Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Defense of Silver. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...d=BingNewsVerp

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Tax voters should be wary of his tariff promises.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I don't understand the value of a model that tells the probability that a candidate will win a presidential election (e.g., Silver gives Trump a 64% chance of winning the Electoral College, per that article). This is not poker, where you play a lot of hands in a short period of time, and you can affect the stakes. A model that gives you that kind of prediction for a contest that only happens once every four years, with fixed stakes, has no value that is apparent to me other than in generating content to get people to click on stuff.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Tariffs only harm the little guy. Most tax voters can absorb them.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I don't understand it either. If Harris is up roughly 1-2% in every battleground state, I can't figure out how Trump can have a 64% chance of winning.

When he beat Hillary, where she was up huge #s everywhere, he had something like a 15% chance of winning. If you adjust those numbers to the present, it appears he's got somewhere between a 45-50% chance of winning.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I'm not questioning the numbers that the model has produced, I'm questioning the whole point of the model.

eta: If one model says Trump is 65% likely to win, and another model says he's 30% likely to win, which one is right? It's impossible to say. If there's no way to tell whether the model is accurate, what's the point? (Other than to generate clicks, I mean.)

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I think your suspicion is correct. Silver is known for predicting things, so he's dancing for his rent money. He also has a new book out. But I don't think he's acting in bad faith or saying something he knows is dubious or unfounded, as this would harm his brand.

I heard him on a podcast recently defending his position, and he reiterated that he is a Harris supporter, so it doesn't seem biased, either.

His book, BTW, sounds interesting. He carves the warring factions in the political polarization as the "River" and the "Village." The River is characterized as entrepreneurial, risk-taking, and libertarian. The Village is more established, bureaucratic, comprised significantly of the professional managerial classes.

He sees friction between these two powerful groups as a big part of polarization. The River dislikes a European managed state model and the Village is leaning increasingly toward it.

I don't know if I'll bother reading it, as I think Peter Turchin's End Times* already developed this framing with significant enough rigor that I wouldn't dispute it, but I did find Silver a very fun interview and really fucking smart.

FWIW, Trump appears to be in free fall. But this appearance matches the feel at the same time in 2016. When I, very much not Nate Silver, stated that Hillary was going to stomp Trump like Nixon had McGovern. I sense at the moment Trump cannot win. But I'm not predicting anything anymore, for good reason.

_______________
* Turchin uses historical/data analysis to demonstrate how revolutions follow periods of "elite overproduction," where groups of warring "courts," one developed and stagnant and the other insurgent, fight for control of the state/economy. Silver seems to steal this idea and repackage it as the River vs the Village.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

Many of these points are worth repeating.

"But the most fundamental problem with polling is that the phenomenon it claims to record—public opinion—has no coherent meaning or existence. The polling industry resolves this conundrum by simply making “public opinion” synonymous with its methods: polls record public opinion; public opinion is what polls record. Skeptics could see this sleight of hand from the start. “Dr. Gallup does not make the public more articulate,” Lindsay Rogers, a political scientist at Columbia University, wrote in an early polemic against polling in 1949. “He only estimates how in replying to certain questions, it would say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘don’t know.’ Instead of feeling the pulse of democracy, Dr. Gallup listens to its baby talk.”

"No poll can ever be sure what portion of answers are similarly offered off the cuff or to what extent respondents hold their positions outside the survey setting. The sociologist Leo Bogart said in 1972, “The first question a pollster should ask is: ‘Have you thought about this at all? Do you have an opinion?’” But usually polling companies don’t want to know: adding questions costs time and money, and ideally they want everyone to have an opinion on everything."

"Perhaps the polling industry’s standing in society today is most analogous to that of the advertising industry that spawned it: polling organizations are similarly ubiquitous, profitable, and treated cynically by members of the public, who suspect an ulterior motive."

And this is a mother of a closer...

"Silicon Valley ultimately peddled the same feel-good story about democracy as the polling industry: that the powerful are unresponsive to the wider public because they cannot hear their voices, and if only they could hear them, then of course they would listen and act. The virtue of this diagnosis is that structural inequalities in wealth and power are left intact—all that matters in democracy is that everyone has a voice, regardless of background. In a very narrow, technical sense, their innovations have made this a reality. But the result is a loud, opinionated, and impotent public sphere, coarsened by social and economic divisions and made all the more disillusioned by the discovery that, in politics, it takes more than a voice to be heard."

Ouch.

