. The in-town one had ~$0.15 higher prices because there was a huge city-level gas tax.
> Pardon my dyscalculic backside, that would be €3.67 per 3.785 litres, which is €1.71 per litre
Ahem.
Did I eff up the division? Correct me if so, I'm still counting on my fingers to do addition (no joking there, it's no fun not being Numbers person when all the little figures spin around and reverse and I can't grasp them at all with any cerebral tentacle).
3.67€ / 3.785L = 0.97 €/L. That might have been a copy/paste error? Because you continue to use the incorrect 1.71€ = $1.86 as the online price for gas in Ireland next which would be quite the coincidence if you got the division wrong in that exact way:
> or $1.86 per litre as below on current exchange rates.
>Looking up online prices right now, I'm told that the price of petrol in Ireland in October went down to $1.86 per litre.
But the gist of your comment is of course correct - Americans pay far less for gas than Europeans and always have, which they promptly compensate for with pedestrian-killing, real-estate-stealing gas guzzlers.
Musk ranks #19 in Diablo 4 pit runs (https://helltides.com/pit) so idk about him not having time
I don't know if that's a good time or a bad time for the run, but it does indicate where Trump should appoint Musk - Online Czar! There are Czars for everything, there surely should be one for the Internet especially with our new forthcoming AI overlords 😁
Since the market has this clause: "If the Republican ticket loses the election, this market will settle as N/A.", I'm willing to buy 33%.
Given the geopolitical situation, with the war in Ukraine and all that, they should really appoint a Czar for Russia.
Do NOT move to Canada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abcI-_SZHU0
ai art thumbnail, instantly clicked away.
I never even looked at what they put up there. Why is that a filter for you?
The video itself is AI generated.
Honestly I've never watched it. I heard the song on a podcast and thought the lyrics were hilarious. I only listen to most YouTube stuff while I'm reading other stuff.
I mean, the song is AI generated.
Don't look too closely at the ACX thumbnails if you feel that way.
I'm blocking you (and recommend others do the same), but wanted to let you know why first:
1) Video without a tldr is useless.
2) You like your own comments.
Ok? I like my posts because they're easier to spot when I'm scrolling. I'm not on substack to farm karma.
I have bet a bottle of decent red wine that Trump wins, against a friend betting a bottle that Kamala wins. On the agreed condition that we share the bottle at a good restaurant after the event. On behalf of most, perhaps all, Europeans I encourage Trump and Harris voters to make similar bets in the few hours remaining, and to share the bottle afterwards.
Since the rest of the world needs a united US. For world stability’s sake we need a unipolar world with the US as top dog, and we cannot get that unless you guys over there find a way to bond, despite your differences. Be it over a bottle of red wine, or something else.
This sounds like an eminently civilized thing to do. Besides, at least one of you may well want to get drunk.
> What’s the world where Trump wins but there are still election riots?
Well, how about a world where the last time Trump won 1) there were riots, 2) none of the persons arrested for rioting were convicted, and then 3) the city of Washington eventually paid the arrestees a $1.6 million settlement?
Does that sound like the sort of world where it's reasonable to believe a Trump victory will result in riots?
Link providing evidence you're living in a world where 1) is true: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-inauguration-protest-damages-downtown-washington/
Link providing evidence you're living in a world where 2) is true: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/government-drops-charges-against-all-inauguration-protesters-n889531
Link providing evidence you're living in a world where 3) is true: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/washington-pay-16m-settle-lawsuits-protests-trumps-2017/story?id=77324117
Re #2, 21 defendants pleaded guilty https://theweek.com/speedreads/783577/532-days-after-trumps-inauguration-last-remaining-charges-against-inauguration-day-protesters-have-been-dropped
Re #3, your link says that police "detained them without access to food, water, or restrooms for up to 16 hours." Do you not believe that police should be held responsible for illegal actions? Note also that some of the plaintiffs, such as journalists, were probably wrongly arrested. Finally, note also that $1,600,000 is a rather small settlement, esp divided among numerous plaintiffs.
Edit. There were two lawsuits. One was by the ACLU, representing six plaintiff. "The plaintiffs in the case are a photojournalist, a legal observer, and four demonstrators, including one who was just 10 years old at the time of the protest." https://www.acludc.org/en/press-releases/federal-court-rules-aclu-dc-lawsuit-behalf-inauguration-day-protestors-may-proceed
The other was filed by a local attorney, but I can't find information about it yet. But it does seem that your assumption that most of the people who acted violently ended up getting paid.
Many Thanks for the evidence!
YW
Does (1) rise to the level of triggering the payout of this market?
Many Thanks for the evidence!
>Future generations will number American elections among history's greatest and most terrible spectacles. As we remember the Games in the Colosseum...
I think that the more apt Colosseum comparison is in the "bread and circuses" direction.
I know very little about markets, but the Polymarket presidential election market has now about $2B in it. The French trader guy allegedly invested tens of millions (the largest number, which is somewhat speculative, is $75M, but that's split between multiple markets), so maybe 2-3% of total market volume. Can that really cause a 15% swing in the prediction?
And there was a swing in Nate Silver‘s model as well. It‘s just that the markets‘ swing was bigger. They probably thought the Harris effect is over, Trump has momentum now, which is what I would have thought. (Or does Silver‘s model include a momentum component itself?)
Surely not. How would you tell when the momentum starts / ends? As he tends to say ( https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1846556824029266001 ) , short the trend and long the level.
I agree with this view. It is extremely unlikely that one person holding 2-3% of the market in a liquid market could swing the price by this amount. Conversely, if you think it does, then you should have very little belief in stock markets, because an individual agent holding 2-3% of a company's shares is completely banal.
I think that betting on election outcomes is something that should not be banned. To me there is no better proxy for confidence than a wager. It's an incredible data point in my opinion. Enough wealthy people feel like X is the winning candidate that they're willing to risk their own money on that outcome.
Where I think legislation could potentially help: disclosure. The information, "how many people are betting, how much are they betting, and from what country does their account originate?" is very important when considering the data point.
The other thing I love about it is that it's incredibly democratized. If you truly believe that the odds are wrong, you stand to make a fortune and should absolutely do so.
What has been telling about the market is that while a lot of people claim Harris is going to win in a landslide, much fewer have been willing to "put your money where your mouth is".
"Whether or not you agree with Trump that those deals are extortionary and unfair, it makes sense that Iran is more likely to go nuclear if those deals are discontinued."
Compare: "Whether or not you agree with Churchill that giving Germany the Sudetenland is extortionary and unfair, it makes sense Germany is more likely to go to war if the deal is not made."
Or if you prefer: "Well, if you give the bully your lunch money today, rather than stand up to him; it makes sense he's less likely to take your lunch money tomorrow."
Good point. Pearl Harbor happened after we placed an oil embargo on Japan.
Which happened to starve Japan's war effort?
Yes, and they saw that as a threat and attacked Pearl Harbor.
Do you not see a parallel in Iran? If all we talk about is regime change, they're going to do everything possible to develop a nuclear shield. North Korea did the same thing.
"as a threat"
As a threat to their war efforts. There's definitely a parallel, but you're reversing cause and effect in both cases.
Japanese expansion was a matter of opportunism and aggression, as is Iran's. If you decide to put yourself in the way of that to defend yourself and others, it's the same as putting yourself in front of any bully. You'll probably get punched.
But be mindful that stepping aside doesn't reform the bully, you're just letting them go ahead.
This isn't hypothetical. Just look at the difference in the Middle East between more sanctions on Iran (under Trump) and not enforcing those sanctions (under Biden).
Which happened to starve Iran's war effort?
Nonsense! We're the freedom-loving patriots self-sacrificingly spending blood and treasure to preserve the rules-based international order.
I thought the Iran nuclear deal collapsed in 2017 and has not been replaced, as of this week the Iranians have said that the only thing holding them back from nuclear weapons is the supreme leader’s fatwa.
I think Iran are actively developing nuclear weapons. Intelligence leaks confirm this was definitely true in the past. Recently it was widely observed that Iran's disclosed enrichment levels make no sense otherwise.
There is no such fatwa. That was just something Iran said to credulous Westerners.
It wouldn’t surprise me, but either way nobody should vote on the basis of a nuclear deal that no longer exists.
Oh I see. Yes. Completely agree.
As far as the US is concerned I think it's dead.
I thought the other parties were still observing it but I might be out of date there.
If I was Iranian, I would support nuclear armament immediately. I would demand it. After seeing what happened to Iraq and Libya, I would consider nuclear weapons vital for the security of my nation. And I wouldn't be wrong.
Some more clarification on the Kalshi ruling. The history of this is the CFTC decided to ban them, Kalshi challenged the ban in court and won, and the CFTC is appealing the decision.
That appeal is going ahead regardless, so the ultimate fate of Kalshi and real-money prediction markets in the US remains unclear. What this smaller question was about was whether Kalshi could offer election markets in the meantime while the appeal is pending.
By default, as Kalshi won the lower court case, they should be allowed to offer those markets. But there are particular circumstances where courts can "stay" rulings and prevent them going into effect. Most relevantly, this can happen if the losing party would suffer irreparable harm.
As an example, imagine someone wants to euthanize his pet dog, and his ex-wife is suing for custody of the dog so he can't kill it. The lower court rules in favour of the dog-killer and says he's clear to put down Fido. The ex-wife appeals this ruling. In this scenario she might be able to secure a stay, putting the original judgement on hold until the appeal goes through. That's because if the decision isn't stayed the ex-husband can just go ahead and kill the dog, effectively denying her right to appeal - she might win, but she can't bring the pet back to life. That's irreparable harm.
What this ruling was about was really nothing about the merits of the case for or against Kalshi - that will be litigated in the appeal. It was just finding that there's no irreparable harm that would result from allowing the lower court judgement in Kalshi's favour to go into effect while we're waiting for the appeal to play out.
"And '28's not far away"
I'm usually the one reassuring everyone around me. But this time I think there are valid reasons to be worried that this is not the case. Four more years of open borders plus the promised citizenship amnesty would plausibly mean a one party country (what people are calling the Californisation of the US).
I think that's incredibly unlikely. There are no one-party democratic countries in the world, I highly doubt that the U.S. would be the first.
Didn't Japan just vote against the ruling party?
I thought there were plenty. But to pick one. What do you think of Russia? You don't think Russia is a one-party "democratic" country?
And if the same thing happened here then other people would say the same about us. What's your point?
When a Soviet ambassador was criticised for USSR being a one-party state in the good-old "ideology is dead" days of the 1960s/70s, he replied: "What of it? After all, USA is also a one-party state. Although the US, with typical US extragavanza, maintains two of them".
I expect that's because your definition precludes the possibility: if such a thing DID come to exist, you would declare it to be non-democratic.
Japan, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia...take your pick.
Don't forget Singapore.
Japan and South Africa just picked other parties.
No they did not. The dominant party lost their majority, but not their plurality. The government of South Africa is led by the ANC, and the government of Japan will include the LDP (it is mathematically impossible to form a majority without them).
I don't believe, like Musk and Rogan have been suggesting is possible, that a Harris victory will surely create a one-party system. However, I do worry that (conditional on the Californisation conspiracy being true), that it would significantly intensify the tribalism/identity-group-patronage politics we are seeing more of these days in the US. Democrats, to keep the coalition they build, will need to continue to give increasing favors to their favored groups -- and in a zero sum world, that means to the exclusion of the disfavored groups. That could have all sorts of nasty long-term effects to our politics. Of course I'm not confident about the second/third order effects of a Trump presidency either.
Normally what has happened is that when one party collapses, the remaining party collapses in feuds and splits in two. I've got a vague feeling that once a third party replaced the collapsed one, but I can't remember any details.
