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Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

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Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#151

Post by 0-_-0 »

kilburn wrote: post #128
ummonk wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I normally like Taleb's insights but it was obvious when following this that he (and Dinesh D'Souza) were ridiculously misconstruing Nate Silver's comment. Two outcomes being "extremely possible" in no way means they have a 50/50 chance of happening. It merely means that neither outcome has a low enough chance that you should assume it won't happen.

Using the phrase "extremely possible" as an expert is either a gross mistake or intentional misguidance. "Possibility" is like "optimality" in the sense that they are binary attributes and thus don't admin grades. Something either is or isn't possible. Qualifying something as "more possible" is a mistake, and qualifying it as "extremely possible" is just nonsense. A guy who lives from probabilistic analysis should no…

I suspect the main reason he was attacked by Taleb was this misuse of language, which can be misinterpreted as meaning a 50-50 chance. Like others have said, he could have said "far from impossible" or "entirely possible" to convey that he meant the estimate had a large variance. Then again, I think Taleb should have realized this and not attacked him for simply failing to convey variance correctly. This seems like another example of Twitter bringing out the wrost in people...

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#152

Post by JabavuAdams »

jimnotgym wrote: post #126

All of which increases the probability that I will ignore Taleb's tweets. I follow people who are smart enough to disagree in a civil manner, and smart enough to recognise that there may be things one doesn't know. The way he talked to renowned classicist (and feminist, which seemed to be a problem for Taleb) Dame Mary Beard in another spat was disgusting. Trying to impose statistical certainty on ancient history end…

The problem is that the smart arrogant jerk may have the right answer sometimes when it counts, while being a pain in the ass the rest of the time. Better just to stay open to all feeds. He does come off as an arrogant dick, wow.

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#153

Post by matt4077 »

acidburnNSA wrote: post #39
mturmon wrote: post #25

This is an intellectually confused post. It is so unclear and muddled that only a charitable reader would suppose the author understands the mathematical and modeling issues here. I’m surprised the author published it in this form - you don’t want to jump into a controversy like this with such an unclear discussion. As just one example, the whole digression on a “decision boundary” is conceptually mistaken. Once you…

Peripherally, I like using nuclear reactor design analogies for Aleatory vs. Epistemic. Aleatory is the inherent randomness of a system. You can characterize it but it's often hard to reduce. For example, how much boron impurities are mixed into your steel at the time of manufacture. Epistemic is things that are knowable but you don't know with much certainty (because it's hard to measure), like the probability that…

“Known unknowns” vs “unknown unknowns”.

Despite the sniggering at the time, those terms are quite smart.

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#154

Post by ThrowMeDown01 »

yorwba wrote: post #91
ThrowMeDown01 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the blog post rightly said, they present 538 present the forecast in a way that they are never wrong. I can see the point. I also fond the comparison of NFL vs. Senate forecasts meaningful. This kind of "forecasting" seems to be the current version of crystal balling and astrology. They (models) don't really know anything (no causation, and definitely nothing close to an actual model of the real world like in phys…

> As the blog post rightly said, they present 538 present the forecast in a way that they are never wrong. The whole point of probabilistic modeling is to replace absolute decisions like "right or wrong" by continuous weights on the possibilities. If you absolutely need a definite decision, you can sample a prediction according to the probability assigned by the model. If the true outcome is x and the model assigned…

> The whole point of probabilistic modeling

The whole point about the current topic as well as of my post: You missed by about a thousand miles. Please read it again. It's really pointless to argue about a strawman created by you. Your model is useless, that's the point! It makes no real(!) predictions - not usable for anything apart from blowing ever more hot air, and if it doesn't come to pass, you are never wrong because you left the door open by not actually saying anything in the first place.

Do you not understand that the guy/his company did nothing at all? And that giving some arbitrary probability was/is utterly devoid of any meaning (especially if you can't be wrong whatever the actual outcome)? They could have made any prediction at all, what difference would it have made? That is the value of that "work".

However, I realize there's people who like such meaningless drivel. It is a version of appearing to actually do something while not actually doing anything. You make it into the news but you can never be held accountable because whatever happens happens, you just helped create a few more entirely useless headlines (apart from helping with page views and ad impressions of course). It's actually quite ingenious to misuse actually useful tools like statistics.

