Amezarak

> Holding a forecaster to a standard of "Silver must get 100% of predictions correct or else he's a fucking moron" is, in itself, a sign of low critical thinking skills.

The forecaster in question was fully aware of everything you're saying and yet he blew 100k on what he thought was a sure thing that turned out to not be. Maybe if he was as statistically-aware as you claim, he would not have made the bet, since he should have known there was a reasonable statistical probability he was wrong. I don't demand Nate get "100% of predictions correct", I'm mocking him because he's overrated and he made an outrageously confident prediction that blew up in his face when almost anyone who wasn't high on their own supply could see he was wrong, or at least could clearly see there was no basis for such a confident prediction. "There is an 80% chance Trump wins Florida by < 8pts" is very different from "I'll put down 100k that Trump wins Florida by < 8 pts."

Of course the real problem is "statistical probabilities" don't actually factor into it and 538's model is actually not that well calibrated, and anyway we're talking about real-world forecasting, for which "well, 80% of the time I'm right" is useless in terms of actionable information unless the only reason you care about election forecasts is to gamble on prediction markets.

Polling aggregators also have a miserable record. You get closer because by aggregating you partly eliminate individual biases, methodological errors, sampling issues, and ulterior motives, but you also have problems with the pool of polls itself and aggregators are ineffective in adjusting for these issues by weighting or eliminating pollsters accordingly.

Another comment even mentioned the notorious Nate Silver (bronze perhaps), the most famous of these types who lost 100k by being completely wrong about Florida by a huge margin. (Did he actually commit and payout? Not sure.)

Yes, I have made a lot of money by not looking at them on prediction markets dating back to the Intrade days.

Yes, that’s her public defense. Did she publish the raw data and methodology showing this? Or are these unprovable statements that cover for her reputation?

I mean this defense is effectively saying that polls are actually worthless and should be ignored anyway - that’s what “the best polling methodology we have can sometimes be off by 15 points” would actually mean.

If you really believe “good” pollsters don’t do this, you should question how the Harris campaign’s internal polling outperformed them. How did a political campaign correctly predict with polling all along that she was behind Trump when public polling consistently showed her ahead until tightening immediately before? Public polling, again, is generally more of a tool to shape opinion than it is to reflect reality. Private campaign polling that’s limited to leadership only is much more likely to be accurate since they actually want the truth.

Fake polls are not election fraud, although they certainly are a dirty trick.

Fake polls are definitely a “both sides” thing. A notorious example in the 2024 election was the Selzer poll, which was ludicrous when it was released and confirmed to be such during the actual election. 16 point misses by seasoned pollsters are not accidental. Polls generally speaking have long been used to shape public opinion and policy more than they have to actually understand the public .

Nowadays both sides are also doing what they can to manipulate the elections via prediction markets.

> I know many people who have broken the law. Like most people, I break it all the time.

Clearly, it is worth making a distinction between crimes like robbery / theft / assault / murder and speeding.

> The US already has the largest prison population in the world.

In absolute numbers. Per capita, El Salvador does, coming on the heels of dramatically lowering their crime rates from some of the worst in the world to the best in Central America...by arresting everyone who caused problems and jailing them. The homicide rate went down by 98%, to 1.3, better than many European countries.

That's the sort of change that obviously makes a real difference.

> You're talking about the genocide of Indigenous Americans. You know the Comanche aren't the bad guys right?

Either you don't know very much about the Comanche, or you believe in some sort of alien Nietzschean morality, in which case we are definitely too far apart - but either way, I wasn't making a moral statement, simply illustrating how difficult it is to assimilate people with radically different norms who aren't interested.

> we need to stop imprisoning so many people

We need to imprison more people. The single biggest predictor for future crime is past crime. Multiple offenders are doing almost all the crime. Your hypothesis that we should just let them all out and stop arresting them and they will just stop committing crimes because there are no more mean cops to persecute them is so absurd it beggars belief. Do you know any of these people?

From my perspective, you seem to be making a common error that do-gooders make: projecting your own psychological state onto that of the average criminal. You wouldn't do any of these things, as a conscientious, decent human being, except under severe duress, or perhaps relentless persecution - so they wouldn't either. And that first part is true. It would take a long period of intense suffering, breakdown, and resocialization before the average upstanding citizen began engaging in common criminality.

But I assure you this is not how the average criminal thinks. In millions of tragically unfortunate cases, they were socialized from the beginning into criminality. You cannot fix this with feel-good interventions like therapy or 'equitable' interventions in schools. You are dealing with a different culture. You cannot fix it except maybe through a very long and arduous process analagous to the one that would turn you into a criminal. The will to do this does not exist. It would require prison reform - but not the kind you would approve of.