OTOH, plurality wins voting systems can't really host more than two dominant parties.
Yes, Republicans replaced the Whigs.
Harris hasn’t even mentioned that she would be the first woman president. Identitarianism is less popular than it was ten years ago.
...Or she just learned from Hilary's mistakes. Still can't change the fact that she's a woman, though.
I don't believe that's true. I remember 2014.
>it would significantly intensify the tribalism/identity-group-patronage politics we are seeing more of these days in the US. Democrats, to keep the coalition they build, will need to continue to give increasing favors to their favored groups -- and in a zero sum world, that means to the exclusion of the disfavored groups. That could have all sorts of nasty long-term effects to our politics.
In keeping with the legal terminology of "protected" groups, and extending the reuse of chemical terminology that led to contrasting transpeople with cispeople, should the disfavored groups be called "deprotected"?
Immigrants are not automatic Democrats for life (although I imagine if one party is running on "we hate you, we want to revoke your citizenship and deport you," that certainly tips the odds).
I'm not advocating open borders, but if it happened, the parties would adapt their platforms, immigrants would gradually shift to more nativist positions as they get settled, and in 4 or 8 years the parties would be back to a 50-50 win chance.
Why do you think this hasn't happened in California?
But immigrant registrations are in completely different proportions to non-immigrant in California. Immigrants have not shifted to nativist positions in general. And I wouldn't expect them to. People bring their own backgrounds and experience to inform their voting.
A majority of Cuban Americans are Republicans - they're a big part of Florida being red. It's not unheard of by any means.
I don’t understand what you are imagining. Are you imagining a world where citizenship processes are sped up so that people can go from immigrant to citizen in under four years, rather than the ten or so now? On *top* of a massive speed up in immigration, and a greater tilt of immigrants towards one party?
You understand exactly what I am imagining : ).
"a massive speed up in immigration"
This has been the policy the user @fentasyl (aka datahazard) is good at catching up with this -- he just graphs official government statistics; and leaks today suggest they will try and accelerate it in the next two months. Hasn't this admin flown 5% of the population of Haiti into the US already? And border enforcement whistle blowers aplenty saying their job has been to welcome people into the US. The current scandal is that the whitehouse was coordinating with a bunch of NGOs in order to facilitate illegal border crossings.
"where citizenship processes are sped up so that people can go from immigrant to citizen in under four years"
Leading democrats (Shumer, Harris, Pelosi) have been saying that amnesties and fast-tracking naturalisation are policies they want to pursue. This admin's actions agree with this, with (iirc) fast-tracking of naturalisation, and actual attempts at amnesties that have been struck down by the courts.
"and a greater tilt of immigrants towards one party"
If you're illegally in the US, and have no right to be here, you are at the mercy of your political sponsors, no? Inanycase this seems to be the assumption of the whitehouse -- fentasyl had a bunch of graphs showing that illegal immigrants where being disproportionally settled in Republican areas -- this could be about avoid Democrat areas since they don't want to lose votes, but could also be about hoping these Republican areas turn blue.
Philly voter here. I don't follow news and am pretty undecided still. Heading to the polls during lunch. Obviously both major party candidates are disturbing authoritarians who appear to be united in their support for e.g. police immunity for misconduct, which seems most adjacent to the actual authoritarian history I am aware of (in Taiwan). Due to religious commitments to live simply to support those in need, I am unlikely to vote for the candidate with a golden toilet. But I don't know if I should vote third party. There is still enough democracy in America that I want "major party candidates will get my vote if and only if they either support good AI safety policy or oppose qualified immunity" to be a true way for a craven politician to gain advantage for themselves.
I am open to comments that might weigh substantially in the balance. I decline to be persuaded to cowardice -- pitches should be made that a candidate is the best on the ballot, not that I should choose a lesser candidate for fear of what may come.
Are politicians so reliable in their campaign promises that we are now accepting campaign innuendo as currency?
To clarify: the campaign was designed by professionals, who determined that statements on the issues I care about would cost them more votes than it would earn them. It is not coincidence, and if anything I should read the silence as antipathy. "Does not want my vote enough to speak their conscience" is the best case, but the default is closer to "opposition to change is so well known to be their default course that no public statement has any upside".
I'm reminded of the funny Scott-post https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/633822178059730944/here-are-the-nine-ways-the-election-could-end from the last election, and in particular the bit about you:
>You are the last undecided voter in the state of Pennsylvania. Everyone else has made up their mind but you. One of your friends is subsisting off unemployment checks right now - does that make you a little more sympathetic to the social safety net? But your tax bill last year was scandalous - does that mean there should be smaller government? For days, reporters have knocked on your door, stopped your car, grabbed you on your way to work. “How will you vote, last undecided voter in Pennsylvania?” they ask, and you do not know. Nineteen years ago, in middle school, a bully with a Confederate flag t-shirt harassed you. Three months ago, on Twitter, a social justice warrior called your sister a “Karen”. Have you updated on these events? How much should they guide you? When you were twenty-three, two thugs cornered you in the park and took your money. When you were only nine, you watched a documentary about global warming and spent the whole night crying about the polar bears. Does it all add up? Do you know, deep inside, which is the right decision? You walk into the voting booth. You open your ballot. Two roads; two paths before you. It is Election Day 2020, and everything that has happened in your life has brought you to this moment.
I mean, he certainly didn't overstate how annoying it is. I thought the barrage of ads was annoying but these last few days it's been spam phone calls and texts, extreme persistence, and 100% of this behavior that might reasonably be termed harassment is from precisely one political party. I am striving to avoid that behavior influencing me, but I'll admit if I was left alone, or had fewer people criticize my history of sometimes voting third party, I would have been able to sleepwalk through this and vote for the candidate where I happen to know someone who used to work at GiveWell and left to join their campaign staff.
This is the easy case: both candidates have been in administration (Harris has repeatedly said she wouldn't do anything different from Biden) -- so just pick which four years you think went better. (Well, correcting for covid.)
I'm primarily debating between 3rd party candidates and Harris. I apologize that my comment about golden toilets was too obscure.
I do agree with your approach, though, and have recommended a similar thing (although I make no adjustments for COVID).
"(although I make no adjustments for COVID)."
You think Harris somehow prevented a global pandemic? Or you don't think it affected you?
"I apologize that my comment about golden toilets was too obscure."
Ah. For what it's worth, as far as I know, Donald Trump doesn't have a gold toilet (iirc that was fake news). But either way making your voting decisions on the basis of how someone's bathroom is decorated, is irresponsible so I hope you don't do that.
"Due to religious commitments to live simply to support those in need, I am unlikely to vote for the candidate with a golden toilet."
Maybe it's more relevant to check poverty statistics during each administration to see which vote is most likely to support people? I haven't done this so I don't know what you'd find. But given your stated priorities it seems like a good way to go.
In January 2020 I was in Taiwan. They avoided the pandemic with good policy. America has the best public health infrastructure in the world. The reason there were lockdowns was the result of bad policy and incompetent administration. I understand this is controversial in America, but I figured I'd speak plainly. I have no reason to suspect a *huge* gap between Biden and Trump in this regard, but I also don't "adjust for" it, in the sense of disregarding it.
And yes, I believe if you wish to be a servant to the people, you should care about them enough that you do not accumulate billions while your brothers and sisters, made in the image of God, perish in the cold. Side note: The fake news bit is that the toilet isn't *solid* gold, it's merely gilded.
> They avoided the pandemic with good policy.
If only Trump had adopted the sagacious policy for the US of "being a small island."
I think that Harris would have tried. Telephone Xi and say, with suitably diplomatic phrasing, “Bad news tends to flow to the top slowly in an authoritarian regime like yours. But the reality it isn’t in either of our interests for this virus to turn into a global pandemic. You need to get a handle on this before that happens, and we will be happy to send you the CDC’s best virologists to help you out.”
It’s likely that COVID-19 was too transmissible to be contained in China no matter what Trump did. (The successes under Obama were with much less easily transmitted diseases.) But the reason that it matters who is President is that while some events are out of the President’s control, in other cases what the President can change the outcome. A President who is OK with a million Americans dying in a pandemic might make a similar choice in a situation where avoiding a million American deaths was more easily achievable.
How could one possibly correct for Covid? I can’t imagine how one would do that.
"The kings go up and the kings go down,
And who knows who shall rule?
Next night a king may starve or sleep,
But men and birds and beasts shall weep
At the burial of a fool."
-G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_the_White_Horse
Giant ants from space
Waste the human race
Mankind is destroyed
Sprinkled in the void
La la la-la-la la la la-la-la la la la-la-la.
--Blondie
> We reject these, and - in a country with a hundred living Nobel laureates - near-invariably pick a pair of mediocrities, extremists, or lunatics.
If you set up a system so that no competent individual can get anything done without compromising their integrity, this is exactly the outcome you should expect.
You’d have to either be evil, insane, or else willing to take massive personal sacrifice and endure hatred of all the institutions in order for a small chance of changing this state of affairs.
Maybe we'll end up electing oligarchs like Musk or Bezos -- and letting go of the masquerade. Good actors like Reagan and O'Bummer are rare.
“All of these involve foreign policy going worse under Trump than Harris. Is this unfair?”
I actually think the worst case scenario is China invades Taiwan and the US responds militarily. That sounds like it will almost certainly start WWIII and I and many Americans would rather we don’t start WWIII over Taiwan. We’d be better off doing what we do with Ukraine, and help with intelligence and supplies.
I went ahead and ran conditional probability to see which candidate is more likely to get us in this worse case scenario. I got 13.5% for Trump and 12.75% for Harris. That’s actually extremely similar and I find both numbers uncomfortably high.
"That sounds like it will almost certainly start WWIII and I and many Americans would rather we don’t start WWIII over Taiwan"
Compare: "Britain started WW2 by declaring war on Germany over Poland".
I think if China is willing to open up WW3 over Taiwan, then WW3 with the Russia-NK-Iran-China axis is just a matter of time; and the more ground surrendered without a fight is more advantage given to that axis when there is a fight, as well as inviting our descendants to be ashamed of our terrible decisions (like we look upon pre-WW2 western leaders today).
I think if you're worried about this, then voting for the candidate more likely to place sanctions on China right now is a good start.
You seem to read "the US responds militarily" as "the US attacks China". I think the first is quite likely, and the second implausible. I expect that the US would ensure that TMSC was destroyed, and that certain people were evacuated. That's likely to involve a military response, even with the advance preparation that's already in place.
I checked the resolution criteria and this is what it listed. “The United States will be considered to have responded with military forces if there is an offensive physical attack on Chinese infrastructure, ships, military personnel, or civilians, in direct retaliation to the full-scale invasion, and this attack is ordered by a member of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff or the President. Cyberattacks will not be considered offensive physical attacks, but covert operations to e.g. assassinate Chinese nationals, will count”
Destroying TMSC and evacuations should not count on that definition, unless we destroy TMSC after China occupies it. I would consider what is described in the evaluation criteria as a bad outcome.
> Destroying TMSC and evacuations should not count on that definition, unless we destroy TMSC after China occupies it.
TSMC (and a number of other businesses / factories) have active explosives and plans to blow them up in all their fabs / factories in the case of Chinese invasion.
I was not aware of that (though, given how fragile a semiconductor fab is, I had assumed that any significant fight would wreck it anyway). Many Thanks!
Theo didn't manipulate anything--he's a whale doing whale things. The markets DID correct, it just took longer than it would have done on the NYSE. This is exactly as we should expect for a nascent market with smallish liquidity; no institutionalized research, market makers or trading desks; and significant barriers to entry (crypto-only; non-U.S.; excluded from most fund objectives). I think the lesson here is get that dry powder into your Polymarket account and be ready to strike whenever a Theo places a bet. Unlike on Wall Street, retail has a real opportunity to play the arb game on prediction markets--for now at least.
