2024 Election Thread

[Kaelik]

Not sure if completely failing to understand what people say and making up a new thing to imagine they say is bot posting or just normal deaddm.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Insert something here about an entire generation of DeadDMs failing to understand basically everything about the world and having happy self affirming hallucinations instead being the bread and butter of neo-libneralisms only tiny remaining true believer grass roots base or something.

[MGuy]

This isn't an unheard of tactic for ddm after realizing he is wrong. Some weird final response before going back to reading NYT is one of his two usual finishers after saying something gross or wrong. Last time it was some joke(?) that did not make sense given the subject matter. This time it is reading partial agreement in a statement telling him that he missed the point of every post he responded to.

[deaddmwalking]

The Den used to be useful. While people here have always enjoyed telling people they were wrong, there was a time when people would explain WHY someone was wrong and provide the right answer.

My take is that the people telling me I'm wrong just enjoy being contrarian and pretend not to understand. The fact that people are arguing out of both sides of their mouth by simultaneously claiming that my number is too high and too low is just proof in my mind that they don't even have a position other than trying to pretend that some people are just always wrong.

That would count for more if people were willing to say what it is right.

[Kaelik]

People told you why you were wrong.

It's not our fault you are too stupid to understand.

[deaddmwalking]

People told you why you were wrong.

It's not our fault you are too stupid to understand.

Back in the day, posters like UserName17 would explain why you were wrong using small words.

But even if you think you've explained why I'm wrong (and I contend you have not) you have not laid out what the right answer is and how one arrives at it. That used to be the strength of the den. Your unwillingness to even suggest an answer and a reasoning works for me as a proof that the vitriol is so extreme that you're not willing to suggest an answer because only those who make assertions are ridiculed.

[Thaluikhain]

you have not laid out what the right answer is and how one arrives at it.

The right answer (or a more correct answer) is that Trump's case is sufficiently different from various averages, so that using averages doesn't tell us much about Trump's odds of survival. We can't give a several digit percentage chance of Trump dying before the election, because that's not particularly possible.

[Kaelik]

People told you why you were wrong.

It's not our fault you are too stupid to understand.

Back in the day, posters like UserName17 would explain why you were wrong using small words.

But even if you think you've explained why I'm wrong (and I contend you have not) you have not laid out what the right answer is and how one arrives at it. That used to be the strength of the den. Your unwillingness to even suggest an answer and a reasoning works for me as a proof that the vitriol is so extreme that you're not willing to suggest an answer because only those who make assertions are ridiculed.

Literally every person in this thread can tell you why you are wrong. It's not my fault the words are too big, I don't think I've been using them, Thaluikhain didn't, but it doesn't matter how small or big the words are, you are committed to using an acturial table to get a specific .0000076% number that no one fucking cares about.

Sorry dumbass, no one can give you a meaningful exact percentage chance of a black swan event.

If I say Trump has a 10% chance of being assassinated or a 2.7568934314% chance, both of those numbers are equally as made up, even if one makes you feel better. That's why no one is giving you an exact percentage chance of how likely Trump is to survive 2 weeks, because no one knows or CAN KNOW if he's going to get shot in the head or blown up in a car bomb, because the chance is very small but non zero.\

That obvious inability to predict is why you wrote off the much greater likelihood of his death in two weeks by assassination as "I choose to believe zero" and then spent a lot of time whining about the chance he will die of falling down and breaking his hip and not eating for 3 months in the next 2 weeks.

[deaddmwalking]

Nate Silver and others like him show us that we can calculate both an answer based on probability as well as confidence in that number.

When you make an estimate there's no guarantee that you're right, but that’s why you explain your reasoning. When estimating mortality, things like Extinction Level Events and car crashes should be rolled into your numbers, so if your estimate is 0% you're just wrong.

But the real question we're confronting is whether an offered bet pays out well enough to justify the risk. The odds offered correspond to an estimate of 0.76% - so the question you have to ask to decide of the bet is good is whether the chance is greater or lesser than 0.76%. If they were higher, it's be a 'good bet' - not one that you're likely to win, but if you calculate the odds correctly every time the kind that you should make, knowing that over time you'll win more than you lose. If it's lower, it's a 'bad bet' - the more you play the more you're expected to lose over time.

