2024 Election Thread

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

NPP,

You do not have to have infinite money to make money off 'gambles' when the Expected Return is positive. It's just simple math. And you keep saying I'm innumerate.

Because you don't understand what plugging actual numbers into the math you are discussing does. You KEEP tripping over the threshold of a bad bet and calling it a good bet because your entire strategy IS the "if you never stop doubling down at the casino you can never lose!".

The actual numbers, the actual inputs matter, that's why the lottery "example" sometimes occurs in real life, because, rarely, the numbers you input DO work, but mostly they do not, mostly the vanishingly small win rate just isn't good enough no matter the possible return, especially because mostly the number of bets is FINITE you fuck listen and respond to the one sentence you've heard yelled in your dumb fucking face this whole discussion, FINITE INVESTMENT MONEY.

Mostly the numbers you input into your strategy do not work, especially specifically in anything other than a contrived and contained example like your lottery fairy tale. You are literally giving the advice of the horse race addict, SURE you lost your house, but if you keep betting the no money you now have on GOOD BETS with HIGH RETURNS at the races sooner or later you MUST win back all the money, it's guaranteed eventually!

And unlike you the horse racing addict might at least fucking know something about horses.

[Foxwarrior]

your entire strategy IS the "if you never stop doubling down at the casino you can never lose!".

While I do agree with kaelik that ddmw's estimation technique is really bad, I can't shake the feeling that you're mixing up three entirely different gambling strategies that have entirely different behavior.

There's the doubling down one, where every time you fail you bet twice as much. It's funny in the infinite money case but not actually relevant to any of the things anyone here has talked about doing. It's not even relevant to billionaires because what sort of billionaire wants to risk all their money on a gamble when bets like the SVB one are a valid alternative?

There's the SVB one, where you make one single bet knowing that if it doesn't pan out it'd be a global disaster and disaster recovery will be there to recoup your costs so you're not actually risking anything.

Then there's the iterative probability one. Where you make enough independent bets with favorable odds that the odds are good that at least one will pay off. If, say, a highly incompetent casino offered $200 on a $1 bet that a d100 would roll a 5, if you had $199 you could bet $1 199 separate times and have an 86% chance of making a profit, with a pretty considerable chance of doubling or quadrupling your money. $199 isn't a billionaire amount of money btw. Bringing it back on topic, you just need to find a few hundred presidential elections to bet on where you know your assessment of the odds is much more accurate than that of the gambling professionals who set them, in order to try it out yourself.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

While I do agree with kaelik that ddmw's estimation technique is really bad, I can't shake the feeling that you're mixing up three entirely different gambling strategies that have entirely different behavior.

I'm trying to point out that DDM is unable to differentiate between different scenarios. He saw that fucking movie about the lottery scam and now thinks that investing in tech bubble companies is a viable investment strategy "because that lottery thing", in the same way he thinks that he can make multiple decimal place predictions about Donald Trump being the same as an average 80 year old "because of that tank no. 300 thing proving you can derive totally accurate data from one data point" which is also a totally false combination/conclusion.

Then there's the iterative probability one.

It's not an "iterative investment", and the term "iterative probability" is a bit of stretch to describe the given investment strategy, especially in the context of what DDM is completely fucking misunderstanding when calling it a guaranteed investment and misusing the word "iterative".

To be an iterative investment strategy you need to repeat it, trying to bet on the whole market at once is NOT being "iterative", for that to be "iterative" you would then have to try and bet on the whole market AGAIN. Which you can only do if you can fucking afford to bet on the whole market at least once. Which again. Requires fucking infinite money. Which again, is the whole fucking point here.

Now "iterative probability" meanwhile is a term you should never use in front of DDM because he will assume AFTER having flushed hundreds of investments down the drain that he can now 'iteratively" flush hundreds of more investments down the drain and only have his chances of success rise from having "iterative" increased the number of bets, which is NOT how iterative probability works, because iterative probability does not retain it's "iterative" nature once the results start coming in.