Consider historical cases, like that of the Comanche - it took many wars to stop them and force them to stop just killing people for sport. Surrounded, at gun point, and under forced re-acculturation, with many 'incidents' still breaking out, you have many examples of them grousing that living like this is just not worth it, compared with riding around having fun killing and looting while your slaves did all the work. This is the sort of situation you are dealing with when it comes to the average criminal mindset. You are dealing with an alien culture in your midst. And it spreads! Social disorder is contagious and breeds itself. While you pooh-pooh the idea of simply removing offenders from the population, a hundred kids are missing out on an education because of three ineducable kids disrupting the school for everyone else, who can't be removed because that wouldn't be fair. Someone down on their luck has their car get stolen with no consequences for the thief and wonders what's the point of doing right. A young unemployed adult with some criminal friends decides to go out with them one night - nothing's happened to them so far, after all. A teenage girl ends up pimped out in LA, and ends up so deeply misocialized by the experience that even when the cops do manage to rescue her, she just goes back to it.

There's always some base rate, because people with low impulse control / antisocial disorders / aggression always exist. But you get beyond that, like we are now, when criminal subcultures emerge. And you absolutely cannot fix it by spending more money - they'll gladly take your benefits and keep stealing and killing.

The only solution, besides radical re-education camps, is removing these people from the general population. Fortunately, most career criminals are already known to the police and are the ones committing most of the crime. Lock up everyone with 2 prior violent crime convictions and violent crime drops by 50% overnight. That's quantifiable.

Can you quantify how much it improves? How much will say, homicides go down if we eliminate police and defense spending and put it toward social programs?

Can you explain why 33% -> 40% will make such a huge difference? Why didn’t the first 33%? Why are most other countries able to spend much less? At what dollar amount can we safely gauge whether it is working?

3% of the US GDP is spent on defense - I don't have good numbers for LEO. So your argument is that if we spend 3% more of our GDP and move from 20% to 23%, that will solve crime? [1]

You are mistaking me as an opponent of social spending. I am not. What I am an opponent of is the obvious untruth that we can spend our way out of our social problems. This idea is not only wasting enormous sums of money, it's degrading the justice system (by getting criminals released) and the education system (by lowering standards and ruining the education of conscientious children in the name of keeping all kids in school, no matter how bad.) This is an actively destructive idea.

[1] This is an extra curious idea because of course, for the most part, military spending is a jobs program for young 20 somethings, veterans, and engineers, and obviously even if the police were net-neutral, that would be a jobs program as well. So the hypothesis is that firing the millions of people employed in these sectors and spending more on social workers and benefits would somehow be a net positive over that.

Edit: Small correction. 20% of GDP is dedicated to government social spending. 33% is on both private and public social spending. So 1 out of every 3 dollars in the US is spent on social programs right now. And your contention is that 36% is what’s going to move the needle?

About 20% of US GDP is social spending. What percentage of GDP will get us where we need to be? Why does California have so many notorious problems when, compared with many other states, its social spending is so generous?

Social systems are not as simple as "give people more money", particularly when millions of people have already been socialized into criminality. Thinking this is a total misunderstanding. Most criminals are not stealing to get bread to feed their family. They commit crimes because a) it's fun b) it's what their peers are doing / needed for their social standing and c) it beats working for a living. Yes, a well-socialized conscientious person would never do this except in cases of severe hardship - but that's not the reality of what's happening.

> With that in mind, why shouldn't it be in favor of the locals and reflect the values of its own society instead of some tech bros with imperialist ambitions?

The article is discussing a candidate who got the majority of the vote in the 10/4 election. Where did you get the idea that this content doesn't "reflect the values of its own society"?

People want to deflect and blame foreign powers for why their platforms are failing among the electorate. The argument is essentially that they are so right and correct that any deviation from their values could only have occurred due to Bad Guy external intervention, which conveniently justifies why we need mass censorship.

Just do a better job convincing people you're right. Censorship will just mask social problems until the outbreak is even worse.

There were also several two and three digit keys.

The Siona gene didn't actually remove prescience, it hid people from prescience. That's why Leto II is still able to control events as far in the future as Chapterhouse Dune.

This is an important distinction. It's also the case that Leto needed the Ixians for the no-ship technology, which he also regarded as of extreme importance for the same reason. Which also, remember, the Idaho gholas had to be confined to no-ships so they, lacking the Siona gene, wouldn't be visible to prescience.

Leto II had visions of AI-driven Ixian hunter-killers annihilating all human life in the universe. That probably had something to do with it.

After the Scattering and the fulfillment of his eugenics program with the Siona gene, he no longer cares, because it is no longer possible for even AI to eradicate humanity.