Calculating these things is possible, even with limited data. Otherwise you wouldn't have a sense of, say, how likely an asteroid is to hit the Earth and cause a mass-extinction event, or whether a flood was a once in a century event (1% annually) or a once in a millennium event (0.1% annually).

If your argument is that you can't calculate those things than it's clear that it's not me who is guilty of innumeracy.

[Kaelik]

Nate Silver does not show that you can calculate an answer based on probability to the question of whether or not Trump will be assassinated.

The ability to make probability calculations has long predated Nate Silver and Nate Silver did not invent a heretofore unknown method of putting in bad inputs and getting good outputs. The question is fundamentally incalcuable because whatever numbers you make up as inputs are dogshit, so whatever numbers you get as outputs are dogshit.

No one is saying you can't do math, but doing math of nonsense just gets you different nonsense.

And your probability prediction on how likely we are to be hit by an asteroid is equally as nonsense as Trump's assassination.

There is a way to calculate probability when you have wide uncertainty about the inputs, but the problem is, when you actually do that calculation, the uncertainties swamp your calculation and you end up with something like "0.00002-20% damn, fuck, that didn't tell me anything" which is why people mostly don't do that.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

I think I need to downgrade DDM from "does not know what statistical maths are for or when to apply them" to "Does not know what an estimate or an approximation is".

Also he doesn't know what a good bet is. Because again, discrete math. Even if chance of winning beats the given odds, if the chance of winning is vanishingly small and you can only make that bet ONCE EVER its a pretty fucking bad bet.

[MGuy]

I only use small words to explain every position I take. So you should downgrade him to not understanding English. This has been a ridiculous thing to double down on. The only interesting thing here is that THIS is the thing he admits that he doesn't understand. Given the number of people who have consistently told ddm he's wrong on so many subjects over the past few years this one is just dumb instead of being monstrous or gross. Of course he turns right back around and continues insisting on being wrong but that's just his style.

[Foxwarrior]

Even if chance of winning beats the given odds, if the chance of winning is vanishingly small and you can only make that bet ONCE EVER its a pretty fucking bad bet.

Hey, if you can find enough different favorable bets that can only be done once ever you might make a profit from the maybe one of them that pans out.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Hey, if you can find enough different favorable bets that can only be done once ever you might make a profit from the maybe one of them that pans out.

The only reason you would consider that is to try and make a new irrelevant scenario where DDM can feel good by being right, which he isn't, so you shouldn't.

edit: Also that strategy is basically the root form of much of the worst investment advice.

[Kaelik]

I mean if he gets his gambling understanding from a guy with an intense gambling addiction it explains why he ignores things like "the actual cost/benefit of gambling away a bunch of money vs winning a longshot bet" because presumably the high of winning a Longshot bet is the actual benefit for Nate Silver instead of the money anyway.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

I thought Nate Silver was banished to purgatory in 2016 for the crime of somehow enabling Clinton supporters to willfully misunderstand the implications of what the error margins in close polling because it made them feel better about their fail candidate, right up until it didn't.

I'm seeing his name around elsewhere too. It's like they are bringing him back just so they can again beat up a bunch of false confidence about a close election in the same way that went really poorly for them in 2016. And if it goes wrong they will blame him again and they will blame close polling for "being wrong" again too. And black men and arabs and college students and the left and latinos and young people and Putin and Iran and China and Susan Sarandon and...

[Kaelik]

Nah, nate silver never went anywhere after 2016. He coasted being the least wrong of the major pollsters into continuing to be the pollster guy for years.

His contract wasn't renewed at 538 in 2023, so he wrote a book that's basically "confessionals of a gambling addict" though he doesn't realize it and he's just a random guy who tweets and gambles now.

[deaddmwalking]

Even if chance of winning beats the given odds, if the chance of winning is vanishingly small and you can only make that bet ONCE EVER its a pretty fucking bad bet.

