For those who don't want to follow the link: "individuals convey preferences that differ from what they genuinely want"
It doesn't need a Wikipedia article nor a term for it. It has been around since the beginning of time.
What is new is that this sort of environment is taking hold in the US, which is unfortunate. And this forum is as guilty as any other. People lambasted Peter Thiel for speaking his mind and voting his wallet. They demanded his head and spoke of repercussions.
That's what you get when you behave that way. When people are threatened when they speak out, they just wont speak in public, but it doesn't change what they believe. Our society is worse off for silencing their voices.
Very true unfortunately. That's not all of HN of course. Many of us supported Thiel and his ideas, or else thought it was worth having an opposing voice around even if they disagreed with it.
I wrote an essay on Peter Thiel's ideas and (partly about) how the Media misunderstood him here:
https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-wolfe-b8de...
It was composed from a chain of HN comments before the election went to Trump, so I can credibly state that I saw a media malfunction with reality on the cards.
I was watching his press conference from a few days ago at the National Press Club event, and I really did Laugh Out Loud when he said (paraphrasing), "You know, this is pretty much the first time I'm not making a contrarian stance, I mean literally how can I be a contrarian when half the population agree with me, and for this I get the flak? Unbelievable!".
Together with the investment in Seasteading, this has been incredibly high impact for comparatively minor sums of money. Thiel has managed managed to make himself the only venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who appeals to the majority of the working class. That is power. He'll be reaping dividends from that for the rest of his life.
This is because many serious inventions and innovations were created by the working class, not the middle class as they appear to think today. In fact historically (and I would argue currently too) the middle classes and elites looked down on entrepreneurship. Entreprenurship is seen as being unprofessional. Most engineering was created by working class with the aristocrats holding up the exploration of science. The water mills, the steam engines, these were not created by the kind of people who studied at universities. We no longer understand our own past.
This may sound like an attempt at provocation, but I swear it is not. I really do think many of the best innovators and inventors have a working class way of looking at the world.
Let us take something that isn't directly in Silicon Valley's ballpark. Tiny Houses.
All the non-cosmetic innovations I've seen in Tiny Houses have been created by working class people.
The majority of Tiny Houses are created by young aspirational middle class or those who want to retire without worrying. It is especially gratifying to see many young women picking up the hammer to forge something for themselves. I saw one who built a VOC-free house recently and that is impressive if you know anything about building.
Despite this, the only major differences between most builds are cosmetic. People really are afraid of being different despite being adventurous enough to live differently to most. There is a finite amount of adventurousness people have and it is easily exhausted.
The names in italics are Youtube channels if you wanted to inspect what I'm talking about.
Esket Tiny House is built by a carpenter, and he has built a magnificent curved roof when everybody else went with a standard gable roof. If you're perceptive you'll notice that a Tiny House only has 13 ft 6 inches to play with. So logically changing the roof shape would hugely improve the living space in the loft area. Yet they choose not to change it.
Tiny House Customs is another working class Joe (framer). He has cleverly hidden the trailer's wheels and tow bars so it doesn't even appear to be a potentially mobile structure.
Life in a Box (electrician) has introduced the concept of a rain screen, despite being in Arizona! Everybody's builds (in the more rainy regions) are going to have the siding rot off in five years! This is smart.
The Not So Tiny House (power plant operator but definitely working class) has very cleverly hidden his trailer using a faux rock skirt. It now just looks like a regular house on a foundation. It is a rather brilliant solution.
The reason why I mention these is because there are very few working class people building Tiny Houses. I think that is a shame. However the thing to notice here, is that when they do build, they build them very differently to the cookie-cutter approach most middle class people do.
In retrospect, all their innovations are extremely obvious. That is quite curious.
I think this says something pretty profound. There is something about being middle class that could damage your ability to integrate innovations into real life. I realize this is anecdotal but in retrospect I have the feeling I see this pattern everywhere in life.
One explanation could be that: once your comfort increases, your comfort 'zone' decreases. I think this could be a powerful explanation for why so few Silicon Valley companies are truly inventive despite being a Mecca for all kinds of talent and enterprise.
As Peter Thiel points out: all kinds of clever young minds go to Harvard, and despite that they keep electing to join industries just as bubbles are bursting. That is not an accident, it is culture.
tldr; When you think of diversity, maybe think of the working class also. Maybe they have something to add nobody else does.
However, formalizing the concept this way allowed the further step of the preference cascade, and that, while also not exactly new in practice, was a more enlightening concept.
First of all, yes, they got it wrong, in that they gave Clinton a higher chance of winning than Trump. They didn't give him a 0 chance, and a model that has 67%ish certainty should be "wrong" about 1 in 3 times. They were better than the other major forecasts, insofar as they gave Trump the highest chance of winning.
I respect Nate Silver for his opposition to non-data-driven media narratives. In 2012, when the media was calling the race super close, Nate called them out for making a media circus when the race was actually looking really good for Obama. In this race, he did the opposite, constantly pointing out how likely a 30% chance was and how big of a polling error there could be (and also how many undecided voters there were). He also called out herding (the tendency of pollsters to not publish outliers) when he saw a ton Clinton+3 and Clinton+4 leads in the week before the election. His forecast may have been wrong, but his instincts are pretty good.