Now that we know the outcome, maybe Theo was just correct, and there was nothing to arb.
>The pundits who guessed 51-49 will be hailed as prophets; the pundits who guessed 49-51 will get bullied out of public life.
Also, we'll finally learn whether the American public is a wise and freedom-loving people or brainwashed fools who want fascism slash communism.
Neither side supports freedom. Both sides support fascism, in the sense of Mussolini. Nobody (well, nobody with any power) on the face of this planet supports communism as defined by Marx.
The major difference is that the Democrats support a social safety net, and the Republicans oppose one.
>Neither side supports freedom. Both sides support fascism, in the sense of Mussolini.
Agreed. Which is basically why I grit my teeth while voting.
The American public will be found to be a wise and freedom-loving people, as the brainwashed fools lost. This will be true no matter who wins.
>“Polymarket said there was a 66% chance he would win, but he lost, so it must have been rigged!”
You'd think that, when Trump won at ~33% odds from Nate Silver, people would know better than to say stuff like this, but here we are. How soon we forget.
(If elected, I promise I will make XCOM part of our school curriculum so that every student learns how often you miss a 66% shot.)
> (If elected, I promise I will make XCOM part of our school curriculum so that every student learns how often you miss a 66% shot.)
Well I just became a single-issue voter. This is genius.
(also add FFT and possibly Darkest Dungeon with a mod to remove the (minimal but existent) cheating in your favor)
Doesn't XCOM2 display fake probabilities in lower difficulty modes? As in, the actual chance to hit is higher than the number shown to the player.
All the XCOM games (and tactics games generally) play very fast and loose with probability. Basically, they're always cheating in one way or another. What they display is only relatively correct (you hit higher probability shots more than lower probability ones), but not absolutely correct or even consistent.
It varies by the game. The EU/EW RNG is honest on Classic difficulty or above, as far as I know. XCOM2 is not (which is a large part of why I never got into it -- the other part being that it took my least-favorite mission type and made it the centerpiece of the game).
I wonder if there's a fan database somewhere of "which game RNGs are honest and how the dishonest ones cheat".
We can pretend that represents epistemic uncertainty.
It does. I thought on Veteran it was fair except for a few bonuses when you're losing, but I misremembered, apparently - it also gives you a flat multiplier to your accuracy. Here's the full breakdown:
https://www.reddit.com/r/XCOM2/comments/45u81x/yes_xcom_2s_rng_cheats_in_your_favor_heres_how/
Still fairer than Fire Emblem's "roll twice and take the average" method. :P
Use Battle for Wesnoth instead then.
But one should almost always choose the three-shot option! Even at the lower 60%, one of those ought to hit.
Hi Scott!
What's your take on the new Interactive Brokers forecast market?
https://forecasttrader.interactivebrokers.com/eventtrader/#/markets
Kind regards,
David
Quoting Kipling? Yeah, that's the other reason you're popular with conservative intellectuals. You may be a technophilic liberaltarian, but you have an appreciation of the Great Western Tradition, and they pick up on that.
I was thinking of making this comment in a “mock outraged” tone, but, upon reflection, it’s actually worth being earnest about it.
What would a conservative intellectual (in your model) consider as the Great Western Tradition worth appreciating?
I’m asking because I wonder how much overlap there is with what my own (Western European) country would call the Great Western Tradition.
Having two Great Western Traditions with little overlap would be quite peculiar. Yet Chesterton or Kipling seem to be fairly obscure figures there, even to the literate.
Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Dante, Chaucer, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Plato, Boethius, Epictetus, Dickens, Austin, etc.
This is an interesting list, thank you. Could you please carry on beyond the “etc”? I’m curious about what else comes to your mind.
Its a bit hard, actually, because there are so many to choose from! But here's my best shot off the top of my head: St. Augustine, Locke, Aristotle, Malory, Goethe, Aquinas (though honestly, who can really read the whole "Summa"?), Ovid, Virgil, Homer, Herodotus, the Gospels, Coleridge, Byron, Blake, Melville, and Pascal.
I'm sure I'm missing quite a lot of authors. Personally I'd argue for C. S. Lewis, Chesterton, and Tolkien but I don't think most conservative intellectuals would consider them part of the Western Canon.
I see, thank you. The Western Canon is indeed pretty big, but I was curious what would come to your mind under that name (and especially what the overlap would be with what would be called “Western Canon” in my country).
I agree with most of the Classics (except Boethius and maybe Epictetus but only on the principle that “there may be other names worth mentioning”).
Dante, Sheakspeare, the Russians, Goethe, Milton: no objection there.
Aequinas: probably, yes. There are few better people representing the Medieval period.
But then – then it becomes the list of great English writers (and Pascal, I guess). They’re fine representatives of the Western Canon, certainly – but their over-representation makes the “Western” claim ring a bit hollow.
(Honestly, I’m not sure what fraction of the Western population could write a remotely fair list without an encyclopedia. Let alone if we don’t tell them we’re looking for some kind of balance… how far we have fallen, that “the West” will only denote the Romans and the Greeks, and our language. Zweig would know better, and I suspect his contemporaries as well.)
Here are a few more ideas for the list (ordered mostly by nationality because it’s easier – so weak is the “Western” glue that attaches us): Hobbes, Hume, Smith, Cervantes, Boccace, Petrarques, Erasmus, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Lessing, Hegel, Corneille, Rousseau, Dumas, Hugo.
I definitely have an English language bias, but what can I say: it's the only language I know! I would not disagree with any of your additions to the list (except maybe for Hegel, but I suppose he is too influential to avoid including). Out of your additions I am not familiar at all with Lessing or Corneille. So that's a bit of data for you on differences in perspective.
Kipling has a lot going for him. Read some of his poetry, read it aloud. I'm very far from the "right" side, but I've got a lot of appreciation for him. If nothing else, read "Boots". (That's a simple one, though not my favorite.) https://allpoetry.com/poem/8445289-Boots-by-Rudyard-Kipling
Oh, I wasn't being sarcastic at all. Some of his stuff's amazing.
<quote> This market is priced higher than Manifold’s chance that Trump loses, suggesting a ~5% chance that the Democrats riot (or that Republicans win but riot anyway).</quote>
Is it 100% conditional on a Trump loss? Otherwise this isn't correct is it?
The argument I've heard, and that makes sense to me, about Taiwan being more likely to be invaded under Trump is that he's more likely to end up with a large war in the middle east; if US resources like aircraft carriers are deployed in the middle east, that means they're not deployed in Taiwan, and so necessarily Taiwan's defense suffers.
"about Taiwan being more likely to be invaded under Trump is that he's more likely to end up with a large war in the middle east"
Counterpoint: there was no big war in the Middle East during Trump; contrast the years before and after he was in. So I don't buy this argument.
I think you have to consider the argument that the Abraham accords were the impetus for Hamas to start planning to blow things up. The Abraham accords were death to them. The Palestinian cause that they represented was being completely sidelined. There are the economic concepts of leading and lagging indicators, and I am often surprised at how people don’t take this into consideration when they assign events to a cause. It is similar to the theory that 9/11 would never have happened had Gore been elected president.
"the argument that the Abraham accords were the impetus for Hamas to start planning to blow things up"
Hamas has been blowing things up since their inception. If you're referring to triggering a wider conflict, then I don't think it makes sense because they and Hezbollah have been digging those tunnels for long before the Accords, and they only seem to have one purpose (that is, this wider conflict).
I imagine it's more likely to be Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran receiving lots of money; the US pressure to have more crossings for Gazans into the towns near Israel, and for Israel to stop enforcing the Gaza buffer zone; and the general perception that the US would do its best to protect Hamas's position in Gaza; and the US feeding its allies corrupted information (fed to it by the Iran via the Iran Experts Initiative https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/iran-spy-ring-robert-malley-lee-smith ) downplaying the plans of Hamas and exaggerating the strength of Iran and Hezbollah.
I never meant to imply that Hamas has not been causing all kinds of trouble for a long time and that the tunnel network has been built out over decades, I guess. But the set up for October 7 and the intensity of it was clearly meant to set things off in a big way. I find it difficult to believe that the prospect of upsetting closer diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel was not a consideration for them.
"I find it difficult to believe that the prospect of upsetting closer diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel was not a consideration for them."
Totally agree. But to be exact I think it was a "when" consideration over timing of the attack; and not an "if" consideration over whether or not to carry out the attack.
> There are the economic concepts of leading and lagging indicators, and I am often surprised at how people don’t take this into consideration when they assign events to a cause.
They do! Their consideration or lack thereof just has no causal relationship to reality.
Back in the Bush II years, I'd hear conservatives blame his recession on Clinton, on the grounds that a president's economic policies don't show their effects until after the president leaves office. It's not an entirely unreasonable argument! But I never heard it deployed to blame the recession of Bush I on Reagan.
The left wing is no different in that respect. Right or left, lagging effects will be acknowledged only and exactly to the extent that doing so assigns blame to the hated Other Side and credit to the virtuous Our Side.
But the world is different now from how it was eight years ago. Eight years ago, easy money policies and tariffs couldn't provoke inflation but now they could. Eight years ago, the biggest Middle East situation was figuring out how to wind down involvement in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, but there’s some other stuff going on there now.
Yeah. And the proper action is to invest heavily in alternative energy sources, so the Middle East becomes economically irrelevant. We need to stop burning oil anyway. With enough solar/wind/nuclear power it becomes reasonable to synthesize the oil we still end up needing.
After we do that, we can make rational decisions about what to do in the Middle East.
The U.S. is the largest oil producer in the world, producing about a quarter of oil produced. If we use less oil as we use other sources of energy, we could export to places that still need it, and the U.S. would use a smaller percentage of world oil. This would also make the Middle East less relevant.
"easy money policies and tariffs couldn't provoke inflation but now they could."
I'm under the impression that the current spending is unprecedented; hence inflation.
"Eight years ago, the biggest Middle East situation was figuring out how to wind down involvement in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, but there’s some other stuff going on there now."
The biggest ME situation then as now was Iran. But the propaganda from the whitehouse that this wasn't the case was considerable. Best source for this is Ben Rhodes, Obama's top advisor, talking about how they spent his admin lying and covering up the reality of the ME. (I think this is the article, but it's now paywalled from me. Good luck.) https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html
I think the reason people make this argument is that the middle east is much closer to disaster at the moment; whereas before it was only necessary to avoid causing trouble, now it's necessary to take active effort to avoid war. Republican administrations don't have a great history in brokering agreements that lead to peace (compared to, say, the JCPOA, or normalization with Cuba). I'm not optimistic about the prospects of either Harris or Trump to avoid a larger war in the middle east, though.
A reason I find more persuasive, though that I've not heard many people talk about, is that if Trump wins, then Biden will be in an incredibly weak position to act in the lame duck period; that is an opportunity for an invasion of Taiwan, and also an opportunity for a larger Israeli war against Iran, which would make the US less able to respond to an invasion of Taiwan. Conversely, if Harris wins, then she and Biden will be in a relatively strong position to act, since there's not much break in continuity. People always try to get away with stuff in the lame duck period.
Biden is currently a lame duck. I don't see what is special about the period between the election and inauguration. If China would attack under a Harris presidency but not a Trump one, then this would make sense. But if China would attack under a Trump presidency but not a Harris one, then they would have to attack between November and January, and leave Trump with the fallout from it.
