[FRIAM] anthropological observations

[uǝlƃ ☣]

I agree. Nate's not much more rigorous than the rest of us. And just like Justin Bieber or Britney Spears, he was probably ill-equipped to handle the steep increase in fame. Morlocks don't handle that sort of thing very well. We can get confused about who we are and what we do, maybe even listening too seriously to the imputations of others ... telling us what it is we do, defining it for us. Then, when things go a bit South, or we're allowed to toil in darkness for awhile, we remember what it is we do and how it's different from what they told us we were doing.

The trick is whether one wants to *tell* Nate what he does or *listen* to him describe what he does. If his story changes too much, then he's an unreliable narrator and we're free to ignore his narrative. But if there's an underlying stability, then that's the thing to understand.

And I'm totally with you on falsification. It's a debugging staple. Before you can tell whether something's doing what it's supposed to do, you have to well-formulate what it's *supposed* to do. If you can't formulate what you think should happen, then you'll have no idea if what happened should have happened. And I think you could have easily *predicted* that anyone who guesses "heads", then the coin lands on "heads", tends to think they "got it right". And if it lands on "tails", they don't think "I got it wrong". They think "do it again". Nate's no different.

I'm pretty sure I disagree with you about Epstein's argument, though. But that's a story for the other thread that Eric's tugged loose. I'll give my take on it if I can formulate it in under 300 words.

On 4/18/20 9:53 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> I admittedly way out of my depth here and so deserve to be picked on.  You guys are kind to let me play in your sandbox.
> 
> Ok, to be completely honest, I listen to a LOT of Nate Silver and he says a LOT of different things.  So, at the very minimum, I am probably guilty of cherry-picking.  BUT .../wait or it! … /I think there is a case to be made, in the variety of the things he has said, for his ambivalence about what it success at prediction means.  He wants to live in two worlds at once, the world in which he miraculously predicted  Obama’s election in 08 (was it?) and the world in which he miraculously predicted Clinton’s election in 16.  He has a claim on both, but they aren’t the same sort of success.   At core, I am an old-fashioned falsificationist.  The one thing that is absolutely essential in a prediction is that you should, when the data are in, be able to know when you’ve been wrong.  That’s what got me so riled up about Epstein’s bit of flatulence in JASSS <http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/12/1/9.html>.
> 
> So, if Silver says (or anybody says of him) that he got the 2016 election RIGHT, what WOULD HAVE BEEN the conditions where he, or his advocate, would have admitted that he got it wrong?  If he has clearly stated those, and held to them, then I deserve to be picked on.
> 
> By the way:  I was the youngest in my family.  Truth was when you didn’t get your ears boxed. 

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