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Chapter 2 of Almost Nowhere is up here

(morning reblog)

Exciting......... interested to see if the spinor anomalies are responsible for the strangeness in Cordelia’s world and Anne’s world as well, or if these are three separate fantasy universes linked through some conceptual means. 

I’m trying to avoid talking about Trump, generally.

However, here’s just a brief thing I want to say.  I am seeing a rapid convergence toward “why were the elites so blind?” as the new topic of discussion – not least in the “elite” media outlets and formats which were themselves blind.  Thinkpieces about how you can’t understand Trump by reading thinkpieces, that sort of thing.

This isn’t inherently hypocritical, and if the message “leave the bubble” has to come from within the bubble, well, that actually makes perfect sense.  But what makes me wary is the people who think they know why the elites were blind, that their favorite theory explains why theoreticians like them missed the ball.

You don’t know why Trump won – and won with the level of support he got.  You really don’t.  Unless you already more-or-less knew before the election, and watched the results come in without surprise, or with much less surprise than the elites who are being charged with blindness.  You can speculate, and you can think about things you could be doing differently, so you won’t be as blind next time.

But you can’t get there without doing that sort of reorientation first.  There’s a larger epistemic break here.  If you’ve learned that your tools don’t work, you can’t use those tools to fix the problem.  They don’t work, after all.

Some people weren’t surprised.  (Got linked to this today.)  It’s worth looking at what they were doing differently.  But if you were surprised, you aren’t there yet, and the move from here to there won’t happen overnight.

I think I wrote slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/07/tuesday-shouldnt-change-the-narrative/ to pre-disagree with this.

I didn’t predict that Trump would win. But I predicted he would come within 2-3% of winning. I don’t know why somebody whose pet theory is able to explain why someone can get 45% of the vote, shouldn’t also be able to explain why he got 47% of the vote.

And I think almost everybody agreed Trump would get at least 40-something percent of the vote, so what’s left to explain? Sure, we’re not Nate Silver who can use weird voodoo to figure out exactly what every single poll shows, but we understand the underlying trends just fine.

I think I’m saying something slightly different than the thing you’re contesting.  (Although TBH I might just be rethinking my opinion on the fly, I can’t really tell)

It’s true that this was basically a normal presidential election: things were close, it looks like it could have easily gone the other way, and the Dem/Rep margin in most major demographic groups was typical of recent elections.  (The main exception is the unprecedented college-degree vs. no-college-degree gap, especially among whites.  The gender gap is also pretty big, a bit bigger than 2000′s, which was noteworthy in itself.  Note: I haven’t seen a similar demographic breakdown of turnout, so I’m not sure how typical turnout was.)

But the very fact that it was a normal presidential election surprised many people, including me.  Some of this was just the same old sense that Trump can’t possibly be a “serious” candidate, which has stuck around as a feeling despite making wrong predictions again and again since the start.  That qualitative feeling also had a quantitative counterpart: the polls in fact made the election more slanted toward Clinton than it was.

Some are speculating that sampling biases caused the polls to miss Trump voters.  Nate Silver has pointed out (in a post-election article very reminiscent of your pre-election one) that this isn’t unusually large as polling errors go, which is true, but just means that the inherent biases of polls didn’t hit us unprecedentedly hard this time.  They’re still there, and if this error was indeed largely due to sampling bias, then our “instruments” were indeed unable to see a nontrivial portion of Trump’s support.  (If a piece of information simply isn’t captured in the polls, then even Nate Silver can’t see it; he’s just more aware that information may be missing.)

In retrospect, it’s obvious that Silver was right to emphasize the unreliability of polls, and that treating the polls as reality gets you absurd conclusions like HuffPo’s 98% probability for Hillary (as their modeler says here in a postmortem).

I trusted Silver, so I knew Trump had a substantial chance of winning.  But I hadn’t internalized that on a gut level.  The qualitative and the quantitative comfortably supported one another: there could be substantial polling error, but if there isn’t then Hillary’s gonna win, which of course she is because just look at Trump, right?  I wouldn’t have bet against Trump at any odds longer than Silver’s, and yet when I was on the bus home Tuesday evening I felt at ease, not nervous but actually slightly buzzed, as if I were going to an exciting party that evening.  And by the time I went to bed, I felt like the cosmic balance of the universe had been disturbed.  I knew it could happen, but it wasn’t supposed to.

Now, I realize I’ve just nearly sketched the sort of theory I was complaining about in the OP – here’s what we did wrong, here’s why.  But my theory is a broad sketch that largely just bins the uncertainty into two boxes, “quantitative” and “qualitative.”  Trump’s full level of support was invisible from the polls (quantitative), and it wasn’t something that “the elites” could pick up on from other, fuzzier sources of information, either; at best they could just say “the polls could be wrong, because they always can be.”  There was a signal there that did not arrive on any of the usual information channels, and the usual concepts weren’t able to warn us of such an unobserved signal.

(To the extent that there were “usual concepts” that did, people ended up ignoring them – see point 1 here.)

I really disagree with this - all the “fuzzier” sources of information pointed to Trump having far more support. The size of the rallies, social media engagement, and yard signs (in rural areas, from what I’ve heard). This is pretty obvious if you think about psychology - Trump was a vastly more exciting and inspiring candidate than Clinton on almost every conceivable level. 