Hey, if you can find enough different favorable bets that can only be done once ever you might make a profit from the maybe one of them that pans out.

This is correct.

For regular people, losing money on a long shot is kinda a big deal, so making a lot of bets that have a small chance of succeeding seems like a bad idea. But it's exactly those kinds of long-shot bets that powered Google and Amazon.

A $1000 investment in Google 20 years ago would be worth $375,000 (plus you would have earned dividends).

The calculus for billionaire investors is not 'how many times will I lose this bet'? The fact is, you can't lose more than you invest. So if you have 10 stocks and 9 of them are going to bust but 1 of them is going to produce a 10,000x profit and you don't know which one is which, you should invest in all of them. Otherwise you'll miss out.

Now, obviously each of them having a 10% chance isn't actually a guarantee that any one of them will succeed, but there's also a chance that 2 succeed! So if you actually are good at calculating the odds (so they things that you think will happen 10% of the time happen 10% of the time) you can absolutely make bank if the expected return is more than the 'risk'.

[PseudoStupidity]

The reason billionaire investors don't lose money on their investments is because we bail them out whenever they fail. We had a thread on SVB here, you advocated for bailing out billionaires there. We bailed out the banks when they gambled on subprime loans as well. Billionaire investors never lose money because the government literally bails their stupid asses out every single time (in addition to all the insanely favorable tax policies we have, like why the fuck are loses on investments a tax writeoff but getting laid off and taking a lower paying job is not one?). Billionaire investors make stupid fucking bets all the time and lose, but instead of losing their ass other people lose their asses.

Do not follow the behaviors of billionaire investors, they are idiots who only win because the system is designed to never let them lose. Fuck, look at the entire existence of people like Jared Kushner. Or Trump. Or Musk. Those guys are the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet, but they were born to win. Smart investors seem pretty rare to be totally honest, and they mostly run scams. Isn't Soros a genius for doing evil currency trading or something? I hate financial shit, but all the "smart" finance people just look like scammers from my point of view.

[Kaelik]

It's extremely funny to now be like "if you assume the person posting on tgd is a billionaire investor making one of millions of investments my betting advice was good."

Doesn't really address any of the criticism but does introduce a new one.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Wow. I mean I even said it was the root of some of the worst investment advice and then DDM turned it into some of the worst investment advice.

A bot WOULD do that...

[PseudoStupidity]

I think ddm may believe extremely wealthy people are inherently smart and/or good with money, in spite of all the evidence that extremely wealthy people are stupider and less moral people than basically everyone else who lives in a similar society.

[deaddmwalking]

No. I believe that if you calculate the odds correctly and the expected value is positive, you can make money incrementally. I also shared how in a book I recently read that was exactly how a group engineered to consistently 'win' the lottery. It doesn't require being lucky or smart, but it does involve some easy math.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

No. I believe that if you calculate the odds correctly and the expected value is positive, you can make money incrementally.

That word there, that's where (or one place where) you do not understand it at all. It is not incremental, it is almost the opposite of that, it is the discrete chunky nature of the rare wins compared to the many losses that makes this an absolutely dogshite investment strategy for anyone with anything short of straight up infinite money.

But using that word isn't just wrong in a granularity/discrete sense. It is wrong in a temporal sense. If it were incremental then you could and should just keep at it to eventually earn a profit. If you calculate a high chance of a profit if you make 100,000 bets but you get unlucky and do NOT get the one win that would make that profitable, then you CANNOT "incrementally" continue to stack on another 100,000 bets to get 200,000 bets and really crush the odds. It does not function in ANY incremental manner.

[PseudoStupidity]

When I was a preteen my brother and I discussed the ultimate way to win infinite money and determined it was to go to a casino with no limits on bets, make a bet on any game, and keep doubling your bet if you lose. Eventually you'd win and gain your initial bet in profit, assuming you had infinite money, and then you could start the process again. DDM's investment advice sounds a lot like this childish plan to win infinite money if you have infinite money.