This is an unfortunate statement. Ironic that Scott Adams has basically tanked his own reputation outside the alt-right through a set of poor choices recently.
Remember that this is the guy that created sockpuppet accounts on Reddit and Metafilter to pump his own image.
People really need to start considering alternative view points. Like perhaps maybe he is right on a number of topics.
Before he pegged my personal BS meter and I just started ignoring anything from him that I happened across, I noticed that Adams seemd fond of a lot of "cold-reader" type tricks: vagueness that can be turned into specifics after the fact, ignoring their own failures while hyping their successes, that kind of thing.
If you want to see what actual serious prediction attempts look like, search for Nate Silver or Nassim Taleb.
They've both had their moments where they got a bit too full of themselves as well. Taleb in particular.
I checked back recently and it seems they've both come back down out of the clouds, but I don't hold either of them in as high of regard as I did a few years ago.
1. http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2016/10/18/presidential-...
2. Silver also noted that such a probability was too high considering the margin for error in polls, calling into question his model: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/11/06/nate_silv...
Your reference is saying the exact opposite. Nate criticized polls saying she had a 98-99% chance of winning. It's clear even from the title!
If the standard is 100% accuracy on all predictions. Well that is problematic.
Even still. He predicted a trump victory and riots. Took awhile, but the core was correct. Lot of rioting going on now.
Actually if you go look at the NYT polls, Trump had a monumental surge in the later half of October that caused the result to look much closer. Probably no small part of this was the additional FBI investigation into Clinton's emails, which was announced Oct 28 (10 days after the NYT article you posted).
If you go look at the polls from right before the actual election it looks significantly closer:
NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/polls....
538: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
It's not completely unthinkable for a 20-30% probability event to occur. Further, it is quite a rare occurrence for a candidate to win the election without winning the popular vote: This was only the fifth time in American history it's happened.
Why? They responded to evolving evidence and sentiment (specifically, the FBI announcement on the 28th). 538 gave Trump a 30% chance to win on election day. 30% isn't a super unlikely event. People regularly take a chance on events with much less likely outcomes.
Here's an analogy: Harvard has a 4.5% acceptance rate. If a mediocre student tells me in June that they're going to apply in September, my prediction is going to be that they will not be accepted. If in August they tell me they've randomly received a letter of recommendation from a US senator after saving them in a car accident, I'm going to change my opinion from "very unlikely to be accepted" to "moderately unlikely to be accepted."
That doesn't mean I was stupid or delusional to think in June that they were very unlikely to be accepted, and that still doesn't mean I'm delusional to think they will still likely be rejected (the mainstream media polls). That also doesn't mean that the person who told the mediocre student in June that they were a shoe-in for Harvard was prophetic by any means (Scott Adams).
> The dude is batty in some ways, but he clearly saw something that most of us didn't.
Ehh, or he just got a lucky guess? A broken clock, etc. etc.?
For an analogous situation, this happens in sports media all the time: Some sports entertainment personality will make a "hot take" that's really just a contrarian opinion based on little evidence. If they're wrong, no one cares. If they're right, they look like a prophetic genius. Either way, they win because they get attention for making a bold prediction.
Whether you want to call it confirmation bias/selection bias/whatever, I implore you to think about all the times Scott Adams has been incredibly wrong and whether you think he actually has some unusual insight or whether he just made a lucky guess based on his personal biases.
It's extremely likely that if the election had been held October 27th, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Think about that for a second.
[outside the alt-right]
[Remember that this is the guy] etc.
I mean, there's a long list of people who said things people find offensive: Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, Barack Obama, William Shockley, Freeman Dyson, Donald Rumsfeld, etc. It takes fairly little maturity to not let that take away from the insightful comments they have made.
In particular, the offensive things Stallman said or did are absolutely relevant when he would spew quotes about relationships or people.
It is different when he talks about philosophy of open source. But on those particular topics, he is not being insightful as he is dumb as brick o that topic.
Care to give a link? Last time someone actually came through with links to their allegations about Scott Adams, all of them were false, misleading, taken out of context, etc., except one: the old sockpuppet incident from nine years ago.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/12774119444...
https://twitter.com/scottadamssays/status/127830983545328435...
While he may have good points in some cases, his thinking is compromised and you cannot discount that. I don't think this discussion will be productive beyond this point and wish you well.
I mean, you keep pointing to these tweets and not saying what’s wrong with them, as if it should be completely obvious to everyone. Hint: It’s not. It’s probably only obvious if you’re already predisposed to interpret everything he writes in the worst possible way. Then I’m sure it’s obvious. But it’s not obvious to me, for example.
If you had ever explained exactly what you thought was wrong with them, anyone here could have argued with your interpretation, and possibly put forward an alternative, more reasonable, interpretation. You would most certainly not have agreed, but at least the argument would have been made in the open, and every reader could then decide for themselves. But as it is, since you don’t actually make an argument, only vague allusions, anyone objecting to your characterizations would have to guess what you meant, and then argue with this made-up opinion. However, this would be bad form, and you could then always claim not to have that exact opinion and cause any argument made to be irrelevant.
Therefore, please, tell us what’s wrong, don’t just say “look, look, bad thing here: <link>”. That’s not an argument. Don’t do that. Make your case explicitly.
In closing, what is and is not on topic might be a matter of opinion, but I don’t appreciate being accused of dishonesty. If you don’t think that I am arguing in earnest, then I agree that not much productive debate can be had between us.
There are certain threads / topics that seem to really hit a nerve though. Perhaps it's on me for sometimes poking the bear when I shouldn't.
I have had comments with a literal 30 point swing that oscillated back and forth a couple times from negative (capped at -4, a great thing for people to know since I think it makes people bolder in what they're willing to say) to around 30 points, then back to zero, and finally settling at like +3.
Those comments weren't "flame bait" (which I have been guilty of on a couple occasions), but simply solid points with a conservative tilt to the them that really just drive a certain group of people nuts.
I agree that we should all strive for "facts over allegiance", I think that's a great way of phrasing it.
Or in other words, stated opinions that disagree with yours / polite Californian dinner talk.
1. He's one of those people that thinks Trump is playing 4D chess.
2. He 'successfully' predicted Trump would win the election, and has subsequently fooled himself into thinking he has some special insight into social dynamics and interpreting Trump's 4D chess that allows him to continue making accurate predictions. I'm sure the more predictions he makes, the closer he'll get to a 50% success rate (binomial theorem) - as do most 'expert' political prognosticators who aren't using statistical models but going off their intuition. I wonder if he'll figure out what's happening.
When I read his writings, I just see an incredibly naive approach to prediction, ignorant of probability, that is primarily informed by the fact that he's a Republican who therefore is biased towards favorably interpreting Republican odds.
That is maybe nothing special, but I never heard of her, and she was a garbage fire when she campaigned here in Iowa. So I thought that was noteworthy.
And his following is bigger than you might expect.
I don't remember that. Could you link some supporting evidence to remind me?
(Link courtesy of Pxtl¹)
This was nine years ago, though. If he hasn’t done anything comparable since, I think he ought to get some slack by now.