Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S. • Hacker News Board

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#191

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 7:09 PM UTC

jonhohle wrote: post #123

softwaredoug wrote: post #81

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen. It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

But the polls then and now weren’t just bad, they were shockingly bad and not representative of any real population that matters in an election. I’d expect something like this from junior engineers looking at metrics for the first time, but these are supposedly the most respective organizations in their field that have failed spectacularly for the second presidential election in a row. What value do they possibly ser…

[deleted]

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#192

Post by evgen » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 7:09 PM UTC

3np wrote: post #96

What I’m really curious about now is how the GOP are going to position itself wrt Trump and his rhetoric and claims when he’s no longer in office.

In a sense, this was a bit of a worst-case scenario for the GOP. Trump is out of office and wounded, but not destroyed and so able to try to play kingmaker from the sidelines. A large, centrist portion of the GOP would probably have liked to see the end of Trump, but now they are going to have to wait for his conviction and imprisonment to finally be rid of him. Some will try to claim the mantle of racist-in-chief but Trump is a jealous god and will now allow another to steal focus from him, so I expect some rather petty knife-fights for a year or two while Trump goes through a few state trials but eventually some minimum security prison will finally take the phone out of his tiny hands (or at least force him to hoop it if he wants to tweet...)

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#193

Post by dang » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 7:09 PM UTC

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #107

Not surprising at all given Wikipedia's political leanings. I wonder what Wikipedia says about Antifa?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25017345 and marked it off topic.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#194

Post by jayd16 » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

dorkwood wrote: post #163

softwaredoug wrote: post #81

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen. It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

What you're saying is that any result with a non-zero chance of happening should be unsurprising to us, because it was still in the realm of possibility? If that's the case, what use are polls? What makes an election forecast based on polls more valuable than a coin flip?

Results fall on a spectrum from surprising to unsurprising based on the modeled prediction and confidence.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#195

Post by mixmastamyk » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

alexashka wrote: post #126

Does anyone feel strange about a 77 year old man being put under this much stress? Politics aside, I would not wish a stressful job on any 77 year old regardless of their health and well being - there are biological realities to being a human. I don't know what motivates these decisions but it seems to me the people of his own party either don't care that there is a non-trivial chance he will die, or they think the g…

He knows what to do, and delegation is a thing as well.

I will be very surprised if he runs for another term however.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#196

Post by bra-ket » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 7:10 PM UTC

it's a projection, tens of thousands of provisioned and military ballots are still not counted. Recounts are still to happen in most swing states. Lawsuits are pending.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#197

Post by deanCommie » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

lovecg wrote: post #124

Can we have a conversation about broader implications of the increasing power in the public discourse of Twitter et al.? I’m no Trump supporter but I do wonder if the tables were turned and Twitter e.g. turned Biden’s page into a wall of hidden tweets because of something it disagreed with (there are enough grievances with Big Tech from both sides). Do people think this is isolated (because Trump is, well, Trump) or…

"because of something it disagreed with" is a mischaracterization of "because of provable falsehoods dangerous to public safety, and democracy".

A President with a massive angry following with guns, tweeting falsehoods about the lack of integrity of the electoral process (And I don't mean the vague things, I mean the explicitly false things like his party not having access to view vote count processes, which they do) is about as close as you can get to yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theater on the internet.

Not only is it Twitter's prerogative to act accordingly, I'd go further and say it is their ethical duty.

And yes, if Biden did the equivalent "from the other side", Twitter would act in exactly the same way.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#198

Post by SomeoneFromCA » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

deftnerd wrote: post #179

I've always felt that the Trump presidency served as an effective form of "Chaos Engineering". Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered. The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to ma…

It is very strange how he, a master manipulator, missed the obvious danger Covid could cause to his presidency. I mean, really?

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#199

Post by skywal_l » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

lovecg wrote: post #124

Can we have a conversation about broader implications of the increasing power in the public discourse of Twitter et al.? I’m no Trump supporter but I do wonder if the tables were turned and Twitter e.g. turned Biden’s page into a wall of hidden tweets because of something it disagreed with (there are enough grievances with Big Tech from both sides). Do people think this is isolated (because Trump is, well, Trump) or…

Please give us an example of a Tweet from Trump that was removed and that was just remotely debatable.

Re: Biden wins White House, vowing new direction for divided U.S.

#200

Post by phlakaton » Sat, Nov 07, 2020, 7:11 PM UTC

softwaredoug wrote: post #81

On the data nerd side I continue to be shocked at how people misinterpret the certainty of polls/forecasts. Forecasts give us probability distributions based on historical polling error data. Not infallible predictions the expected value will 100% happen. It’s fairly revealing of society’s general innumeracy, just as it was 4 years ago when Trump won.

I think it's more fundamental than numeracy. If the polls suggest there is a 2/3 probability you are going to win an election, but you lose, does that mean the polls were wrong? What if the probability was 9/10?

I think the problem is trying to make sense of outliers and uncertainty, and that, in an election with 150M+ variables, you will end up with a result that isn't quite what anyone predicted. In other words: it's not numeracy, it's epistemology.