The Homa Files

He was for them before he was against them.
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You’ve probably heard of Nate Silver … a self-identified prediction guru.

In 2012, he wrote a book called “The Signal & the Noise – why many predictions fail … but some don’t”.

In the book, Silver made references to prediction markets, e.g. the betting books and online sites such as Predict It.

One might expect these markets to improve predictions for the simple reason that they force people to put their money where their mouth is, and create an incentive for their forecasts to be accurate

I buy that logic, which is why I oft reference what the prediction markets are saying about this year’s election.

Noteworthy: the left-leaning Silver, changed his position on prediction markets when Trump closed the odds gap against Biden…

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He now says that prediction markets are “dumb” … the province to “techbros and financwbros”.

Since Silver predicted on election day 2016 that Hillary had a 99% chance of winning, his tweets got some predictable pushback.

Here’s my favorite:

Nate, chill out “pollbro” and stop pretending like there is some profound, abstruse and complex science involved here – there isn’t – and that only certified grand druids of polling have a right to opine on the future.

If anything, you are the one who should shut up, instead of trying to “look smart” by bashing (folks who follow the prediction markets).

Bettors who are right get rewarded.  Those who are wrong lose the pot.

You, on the other hand, were hopelessly wrong in 2016 and yet here you are pretending you have some arcane “technical and domain expertise.”

It appears that despite his catastrophic track record from 2016, You still believes that you somehow hold a monopoly on forecasting and “analyzing” polls.

We are shocked that people still care and listen to what you have to say. Source

For the record, Silver currently posts Biden as a 71-28 favorite….

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P.S. Now that the betting markets have turned back in Biden’s favor (see chart above), I wonder if Silver will continue to diss them.  I’m betting the under on that one.

This entry was posted on September 8, 2020 at 10:00 am and is filed under #Believe Women, 2020 Election - Odds & Polls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.