My point is more about whether China would be more likely to attack under a Biden lame duck leading to a Trump presidency (since Biden would be relatively more weak) than a Biden lame duck leading to a Harris presidency (since Biden would be relatively less weak). Though I suppose we're about to find out how the Trump version of events goes.
These two months are very special if (and only if) the Biden-Harris admin is actually very extremist (that is, anti-Israel, pro-Iran, pro-China, and so on) and has only been held back by wanting to be re-elected. This two months will be largely forgotten by the electorate so it is a period when they can potential be unleashed from their constraints.
I, personally, expect to see harsh measures taken against Israel in these two months of some form or another as I believe that people in the current admin dislike Israel but have been restricted by the American public's general affinity for Israel.
This is what happened when Obama lost. His administration had UN security council resolution 2334 passed which called for the ethnic cleansing of all Jews in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem; specifically it said that there should be no Jews (irrespective or nationality) living anywhere across the 48 ceasefire lines (including in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem) -- and had no problem with the 20% of Israeli citizens who are not Jewish living there -- or anyone of any other background who may have moved there no matter how recently -- it was a straight call for ethnic cleansing. At the time, the administration claimed that they had nothing to do with it and didn't agree with it but didn't want to veto it; but later it turned out that they drafted it. This was indefensible, but they knew they could get away with it in these two months without hurting future democrat candidates.
Based on this, I'm half expecting some similarish security council resolution, possibly related to Gaza or Lebanon.
If they had come down against Israel, they might have won Michigan. Michigan had a big protest during the primary, with just over 100,000 voters voting "uncommitted". Trump won Michigan in the general election by about 80,000 votes.
Of course, coming down on Israel might have lost voters elsewhere, but we know for sure now that their actions on Israel didn't win them the election.
In any case, I think it's a lot of hubris to think one can influence policy just by saying what you want done or you will withhold your vote. How many of those "undecided" voters stayed home or voted for Trump? AFAIK, no one knows, but I find both improbable.
"before it was only necessary to avoid causing trouble, now it's necessary to take active effort to avoid war"
That's what happens when you remove stabilizing forces from Afghanistan and Iraq and unlock huge amounts of money to Iran who then use it (as everyone knew they would) to fund their proxies in Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon.
"Peace" agreements like the JCPOA caused the current situation.
"and also an opportunity for a larger Israeli war against Iran, which would make the US less able to respond to an invasion of Taiwan."
Iran has been waging a war against Israel for the past year, and has only been able to do that because they know the US will protect them. The US's policy of protecting Iran has emboldened it into firing hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel. This will continue until the moment the US tells Iran that Israel is free to respond however they like -- the US will not hold them back; then I would expect everything to get a lot quieter very quickly. (Based on prior experience of Iran preferring to sacrifice its proxies readily but being very reluctant to brave attacks on Iran proper.)
Also, keep in mind that China-NorthKorea-Russia-Iran are a coordinated axis who are constantly supporting and re-enforcing each other. Weakening Iran, weakens this axis. Also, supporting Israel in the middle east means you can move a lot more forces closer to Taiwan, deterring China, while having the important diplomatic plausible deniability that they're only there to support Israel and US bases across the Middle East.
I don't know if this is right. Lots of surprises this year. But imagining that this administration or the Obama one has contributed to peace in the world or the Middle East... well, if you're holding that opinion I'd be interested how you'd explain all the current wars in the middle east, the violent takeover of Afghanistan (under Biden), the complete disintegration of Syria (under Obama), the war in Ukraine (under Biden), including the mobilization of North Korea, the invasion of Crimea (under Obama), the rise of Islamic State (under Obama), and so on; as well as the complete absence of similar events in the four years when Obama and Biden were not in power?
This is minor, but Silver had Trump as high as 64% going into his debate with Harris (much higher than markets, which had him at 51% at the same time): https://www.natesilver.net/p/nate-silver-2024-president-election-polls-model
>I’m not sure why “Trump in power beyond 2028” needs to be conditional
I am guessing on the chance that Trump loses but then is alive, runs, and wins in 2028?
I assume that “Trump in power beyond 2028” is conditional because it is possible for Trump to lose this election and get elected in 2028.
The value function of betting for a trump victory is inherently tilted by only allowing bets outside of the USA, right? You can debate the effect of Trump's tarrifs on the US economy, although I assume most people here would agree it's negative, but surely there are very few people who think it'll be good for anyone outside of the USA. Betting for a Trump victory seems like a obvious way to hedge against the risk of a Trump victory, so you'd expect his chances to be over represented by a betting market that cannot allow Americans to participate.
On Polymarket swings:
In the best of worlds, supporters hope that prediction markets will eventually become as accurate and unexploitable as the stock market. But even in the stock market it's clear that prices can be inaccurate for long periods of time when there is enough betting from inexperienced bettors. Famous examples of this are meme stocks like AMC and GME. More on-point, there is currently a Trump-related meme stock, DJT, that has a market cap of 7B and was greater than 10B as of last week. This is despite the company having a last-quarter revenue of 800K (down YoY) and a net income of -16M. If you look at DJT over the past few months, it's mainly been rising and lowering with the vibes of how well Trump has been doing in the election. Sports-betting has similar problems in popular markets (or so I've heard), where betting odds are least accurate during the Super Bowl.
So even if prediction markets succeed beyond your wildest dreams, they may still be skewed towards the vibes of the user base on especially popular markets.
I don't know what it means for a price to be "inaccurate." The GameStop thing was a short squeeze, one of the well-known ways by which those who bet badly on the market lose, and as I understand it, the "inexperienced bettors" (some bagholders aside) exploited it correctly.
Perhaps a price that is undiscovered would be a better way to put it.
Still can't get over how dumb that tweet is. Even if we accept those percentages as real, that is still a 1 in 3 chance for Harris to win. "I have a 2 in 3 chance to roll 3 or above, so if I roll a 1 or 2 the dice must be loaded"
"Still can't get over how dumb that tweet is."
Isn't this the best, most accurate description of what Twitter is?
It took me a while, but I think the explanation is that they've mistaken it for a percentage share of the vote in a poll. If those /were/ reliable polling numbers, it would very much look like Trump was due a landslide victory, and anything else would be very suspect indeed.
On the one hand it's very much not clear from the screenshot what the values represent, but on the other it does look like there's a link which would explain it, if only she'd clicked through.
Honestly, I've seen worse misinterpretations of statistics.
Trump being favored as much as he was/is in prediction markets is of course evidence *against* his hypothetical loss being due to fraud.
Crypto markets are way down over the last week or so, is it possible people are using the betting markets to hedge crypto markets?
"The mathematicians say there are simple voting systems that could practically ensure the selection of a universally-popular moderate. We reject these, and - in a country with a hundred living Nobel laureates - near-invariably pick a pair of mediocrities, extremists, or lunatics. Once their inherent badness has been magnified by a froth of propaganda, millions end out convinced that one candidate or the other wants to hunt them for sport,. . ."
(1) True, the magnification and demonization is bad. But how would we avoid it? Not by nominating moderates. The magnification and demonization process would be at work in the same way as now--- remember, the problem with it is that it takes reality and warps it, so the end point is not going to be close to the starting point. Mitt Romney's presidential run is an example-- he was terribly moderate, but Obama demonized him anyway. (Did Romney demonize Obama? I don't remember him doing that.)
(2) Do we want moderate nominees? No, I think. We indeed could change the voting rules to get them. I write as a game theory PhD, a student of Eric Maskin, the ranked-choice voting Nobelist. We could do it by having a nonpartisan primary, as some states now do, where the top two votegetters are the nominees even if both are Republicans. Our current system results in the conservative's favorite and the liberal's favorite, instead of the median voter's favorite.
But maybe we *want* more extreme candidates, instead of having two moderates run against each other in the general election. People complain about lack of choice, about the Uniparty, about mediocrity. Having two distinct choices might be better. In a lot of policy situations, going with a strong Yes or a strong No is much better than going with an incoherent compromise. In the Ukraine, for example, taking a strong "Russia, hands off" policy in 2021, or a clear "Russia, you can stay in the Donbass and we'll be happy" would both have been better than "Russia, we're very unhappy but we're not going to threaten you"; there would be no war with either of the first two policies. I like the fact that the people with strong principles in each party force a choice on the wishy washy middle, and give us a real choice.
The ultimate in the opposite was when back 80 years ago Earl Warren won both the Republican (his party) and the Democratic nominations for Governor of California, because he was so centrist.
On the Ukraine and Harris/Trump: Do keep in mind the win/win possibility. Currently, Russia occupies a big chunk of Ukraine, and there's a bloody war going on. That's been true for three years, and if Harris wins, is there any reason to think it will change? If Trump wins, he says he'll make peace, and I believe him. What he doesn't say is that his peace will result in Russia occupying a big chunk of the Ukraine, though a bit smaller than the current chunk since he's a good bargainer, just with no bloody war any more. That, however, is a win/win as far as the Ukraine and Russia go. Thus, it is possible for both Ukraine and Russia to be hoping that Trump wins.
Speaking from a European perspective, that is indeed an argument for Trump.
The Ukrainians had their shot at reconquering territory during last years’ summer offensive. It was a decent attempt and worth a try, but it failed. The Russians were too good at defense, including stacking areas with mines.
By now, this is a potentially forever-ongoing war of attrition with no end in sight. Putin has difficulties making feelers for peace, as this risks being perceived as weakness and undermine his position at home. Zelenski, exactly the same.
The US, coming in from the outside, is perhaps the only one who can break this “logic of the situation”. US can say something like this to Putin: “If you are satisfied with what you have got and make that promise credible to us, we will shut off weapons supply to Ukraine. If on the other hand you want to (or show signs of) pushing on, we will give the Ukrainians more weapons, including weapons we have so far denied them, and weapons that can reach much further into Russia.”
Such an offer gives both Putin and Zelenski an opportunity to say ok to a seize-fire (perhaps even peace), without loss of face – i.e. being defendable domestically for both of them (if presented right).
Both Trump and Harris can to this, but Harris is hampered by Biden having declared Putin a war criminal. It is difficult to negotiate with someone your former boss has declared a war criminal.
Mind you, she can still do it, but it is more difficult for her than it would be for Trump.
...if it were not for the fact that Trump attempted a coup after he lost in 2019/20, this argument would make me qua a European quite agnostic concerning the choice between Trump and Harris. But the coup attempt is like a trump card in bridge. It nulls out other considerations. Since it is very, very dangerous to elect a guy who had earlier tried to seize power by extrajudicial means.
But then, who am I (or other Europeans) to have an opinion on this. We do not have the right to vote in US elections. We can only cross our fingers that whoever is elected, turns out to be a clever and level-headed person.
Thank you for this analysis.
I cannot vote either, but I have lived here a long time so I’m slightly less clearheaded perhaps.
As a non-Ukrainian European, I don't find the prospect of such a peace compelling. Frankly, I prefer the war of attrition to drag on.
Let's say that Trump and Putin make a deal that Russia gets Donbas, and pressure Ukraine to accept a seize-fire under this condition. Then I expect that Putin and Russia will not stop militarization. Just then there won't be daily losses of men and material. Instead Putin will build a pretty frightening army in the next 3-5 years, and will go to war with some country. There are candidates amass: apart from Ukraine (which is pretty likely to become a target again), there are countries like Georgia, Moldova, Estonia. Especially attacks on the latter two can way too easy result in a large conflict with NATO. I am very unconvinced that such a cease-fire would decrease the chances of escalation, it would just open up new battlefronts.
This is also the reason why Ukrainians are so little thrilled by the prospect of making peace with Russia. They have tried that 2014 and 2015 (and arguably 2019), and it just brought them further Russian attacks.
