If you are (a) not playing against people who know more than you do, (b) have no good way of acquiring more information, and (c) are risk-neutral because things are low-stakes, then it is an absolutely fine thing to do to focus on expected value and adopt the methodology of the Rev. Thomas Bayes. Indeed, it is hard for me to see why it w…
If you are (a) not playing against people who know more than you do, (b) have no good way of acquiring more information, and (c) are risk-neutral because things are low-stakes, then it is an absolutely fine thing to do to focus on expected value and adopt the methodology of the Rev. Thomas Bayes. Indeed, it is hard for me to see why it would be worth your while in cognitive and other resources to do anything else.
And in that context the "Silver Bulletin" daily updates telling people that it was, is, and will probably be a toss-up until election day seem to me to be very useful.
I do have one serious quarrel with the way Nate and Eli talk about their presidential odds. They write as if small things that are going to happen in the future will be decisive for who wins—with the implication that you should pay close attention to the news in order to catch those small things that will matter a lot. I think that is more-or-less completely wrong. What is right is that small things that happened in the past of which we are now ignorant will turn out to have made the difference. So unless you have good insights into what those small things that happened and that feed into pollster biases are, you might as well hang it up and stop watching for polls.
I understand the objection if (c) does not hold: Then you should be spending your cognitive and other resources doing scenario-planning to figure out what your pain points are and how to buy insurance. Bayesian frames are then not very helpful.
I understand the objection if (b) does not hold: Then you should gather more information about the situation, because even if you do care about the odds the odds you think you know now are not the odds.
And I understand the objection if (a) does not hold: Then the only way to win (on average) i not to play, and your even trying to calculate the odds is to run a DDoS attack on your own brain.
So I would like to turn the question around: If you stipulate to (a), (b), and (c), what is the objection to the Bayesian scheme?
Hmmm... would have to think more in depth on this, but on first blush, my dumb answers would be that essentially, those three things seem to go together, in low-stakes/trivial stuff (e.g. poker, sports betting); while (a) and (b) go together for higher-stakes hard-science estimates of well-understood physical phenomena (e.g. climate change). In these cases, Bayes is the right way to go, I think.
But generally, as the stakes get higher, stuff is simply not predictable, and applying game theory approaches to fundamentally unpredictable things can get us all into very serious trouble. I keep going back to the Herman Kahn game theory approach to nuclear weapons. Maybe there really is a kind deity, because I suspect we have been incredibly lucky not to have blown it all up using that kind of kooky approach. I used to think the game theorists had kept us alive until I read Michael Dobbs' 2009 book "One Minute to Midnight" about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everything I had crammed into my head about that event (mainly via Bobby Kennedy's "Thirteen Days" in Harvard Government classes) was complete fiction. The JFK ExComm had this very elaborate mental model of the Soviet leadership's approach to the crisis, and it was complete crap. If one Soviet sub officer had not vetoed nuking a US Navy convoy that was forcing it to the surface in the Caribbean, we might not be here discussing this. There was no "the other guy blinked" moment non the quarantine line; there was no Politburo coup against Khrushchev with the second hard-line cable; there were 80 MRBMs armed and ready to launch if attacked, with local control. We were incredibly lucky, not good at game theory.
I think we try to apply mathematically rigorous game-theory-type approaches to way too many intersubjective realities (of Keynes' "beauty pageant" type). And as long as the mental models are shared widely, they work. But as soon as mass opinion shifts, they go kablooey. Because the laws of physics do not apply to mass delusions (e.g. religion, patriotism, fashion, the stock market, belief that home prices in the U.S. never decline across the entire country), they can abruptly shift in a way physical materials, poker games, and even baseball games cannot.
Games are designed to deliver dopamine hits in small increments, with reasonably low stakes, the exact way cigarettes deliver nicotine hits. Real fundamental uncertainty doesn't do that, but Nate Silver implicitly seems to promise his readers that it can. What we really need for the high-stakes stuff is not more Bayes, but a more systematic and rigorous approach to imagining the full range of plausible large scale outcomes, and then use math and logic to explain how those outcomes might happen. It's a bit terrifying, because you cannot go through that process and remain unaware of just how vast the scale of uncertainty (and the universe of truly plausible outcomes) really is.
I'm about to write a few scenarios of this election from about four years in the future. I think they will correspond to your "small things that happened in the past of which we are now ignorant will turn out to have made the difference" hypothesis. (The monster early voting turnout in Georgia is of this type of thing.) I never like to say things are predictable, but if she loses, the "She should have chosen Josh Shapiro" garbage that would follow is kind of a lock. As well as the "If only Trump had moderated in the last few weeks he would have won" garbage that would follow him losing. No one knows, as you say - abortion might already have won the election for Kamala; her 2019 trans-friendly statement might have already lost it for her.
It's a scary world, and nobody knows nuttin.' That's why we like to pretend there is talismanic power in poll aggregation. Gimme another nicotine hit...
I have done as threatened and written two scenarios for what the world looks like if either Trump or Kamala wins. If you are not already exhausted by my logorrhea, they are here (Trump)...