Regarding the shy-Trump effect, we didn't see this play out in the primaries (Trump often underperformed his polls), which makes me skeptical. It might be that with all the reluctant republicans felt a need to vote for him in the general election, the effect got played up. Personally, I think there are 2 big problems in polling as we do it today:
- Not enough pollsters are polling in Spanish. From the polling we do have, we know that Spanish speaking latinos vote very differently from English speaking latinos.
- Our methods for finding people are a mess. Phone polls often use land lines (Cell numbers are often unlisted and may belong to people who live in other states despite their area code) which prejudice them towards the demographic of "people who still have/answer a land line". Internet polls suffer self-selection bias. We need a way to randomly sample people without them making the first move to join a poll. This problem needs to be solved.
Lastly, I want to point out that even Trump's campaign didn't see this coming. No one (except Bill Mitchell's yard sign and Halloween mask model) saw this coming. We have a lot of work to do to fix polling.
They were better than the other major forecasts,
insofar as they gave Trump the highest chance of
winning.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-usc-latimes-poll-2...
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/election-update-leave-th...
I wasn't predicting a Trump win out of bias. I'm very liberal, and my friends are too. However, none of my friends believed me. I'm not going to say I was confident in my prediction, but I thought the race was much closer than it appeared. I talk to a lot of people in my job, and I could just tell that a lot of people would be far more okay with Trump as a president than they were willing to overtly say.
I'm not saying I'm some election analysis god, but I felt like people were galvanizing Trump support by refusing to acknowledge Trump as a legitimate candidate, which I think resonated with a lot of people who felt that their concerns were not being taken legitimately. The HRC campaign focused on the negative aspects of his campaign, but his support came from the fact that people felt that Trump cared about their concerns.
Don't believe me? When you look how they are constructed it becomes clear. Too bad for Clinton campaign she was highly unlikable and even the most expensive campaign in history couldn't help her.
The scarier thing is that for the next 10-20 years, boomers in the rust belt are going to swing republican unless dems can get a Bernie. To me, whatever democrat wins the michigan primary, is their candidate above all else.
That being said, I saw a lot of arguments on Facebook about Trump. I don't think the echo chamber is as complete as claimed. I think a lot of the issue is not that social media provides an echo chamber, but that social mores prevent people from voicing controversial views in large groups of people who disagree with you. So, assuming the people in your friends list are from a similar socioeconomic background, a substantial majority of them probably support one candidate over the other. So the only posts you'll see about the other person are from the least "well behaved" members of your social circle.
I think the larger issue is that the quality of the conversation on social networks is just terrible. A five-minute conversation with a stranger has more depth to it than a status with 100 comments on it. Online discussions are basically won by whichever side's memes appeal to the broader audience.
It also seemed like the celebrity endorsements had the opposite effect. Some of the people who I've met who spoke ill of the celebrities used language that I don't think they normally use. It has been quite odd.
Hilarious defence of their work in recent tweet
"Clinton came within 2 points of 307 electoral votes, in which case polls would have been right in 49 of 50 states. "
ie. If the results had been different, our prediction would have been correct.
First, that comment is about the polls, not their model.
Second, it's called a polling error. It's actually a thing.
This election happened to be extremely sensitive to polling errors due to the nature of the electoral college and the fact that a number of key races were extremely tight.
When an average poll has a 3% margin of error, and you factor in state-level correlations (and the fact that the state level polls tend to have more variable quality than national polls), a slight error results in a huge swing.
Which is the entire point they're making, if you're willing to set aside the snark and read what they wrote (since it's actually, you know, interesting and informative).
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundi...
If you're talking about Taleb's "black swan" style uncertainty, that's specifically the kind that cannot be taken into account.
If you're talking about events being correlated instead of independent, that's what set 538 apart from other poll-aggregators: Nate gave Trump a relatively high chance of winning, because a polling error in one state would likely indicate the same polling error in every other state.
At one point, FiveThirtyEight was forecasting/predicting that Clinton had a 66% chance of winning the election. If there were infinite parallel universes that veered off from that moment in time, their implication is that she would win the election in two out of three times. Taleb is saying that is nonsense, that there is more variability than that.
Of course, Taleb's model wouldn't drive page views or get people excited. FiveThirtyEight gives voters a reason to check-in daily on how their candidate is doing in polls, but it is misleading as a forecasting tool.
He didn't criticize them for underestimating uncertainty, but for being too uncertain.
Of course, this is just a weird year when a third-party had a shot at the 5% and all of them sabotaged themselves by picking people who were uniquely unlikely to get votes. Could have been the setup for a 2020 three party run.
1) you would have to be insane to run a business and have a Trump sign in your window unless you were hoping for an insurance settlement.