And that is not even accounting for countries like Syria, Libya, Mali, or the Central African Republic, where Russian troops are active and having (in the last case) a direct control over the government.
Let us agree that the Russians should ask themselves this soul-searching question: “Why is it that none of our neighbors voluntarily want to bond with us, rather than with the European Union and USA? Why is it that the only way we can make them be on our side, is through brute force?”
…And more particularly, before they invaded Ukraine, why did they not ask themselves: “What’s in it for the Ukrainians? What have they to gain by us making them our (forced) friends?”
Framed differently: The Russian elite somehow forgets, or fails to consider, that their former vassal states have agency. They are not passive chess pieces in the game Russia and USA play with each other.
…admittedly this agency has been a “problem” for the so-called West also. Did EU and the USA want all the new Central/East European countries as members of EU and members of NATO? I followed that debate rather closely in 1992 onwards, and the answer is that the great desire back then was “not to act in a way that makes us lose Russia”.
..but what can you do, when state after state knocks on your door and wants in, with the perfectly understandable reason that “we want to get into some other alliance while Russia is weak, because God knows what they will do when they sooner or later become strong again”. (Perfectly rational behavior under uncertainty.)
When they got these knocks on the door, the West could hardly say: “Eh, you know, we certainly think you are fully independent nations now, power to you…but eh…we would prefer that you preserved an independent self-image where you still belong to Russia, you know.” That’s impossible to say, for a variety of reasons. So state after state got in, and western elites were increasingly bitching to each other “who lost Russia?”
…And the answer is: No-one in the West did. The logic of the situation, in particular the perceived self-interest of the states formerly living under big-brother Russia’s shadow, did. Russia as an alliance partner for the West was lost, at least temporarily. And with the ongoing war, the chance has receded further at least 10-20 more years.
Ok, that was just some background, before commenting on your comment: The characteristic of a compromise is that no-one is fully satisfied. So of course it is not ideal to strike a deal with Russia. But it is something it is hopefully possible to live with, for all parties
….The alternative is to win. But the summer offensive last year showed that the Ukrainians are unlikely to be able to push the Russians out. Or, do you want to go completely insane and attack Russia itself, to make them let go of eastern Ukraine?? No-one in the West want to risk World War III over eastern Ukraine. For obvious & extremely good reasons!
…finally, if you put your hope in a putsch inside Russia that replaces Putin, notice 1) that Putin is good at staying in power, grant him that, and 2) there are worse autocrats than Putin lurking in the shadows of Kreml. The main opposition to Putin is from even more nationalist Russians; from the extreme nationalist right.
…so some kind of compromise is a rational thing to look for. Implying that you/the US has to speak to both parties. And to achieve that, it was not helpful that Biden came out flat-footed and called Putin a war criminal. It was an extremely poor, emotional-type political judgement. I am still somewhat shocked that an experienced politician like Biden could make such a blunder.
Thankfully, Trump is not burdened with that legacy. (Harris would have been.)
I agree with most of what you say, especially the analysis on what happened in the 90s is very good.
But for the deal, I think your analysis has a blind eye. I completely agree with everything you said from the perspective of Ukraine and the West, but it takes two to make a deal. And for Putin, why should Putin compromise with anything less than the maximum? Right now the situation is pretty much the following:
The main goal in terms of land was to take complete control over Donbas. Even with Western aid, Russia is currently not far away from that goal. If Trump stops support, then Putin just gets this next year by military strength. So Putin has no incentive to settle with anything less. If the war continues without US aid, he will get this *plus* the propaganda success of defeating the NATO in a full-fledged war. (Maybe that's not your perspective, but I don't think Putin cares about your perspective.) A treaty only makes sense for him if he gets something at least as valuable.
What more does Putin want beyond Donbas? I see a few things that he really does want:
1) He wants a different government in Ukraine.
2) He wants a formal and binding promise of the West that Ukraine (and other countries in the Russian sphere of influence) will never become part of NATO.
3) He wants that NATO retreats from countries that are in the Russian (self-perceived) sphere of influence, like the Baltic countries.
I don't think that Trump can/will offer any of those. Perhaps Trump would be fine with saying things along 2, but I am not so sure that he can make a binding promise that lasts for more than four years. So I am not sure how much value Putin would assign to such promises.
I see a few other things that Trump could offer. Lifting the sanction. Or money. But does this counterbalance the propaganda success of Russia winning the war? For the sanctions, they have been of limited success, and with Trump in power any sanctions that also hurt the US will fall very soon anyway.
Perhaps I am a bit negative. For the propaganda success, Putin can still sell it as military victory if he agrees now to a good bargain. But for your statement "the characteristic of a compromise is that no-one is fully satisfied", I don't see why Putin should accept any deal that he doesn't find fully satisfying.
Also, on this sentence: "The Russian elite somehow forgets, or fails to consider, that their former vassal states have agency. They are not passive chess pieces in the game Russia and USA play with each other."
Yes, very true, Russian elites tend to forget this. I think they honestly still believe that the Euromaidan was a Western infiltration because the thought is so alien to them that the Ukrainians could have really wanted those things.
But even if they were aware, perhaps it is the correct action to disregard this agency? Forcing countries by brute force and fear has worked during the time of the Soviet Union as well. I mean, the very point of the Russia sphere of influence is that states in that sphere do *not* have the right to develop agency, like electing governments that do not have Russian approval.
> The main opposition to Putin is from even more nationalist Russians; from the extreme nationalist right.
That's my impression of the situation as well. The biggest critics of Putin are the ultranationalists who see him as being far too weak and passive towards Ukraine and the West. If a coup does happen (which I think very unlikely), the people in power will want to nuke Kiev, not usher in democracy.
"Framed differently: The Russian elite somehow forgets, or fails to consider, that their former vassal states have agency."
Did Czechoslovakia have agency in 1968? How about 1969? Did Hungary have agency in 1956 or 1957?
The Russian elite hasn't forgotten that agency is a thing, they have remembered that agency can be *taken away*. To the Russian elite, the "agency" of any non-Russian part of the proper Russian sphere of influence is not a fact to be accepted, but a problem to be solved. By force, by intimidation, by infiltration, by extortion - Putin is a spymaster at heart; actual invasion is probably not his first or even second or third choice here. But he and the rest of the Russian elites are never, ever going to ask themselves "what do we have to do to make the Ukrainians/Poles/whatever like us and want to team up with us?"
Do with that what you will. And be judged by what you do.
Why think he’s a good enough bargainer to get Russia to give up gains they currently hold, when he’s planning to cut off aid even if there is no bargain?
Russia would gain from peace, in money and blood, so they'd be willing to give up a little something. If they do, Putin can still declare victory because he still retains some, and Zelensky can declare victory too.
Better yet, Trump could give each side a billion dollars, and get even more territory back from Russia. We did something like that with Israel and Egypt. Part of that deal was heavy foreign aid for Egypt as well as Israel.
Teddy Roosevelt got a Nobel Peace prize for making peace between the Japanese and Russians in 1905. He pressured the Japanese to give back some but not all of what htye conquered.
Note that in the 1905 case too, we let our more likely adversary keep some of what it conquered. Japan was a moderate threat to us even in 1905.
"Trump could give each side a billion dollars, and get [...]"
Please tell me it's a joke. [Edit: removed an unnecessarily inflammatory phrase, sorry about that] A billion? Just one?
That’s a bit harsh. On the merits, I completely agree with you but still…
Ok, agreed. I should strike the second sentence.
On a second thought, no, it wasn’t harsh enough…
I am not sure you are correct about Putin and I am not sure $1 billion each would be enough to calm the waters but giving you all of that it would be at best a postponement. The conflict would rear it’s ugly head again in the not too distant future. Maybe that’s enough. I was in Poland this summer and it is the first time I have traveled that far east in Europe.
It was a real eye-opener for me.
A billion dollars is the valuation of a single town of a few thousand houses.
Mutatis mutandis. Change it to 50 billion, if you like.
I see. You are serious about this. How does this number compare with Russia’s monthly spend on this war? What about its monthly oil and gas revenues? Who specifically are you proposing this be offered to? What is the mechanism that insures that whoever takes the money can/will stop the war?
I feel exhausted just typing this.
"We reject these, and - in a country with a hundred living Nobel laureates - near-invariably pick a pair of mediocrities, extremists, or lunatics."
The "or" does a lot of work here. Consider our 4 P and VP candidates. Harris is a mediocrity and an extremist, but not a lunatic. Walz is an extremist, maybe a mediocrity, but not a lunatic. Vance is neither an extremist, a mediocrity, or a lunatic, and in fact is a brilliant lawyer and author and impressive in all kinds of ways. Trump is definitely no mediocrity-- he is very talented and very special, one of the richest men in the country and successful at his own business. He is no extremist, either, though he pretends to be one-- he is on the left of the Republican party, and only his rhetoric is extreme. We could, however, call him a lunatic, using his own "figuratively but not literally true" style appropriately; he is a narcissist, a vain attention-lover.
Could you elaborate on why you view Harris as an extremist?
Personally, I voted against her largely because of her support for censoring online speech, which is an unconstitutional position, but not, I fear, an uncommon one (hence, unfortunately in my view, not an extremist one). What do you see in her record and/or positions that is extremist?
Doing away with the first amendment is extremist, no matter how popular it might be. You can swing populations to extremes using propaganda.
There is even a rumour you can convince good people to try to genocide an entire other people using propaganda.
It's extremist because any dispassionate observer would recoil in horror.
An extremist is "a person who holds extreme or fanatical political or religious views, especially one who resorts to or advocates extreme action", according to Google. So a popular position can't be extremist, unless it's also a fanatical position.
Anyway, though I think free speech is an important right, I don't see the case that a dispassionate observer would recoil in horror at not having the right guaranteed. For example, I think the US no longer has functional free speech, in the sense that one can get canceled for speaking freely, if not legally prosecuted for it. There can be consequences for exercising your rights.
>Doing away with the first amendment is extremist, no matter how popular it might be.
Ok, Many Thanks!
If calls for unconstitutional censorship are extremism, then you should probably worry about the guy who called for CNBC to lose its broadcast license, especially since he just won an election.
I think views can be both common and extremist, sadly. In these terms I agree with you that she is an extremist (because of her being highly pro-censorship).
In those terms, I agree. Many Thanks!
Could you please.elaborate on why you dont regard Vance as an extremist?
You've got the burden of proof here, since most politicians aren't extremists-- why do you think he might be an extremist?
Seems to me there are two common confusions about the election markets. First, the key point (in any speculative market) is not simply 'who bid up price x so much' - thinking that if you understand their motives and knowledge you can figure out the deeper meaning. The key point is that if the high price persists, why isn't anyone going in the other direction? It isn't just one rich guy betting one way, its lots of other poor and rich folks NOT betting the other way.
OTOH, the second confusion is that a 60% chance of victory in a single event isn't as dramatic as come people seem to think. I believe some intuitively connect it to a 60% poll result - which would be very dramatic.
As i see it, for quite some time the election markets have been saying its quite close, and trump has a bit of an edge. But its hard to see how any result will point to any kind of verdict on election markets generally.
"...in a few years than because of any flaw in Mayor Breed’s policies." Are you kidding me!? She defunded the police at the peak of the pandemic and also pretty much announced that announced that misdemeanors would not be prosecuted. Then there was SFs infamous Draconian measures for pandemic which drove our businesses is into the ground. It's incredible you can get away with this statement and pretend to be any source of rational opinion.
