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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

Why is "guessed" in quotes in the HN headline. That word does not appear in the article. They even say the following:

>The Bocconi team is the first to point out the limitations of the model. “We do not claim to predict the outcome of the Conclave,” Soda points out. “As the great statistician George Box said: ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful.’ Ours is intended to be a tool for reading the context, not an oracle.”

Trying to take a victory lap on something like this seems to fly in the face of the statistical thinking that goes into creating a model like this.

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I would add, this wasn't really a prediction anyway, they listed 14 total people across three separate top 5 lists. That's a pretty sizeable chunk of the total people who had a chance of being elected pope and they didn't try to make a unified list or assign percentages of getting elected.

Also the explicit survivorship bias... this would not be near the front page if their predictions were all wrong.

I took that “guessed” from their twitter post at https://x.com/lnrdrizzo/status/1920783054181728701?s=46

Fair enough, but I think that makes this a lesson in the importance of context.

When someone uses quotes in their own informal original writing, they will often be received as scare quotes[1]. Knowing nothing about that author, I would assume he is using the word with some detachment. He knows the analysis wasn't trying to guess the pope, but he is having fun with the fact that the analysis pointed in the right direction.

When someone uses quotes to summarize something someone else wrote or said, especially when it is in a more formal context like a headline, it generally comes across as a direct quote. The headline therefore implies that the goal of this exercise was to predict the pope, which the article directly refutes.

The quote in the context of the headline wasn't "guessed" it was "How we 'guessed' the Pope using network science".

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes

The real lesson here is that you can’t please everyone.

Quote it literally, some people say you missed the context.

Edit the quote, some people say you editorialized away the true meaning.

Summarize the situation yourself, some people say you took away the essence when there was a perfectly good quote available.

Which is part of the reason that the HN guidance is to use the original headline, which OP didn't do here.

Polymarket had this guy at something like 1%. Enjoy your winnings, modellers.

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