I've only seen this form of complete isolation as part of feminist "no platform"-ing (basically: actively excluding speakers because of their political views, regardless of the topic of the conference or occasion) before. But this time it wasn't simply about fringe extremists (e.g. racial supremacists) but about all supporters of the final candidate of one of the two major parties.
I hope this is the end of this practice rather than the start of something worse. Demonising half (or a third, depending on how you measure) the population is not how you fix social issues, especially if it desensitises people to slurs you will still need to label the real extremists.
Trump in particular is so far out of the bounds of normal politics that to many people, support for Trump appears no different than support for, say, Mussolini. It may only be fringe extremists playing the racial supremacy song, but half the country is marching along to the beat. At that point it doesn't matter what your private reasons for supporting a Mussolini or Franco or Trump are - you're still a collaborator. The justification for boycotts etc comes from that point of view.
It's a difficult problem - the left (such as it is) needs to find some kind of productive path forward, but I'm not convinced that pandering to the sensitivities of people who have no intention to reciprocate is at all useful.
Nassim Taleb has been calling BS on FiveThirtyEight's methods and models for months: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/762032883414556674
He's now gone as far as calling FiveThirtyEight "clueless" and posted further comparisons of his model with theirs: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/binary%20foreca...
He has a point that the chances of winning shouldn't shift so rapidly, but a rapidly moving gauge is a decent indicator of uncertainty.
Definitely not that new. For example, pollsters in France have for decades been applying a "coefficient of shame" to account for Le Pen voters' underreporting.
Ex falso quod libet. The statistical mechanics can be rock solid, but if the data is garbage or the model is garbage then the prediction will likely be garbage. Hiding behind mechanical minutiae is no excuse for the overtly bold and wrong predictions.
As with credit agencies... "We do not give advice on investments", yeah but everybody invests based on your ratings.
There's no better reality-based approach than aggregating polls across the political spectrum. But who would have thought that all polls would be wrong in the same direction?
Alternate theory: People did not lie to the pollsters -- but there was voting fraud, and Trump didn't win.
When the next election rolled around, when Obama won, they didn't make a peep about the electronic voting machines, which were still in use, nor about the possibility of voting fraud. Neither did the Republicans. Nor did anyone mention these issues in the following election, when Obama won again. It was only Trump speaking up about it which brought the issue back in to the news. But the possibility of massive voting fraud has been there all along, and will continue to be there for the following elections, as long as electronic voting machines are still in use.
Now, why does the mainstream of both the Democratic and Republican parties permit these machines to continue to be used? That's a very good question. The consipracy minded might speculate that they might have an agreement between them, and that US elections have become simply political theater, with the real decisions as to who gets to hold office being made through other means, and by people other than the voters.
The question is whether Trump supporters were better at cheating than Clinton supporters, or better at covering their tracks. Even if nobody suspected fraud, we should still be doing randomized checks for it, in a transparent, publicly-auditable way.
My hypothesis is that voting fraud is endemic, but that it only rarely influences the results of any election. I suspect that most of it is done by crackers for hire or by people already heavily invested in politics who happen to have the necessary skills.
It just seems like such a simple, boring, and yet insanely high-risk hack that no one would bother doing it just for the giggles of getting Ivanna Tinkle elected as county dogcatcher. Also, in order to pull off a significant advantage, you would need a conspiracy of multiple actors in several different counties, and the more participants you have, the less likely it is you will be able to keep it secret.
Tyler Durden (of Fight Club) could silently steal an election with a vote fraud conspiracy, but no actual, living person could--not until all the votes are cast on network-connected machines, anyway.
It doesn't have to be one person. It could be multiple teams of people.
They don't have to intervene all over the country, either. They could make a huge difference by affecting a relatively small number of votes in a handful of battleground states where the race is very close.
In the case of Bush v Gore, it would have been sufficient to make a difference in only one state.
For real people, the more people you add for operations, the more you have to add for security and cleanup. Beyond a certain point, you just can't keep everybody quiet without extreme measures, which are themselves likely to be noticed.
Secret conspiracies have to be small, otherwise someone eventually gets disgruntled or has an attack of conscience and spills the beans.
Even large, public conspiracies, like the classified documents protection system, eventually develop leaks, and it is already really expensive to operate before accounting for cleanup up after spies or whistleblowers.
So if we ever reach the point where five people or less could remotely rig the vote for every county in Florida, I have to not only assume that it is being done every election, but also that multiple groups may be stepping on each other's toes while doing it. Previously, the traditional ways of rigging the vote are right out in the open. You get people likely to vote against you stricken from the voter register. You enter fake ballots in the name of someone not likely to vote, such as the recently deceased. You sabotage polling places in urban areas such that voter throughput is reduced, and lines grow around the block. You get local cops out on the streets, giving out traffic citations to selected people that may be on their way to vote. I have even seen sudden construction activity on election day obstructing the sole entrance to a polling place.
Those are nasty, but at least people can seek redress for the misbehavior that they can see.
Reading this honestly makes me question why I read HN.
Read Talebs tweets:
https://mishtalk.com/2016/08/07/nassim-telab-blasts-nate-sil...
Funny how times change, eh?