The REALLY stupid thing is there IS a way to make safe investments with non infinite money that bet on the whole market at once it just ISN'T the one DDM imagines where you just invest in every tech bubble company going hoping to win big enough on one of them to cancel out your massive and predictable losses.

$199 isn't a billionaire amount of money btw. Bringing it back on topic, you just need to find a few hundred presidential elections to bet on where you know your assessment of the odds is much more accurate than that of the gambling professionals who set them, in order to try it out yourself.

$199 isn't a billionaire amount of money because you just PULLED IT OUT OF YOUR ARSE.

Meanwhile if I JUST got ENOUGH US presidential elections where I could drop $100 dollars on each at odds good enough that I could guaranteed see one where the winning candidate is assassinated and replaced by their VP I WOULD BE LIVING IN FOREVER WORLD WITH US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS EVERY 5 MINUTES AND I WOULD STILL NEED HUGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY AS WELL AS THE SOMEHOW CONSTANTLY FUCKING FAVOURABLE ODDS.

If you plug actual numbers in, if the odds of the correct election outcome are vanishingly small the cost, the amount delivered by a win, they don't matter, I will not live to see enough presidential elections to make this a collectively safe bet. And iteratively as I lose the bet each election my chances of success only go DOWN not UP as I burn through my very small finite number of US presidential elections in my lifetime.

[deaddmwalking]

You keep using examples with a negative expected return as counterexamples for those with a positive expected return.

If your odds of winning are 1%, the odds of winning any single game are very bad. But the odds of winning one game if you play 100 times are good (though not certain).

I haven't watched any movies about people winning lotteries based on a strategy. I did watch one movie where a man (probably Nicholas Cage) tells a waitress that he'll give her half his winnings if his lottery ticket is a winner, but that’s not relevant. I read a book about thinking mathematically and it used the MA lottery as an example (while referencing the MI lottery and Voltaire's fortune.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

You keep using examples with a negative expected return as counterexamples for those with a positive expected return.

NO. You fucking idiot I'm telling you that you do NOT routinely get examples with a positive expected return. Not without infinite investments/investment money.

You can manufacture an example where you do out your ass like Foxwarriors $199. The thing is, those are rare enough in reality they might as well not exist, and YOU are being criticized for your stance on long shot investments in tech companies like early days Paypal and Microsoft or the 30 million US Presidential elections that somehow theoretically happen.

The problem is YOU are stupid enough to think that if there is AN example where it COULD work then it MUST work for the examples where you WANT it to work, your lack of a deeper than superficial understanding of the math and your inability as a liberal to compare two values facilitate your total failure to see the threshold where your contrived examples cease being relevant.

[deaddmwalking]

You keep using examples with a negative expected return as counterexamples for those with a positive expected return.

NO. You fucking idiot I'm telling you that you do NOT routinely get examples with a positive expected return. Not without infinite investments/investment money.

I agree that with GAMBLING, situations with a positive expected return are rare. In fact, I have been very clear that situations like that are usually the result of someone making a mistake - but not always. But that's why calculating the odds and the payout is a useful function. Did you know that the worst bet in Roulette is 'the first five'? Every bet in Roulette favors the house, but this particular bet favors the house by about 1 1/2x as much as any other bet. Knowing how to calculate expected value is how you can evaluate between different bets. If you find one that has a positive expected value (which is admittedly rare) you can make money exploiting that even without infinite money to invest.

You can manufacture an example where you do out your ass like Foxwarriors $199. The thing is, those are rare enough in reality they might as well not exist, and YOU are being criticized for your stance on long shot investments in tech companies like early days Paypal and Microsoft or the 30 million US Presidential elections that somehow theoretically happen.

An S&P Index Fund has returned 10.7% as an average compounded rate of return over the last 30 years. That means that if you invested $1,000 in an S&P Index fund 30 years ago, you'd now have $7,200. Finding positive returns isn't even hard. People will tell you that a well-diversified stock portfolio will typically out perform inflation, and that's true. But if you're trying to MAXIMIZE returns, you want to be able to calculate 'winners' versus 'losers'. That's possible too!

