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2 posts found
Nov 07, 2016
ssc
9 min 1,158 words 953 comments
Scott Alexander argues that the 2016 US election outcome shouldn't drastically change our understanding of politics, given how close the race is. Longer summary
Scott Alexander argues that the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election shouldn't dramatically change our understanding of politics and society. He criticizes both extreme predictions of a certain Hillary Clinton victory and a certain Donald Trump victory, pointing out that the race is close enough that the outcome could be determined by random factors like weather. Alexander suggests that people should precommit to their views on politics and society rather than drastically changing them based on the election result. He uses his own January 2016 prediction of Trump having a 20% chance of winning (conditional on winning the Republican primary) as an example of a reasonable prediction, given that prediction markets on election eve give Trump an 17.9% chance. Shorter summary
Jan 02, 2016
ssc
8 min 992 words 173 comments
Scott Alexander evaluates the accuracy of his 2015 predictions, finding overall good calibration and considering it a successful year. Longer summary
Scott Alexander reviews his predictions for 2015, assessing their accuracy. He lists 35 predictions across world events and personal life, marking successful ones and crossing out failed ones. He then scores them based on confidence levels, presenting the results in a graph. Overall, Scott considers it a successful year for his predictions, with good calibration except at the 50% confidence level. He also comments on Scott Adams' reported prediction success for 2015, suggesting ways to verify the authenticity of such claims and expressing interest in seeing Adams make concrete predictions for 2016. Shorter summary