As Amazed as Whom?

By -
"I'm as amazed as everyone else by the results on Tuesday night." -- Andrew Sullivan

Everyone else? Tuesday morning, my wife said to me, "This is going to be really close, huh?"

"No," I replied, "Obama is going to win fairly easily."

"What makes you say that?"

"Nate Silver."

It was not merely his predictions, nor even mostly his predictions: it was his extensive explanations as to why his model was getting the results it was getting. They made sense. And they were pretty clearly simply an attempt to get things right, rather than a partisan effort to influence things. Of course it was not certain things would go the way the model said they would. But it was a pretty safe bet. (In case you think this is useless postdiction, I publicly offered to bet Kate Pitrone, who was claiming Romney would win easily, several hundred dollars with odds well in her favor. She declined.)

Comments

  1. traumerei2:27 PM

    If your wife was thinking in terms of the popular vote rather than the dynamics of the electoral college and swing states, she'd be right.

    I too abandoned my armchair punditry after discovering Silver's methods when he ran fivethirtyeight in the last election.

    Did you consider betting on Intrade?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Silas Barta5:33 PM

    Serious question: did you previous object to the use of bet-willingness as an estimate of subjective uncertainty?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah6:12 PM

      I don't think so: that is usually how I have interpreted it. But I certainly don't remember everything I've objected to!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more