In traditional stock investments (as opposed to shorting a stock) you invest a certain amount of money. If that stock fails, the most you can possibly lose is the amount you invested. If you owned stock in SVB, that money is gone. There are plenty of other historical examples of high-flying publicly traded companies that went bankrupt and their stock prices collapsed. On the other hand, there's no limit to how much a stock can accumulate value. In the same time that a well-diversified stock portfolio would have turned your $1,000 into $7,200, investing $1,000 into Apple would have turned it into $290,000. Now, billionaires have a lot of money, but not INFINITE money. Still, they get invited to consider investing 'early' before public launches of companies. For every Google or Apple there's a Theranos.

If you know there are bad investments and good investments and you can roughly determine what percentage are which, even if you can't identify the good ones from the bad ones you can determine mathematically whether you're likely to win money or lose money if you bet on all of them. In American Roulette, betting on every number costs you $38 and you win $35 plus your $1 bet for a total return of $36 (losing $2). With investments, you can divide your 'wager' across any or all of them. Even if a small number of companies make a BIG return, you're very likely to earn more than you lose. Lance Armstrong's $100k investment in Uber earned him $20,000,000. That's enough to cover a lot of 'bad bets'.

The problem is YOU are stupid enough to think that if there is AN example where it COULD work then it MUST work for the examples where you WANT it to work, your lack of a deeper than superficial understanding of the math and your inability as a liberal to compare two values facilitate your total failure to see the threshold where your contrived examples cease being relevant.

The math works the same whether the example works or doesn't work. That's why you run the expected value calculations. IF EXPECTED VALUE IS POSITIVE then you're likely to make money. If the expected value is negative, you're likely to lose money. But nothing is guaranteed. Sometimes people spend $2 on a lottery ticket and end up winning $500 million. The odds of getting all those numbers right - 1 in 292.2 million. Incidentally, the Expected Value of your $2 ticket with a $500,000,000 'take' is $1.71 (though that has to be after taxes and such). Looking at the 25 biggest jackpots, there were 37 winning tickets, so you odds of 'splitting' the jackpot are actually surprisingly high (higher jackpots encourage more players). If you assume that you're EXPECTED to earn 2/3 of the jackpot if you win because SOMETIMES you share, that reduces it further. Those are good things to consider. And then, finally, how many times you'd have to play before you're likely to win. But, knowing that there are 1.22 million possible combinations of numbers, for $584,402,676 you could play them all, guaranteeing you win. That's close enough to 'infinite money' that it isn't ever REALLY worth it, but that has more to do with how we value money and nothing to do with mathematically sensible investments.

[Kaelik]

you want to be able to calculate 'winners' versus 'losers'. That's possible too!

Nah.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Holy fuck DDM you gish galloping goal post shifting fuck you want to talk about index funds NOW? You want to name drop real investment strategies to try and look cool and pretend you understand them? You suddenly want to talk about actually DISCERNING whether an investment is a good idea or not instead of just investing in "enough" high pay out long shots?

And even after trying to shift the entire argument to something else for several hundred words you STILL manage to go back and be wrong in the same mule headed fucking moronic way and resort to dismissing the entire point of the criticism (your math doesn't apply in all situations) by means of a fucking tautology claiming effectively that when it is right it is right! Literally doing the thing I have accused you of, imagining that giving any example in which it is correct somehow justifies your belief that it is ALWAYS correct and correct in the examples you have been criticized for.

How. Are. You. This. Dumb?

[deaddmwalking]

Holy fuck DDM you gish galloping goal post shifting fuck you want to talk about index funds NOW? You want to name drop real investment strategies to try and look cool and pretend you understand them? You suddenly want to talk about actually DISCERNING whether an investment is a good idea or not instead of just investing in "enough" high pay out long shots?

No. I brought up the point that billionaires are more afraid of 'missing out' on a big opportunity than investing a (to them) trivial amount in a failure. You have refused to accept that point so I've just been elaborating on that.