(Personally I put money on Trump winning the presidency back in October 2015 and was confident he would win for a long time, but then for a while in the recent few months I was back and forth between “I suspect the polls are systematically wrong” and “then again I have no real evidence for that assumption, maybe the rational move is to just trust the polls”. )

Regardless, the problem isn’t people like Nate Silver who made an honest mistake, the problem is people like the HuffPo “98%” moron / those who refused to admit that Trump had any chance against all evidence (and there were many). 

So like did that last year and half just never happen or something like is everyone just supposed to act like Trump is an “ordinary Republican"

It seems like even the people most opposed to Trump and freaking out about the result are acting like this, at least on my Facebook feed. “oh no we elected trump and he has a republican congress behind him, what if they take away gay marriage or something” (only expressed twelve times as dramatically) 

http://defoo.org/defoo/ is really interesting. @nostalgebraist, I feel like you would especially like the “lovingly chronicled non-religious cult” aspect you get from eg the “Inner Circle” page on the top.

http://defoo.org/stefan-molyneux/ is amazing:

I feel really bad about reading this because they’re obviously sincere and really care about something important, and I am probably a bad person for laughing at it, but I can’t stop.

Stefan Molyneux is a huge figure on the alt right, I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him before (?). His videos are really interesting because if you watch just one, he appears to be very intelligent, sensible, articulate, logical, cites his sources, weighs the evidence fairly etc. but if you look at the big picture of what he believes, he’s actually a rabid ideologue with tons of crazy ideas (like this shit). So watching his videos is a good exercise in “you can create any narrative you want if you present the facts in a certain way”

I had heard about the defoo thing before but I had never seen this website linked even in attacks on him, which is weird because it’s SO blatantly sinister and cultlike. I almost wonder if it was made by someone else in an attempt to smear Molyneux? His website freedomainradio.com doesn’t link to defoo.org anywhere, as far as I can tell

Looking at it more I’m almost certain that defoo.org is a website someone made to defame Molyneux, which is even more interesting than the alternative 

The who.is information is intentionally obscured and the only link to it I can find is on this youtube channel that appears to selectively re-upload Molyneux videos in which he comes off as particularly creepy

 Text like this cannot have been written without ironic intent

Whoever made this site is a serious fucking weirdo. It contains tons of in-depth information on the sex lives of the people in Molyneux’s “inner circle”, including helpful diagrams like this picture

http://defoo.org/defoo/ is really interesting. @nostalgebraist, I feel like you would especially like the “lovingly chronicled non-religious cult” aspect you get from eg the “Inner Circle” page on the top.

http://defoo.org/stefan-molyneux/ is amazing:

I feel really bad about reading this because they’re obviously sincere and really care about something important, and I am probably a bad person for laughing at it, but I can’t stop.

Stefan Molyneux is a huge figure on the alt right, I’m surprised you haven’t heard of him before (?). His videos are really interesting because if you watch just one, he appears to be very intelligent, sensible, articulate, logical, cites his sources, weighs the evidence fairly etc. but if you look at the big picture of what he believes, he’s actually a rabid ideologue with tons of crazy ideas (like this shit). So watching his videos is a good exercise in “you can create any narrative you want if you present the facts in a certain way”

I had heard about the defoo thing before but I had never seen this website linked even in attacks on him, which is weird because it’s SO blatantly sinister and cultlike. I almost wonder if it was made by someone else in an attempt to smear Molyneux? His website freedomainradio.com doesn’t link to defoo.org anywhere, as far as I can tell

Ideally, don’t look at the test explanation and other people’s results until you do the test, so as not to bias your selections.

But then reblog with your results!

Keep reading

Also 76

@slatestarscratchpad here’s a somewhat interesting counterpoint to the “do all the psychedelics you want, it won’t make you a more enlightened person outside of the trip” bit from your recent SSC post

Interesting! To paraphrase, “after 10 months I realized I was on the brink of Enlightenment. So I had to make a conscious decision that I didn’t want that, laboriously walk it back, and after a long time the Inner Eye mercifully eased shut again”. It reminds me of Muflax’ Why You Don’t Want Vipassana.

I read that as “after ten months I was on the brink of utter indifference emotionally indistinguishable from death”, which seems quite a different thing.

it’s the same thing, nirvana is the total cessation of existence

yo also @slatestarscratchpad this girl reads your blog https://www.reddit.com/r/INTP/comments/4k27v8/the_cowpox_of_doubt_on_how_we_are_vaccinated/

@slatestarscratchpad here’s a somewhat interesting counterpoint to the “do all the psychedelics you want, it won’t make you a more enlightened person outside of the trip” bit from your recent SSC post

Interesting! To paraphrase, “after 10 months I realized I was on the brink of Enlightenment. So I had to make a conscious decision that I didn’t want that, laboriously walk it back, and after a long time the Inner Eye mercifully eased shut again”. It reminds me of Muflax’ Why You Don’t Want Vipassana.

I read that as “after ten months I was on the brink of utter indifference emotionally indistinguishable from death”, which seems quite a different thing.

it’s the same thing, nirvana is the total cessation of existence