Can you explain more about what you mean? When I look for Breed's record on crime, I see things like:
Breed Backs GOP Initiative To Stiffen Penalties For Retail Theft: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-02-08/san-francisco-mayor-london-breed-backs-gop-initiative-to-stiffen-penalties-for-retail-theft
Breed Unveils New Penalties Cracking Down On Sideshows: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-mayor-london-breed-unveils-new-penalties-cracking-down-sideshows/
Breed Convinces Voters To Approve Measures Moving The City Strikingly Rightward On Crime: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/06/sf-voters-approve-mayor-london-breeds-drug-and-crime-measures-00145257
San Francisco Crime Down As City Prepares To Implement New [Mayor Breed Backed] Public Safety Measures: https://www.sf.gov/news/san-francisco-2024-crime-rates-down-city-prepares-implement-new-voter-approved-public-safety
Can Mayor Breed Take Credit For San Francisco's Crime Drop: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sf-crime-breed-2024-election-18624198.php
What sources are you using?
Am I reading the ballot props correctly? Have we escaped the Kidney One this year?
Yes!
Why are we so quick to dismiss the possibility that Theo and other Polymarket traders do have special information, and that the market is correctly priced? I'm not saying this *is* true, but surely we should be willing to *countenance* the a priori default explanation, rather than assuming it must be one of five different types of trader irrationality/liquidty failure.
I will never understand the intuition smart people have that fake-money markets are more reliable than real ones. You have a financial incentive to fix the reliability of the real-money ones!
Reliability in what sense though?
Correctly aggregating information.
If some random French banker had special inside information on the US election that Nate Silver, the NYT, etc, didn't, that would imply some kind of crazy story that would be the biggest scandal of the decade (Conspiracy to rig? Secret polling operation which is vastly better than any of the known polling operations?). And instead all the major news sources know who he is and don't seem to care.
I think the main reason why real-money markets have been worse than play-money ones is because play money ones give everyone about the same amount of play money (or distribute play money based on some mechanism that can't be massively gamed), whereas with real money markets some guy can just have $75 million and get more votes than everyone else combined. In theory smart people should enter the market to take the other side, but in practice most people are only willing to bet ~1% of their net worth on a single question, so if the average trader has a net worth of $500K and will bet $5K, it takes 15,000 other traders to take the other side of Theo's bet and it looks like that just didn't materialize.
If you think of prediction markets like any other financial market, it just doesn’t make sense that there would be a fifteen point mispricing in a liquid market with no bet limit. Why wouldn’t a (diversified) financial firm correct it? In comparison, think about how small the alphas are that these hedge fund guys are chasing.
I have the opposite intuition regarding the effect of bet limits (forcing an even distribution): if there’s no limit, then you only need one person to correct a systematic mispricing. As an example, everyone knows that big teams like the Dallas Cowboys always get extra action from their fans. But their lines are never mispriced, because it would literally only take one sharp to correct them. You could just keep betting indefinitely until you moved the line and your EV disappeared. With a low bet limit, however, Cowboys lines would always remain mispriced, because the market would be restricted in how it could aggregate information.
I’m not saying Theo or anyone else had inside information, but elections are notoriously difficult to predict, even given the publicly available data. Your theory of the world required that there were millions of dollars out there and nobody was taking them, versus the possibility that Nate Silver (goated as he may be) was wrong in this case.
I don't think the "why wouldn't a financial firm correct it?" question tells us anything about whether Theo had secret knowledge, because a financial firm wouldn't know if Theo had secret knowledge, and couldn't use that fact in determining whether or not to correct it. I think the more likely answer is that there no financial firm with a significant amount of assets under management is currently specced to invest in prediction markets (they might not be regulatorily allowed to).
Except we now know that Theo did have a) a specific and sensible theory about why the polls were wrong and b) his own private polling from a professional Democratic pollster to support his theory.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/how-the-trump-whale-correctly-called-the-election-cb7eef1d?st=YAsoUY&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
There are one million people with opinions of approximately this quality. Half of them had galaxy-brained theories for why the polls were wrong and Kamala would win by a landslide, half for why Trump would. The fact that the one of these guys who made it big was on the side that happened to be correct is almost meaningless.
Private polling which is moderately better publically available polling,
Private information into public polling unpublished methodology. Are possible explanations here.
Obviously, just got lucky is an explanation as well.
Fwiw Silver noticed herding among the pollsters which suggested something was up with their methodology, he came to different conclusions as to what was up with it than Theo did.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/theres-more-herding-in-swing-state
Whether this guy was a sharp or a whale seems very much an open question.
On The Edge chapter on sports betting states that individuals sharps often move lines.
Can you tell me more about private polling being better than public? I'm sure private pollsters claim this, but I've never seen any evidence that it's consistently true. Also, if someone was better than the public, I would expect it to be a campaign's internals, but how would a random French guy have gotten access to those?
I don’t have any unique info, how much does it cost to conduct a poll?
If you had $75 million riding on it, what percentage of that could you devote to commissioning a poll with whatever methodology you think it should be conducted with?
Scott, see the link above. Theo believed that standard polls underestimated Trump's vote, but that polls which asked people what their neighbors were going to do were more accurate. Then he commissioned such polling for this cycle in certain places. Here's the story again:
https://www.wsj.com/finance/how-the-trump-whale-correctly-called-the-election-cb7eef1d?st=YAsoUY&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Reading that WSJ article, I’ll update modestly towards lucky whale. I’m somewhat skeptical of the ‘shy Trump voter’ theory.
I respect the skin in the game though, and don’t begrudge him his windfall.
This is solidly in the "got lucky" category, unless the guy had been running polls like this in previous elections to calibrate. Human behavior is far too complicated for anyone to have justified confidence in a theory as simplistic as "if you ask people who they think their neighbors are going to vote for, you'll know who people will on average vote for". I mean, among other things, different demographic groups will have differing levels of insight into how their neighbors are going to vote. And if there's a "shy Trumpist" effect that has Trump voters unwilling to admit that fact to a pollster, then that's going to have some bearing on whether they open up to their neighbors.
It would be possible to calibrate for these and other effects, in approximately the same way that conventional pollsters calibrate for sampling and response bias but perhaps with better results. It might even turn out that all of these factors cancel and the naive uncalibrated result is close enough to the actual one.
But betting seventy-five million dollars that this will work to +/-2% the first time you try it is sheer hubris, and winning your bet on what everyone else correctly recognizes as a slightly biased coin toss, is mostly just luck.
If you think 65% is a slightly biased coin toss, you have no idea what kind of edges are considered “slight” in the world of finance: nobody would ever call winning on that kind of alpha “luck”.
If you think he was wrong and it was actually 50/50, and the evidence doesn’t change your credences at all, idk what evidence would.
If the shy Trumpist is refusing to talk to pollsters, not lying to pollsters, the neighbor technique could work. The big mystery is why there is no polling error in off years, only against Trump. If neighbor polls are equally accurate in off years, that could double the data to validate them. (But I don't think he had that data.)
(One piece of evidence that polling bias is due to response rates is the convention bounce. Do conventions really temporarily swing voters? No, they make the committed voters temporarily enthusiastic, willing to talk to pollsters.)
Sorry I typed my previous response too quickly (was rushing before I had to put phone in airplane mode before flight).
Median private poll is probably worse than public poll.
Public polls have the incentive structure right, if you think there out to just screw Trump, you’re probably dumb money.
That said, there’s a lot of methodology that goes into (determining like voters, that sort of thing).
There are varying degrees to which the exact methodology being used is a black box to you.
One big advantage to having your own poll is you can in black box the methodology. If you’re really savvy, I don’t think it’s impossible have insight as to why one methodology might be better than another)
Historically, private polling is terrible. Public polling is expensive signalling, publicly committing to the predictions so that you can be judged fairly. With private polls if you screw up you lose a client, but no one else learns that you failed.
If Theo had special information that the real odds were 75%, he could have minimized his risk by publishing that information and selling at 75%.
Nate Foss and I also worked on a more friendly visualization of policy outcomes conditional on Trump or Harris getting elected, see it on https://policypredictions.com/ !
Beautiful.
You could have a decent king or queen, and all of this stuff would go away for ten or twenty years at a time, with *short* random successions at the ends, not even all of them violent.
You could all let this go.
But do you want to?
Ctrl-R, Ctrl-R, Ctrl-R, Ctrl-R...
Re-: prediction markets, and how much they should be believed;
From Fortune Magazine:
“In separate investigations completed by the blockchain firms Chaos Labs and Inca Digital and shared exclusively with Fortune, analysts found that Polymarket activity exhibited signs of wash trading, a form of market manipulation where shares are bought and sold, often simultaneously and repeatedly, to create a false impression of volume and activity. Chaos Labs found that wash trading constituted around one-third of trading volume on Polymarket’s presidential market, while Inca Digital found that a “significant portion of the volume” on the market could be attributed to potential wash trading, according to its report.”
https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/10/30/polymarket-trump-election-crypto-wash-trading-researchers/
Wash trading inflates the volume, but shouldn't affect the actual prediction. It all comes out in the wash.
I won't weigh into the final probabilities in the forecasts covered here and extensively covered elsewhere.
But while we all wait for results, I put together some relevant spicy base rates, in the form of a quick quiz you can take to pass the time. Q1: How often do women win major elections? https://x.com/dschwarz26/status/1853926360731017299
One thing that comes to mind is that Kamala supports free sex change operations for men in prison. I've heard it said she is the most leftwing Senator, but I don't know if that's really true or by what metric (I know Obama was, by some well-known index). It is noteworthy that her father was one of the few marxist economics professors in America.
Chemical castration for rapists, not a completely new idea.
Hmm, presumably it might make _some_ sense to generalize to other sufficiently violent crimes (maybe just murder?) if the testosterone effect is large enough...
"fewer crimes" in general sounds too broad. I would be quite surprised if embezzlement has much to do with testosterone levels...
No need to castrate murderers when we can just execute them.
Many Thanks! Well, in practice, IIRC, the USA only executes about 50 convicts a year https://www.statista.com/statistics/629845/number-of-executions-per-year-in-the-us-since-2000/#:~:text=In%202023%2C%2024%20death%20row,death%20row%20inmates%20were%20executed.
while we have about 25,000 homicides a year https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm
Google claims that the clearance rate is about 50% and that about 50% of those are convicted (having trouble getting a precise URL for this), so about 6,000 murder convictions per year, roughly 99% of whom are not executed.
It might be reasonable to castrate those, if if it led them to commit fewer subsequent murders. I don't know how strong the case is for doing this. I'd put it in the "maybe worth looking into", but lower priority than trying to get the clearance rate up.
People who are never convicted aren't going to be castrated by the justice system. But once convicted, it's physically easier to execute someone (just shoot them) than to castrate them. It's true we don't currently execute most convicted murderers, it's just as true that we don't castrate most of them either. The US was entirely capable of quickly executing murderers back in the 50s.
Why stop there? Sex change surgery for all prisoners! Now all the women are men and all the men are women, so there's no controversy over who gets put in which prison with whom.
I believe that the whole sex change for prisoners thing was the result of the ACLU handing out a questionnaire to all the Democrat primary candidates in 2020, and that was one of the questions. So I don't I don't know if she really held that belief strongly, since she just filled out a bubble on a paper and didn't, like, do a whole stump speech about it.
She could have repudiated it, easily.
There is video of her bragging about it to a gay/trans rights group. Not just a bubble on a questionnaire.
>You could imagine Trump thinking really hard about how to carve out a role that played to Elon’s strengths while shielding him from his weaknesses, but - no, sorry, I did a bad job starting this sentence, you can’t actually imagine Trump doing that.
LOL! Loved it, Many Thanks!
Yeah. This was my favourite LOL from the post. Setting up some counterfactual only to finally admit it's just too preposterous to be real. Trump is nothing if not impulsive.