And even after trying to shift the entire argument to something else for several hundred words you STILL manage to go back and be wrong in the same mule headed fucking moronic way and resort to dismissing the entire point of the criticism (your math doesn't apply in all situations) by means of a fucking tautology claiming effectively that when it is right it is right! Literally doing the thing I have accused you of, imagining that giving any example in which it is correct somehow justifies your belief that it is ALWAYS correct and correct in the examples you have been criticized for.

I have offered examples where the 'expected value' is positive. You offer counterexamples where the 'expected value' is negative. I keep pointing out that determining whether the Expected Value is positive or negative is, indeed, the point. IF Expected Value is positive, then it is a good bet.

Meaning, if you are correct about the probability, and you make enough of those types of bets, statistically you will win more than you lose. While those situations are rare, they definitely exist.

Regarding the 'should I bet whether Trump will survive through the election', it's looking like the 'less than 0.79% chance' is looking correct. In the last two weeks there have been no reported assassination attempts, so I stand by my supposition that Trump being a national figure who some people might want to assassinate didn't significantly raise his mortality rates based on the other factors that pushed his mortality down.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

No, you are just trolling, you think you are engaging in entertaining rhetoric because you are a moron, but you do on some level know you are wrong and think it is totally cool to just keep repeating yourself because you cannot actually engage in intellectually honest discussion and you imagine you have something here you can win by just being mule headed enough when caught out being stupid.

[PseudoStupidity]

Are you claiming Trump not getting murdered (a thing everyone said was unlikely, but that it is still the most likely way he'd die before the election) is proof your number was correct? That is a good example of why people are calling you innumerate and stupid. Trump not dying isn't proof your number wasn't stupid, every single person correctly predicted Trump was unlikely to die without using any numbers at all! Nobody else slapped a number on it because they knew that number was incalculable, hence everyone calling your number stupid. It's still a stupid number, by the way. You have no idea how likely Trump is to die before the election, but it's safe to say the odds are low for all the reasons everyone except for you has listed. Your stated reason for thinking Trump's death is unlikely is stupid because it's from stats that simply do not apply to Trump, a unique individual who is not the entire population of 80-year-old American men.

[Kaelik]

It's great how I exactly predicted that trump living to the election would result in deaddm saying "see I was right when I said .79% and you were wrong when you said 1.5%" but then he just said it anyway.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

It's great how I exactly predicted that trump living to the election would result in deaddm saying "see I was right when I said .79% and you were wrong when you said 1.5%" but then he just said it anyway.

He always does that.

It's pretty solid evidence that he just lacks even a fairly cosmetic level of reading comprehension.

It wouldn't take much to avoid that sort of thing.

edit: And you just wait, if Kamala wins the election he will claim that it proves he was right when he said she would "win by a landslide but maybe not", and also everything else he has ever claimed.

[MGuy]

No, you are just trolling, you think you are engaging in entertaining rhetoric because you are a moron, but you do on some level know you are wrong and think it is totally cool to just keep repeating yourself because you cannot actually engage in intellectually honest discussion and you imagine you have something here you can win by just being mule headed enough when caught out being stupid.

I do not believe ddm thinks he's wrong. I think in reality that he is actually incapable of understanding why he is wrong. At best he might suspect that he's simply not communicating effectively enough. He's spent more time defending this than he did his hand wringing over genocide which is really something. Trying to defend the idea that an elderly ex president = average old person just because they are both elderly is so dumb on the face of it I would not think it was worth defending yet here it is.

If I thought he was clever I would even suspect that this level of stupidity might even be intentional. By posting this nonsense for so long he's clogged the thread to the point where there hasn't been any talk about the actual election.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

I don't know if there is much I want to say about the election now until we see results and responses to them.

[phlapjackage]

Never believe that anti-Semites are ddm is completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have ddm has the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.
- Sartre

[deaddmwalking]

Are you claiming Trump not getting murdered (a thing everyone said was unlikely, but that it is still the most likely way he'd die before the election) is proof your number was correct?

