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...
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.
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!