True! Many Thanks!
Is it possible that overseas businesses owners, who stand to lose a lot from tariffs, are betting large amounts on trump as a hedge against that loss if Trump wins?
It's possible, but there are no signs this is happening; as far as anyone can tell, it's just the one French multimillionaire.
I remember a story, but I can't quite find it. In 2012 there was a whale who bet on Romney once a day on the Intrade platform, adding up to $7 million. There was a lot of discussion of whether this person was trying to manipulate the market. My memory that I can't document was that Intrade reached out and determined that it was a financial firm hedging political risk.
The journalist called up "Theo" and asked what he was doing and he said that he knew Trump would win. If he was hedging, why didn't he say so? People trying to optimize their bets should try to look like "dumb money" so that they don't move the market and can keep buying at the same price. Claiming to be hedging is one way to do that. (Looking arrogant is another.) But if you want to move the market, you want to look like you're "smart money" betting on information.
> A red sun dawns over San Francisco
> A red sun sets over DC
Is this post describing an alternate reality where the sun rises in the west and sets in the east?
And unless you think of the SF Bay as "sea", it's hard to think of where you'd be standing to get this view:
> A red sun dawns over San Francisco. Juxtaposed against clouds and sea
It's describing the universe where time progresses from earlier (at the beginning of a story) to later (at the end).
Okay fair, but where you can you see the red sun "juxtaposed against clouds and sea" in the *morning* in SF? Are you thinking of the Bay itself as "sea"?
(Sorry for the extreme pedantry.)
The sun does rise over SF and it does set over DC even in our world where the sun is taken to rise in the east and set in the west. I've seen red sunrises and red sunsets myself over here, even on the south-east coast of my own country!
Nonsense! Everyone knows the sun never sets on the British Empire. And if the sun can't set on Belfast, then how can it set on Dublin?
See The Ballad of William Bloat for the difference between Belfast and Dublin:
In a mean abode on the Shankill road
There lived one William Bloat
The bane of his life was a nagging wife
Who continually got his goat
Till one morn at dawn with her nightgown on
He cut her bloody throat
He settled her hash with a razor gash
There never was crime so slick
But the constant drip on the pillow slip
Of her life's blood made him sick
And to finish the fun so well begun
He decided himself to kill
Then he tore the sheet from his wife's cold feet
And he knotted it into a rope
And he hanged himself from the pantry shelf
'Twas an easy end, let's hope
In the jaws of death with his final breath
He cried "To hell with the Pope".
But the queerest turn of the whole concern
Is only just beginning
For Bill's in hell, but his wife got well
And is alive and sinning
For the razor blade was Dublin made
But the sheet was Belfast linen.
There are different versions where the razor is German or British made and the sheet is Irish linen, but you get the gist 😀
https://clydesburn.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-ballad-of-william-bloat-by-raymond.html
So far it's shaping up to be a big vindication of the real money prediction markets.
I would say it's shaping up to be more of a tiny incremental vindication of real money prediction markets.
I suppose so, but from my point of view this whole post was a bit like someone smacking a gauge while saying "The real money markets think Trump is more likely to win than the play money markets? Well that can't be right! What's wrong with this thing?"
Turns out there was less wrong with the money markets than the play markets, by at least 8 percentage points.
Both markets rated the race as a near-coin-toss - you get almost no information from this outcome.
Scott wrote "I think we’ve stepped back from the absolute most apocalyptic scenario: Polymarket is back down to 58% Trump - only eight points above Nate Silver - and WSJ has revealed Theo to be an ordinary degenerate gambler rather than a sinister manipulator. Still, this serves as a challenge to prediction market fans to figure out what went wrong and whether it will happen again. It also serves as yet another point in favor of non-real-money forecasts like Metaculus, Nate Silver, and Manifold, all three of which agreed with each other while disagreeing with the big real-money markets like Polymarket, Smarkets, and Betfair."
And then it turned out the real money markets were 8% more accurate than the play money ones. So I say the real money markets are vindicated, since it turns out there is no need for "prediction market fans to figure out what went wrong and whether it will happen again". I mean they may need to figure out why the real money markets were so bearish on Trump, but that's a completely different challenge.
Both markets rated the outcome as fairly likely - there is no sense in which one was 8% more accurate than the other. If the markets included something like confidence intervals around different vote shares then you’d have enough precision to make an argument like this.
Yet however you count it the money markets were more accurate than the play markets.
Still disagree. Consider a Bayesian who starts off thinking there's 90% chance a coin is fair, but 5% chance it's biased 60-40 heads. They flip it once and it comes up heads. If I'm doing the Bayesian calculations right, my new probability that it's fair should be 94% (rather than the original 95%).
(the small update doesn't depend too much on my low starting probability; if I had started out with equal probability on the "fair" and "biased" hypotheses, my new probability should be 55/45.)
I think that exactly mirrors the current situation with the prediction markets, so I'm going to update from 95% belief that Polymarket was in the wrong here to about 94%.
I agree with you on some level, but my gut is saying that the assumption that Theo was a noise trader should be viewed with skepticism as well. The point of betting markets is that it is hard to seperate expert from non-expert opinion.
Picking a "superforcaster" must be just as hard, or harder than predicting the target market. Otherwise your process for forcasting a market would simply be to pick a superforcaster.
I'm not sure what your prior should be on Theo's skill. If Theo truly was a financial trader (one successful enough to make a 75M all-or-nothing bet) who was analyzing election data, as the articles claim, does that not to some degree match the profile of someone who can add marginal information to the market?
One set of NYT and WSJ articles written to fill word count probably should not update your priors on Theo very strongly.
"Picking a "superforcaster" must be just as hard, or harder than predicting the target market. Otherwise your process for forcasting a market would simply be to pick a superforcaster."
Not sure what you mean here - you pick a superforecaster based on past track record.
I don't know why your prior is so low that some rich guy was a degenerate gambler and put it all on red.
Maybe I am reading too far into "financial trader" which I suppose anyone is allowed to call themselves; but in my experience anyone who was trusted to run someone else's money and was then successful enough (under monitoring and risk controls) to take home 9+ figures in compensation is extremely smart.
If the guy claimed to be a crypto trader then sure, my prior is that he is an idiot. I don't know any crypto billionaires myself and will admit you are probably better at setting priors than I am, but that is my thinking.
My argument about identifying talent would be analogous to the idea that beating the stock market has to be harder (>=) than identifying a person who can beat the stock market. Becuase solving the latter problem (finding a person who can outperform) also solves the former one (outperforming).
How did this guy become rich? The same way Trump did? Or by speculation like this?
So, how much will French guy Theo make off this?
Darn it, I should have stuck a tenner on Trump earlier in the week but I was put off by having to set up a betting account online for one bet, and too lazy to go to the physical bookie's office.
Right now it's looking like not alone will Trump take the electoral college votes but also the popular vote. So that cuts off "our election should be decided by popular vote!" set.
But congratulations to the script writers of the simulation, they've kept the third instalment of the franchise exciting. "2016" was an unexpected smash hit, but could they do it again for the sequel, "2020"? That provided plenty of fodder for fan discussion and debate until the third one, "2024", and they've done it again!
Lol
Al Stewart had The Year of the Cat, this looks like the Year of the Weird and as a weirdo myself, naturally I'm delighted 😁
I thought Harris might squeak a victory but it would be close. If Trump won, I thought it would be "he gets electoral college votes, she gets popular vote" as with Hillary in 2016.
I was not expecting Trump to get electoral college, popular vote, and all seven battleground/swing states. The election was close, but right now it's looking about Trump 51% to Harris 47.5% (according to the AP website).
Hmm - looks like more was needed than "brat girl summer", "Kamalot", coconut memes, Hotties for Harris, and "those Republicans are weird, aren't they?"
Weird JD Vance is Vice-President Elect and Tim "Those guys are weird" Walz isn't. Heh heh heh.
Now, I realise a lot of people are probably upset about this and I'm genuinely sympathetic, but as an outside observer I'm just happy I won't have to watch the cringe-inducing sight of our next Taoiseach (be that Simon Harris) having to plámás* Kamala Harris in the White House on St Patrick's Day with some hastily scrabbled together genealogy about an eight times great-grandfather who emigrated from the Ould Sod (and ended up a slaveowner in Jamaica, but let's not mention that**).
Though if Harris had won and Leo Varadkar was still Taoiseach, I'd be highly amused by him trying to make common ground with "you're half-Indian? so am I!"
* https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2010/09/20/plamas/
** https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2024/07/23/kamala-harris-is-a-descendant-of-an-irish-slave-owner-in-jamaica/
Do not confuse winning the popular vote with being a popular president. It is highly likely Trump will remain divisive, hopefully in such a way that will advance the country anyway.
I do realise that, but it's a counter to the people who, in 2016, were complaining that Hillary won the popular vote ergo she should have been confirmed as president and the Electoral College was only a remnant of slave holding which should be abolished and in 2020 when Biden won the popular vote and the electoral college it was 'he has the mandate of heaven to govern as he will'.
Now in 2024 Trump has won both the electoral college and popular votes, so they can't complain that he cheated, isn't legitimate because not the popular vote, etc.
I realise that is not going to stop the complaining, and I'm sure right now someone is getting ready with the "Russian collusion they hacked the votes they bought Musk bribes! fraud! cheating!", but there's no leg to stand on for any kind of legitimate complaint.
They should have listened to the witches: don't try cursing Trump, he's got occult protection 😁
https://www.reddit.com/r/WitchesVsPatriarchy/comments/1e9kjda/would_today_be_a_good_day_for_a_freezer_spell/?rdt=61277
I think few people have found cursing politicians brings useful results, but it sometimes does make people feel better.
Perhaps someone should do a randomized controlled trial on political curses to find out for sure.
He pumped like $75M in, at maybe a 60% cost basis, so $50M, which is maybe $10M in France after taxes lol
I don't mean to be condescending. But I will really never understand the obsession with betting in these circles. I mean, I get it on one level; gambling is fun. But at the same time, gambling also seems fundamentally irrational to me.
The interesting question in this space is "how can we fuse all the different knowledge different people have, that they might not even consciously realise they have, to make more reliable predictions more consistently than any individual could on their own?" In essence, how can we do for general human events what Kalman filters did for inertial guidance?
The betting market thing is presented as an answer to this. The individual bets aren't interesting. The overall market position allegedly is indicative of... something.
Meanwhile, on the subject of gambling: when the expected payoff is higher than the cost, and you can afford the cost, it is irrational not to bet.
Gambling is incredibly habit forming, and no cost benefit analysis is decent unless it takes that huge risk factor into account.
As far as “the overall market position allegedly is indicative of... something,” I've seen it argued convincingly here that that something is not very rewarding.
It's about "skin in the game", the notion that anyone can just throw their ideas around without consequence, but it's a different thing to actually stake something valuable on your confidence that your mental (or explicit) model is correct.
Unless you're betting a substantial percentage of your income, it seems like you can still just throw around ideas willy-nilly. Because there's not that much at stake
That's fair. I guess I'm not much of a degenerate gambler, because I'd consider non-trivial but not life-altering bets to be a solid indicator of someone at least having given their thoughts very serious consideration.
Also, I cannot let this subthread continue without someone pointing out the irony of "Chance" being against betting.
>Because there's not that much at stake
Sometimes a bet can carry a reputation stake, with the financial stake being symbolic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorne%E2%80%93Hawking%E2%80%93Preskill_bet
Admittedly, this isn't a prediction market case :-)
Also admittedly, while I treat
>As far as “the overall market position allegedly is indicative of... something,” I've seen it argued convincingly here that that something is not very rewarding.
the "something" as kind-of the-overall-consensus-of-the-prediction-market-community, provided that the market is efficient and is dominated by informed, thoughtful bettors, the latter condition generally requires that the wolfbane blooms and the moon is full and bright.
