TICKLER/HOISTED: Philosophy of Probability—Something I Really Should Get Back to

Not, mind you, that I have anything deep to say about the philosophy of probability. I cannot even decide whether Bayesian all-is-prior-plus-evidence is a useful crutch or a limiting hobble. Or is...

Not, mind you, that I have anything deep to say about the philosophy of probability. I cannot even decide whether Bayesian all-is-prior-plus-evidence is a useful crutch or a limiting hobble. Or is it Frequentist all-is-smoothing-onto-a-lower-dimensional-subspace-to-avoid-overfitting that is the useful crutch or the limiting hobble way to look at all of it?…

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Back in 2012, the war on Nate Silver by those who thought they would gain advantage by getting people to highball their views of Mitt Romney’s chances:

Gregg Easterbrook: Absurd Specificity Watch: ‘Americans seem to love hyperbolic claims of precision--perhaps it makes us feel that science is more efficient than it really is. When Nate Silver of The New York Times forecasts, as he did on the morning of the 2012 presidential voting, that Barack Obama will win re-election with "314.6" electoral votes to "223.4" electoral votes for Mitt Romney, such numbers are received with gravitas--as if the decimal places made them deep, rather than silly. In just two days, Obama's chance of re-election increased from "80.8 percent" to "83.7" percent. A claim of a "83.7" percent chance rather than "a good chance" is seen as turning the speaker into Mr. Spock, when actually ought to make readers giggle...

And:

Jonah Goldberg: Nate Silver's Numbers Racket: ‘An intense kerfuffle broke out over the poll-prognosticator Nate Silver and his blog at the New York Times, FiveThirtyEight. Silver, a statistician, has been predicting a decisive Obama victory for a very long time, based on his very complicated statistical model, which very, very few of his fans or detractors understand. On any given day, Silver might announce that—given the new polling data—”the model” now finds that the president has an 86.3% chance of winning. Not 86.4%, you fools. Not 86.1%, you Philistines. But 86.3%, you lovers of reason...

So I wrote a dialog: <https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/08/elementary-philosophy-of-probability-and-the-war-on-nate-silver-the-honest-broker-for-the-week-of-august-2-2014.html>:

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Thrasymakhos: So tell us, friend Simplissimus, what your cohorts' objection is. Gregg Easterbook and Jonah Goldberg do not tell us why Nate Silver should make you giggle. Instead, they use that figure of rhetoric that I call "Mean Girls": to mock, and in the process of mocking implicitly warn you that if you admit to not understanding their mockery you will be mocked too. That keeps them from having to outline exactly what their mockery is, so the underlying argument can be examined...

Simplissimus: I will give it a try. Let us think about the kinds of knowledge that we could have about a forthcoming future event, and about the overweening pride of those who falsely pretend to forms of knowledge and certainty that they cannot have...

Sokrates: Let's be specific. Is there something that was once in the future but is now in the past that was bothering you? Something we can examine?...

Simplissimus: OK. The Obama-Romney presidential election. Nate Silver's false pretense of knowledge that he knew the odds down to the last decimal point.

Sokrates: Back up. Let's start with claims to knowledge that we can all agree are false, just so we can all start on the same page...

Simplissimus: OK...

Sokrates: We could claim about some future event that we know what will happen--that, for example, that we know at the start of November 2012 that Obama is going to win. Is that the kind of false pretense knowledge you are talking about?

Simplissimus: No. Everyone argues that certain knowledge of what future events will or will not come to pass is impossible.

Sokrates: So everyone agrees that claims of certain knowledge about the future are offenses against Tyche: impious and false. Only wizards and prophets claim such knowledge, and there are no true wizards and prophets.

Simplissimus: You speak truly, Sokrates.

Sokrates: But that is not the type of knowledge that Nate Silver claims, is it?

Simplissimus: No.

Sokrates: OK, so Nate Silver does not claim--call that first-order certainty. Nate Silver is much too epistemologically modest to fall into that trap of claiming to know who will be the winner.

Simplissimus: True.

Sokrates: There is another epistemologically arrogant claim to knowledge. Joe Scarborough makes it. He claims to know--with certainty--that the odds on who will win the presidential election are 50-50, and anybody who claims to know anything else is a fraud: “Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73% chance--they think they have 50.1% chance of winning. And you talk to the Romney people, it is the same thing. Both sides understand that it is close, and it could go either way. And anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a toss up right now is such an ideologue, They should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they are jokes...” Call that second-order certainty--that the principle of insufficient reason rules, and that the only true fair odds any honest and rational person can arrive at must be 50-50. Is that Nate Silver's offense?

Simplissimus: No.