Deeply Unfunny People
 

From the Observations Desk:

I am of the opinion that almost every subject is quite funny in the right light. Even 9/11 jokes inevitably emerged, and Mel Brooks and Taika Waititi made the Holocaust into great comedy. Carlin famously made even rape funny by imagining Porky the Pig raping Elmer Fudd.

But it appears since 2016 or so, one type of thing has become unfunny to a lot of people: That which skewers one's "team," or "tribe."

Somewhat politically agnostic, I'm of the very common view that every politician, every party, every stance - and particularly positions and subjects that politically aware people deem most sacred and feel strongest about - are fair game for satire, mockery, absurdist revisiting. Because, well, the sacred can be profaned. And the profane and funny walk hand in hand.

If you've been exchanging jokes since 2016, however, you've seen a large number of people aligning their sense of humor to coincide with their political/social leanings.

Trump is objectively a joke whether you like him or not. One cannot ever treat this person with significant seriousness. I don't even think the man takes himself seriously. And yet, if one sends out a joke poking fun at him, roughly half the people to whom it is addressed will respond positively or laugh. The other half, whom we all know realize it is indeed funny, will nevertheless refrain from supporting it with a laugh. Because they support him. And vice versa. If one makes fun of Harris, the half that support her will not laugh, even if it is objectively funny. Same for Biden. His doddering about in his dotage was comical for a bit. And yet, half of people simply would not laugh at it.

I've heard this defended as such: "This election is just too important for anyone to make fun of my side... This is about saving democracy." You hear that from the left and the right. And it's not terribly persuasive. Making fun of one's own candidate is not the equivalent of voting for the opponent. One can and should laugh at one's own side when it is funny. There's no good reason not to do so.

I've also heard people say they won't laugh at jokes demeaning the left because that's countenancing right wing trolls "owning the libs." This is also not persuasive. "Owning the libs" jokes are rarely, if ever, funny. They're usually flat and not funny because they're just not a good quality of comedy.

But making fun of the right or left, when it's funny, should be laughed at by both sides. And I think one is a staggering bore, and perhaps mentally ill, to take a contrary position. It reminds me of people who can't separate the art from the artist. P Diddy is an apparent felonious sexual predator. But if his song is good, well, that's a different thing from the man. So if you like it, turn it up to 11. And I'm not eschewing Miramax films because of Harvey Weinstein's personal life.

To be unable to separate the art from the artist demonstrates a simplistic form of thinking consistent with low intellect. To be unable to laugh at one's own side as easily as one can laugh at the other shows something similar. And it's more than a bit depressing that so much of the country has accepted, or degraded into, this perspective.

Re: Deeply Unfunny People
 

I'm not sure assaulting and blacklisting young actresses was entirely within the scope of his personal life, and I do try to be mindful of where I am sending resources, but yes. It does mean I'd prefer to get the kids Harry Potter books from the library over the bookstore.

Re: Deeply Unfunny People
 

I don't think this is mostly right. It depends so much on the context, and on the nature of the making fun. When jokes are clearly in the service of politics, people respond to them as politics. But when a comedian earns an audience's trust, he or she can go and will go after their own side. For example, Jimmy Kimmel makes jokes about Biden's age all the time. His audience laughs.

There are bad comedians out there. But good ones too.

Re: Deeply Unfunny People
 

I mostly agree. But John Stewart did get a lot of shit from the on-line left when he returned to the Daily Show and immediately started "noticing" Biden's age (pre-debate).

Ollie

Re: Deeply Unfunny People
 

Where do you fall on Harry Potter? I related a story a few days ago on Bluesky how reading Goblet of Fire was one of my treasured memories of hanging out with my dog. I have relatively good feelings about the series, and I recognize its flaws. The movies are fun and the majority of the cast seem to be decent people who have distanced themselves from her. It also had a pretty significant cultural impact.

But, it's not so part of my life that I think about it too much. I still have the books I bought when they came out two decades ago, and I think we have the DVDs (but maybe not a player?). He's only 2.5, so we have a few years before it'd be appropriate to start reading them. I guess I'll wait for him to ask?

Every word out of her mouth is worse than the last (though I don't think she has said anything since she misgendered an athlete at the Olympics), and I do not want to support her in any way. There are literally thousands of other stories and series from non-bigoted (or at least non-publicly bigoted with massive platforms to spew their bigotry) writers out there.

Re: Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!
 

I have to hope that half the country really doesn't want to round up people, separate them from their families, put them in concentration camps, and then maybe ship them to another country. But the polling suggests that the majority want mass deportations.