If you are (a) not playing against people who know more than you do, (b) have no good way of acquiring more information, and (c) are risk-neutral because things are low-stakes, then it is an absolutely fine thing to do to focus on expected value and adopt the methodology of the Rev. Thomas Bayes. Indeed, it is hard for me to see why it would be worth your while in cognitive and other resources to do anything else.
And in that context the "Silver Bulletin" daily updates telling people that it was, is, and will probably be a toss-up until election day seem to me to be very useful.
I do have one serious quarrel with the way Nate and Eli talk about their presidential odds. They write as if small things that are going to happen in the future will be decisive for who wins—with the implication that you should pay close attention to the news in order to catch those small things that will matter a lot. I think that is more-or-less completely wrong. What is right is that small things that happened in the past of which we are now ignorant will turn out to have made the difference. So unless you have good insights into what those small things that happened and that feed into pollster biases are, you might as well hang it up and stop watching for polls.
I understand the objection if (c) does not hold: Then you should be spending your cognitive and other resources doing scenario-planning to figure out what your pain points are and how to buy insurance. Bayesian frames are then not very helpful.
I understand the objection if (b) does not hold: Then you should gather more information about the situation, because even if you do care about the odds the odds you think you know now are not the odds.
And I understand the objection if (a) does not hold: Then the only way to win (on average) i not to play, and your even trying to calculate the odds is to run a DDoS attack on your own brain.
So I would like to turn the question around: If you stipulate to (a), (b), and (c), what is the objection to the Bayesian scheme?
Hmmm... would have to think more in depth on this, but on first blush, my dumb answers would be that essentially, those three things seem to go together, in low-stakes/trivial stuff (e.g. poker, sports betting); while (a) and (b) go together for higher-stakes hard-science estimates of well-understood physical phenomena (e.g. climate change). In these cases, Bayes is the right way to go, I think.
But generally, as the stakes get higher, stuff is simply not predictable, and applying game theory approaches to fundamentally unpredictable things can get us all into very serious trouble. I keep going back to the Herman Kahn game theory approach to nuclear weapons. Maybe there really is a kind deity, because I suspect we have been incredibly lucky not to have blown it all up using that kind of kooky approach. I used to think the game theorists had kept us alive until I read Michael Dobbs' 2009 book "One Minute to Midnight" about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everything I had crammed into my head about that event (mainly via Bobby Kennedy's "Thirteen Days" in Harvard Government classes) was complete fiction. The JFK ExComm had this very elaborate mental model of the Soviet leadership's approach to the crisis, and it was complete crap. If one Soviet sub officer had not vetoed nuking a US Navy convoy that was forcing it to the surface in the Caribbean, we might not be here discussing this. There was no "the other guy blinked" moment non the quarantine line; there was no Politburo coup against Khrushchev with the second hard-line cable; there were 80 MRBMs armed and ready to launch if attacked, with local control. We were incredibly lucky, not good at game theory.
I think we try to apply mathematically rigorous game-theory-type approaches to way too many intersubjective realities (of Keynes' "beauty pageant" type). And as long as the mental models are shared widely, they work. But as soon as mass opinion shifts, they go kablooey. Because the laws of physics do not apply to mass delusions (e.g. religion, patriotism, fashion, the stock market, belief that home prices in the U.S. never decline across the entire country), they can abruptly shift in a way physical materials, poker games, and even baseball games cannot.
Games are designed to deliver dopamine hits in small increments, with reasonably low stakes, the exact way cigarettes deliver nicotine hits. Real fundamental uncertainty doesn't do that, but Nate Silver implicitly seems to promise his readers that it can. What we really need for the high-stakes stuff is not more Bayes, but a more systematic and rigorous approach to imagining the full range of plausible large scale outcomes, and then use math and logic to explain how those outcomes might happen. It's a bit terrifying, because you cannot go through that process and remain unaware of just how vast the scale of uncertainty (and the universe of truly plausible outcomes) really is.
I'm about to write a few scenarios of this election from about four years in the future. I think they will correspond to your "small things that happened in the past of which we are now ignorant will turn out to have made the difference" hypothesis. (The monster early voting turnout in Georgia is of this type of thing.) I never like to say things are predictable, but if she loses, the "She should have chosen Josh Shapiro" garbage that would follow is kind of a lock. As well as the "If only Trump had moderated in the last few weeks he would have won" garbage that would follow him losing. No one knows, as you say - abortion might already have won the election for Kamala; her 2019 trans-friendly statement might have already lost it for her.
It's a scary world, and nobody knows nuttin.' That's why we like to pretend there is talismanic power in poll aggregation. Gimme another nicotine hit...
I have done as threatened and written two scenarios for what the world looks like if either Trump or Kamala wins. If you are not already exhausted by my logorrhea, they are here (Trump)...
https://patrickmarren.com/2024/10/2024-presidential-election-scenario-1-trump-victory
and here (Kamala).
https://patrickmarren.com/2024/10/presidential-election-scenario-2-harris-victory
(Spoiler alert: Limited upside in either case, but almost unlimited downside in the former.)
Going to listen to Hexapodia now. I read that whole Vinge trilogy thanks to you guys. Maybe we can discuss at a reunion some fine day.