(2020-11-10) Hunt The Grifters, Chapter 3 - Election Prediction

Ben Hunt: The Grifters, Chapter 3 - Election Prediction. The “scores” and the “announcing” and the game itself are a totally distinct thing from the process and dynamic and the outcome of our most important political institution. And they (538) know it. And yet they sell their game over and over again as if it were the real thing. That’s what makes it a grift.

You will only see Nate Silver on ABC News and other ABC media properties and events, because FiveThirtyEight is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ABC News. ABC News, of course, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Corporation.

Fivey Fox and his cartoon friends on ABC News do not exist to “educate” the great unwashed, any more than ESPN programming exists for people who don’t watch sports. Fivey Fox exists to engage YOU, the politically-aware ABC News/FiveThirtyEight viewer.

So does “Nate Silver”.

I put his name in quotation marks because of course a real life Nate Silver exists. But the “Nate Silver” that you see at the ABC Leadership Breakfast or that you hear PhD-splaining every four years that “modeling isn’t polling” is just as much a cartoon – just as much a constructed abstraction of an abstraction in service to narrative ends – as Fivey Fox.

For the ABC News/FiveThirtyEight viewers who like the election prediction made by “Nate Silver” and Fivey Fox, this will be a mirror engagement – yes! this Genius Expert ™ agrees with me!

For everyone on the other side of the election prediction made by “Nate Silver” and Fivey Fox, this will be a rage engagement – no! this Idiot Egghead ™ has lost all credibility!

There’s nothing accidental about any of this.

Three mega-corporations in the world today truly understand the primacy of engagement: Google, Apple and Disney.

Of the three, the Covid-19 pandemic has hit Disney the hardest. Parks are shut down. Movies aren’t being made. As for television, sports programming is getting killed and overall ad spend is down

The only potential bright spot is that this is an election year, where $11 billion will be spent on political ads (advertising), and where maintaining engagement with its news programming has never been more important for Disney.

transforming a singular Election Day event into a months-long spectator sport, complete with plays and scores and announcers and cheering/anxious fans. (spectator sports)

No one understands how to create and sell a spectator sport better than Disney.

The “scores” and the “announcing” and the game itself are a totally distinct thing from the process and dynamic and the outcome of our most important political institution. And they know it. And yet they sell their game over and over again as if it were the real thing. That’s what makes it a grift.

FiveThirtyEight went into Election Day 2020 assigning Joe Biden a 90% chance of winning, which was even more divorced from election reality than their 2016 “prediction” that Hillary Clinton had a 72% chance of winning.

The FiveThirtyEight model failed in both 2016 and 2020 – and will fail again in 2024 – for the same two reasons.

First, the prediction model failure in 2016 and 2020 is NOT just a garbage-in-garbage-out problem with the polls that serve as model inputs, as the current “F#ck you, we did a good job“ non-apology tour of “Nate Silver’ would have it. In fact, the Disney/ABC/FiveThirtyEight business model is in large part responsible for creating the bad polls.

the polled begin to see themselves as members of a team competing in this election spectator sport, as active political participants through their poll response.

It’s not that members of the Out group (in this case Trump voters) are “shy”, it’s that both In group and Out group members see themselves as players in a game. (game-playing)

as a result, no one provides “straight”, i.e. non-strategic, poll responses today. No one

Second, the FiveThirtyEight prediction model itself is a category error, created and designed to promote a spectator sport business model with hundreds of point-in-time odds (the “score” of the game) over the months-long course of this made-up game, NOT to predict the outcome of a real-life, singular rare event.

I’m talking about the uncertainty of a poll that doesn’t MEAN what you thought it means, where – in the lingo – error in the poll is not randomly distributed, where – for example – you have a pandemic changing actual voting behavior in a systematic way, but not changing poll response behavior in a systematic way, where – as Nate Silver understands perfectly well – you have poll respondents acting strategically in a systematic way. If you have THAT kind of uncertainty in your statewide polls, then the FiveThirtyEight prediction model will not catch these errors. No, no … the simulation methodology will MAGNIFY these errors.

All of econometric and statistical analysis – ALL OF IT – exists to give you an answer to two and only two questions:
What’s your best guess?
How sure are you?

The FiveThirtyEight election model gives you an answer to the first question. That’s what a model – ANY model – does.

The fatal flaw with the FiveThirtyEight model is that they have no answer to the second question. Or rather, there is an answer – NOT VERY SURE AT ALL – but the Disney/ABC News/FiveThirtyEight business model does not allow them to report that answer. Because if they gave this truthful answer, then we would all ask a third question: Why the hell are we playing this game?

Is there a better way to understand the truth of an election? YES.

There’s a toolkit for understanding how to play singular or rare events, where the consequences of being wrong or overconfident or just unlucky are far more impactful than repeated-play events... Jimmie Savage, the smartest statistician you’ve never heard of, called it decision theory. This toolkit is used in military decisions.

There’s a toolkit for understanding the consequences of a polarized electorate and how that polarization changes both a politician’s behavior and voter response behaviors, including voter response behaviors to pollsters. This is the toolkit of strategic interaction. This is the toolkit of game theory.

There’s a toolkit – which we are at the forefront of developing – for understanding the structure of narrative and how it impacts social markets. Like investing. Like voting. We call it the Narrative Machine.

I think these are the three toolkits required to understand the statistical truth of modern politics. Is there a scalable, billion dollar business model to be created around these toolkits, the way Disney has created a scalable, billion dollar business model around the game-ification of Monte Carlo election simulations? Nah. Not a chance. But that’s the thing about truth, statistical or otherwise. It rarely makes you really rich, but it always gives you a life worth living.