Nate Silver

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias I don't think the relationship is quite *that* deterministic. Sometimes the public reacts in a different way than the media expects. And the media is bad enough about guessing that it sometimes gets it wrong even though it has home-court advantage by influencing that reaction. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias It is to a large extent, although the media's guesses about how the public will react are wrong decently often given that it influences that reaction. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@AllenKessler @nytimes NATE is a great crossword answer (four common letters that aren't a word other than a proper name) so we Nates really punch above our weight in crossword representation. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Polls aren't perfect, but debate coverage would be 100x better if the media was more reserved about judging public reaction until it had made some even vaguely objective attempt to gauge how the public had reacted. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I don't know if any of this is actionable and I have better things to do than send a C&D letter but Democratic fundraising emails continue to use my name and 538's in highly misleading ways. Don't donate to campaigns that do this. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@MEPFuller Yeah and it's unconvincing and the reporting could have been more rigorous. It cites a stat showing rat complaints are up vs 2019 but the areas with the biggest increases don't seem to correspond much to the places with the dining sheds. https://t.co/hxxtyc4Mdp. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@MEPFuller There's like zero evidence of the rat thing though! I eat out a lot (and outdoors a lot) and just haven't really encountered rat issues. I mean there's gonna be some fairly high NYC baseline for rats of course but am skeptical the sheds are contributing much! — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@MEPFuller They were parking spaces and they often make streets in NYC more lively and most people I know like them? NYC had also been a pretty big outlier relative to e.g. Europe in terms of the lack of outdoor dining. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Focus on rats is kind of weird? I don't recall a single time encountering a rat while dining outdoors in NYC. Nor have I heard stories or jokes about rats from friends. Obviously you'll encounter rats in NYC with some frequency but is this really A Thing? https://t.co/aZhLSItQTo — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

We've come a long way from "What's The Matter With Kansas?" to the increasingly common take that voters are silly to be worried about gas prices with <everything else going on>. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@Crimealytics There are statistical tests you can conduct for it! Usually herding takes place at the very end of the race (i.e. the very last poll that people release). But, IDK, wouldn't be shocking if pollsters exhibited some degree of herding at earlier stages too. https://t.co/mIFXJyFxXs — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

There was like this 10-day stretch where nearly every poll was a disaster for Democrats but for the past few days, it's been more of a mixed bag. Don't know what to make of it, "noise" is always a plausible explanation, but maybe the race has stabilized at a new equilibrium. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@joshtpm They do show correlations, especially in younger grades, and more detailed studies with better controls etc. have shown stronger correlations. https://t.co/l4NBhqaP9d https://t.co/8NaLbcMeQN — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

People on here have wildly implausible theories about how and how much the subtleties of New York Times coverage affect the views of some random swing voter in Ohio. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I guess the good news for Democrats here, oddly enough, is that there's a lot of bad news for Democrats already priced into the forecast. "Democrats somewhat underperform current polling" is the base case for Ds, not the bear case. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

It's interesting how much the 538 Deluxe forecast assumes Republicans will in fact outperform their current polling averages, by ~2 points in the average competitive Senate race and ~3 points in the House popular vote. https://t.co/mXB7KjUg4c — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

It's wild to me how quick people on this site are pull out ad hominem attacks. It's not that I even care about civility per se, it's just that using ad hominems is usually a pretty reliable tell that you're full of shit on the merits. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@conorsen @mattyglesias Yeah, "unreasonable angry about minor slights" seems to be a variable that's correlated with the 0.00001% of success, even if almost certainly not the cause of it. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias @StefanFSchubert @moskov @extent_of_foxes @ESYudkowsky Yeah, one thing I'm pretty sure of is that there won't be much of a market for AI-generated knockoffs of popular artists, any more than there's a big market for Mona Lisa replicas on Canal Street. The more interesting possibilities involve artists working with AI tools. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@moskov @extent_of_foxes @ESYudkowsky I do think it's partly a retail/marketing problem, that there are *some* people out there who would be happy to spend x% of their disposable income on art but don't know how they'd go about finding art they like, but I don't know that there are *that* many such people. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@moskov @extent_of_foxes @ESYudkowsky IMO there are some properties of the art market that make it prone toward a power-law distribution (highly diffuse + hard to determine intrinsic value --> Schelling focal points). So the question is less about the head of the market and more about why the tail isn't more robust. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@moskov @extent_of_foxes @ESYudkowsky There's already lots of very good art at "reasonable" prices. The fact that it's hard to make a living as an artists sucks, and probably the art world could do more to cultivate the non-nosebleed part of the market. But it's more of a demand-side than a supply-side issue. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

That's because we've traditionally used "toss-up" to refer to a 50-59% chance, not 50-54%. And in fact, we still do use toss-up that way elsewhere on the interactive. So we've retired the nonstandard (per 538 style) use of toss-up. Not the most exciting news you'll read today. https://t.co/fXwqHCtgpA — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Minor change to our forecast interactive, which I'll point out to be meticulous: in the headline at the top of each race, we now refer to a race as a "dead heat" if the leading candidate has between a 50-54% chance of winning. Previously, the headline had called these "toss-ups". https://t.co/1DF04oZn2v — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@lymanstoneky IDK with COVID experts there seemed to be an inverse correlation between jerkiness and performance. I can think of some exceptions, but for the most part the people engaged in poor discourse norms also tended to be wrong a lot. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

There's huge amounts of bias in which academic and scientific preprints get media coverage and which don't. You can always say "preliminary, not yet peer-reviewed" but that standard is applied *very* selectively. (Yes, this is a subtweet about a particular preprint.) — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Was a bit skeptical of the GOP poll surge before, but I think the evidence for it is now pretty convincing, and if anything I'm more bearish on Democratic chances than our model is. https://t.co/FbBoMJsJ2H — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

If the GOP wins control of Congress on 11/8, you'd have to be an idiot not to raise the debt ceiling and take the issue off the table for 2023/24. It's the right move politically and economically. Unfortunately, though, we're talking about Congress, so there are lots of idiots. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@SeanTrende We need to grandfather in @RalstonReports by statute like Major League Baseball once did for spitball pitchers. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias What your scenario tells us is that conditional on there not being a systematic error *favoring* Democrats, Ds are underdogs to keep the Senate. Which, I agree. Some of their 59% chance comes from the probability of a systematic pro-R polling bias or a late momentum shift to Ds. — PolitiTweet.org