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Nassim Talebs case against Nate Silver is bad math

m.nautil.us

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Re: Nassim Talebs case against Nate Silver is bad math

#131

Post by dictum »

throwawaymath wrote: post #46
LanguageGamer wrote: post #34

From a business perspective, the volatility of Silver's models seem like a feature - they enhance the drama / sensationalism of election coverage. One week, he's telling me candidate X will likely win, the next week it's candidate Y, and I'm on the edge of my seat. If Silver really believed these probabilities were correct, he should be willing make bets with these odds, otherwise his incentives are distorted.

> If Silver really believed these probabilities were correct, he should be willing make bets with these odds, otherwise his incentives are distorted. Yes, the "skin in the game" argument. That is Nassim Taleb's calling card. Personally, I consider it a little unreasonable to expect people to literally put their money where their mouth is every time they make a forecast.

It's a kind of ad hoc censitary suffrage. One can only put possessions on the line if they have them, and the greater one's possessions, the greater their perceived "skin".

Re: Nassim Talebs case against Nate Silver is bad math

#132

Post by iron0013 »

dmix wrote: post #120
iron0013 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have they though, or have they only made you feel as though your knowledge of probability and statistics has expanded? Taleb is the poster boy for "sound and fury, signifying nothing"

I don't know about Taleb, but Nate Silver's book on Bayesian statistics and prediction in general got me really interested in statistics from a general-reader standpoint. Where I ended up digging harder into the more math/sciencey books afterwards. The part about predicting Earthquakes and his work on sports is really good. https://www.amazon.com/Signal-Noise-Many-Predictions-Fail/dp...

I agree about Silver, and that was kind of my point! Silver knows his shit and is able to communicate it in such a way that the reader actually learns something. Taleb may or may not know anything, but all he is able to convey to the reader is the impression that they've learned something (however, he is very good at giving the reader an unearned sense of intellectual superiority).

Re: Nassim Talebs case against Nate Silver is bad math

#133

Post by baddox »

noelsusman wrote: post #116
baddox wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best criticism I can come up with is that 538 probably doesn't do a sufficient job of explaining to its audience that their published probabilities are predictions for what would happen if the event occurred today . This seems to be one of Taleb's (and others') criticisms of their predictions: that they don't consider the probability of major unexpected events occurring between now and the event (like an athlete…

That's just not true. In 2016 they had several versions of the model. One was called the NowCast that very explicitly modeled the probability of winning the election today. They had a separate model that gave the probability of winning on election day, which included whatever their estimate was of uncertainty moving forward (including the probability of game-changing events, which is pretty low).

Fair enough. If I misunderstand their predictions then they definitely need to do a better job explaining them. :)

Re: Nassim Talebs case against Nate Silver is bad math

#135

Post by pohl »

dralley wrote: post #72
pohl wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know, right? Every time my meteorologist gives me a probability of rain on a day that it doesn't rain I ask the same question.

Meteorologists don't try to predict the weather 2 months from now.

Nate hasn't been trying to predict elections that far out, either, to be fair. He has always said some variant of "if the election were held today" when discussing the model.

Re: Nassim Talebs case against Nate Silver is bad math

#136

Post by [deleted] »

aakilfernandes wrote: post #93
ham_sandwich wrote: post #49

Isn’t it just one big misunderstanding between them? Taleb thinks 538’s probabilities represent a binary option price on the event, in which case, yes, the probabilities should stay very close to 50% because the vol is so high. Whereas Silver’s models are actually saying “Based on current polls, if the election were held tomorrow, then the probability candidate X wins is Y%” and are thus allowed to swing more wildly.…

I don't think your assessment of 538's models is correct. They used to have something called the "nowcast" which is what your referring to, but they got rid of that.

[deleted]

Re: Nassim Talebs case against Nate Silver is bad math

#137

Post by oarabbus_ »

andrewla wrote: post #14

As I understand it, the feud in its current form started from a tweet from Dinesh D'Souza [1] in which he interpreted Nate Silver's statement that "Dems, GOP winning House are 'both extremely possible'" to mean that they had gone from an 80% chance of winning to a 50% chance. Taleb inexplicably chose this as the hill to die on [2] and wrote a lengthy and technical paper to refute, and replied (on the [2] thread) "Whe…

Taleb is simultaneously both worth reading as well as one of the most pretentious, unpleasant asses I've ever read.

The Black Swan was mostly fantastic, but Antifragile was mostly regurgitation.

The biggest problem with him is he thinks he's much, much smarter than he is, like a kind of inverse-Dunning-Kruger effect. It's odd because he is quite a smart man in the first place; there's no need for him to be such a pretentious asshole.

Re: Nassim Talebs case against Nate Silver is bad math

#138

Post by [deleted] »

jandrese wrote: post #84
LanguageGamer wrote: post #34

From a business perspective, the volatility of Silver's models seem like a feature - they enhance the drama / sensationalism of election coverage. One week, he's telling me candidate X will likely win, the next week it's candidate Y, and I'm on the edge of my seat. If Silver really believed these probabilities were correct, he should be willing make bets with these odds, otherwise his incentives are distorted.

Isn't that just new polling data being introduced into the model? It seems disingenuous to say Nate Silver is being sensationalist when he's applying fresh new data to his models and seeing changes in the outcomes.

[deleted]

Re: Nassim Talebs case against Nate Silver is bad math

#139

Post by oska »

andrewla wrote: post #14

As I understand it, the feud in its current form started from a tweet from Dinesh D'Souza [1] in which he interpreted Nate Silver's statement that "Dems, GOP winning House are 'both extremely possible'" to mean that they had gone from an 80% chance of winning to a 50% chance. Taleb inexplicably chose this as the hill to die on [2] and wrote a lengthy and technical paper to refute, and replied (on the [2] thread) "Whe…

> But in this case I'm having trouble following what his criticism even is

A piece by Isaac Faber [1] from December last year clearly described what Taleb's position is. A summary paragraph towards the end:

> Here we can say, with some confidence that FiveThirtyEight predictions are not always reliable probabilities. However, they masquerade as one, being between 0 and 1 and all. This is Taleb’s primary argument; FiveThirtyEight’s predictions do not behave like probabilities that incorporate all uncertainty and should not be passed off as them.

Faber's piece was discussed on HN [2] soon after it appeared.

[1] https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704376

Re: Nassim Talebs case against Nate Silver is bad math

#140

Post by hopler »

chrismanfrank wrote: post #73
ham_sandwich wrote: post #49

Isn’t it just one big misunderstanding between them? Taleb thinks 538’s probabilities represent a binary option price on the event, in which case, yes, the probabilities should stay very close to 50% because the vol is so high. Whereas Silver’s models are actually saying “Based on current polls, if the election were held tomorrow, then the probability candidate X wins is Y%” and are thus allowed to swing more wildly.…

You basically have it right. But it's not a misunderstanding. Taleb understands Silver's approach, but thinks it's BS, entertainment not forecasting. He's right, but I don't know why he cares. The problem isn't that Silver doesn't know math, it's that his goal is to entertain, not predict.

Calling a statistician and entertainer is a rude insult, similar to calling a cable news channel an entertainment channel.
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