**** Elections thread *****

[Savy]

Aug. 2015, six months before the first primary. Another person on his team gave Trump 0% and another gave him a minus 10% chance of winning. Shows how serious that estimate was.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/p...ugust-edition/

So it's people pissing about. A bit idiotic on their part as people will use it to bash them but at the same time just worth ignoring.

Early in the cycle.

Nate Antimatter's claim to fame is getting an easy to predict election right, an election where no surprises happened. Since then, he's been wrong over and over and over. Today, his bias is blatant. He pulls bull like weights the LA times poll to lean 4 points R for zero reason. Frankly, I've stopped paying attention to Nate Compost. I find it hilarious that back when he had a shred of credibility, he claimed that his poll aggregation strategy would be blown out of the water in a shift election, yet here we are in a shift election and he just keeps shilling.

I agree with this. The issue is that his prediction wasn't reasonable. It was some basic bullshit (stuff that I too fell for) like "it doesn't matter that Trump leads in the polls, he's crazy and he has a ceiling blah blah." I think people would give somebody like Nate Pyrite the benefit of the doubt if a low probability thing happened. The issue is that he applied a low probability to Trump for non-scientific, non-statistical, pro-political-bias reasons.

People (and the systems they use) are notoriously bad at putting anything resembling realistic odds on things with very long odds. One of the few things betting companies routinely get wrong is giving people much better odds than they actually deserve when they have a very low chance of getting something right. A good example of this was Leicester city winning the premier league last year.

The fact that some people are full of shit and are riding a wave of past glory which gives them more say than they deserve in these things is unfortunately something that happens in all walks of life. That isn't to say that just because they say one thing the opposite must be true though. I also agree that people will happily try and "logic" away things that disagree with their view of things however false this is.

i dont mean doofus as an insult. everybody's a doofus as far as im concerned.

I don't remember the last time I heard that word used. Must have gone out of fashion about 15+ years ago.