Prediction markets are not gambling.
Gambling is to Prediction Markets as Usury is to Finance.
They're a zero-sum contest of luck and skill with the opportunity to win a bunch of money if you're willing to risk losing a bunch of money. How is that any different than e.g. a high-stakes poker game?
It's one of those irregular verbs English is so full of. The conjugation goes - I make rational tradeoffs, you engage in high risk investment, he/she/it gambles.
The relative amounts of luck and skill.
I think it's closer to people's intuition to say that the "luck" parts of both prediction markets and poker are gambling and the "skill" parts are not. Then factor in that luck naturally fills in whatever holes exist in your skill, and find trivially that if you go into either thing with zero skill, then yes, it's 100% luck and 100% gambling in the negative sense. OTOH, if you train your skill up as far as you can manage, there will be an asymptote beyond which it's gambling, so they're both always *partly* gambling. But the player with room to skill up still affords some control.
Do you really think that the people involved in prediction markets are a completely different demographic than general gamblers? I would imagine that the overlap is Major.
I don't imagine there's a great deal of overlap. I imagine gamblers tend to be low-income, unintelligent, and politically disinterested while I imagine prediction market people to be the opposite.
I think there is tremendous overlap. And when I say gamblers I'm including day traders. Day trading is certainly not a low-income habit and it is just as reckless as playing blackjack at a casino.
"The mathematicians say there are simple voting systems that could practically ensure the selection of a universally-popular moderate"
I have to nitpick a good bit, but.. do they? My textbooks actually argue that this crazy first part the post regional voting thing you Americans do is supposed to help with picking moderates that are accepted by wide range of voters. I mean, it sure doesn't look that way, but I'm somewhat skeptical the mathematicians can save us.
If there was a mathematician thats was capable of saying something practical; yes.
Of the 3-ish other reasonably sane voting methods they have 1 edge case that requires at least a 3 way tie and a situation thats as unlikely as a single vote changing the election ^3.
Which systems? Which edge cases? I'm actually curious about that.
For example "instant runoff", voters provide a preference list "3,1,2", you discard the weakest candidate, so if 3 was discarded that vote becomes "1,2" until theres >50% agreement on the first slot. This has an edge case if 1/3rd of the votes are "1,2,3", 1/3rd "2,3,1", "3,1,2", because this makes a cycle. 1>2>3>1 "rock paper scissors" loops makes comparisons "non-associative", an election is an aggregation of comparison, aggregations need associativity; to simplify how its in my head `max(rock,paper)==paper` is possible, `max(1,2,3..100)` is possible, `max(rock,paper,sissors)` isn't; once a vote contains an abitery list of preferences `rock,scissors,paper`; removing rock can help sissors or paper depending on spooky details.
This is both a) extremely unlikely, less likely then a single vote deciding the eltection because you need the permutations to be in the right order b) not social-politically realistic(in the real world right wing people pick between republicans and libertarians, and not republicans then commies, then libertarians)
nit:
>This has an edge case if 1/3rd of the votes are "1,2,3", 1/3rd "2,3,1", "3,1,2", because this makes a cycle. 1>2>3>1 "rock paper scissors" loops makes comparisons "non-associative", an election is an aggregation of comparison, aggregations need associativity;
I thought that this was transitivity failing, rather than associativity
I agree with everything else you wrote.
The UK also has first-past-the-post, but in a parliamentary rather than presidential system.
Despite the criticism, it turns out that the prediction markets had it right and the more abberant the prediction market, the more right they were. Will prediction market be able to succeed if their biggest supporters continue denouncing them whenever they break from the "expert consensus"? Isn't that the whole point?
If you have Democrat friends and you live in a tall building, keep them away from the windows.
On the other hand, Jimmy Kimmel has his monologue for the next four years.
The really rich guy who put $30 million on Trump to win is now, presumably, an even richer rich guy.
Possibly he thought the prediction markets were underestimating the chance of a Trump victory, and saw an opportunity to make a profit here.
Theo moving the market is a feature, not a bug.
Prediction markets are a cool idea because they're an abstraction of financial markets. A financial market is just a prediction market that can only predict the net present value of a companies future cash flows. And in financial markets, if you make lots of successful bets, you get lots of money. That means you can make bigger bets next time. In other words: if you have a successful track record, your opinion counts for more.
Theo is a professional trader, and he had eight figures to throw at a single position. In spite of his anonymity, I infer that he has an excellent track record. His opinion should count for more than other people's! He's extremely confident and usually right.
I thought this while I was reading this and now regret not posting my opinion until after it had been vindicated, but I guess this cowardice is why I'm not Theo.
> London Breed is the Mayor of San Francisco.
I got tripped up by this sentence for a moment before I realized that "London Breed" was actually a real person's name.
Yeah, it sounds more like a variety of sheep than a person.
Someone asked me the other day if I like London Broil and I told them I've never even heard of her. We were both confused.
There was an 80s pop group called Londonbeat.
Trump won 30% of NYC vote: https://nypost.com/2024/11/06/us-news/2024-presidential-election-marks-closest-new-york-has-come-to-turning-red-in-30-years-as-trump-support-surges-in-nyc/
If we can trust this source, the main wins have been in Queens, South Brooklyn, and the Bronx: https://toddwschneider.com/maps/nyc-presidential-election-results/?year=2024#9/40.7053/-73.975
These areas lean heavily African American and Asian (and a little Latino?).
The way I'm interpreting these results is just how insanely unpopular Democrat messaging* has been. The ACX voting guides for NYC included a section on proposals and only one of six got a weak "yes", the others being about things like "adding more process to process Y" or "establishing a Chief Diversity Officer".
I sincerely hope this produces some tough thinking in the local Dem party.
*But policies too. NYC is the dirtiest and least safe I've seen it since 2009.
I figured it would be a close election between Trumps personal unpopularity and the Democrats unpopular policy but it was much decisive for Trump than I initially thought. I assume that people didn’t care as much about Trumps comments or J6 or any of that other stuff. I’m not sure to what extent they warmed up to him or just thought the Democrats were so bad that he was better. Even worse, Vance will be running in 2028, and he’s going to do much better with the college educated. With Trumps endorsement, he should be able to fully win over the base and expand. The Democrats have to credibly pivot to the right(or else get some kind of economic catastrophe) because otherwise their electoral position is bleak.
It's not bad. Both Trump and JD Vance are significantly left of the previous republican party.
E.g., JD Vance supports Medicare. I think if you actually looked at them without filtering through democrat propaganda, then you wouldn't be concerned.
The real issue is that democrats went completely off the rails. But now they will be forced to reasses. The outcome was what both America and the democrats needed
>The real issue is that democrats went completely off the rails.
Yup. Listening to Kamala Harris's concession speech today, she sounded utterly blind to any need to change any of her positions.
I wouldn't say he is significantly left. Republicans were discussing amnesty before Trump and that backfired spectacularly and supporting Medicare is hardly some radical left wing position.
The thing is that after Trump got elected the first time, the Democrats pushed hard to the left, culminating in the summer of 2020. Of course, they got pushed back from that and in 2024, Kamala was running to the right of 2020. That wasn't a big deal because she could still do what she wanted once in office. But Trump didn't just prevent the Democrats from winning. He beat them bad. Worse, he gained heavily among the constituents that were supposed to be the future, hispanics and young people. Trump is no longer a temporary problem to the arc of history, but a realignment. That completely throws a wrench in the Democrats plans.
If you read the JD Vance dossier you can see that the republican were concerned that JD Vance was too democratic, and one cited instance of this is that he broke party lines in arguing for Medicare (back when the Republican party was still fixated on removing it).
DONALD JOHN TRUMP
REX QUONDAM
REX FUTURIS
Well, it’s done. The beauty of it is it was a decisive moment.; no room for equivocating. That’s a good thing.
Yes
For upset Democrats, you should know that Trump and JD Vance are actually moderate (e.g., being significantly more left than the bulk of the previous republican party). I think the current problem is that the democrats went so hard slandering Trump that now people are upset as they believe the propaganda.
He's not a fascist. In his first speech declaring victory, he talked about being a president for all, and how America needs unity.
The outcome was what America needed.
The outcome was even what the democrats needed, as now they can reassess, move away from insane policies (e.g., defund the police, and being pro illegal immigrantion), and stop belittling and bullying voters (e.g., Joe Biden calling Trump supporters Garbage).
Oh! So this speech is the true one and his *past* speeches about "the enemy within" and "dictator on day one" were the lies!
Gotcha. So he's definitely a liar--but it's *okay* now! Makes sense.
The claim we are refuting is that he is a fascist. Talking about unity in a victory speech is clearly unfascist like behaviour.
As to "enemy within" and "dictator on day one," have you looked at the sources of those statements? If you look at those statements in context, they don't mean what democrats make them out to mean...
Unfortunately, Democrat propaganda (designed to help them win the election) has distorted your perception of Trump and the Republicans. This propaganda is now problematic as it makes a large section of America needlessly anxious and fearful.
Actually, calling for unity is also something fascists do. One state, one party, one leader, etc. But of course so do democratic leaders and the slogan on U.S. coins (even if Al Gore did once get the meaning of e plurubus unum backward).
I think this thread is confusing "calling for unity" with "calling for exclusion".
The language is similar, as you say. But the meaning is very different in my opinion.
I think generally when nice people say "one people" they are calling for everyone to be friends and work together and get over differences.
I think when fascists say "one people" they're calling for the approved group to cohere and exclude other groups.
I think Donald Trump is explicitly calling for unity across groups.
"dictator on day one"
obviously. Unless you think he will actually declare himself a dictator? If you do think that you're in for a nice surprise.
Anyway, just go watch the "dictator on day one" clip where he says this. It's 100% obviously a joke and you'll feel better after watching it. Also you should think about which source knowingly lied to you about the significance of this quote, and stop believing them about anything else.
"the enemy within"
The full quote (again, go watch the clip) is "in my opinion we have enemies on the outside, and we have the enemy within, and that in my opinion is radical left lunatics". The context for this is riots across the US supporting terrorist groups and countries that have vowed to destroy the US, at which it is common to see US flags being burned and people saying "down with the US". This isn't an extreme position. The "enemy within [America]" is being used with the same meaning as "domestic terrorists" which everyone agrees exists?
So yes. Both lies. Anything else you're worried about?
https://www.slowboring.com/p/unhinged-moderation
>He's not a fascist. In his first speech declaring victory, he talked about being a president for all, and how America needs unity.
Everyone does this. Biden gets no credit for it, nor does Trump.
The democrats have repeatedly described Trump as a fascist, and as being "like Hitler."
Talking about unity is the opposite of being a fascist, and so it should weigh as evidence against that characterization.
Fascists are obsessed with unity and it's close cousin, uniformity.
Obama: "Those who did not vote for me -- I will be your president too."
I prefer Dick Tuck's concession speech:
"The people have spoken...the bastards."
Well it looks like Theo really did have alpha: he commissionned some "neighbour polls" (asking people who they think their neighbour will vote for) which showed support for Trump several points higher than traditional polls: https://www.ft.com/content/4b302ab8-7e40-4d1a-bbe6-3d46f6811d85
Looks like prediction markets working as expected.
I'm not sure why him being "just a guy" would cause Scott to dismiss him when his underlying rationale for the bet wasn't known. But "Everyone else arbitraged the wrong direction, maybe (falsely) thinking that Theo had secret knowledge." sure seems silly in hindsight.