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#155

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

paultopia wrote: post #143
elgenie wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The final 538 pre-election forecast is available here: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2018-midterm-election-f... (it moved slightly towards Dems in the last few days) Silver's point is that their model results in a probability distribution of outcomes and, at the time he was commenting, in 10% of the cases Dems won 19 or fewer seats, resulting in a GOP majority, and in 10% of cases Dems won 51 or more seats, re…

Yeah, this is the key point. I was shocked when I saw the linked twitter posts from that exchange (having not followed it at all). Just based on that snapshot my take is even more grim. Taleb surely knows how probability distributions work. The fact that he sneeringly dismissed basic reasoning like that in the political context he did suggests not cluelessness but malice. One thing we do know is that Taleb is very sm…

And beyond that, the other reason I attribute malice to Taleb is that he is just such an asshole. D'Souza of course, he's a political hack, but I feel that Taleb could have easily made his points without so obviously willfully misconstruing what Silver actually said, and without the Trump-esque name calling. If he's so smart he should let his ideas state on their own without using the cheap "let's have a Twitter war for views" tactic, which was obviously intentional.

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#156

Post by golergka »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #37
mturmon wrote: post #25

This is an intellectually confused post. It is so unclear and muddled that only a charitable reader would suppose the author understands the mathematical and modeling issues here. I’m surprised the author published it in this form - you don’t want to jump into a controversy like this with such an unclear discussion. As just one example, the whole digression on a “decision boundary” is conceptually mistaken. Once you…

Agreed. The more I read the more I got embarrassed for the author, mainly because his points were so ridiculously flimsy. I thought this was one of the worst: > Because FiveThirtyEight only predicts probabilities, they do not ever take an absolute stand on an outcome: No ‘skin in the game’ as Taleb would say. This is not, however, something their readers follow suit on. In the public eye, they (FiveThirtyEight) are j…

> Saying "this is not something their readers follow suit on" - only if you're a reader who doesn't understand probability.

But overwhelming majority of people don't.

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#157

Post by briantakita »

mturmon wrote: post #25

This is an intellectually confused post. It is so unclear and muddled that only a charitable reader would suppose the author understands the mathematical and modeling issues here. I’m surprised the author published it in this form - you don’t want to jump into a controversy like this with such an unclear discussion. As just one example, the whole digression on a “decision boundary” is conceptually mistaken. Once you…

The author was expressing apparently advanced philosophy that is missing from normal discourse, so I can understand why it goes over most peoples' heads.

"Instead, epistemically uncertain events are ignored a priori and then FiveThirtyEight assumes wild fluctuations in a prediction from unforeseen events are a normal part of forecasting. Which should lead us to ask ‘If the model is ignoring some of the most consequential uncertainties, are we really getting a reliable probability?’"

We don't know what we don't know. Any probabilistic model is constructed with a snapshot of the perceived variables. If the model-maker is not able to conceive of variables, then they will not be in the model, which could have asymmetric effects on accuracy of the model.

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#158

Post by afthonos »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #149
Kurtz79 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Saying "this is not something their readers follow suit on" - only if you're a reader who doesn't understand probability." Unfortunately that is the more common case, and I agree on the author on that that most people take a binary stance on polls. It should not be the case for regular readers of a website whose main topic is statistical analysis, although I imagine that just before a major election they would see a…

Fine, but Silver goes to extreme ends in my opinion to explain what a probability means. During the 2016 presidential election he was emphasizing "Hey, it's less likely than the alternative, but there is a real possibility Trump will win. There is a very plausible path for him to wrap up the electoral votes." And afterwards, I think the results showed how accurate Silver was - he gave a much higher probability to Tru…

Even more confidence-inspiring: before the election, they had discussed what a path to victory for Trump would look like, and their most likely path is what ended up happening: the midwest went for Trump, in a correlated manner, which is exactly what other forecasters had failed to account for properly.

If your model can help you predict how it's going to fail, I'm fairly impressed.

Re: Why we should care about the Nate Silver vs. Nassim Taleb Twitter war

#159

Post by alexandercrohde »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #152
jimnotgym wrote: post #126

All of which increases the probability that I will ignore Taleb's tweets. I follow people who are smart enough to disagree in a civil manner, and smart enough to recognise that there may be things one doesn't know. The way he talked to renowned classicist (and feminist, which seemed to be a problem for Taleb) Dame Mary Beard in another spat was disgusting. Trying to impose statistical certainty on ancient history end…

The problem is that the smart arrogant jerk may have the right answer sometimes when it counts, while being a pain in the ass the rest of the time. Better just to stay open to all feeds. He does come off as an arrogant dick, wow.

I used to look at things this way, with a "just filter out the rudeness" mindset. However in practical terms I think listening to somebody's rudeness does have a really big cost (to estimate: how much would you need to be paid to make it worth your time to listen to rudeness for an hour?)
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