No, I'm saying it was proof that it was a bad bet.

Remember, some people refused to say whether they thought the number was higher or lower.

[Kaelik]

Again deaddm.

Are you claiming that the fact trump survived to election day proves the chance of him dying was .76%?

Or less?

If someone offers you 50 dollars on a tails but you have to pay 100 on a heads then they flip tails, was it a good bet?

The fact that he lived to election day does not mean the chance was .76%! It is perfectly compatible with a 30% chance of death! Or even 70%! It's so weird to take this as evidence that the chance was less then .76%.

[PseudoStupidity]

A single event happening or not happening does not determine if a bet as to whether or not that thing would happen was a good bet. This is like declaring the Fool's Mate in chess a good strategy because it worked for you once. Things do not always happen the same way every single time! There are variables and shit, dude. Sometimes the winds of fate blow in a different direction, or sometimes the literal wind blows differently and a shot that would hit Trump in the ear instead hits him in the face.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

I could talk about how as Trump surviving or not changes from speculation about a future event into a known fact about a past event all estimates are rendered redundant, and that technically no estimate of a single discrete binary outcome is ever technically "correct" by its very nature especially in retrospect.

But the difference between might become true and is true is too advanced for a DDM discussion, after all we already covered a similar break between estimations about 80 year old men collectively and known facts about one specific guy and that didn't register.

[deaddmwalking]

If someone offers you 50 dollars on a tails but you have to pay 100 on a heads then they flip tails, was it a good bet?

No!

The expected value is negative.

If it's a fair coin there's a 50% chance that you earn $50. The 'expected value' of heads is .50*50=$25
For tails, there's a 50% chance that you lose $100. The 'expected value' of tails is -$50.00.
The total expected value is -$25.00

The more times you play, the more money you lose, so this is definitely a bad bet.

On the other hand, if you reversed the values, I'd play that game all day.

[Kaelik]

Deaddm.

Stop botposting.

The entire point of the example, is to demonstrate, that your absurd, stupid, innumerate, idiotic fucking moron claims are dumb as shit, because you are claiming that an even not happening "proves" it had a .76% chance of happening, when in fact, like coin flips, sometimes things happen and sometimes they don't, and Trump living does not prove that it had a .76% chance of dying, it is completely compatible with a 1% or 10% or 80% chance of happening, just like how a coin flipping tails DOES NOT mean that it had a 100% chance of flipping tails beforehand.

No matter how much your dumb as shit moron fucking brain think it proves you right.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

No!

Quick comparison of DDM Claims.

50% chance to win free money with no outlay or lose double that same amount, BAD BET.

50% chance to win 5% of your bet or lose TEN TIMES AS MUCH AS YOU COULD WIN... GOOD BET.

There is a massive issue here. I doubt DDM could even identify it.

[JourneymanN00b]

Well, it looks like the orange convict is going to return to the White House, as Kamala Harris (and other downballot Democrats) is putting up a *horrid* performance in the Rust Belt.

Only in America can an insurrectionist become president and have his crimes overlooked. Only in America does sexism and racism reign supreme. Only in America can fascism rise and put an end to free elections in the future. This is a sad, SAD indictment of this nation that will last for decades to come.

Oh, and the Democrats are screwing up in the Senate as well. At the time of this writing, Sherrod Brown has lost reelection, Jim Justice predictably flipped West Virginia, Jon Tester is trailing Tim Sheehy by a huge margin, and Tammy Baldwin, Bob Casey, and Elissa Slotkin are in serious trouble. Never in my dreams did I imagine the Republicans getting 55 Senate seats, which has not happened since 2004.

Man, this is very close to the worst timeline that this country could be in.

[Koumei]

Only in America can an insurrectionist become president and have his crimes overlooked. Only in America does sexism and racism reign supreme. Only in America can fascism rise and put an end to free elections in the future.

Don't be stupid. There are plenty of countries all over the world where these hold true. Doesn't that make you feel better?