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Don't chide people for failing to read your mind. If you wanted people to take that away, you should've said that. Using a specific example as a metonym for a larger phenomenon is a poor choice in terms of clarity. Of course people responded to the specific example.

Each eligible voter is a random variable, independence aside. Silver's model does not operate on the level of the voter however. A random variable is a very flexible abstraction, almost anything can be a random variable if you can find a way to measure it. Polls are a measurement. They're imperfect, but all measurements contain error.

It's not statistics because any authority says it is, it's statistics because it starts with a measure of probability (aggregated polls) and builds an interpretation on top of it. That's what statistics is. It can be good statistics or bad statistics, but that's a separate question. Incidentally, it has a pretty good track record.

If you have a criticism of Silver's model I'm curious to hear it. However, as it is I don't see a criticism in your comment. You say it's ridiculous, but it isn't. It's complicated, not ridiculous. I can't say precisely what's on your mind, but if I had to guess, it doesn't make sense to you, which is a different matter.

Those "two" new accounts are probably the same person, I'm sure that paid trolls occasionally drop in on HN, but HN has plenty of native trolls doing it for the love of the game (or out of sincere ideological commitment).

For sure. Thanks for explaining, I think you're right.

Whenever I hear him interviewed (or read his books) I come away with the impression Silverman is a bit up his own rear but I don't see what's objectionable about writing recommendations for people you've worked with. That's pretty normal.

This is such tired debate that comes up whenever 538 is mentioned in discussion. Polls sample an election's outcome many times throughout the campaign. Statistics works. You can't know the future but you can predict it with error bars. 51/49 or 70/30 should tell you there's a very real chance of a Trump victory.

People get bent out of shape about 538 but it's usually because they're misinterpreting the prediction, not that the prediction is meaningless.

I don't know if I'm just dense but I continue to have no idea what the implication is.

What does that mean?

It was preserved in the sense a fossil is preserved. The object was destroyed but some of it's structure remains. (Which is ludicrously cool. The world is so strange and wonderful. Though it's also a world where a volcano can erupt in your vicinity.)

I mean, Chrome is also reskinned to serve a particular niche by a number of providers. I don't think that really cuts it in either case.

That's like saying HR's budget is the same as Accounting's budget because they're both part of Incorporated Widgets, and that we should fire Bob in HR because Sandra is a good accountant. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense or reflect how these decisions are actually made. Funding more social sciences doesn't actually mean funding less other science, just like hiring an HR rep doesn't entail firing an accountant.

Different funds are appropriated for different purposes, funding the kind of research you're talking about would likely be connected to an NSF grant or a national lab. Note as well that science, like everything else, experiences diminishing returns. Putting 1000x the money into water treatment research won't get you 1000x the return. Allocating funds at the scale of the federal government isn't zero sum; you can saturate the amount of funding it's possible to provide, and it does make sense to spread funding around many different areas.

Incidentally, that research you want to see is probably in jeopardy because the grant funding it contains forbidden words like "environment."

This is a false dichotomy. There's no conflict between studying things from a social science angle and creating water infrastructure. They're not coming out of the same budget, they're not coming out of the same talent pool, they're not mutually exclusive, there's just no conflict there.

I agree that foreign aid is a good way to avoid conflict. I'd love to see the US help the entire world have access to clean water. Shame that they dismantled the apparatus for providing it.

Makes sense to me that violence could be related to climate phenomena like draught, and that you might want to pay people to study when and how that has happened and predict when and where it may happen again.