At this point is Nate silver just a professional rage baiter?

biophysboy 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The "village vs river" metaphor he used in his recent book helped me better understand why he acts like this. I think he sees himself as a person that embraces risk, or as a "rage baiter" to use your framing.

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slater 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You could make the argument that he always has been. Just that now he has FU-money, so he’ll go for ever-increasing levels of “outrage” to keep those plates spinning

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jrm4 7 hours ago | parent [-]

He absolutely always has been. Nassim Nicholas Taleb hates him for a very good and simple reason. Lack of skin-in-the-game. It's just arguably immoral to make predictions for a living in such a way that "being wrong" doesn't harm you.

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amalcon 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is a weird criticism. Are meteorologists immoral? They are wrong a lot, with (occasionally) deadly consequences. It doesn't really hurt them - because their predictions are still pretty useful.

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softwaredoug 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don’t get this criticism.

The models he - and others like him - make are probabilistic. 70% probability Hillary would win was actually accurate. 30% probability events happen all them time.

The ones with “skin in the game” in 2016 said there was a 99% chance that Hillary would win. And that they’d eat their shoe, etc, if Trump won. They were in so much disbelief that Trump could win they built models just for confirmation bias.

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jstanley 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> 70% probability Hillary would win was actually accurate.

Based on what?

	▲	AftHurrahWinch 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This: https://vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasets/doc/dslabs/po...
	▲	softwaredoug 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Based on historically common polling errors and how state polling errors correlate. 70% is far more likely than 99%.
	▲	wahnfrieden 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Probably hadn’t expected https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_...