Why say this? Since Trump’s win also destroyed the meaning of “likely” (per the experts), can we put that word on the back seat until the results are re-checked?
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And/or totally outside established norms of what makes a source of information credible.
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Yes, that’s been a huge key to the entire election cycle. Anything that can be posted on Facebook is now considered equally credible, whether the source is investigative journalists at the New York Times or an unsourced meme posted by a white nationalist.
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Not for real, actual experts, which are very few and far between in mainstream media. Nate Silver’s chance of Trump winning never dropped under 14% and he had it at 30-ish% on election day. I remember people saying, “Nate Silver got it wrong!” but they are like people who always complain about the weather forecast. If someone says there is a 30% chance of an event and it happens, that gives you extremely little information about whether they were right or wrong.
The problem is that we’ve been told to conflate two groups of people: actual experts who study things in depth and can tell you how things are and how likely it is that they know what they are talking about, and pundits who are the talking-head equivalent of fad diets - a group of people who sustain their careers by consistently failing. Seeing how these two groups are treated as the same goes a long way to explaining why many Americans lost faith in the “expert” class.
I think for a good many people it went beyond that, and they actively thought that mainstream media outlets were lying, so that when shown a report from the NYT they were inclined, other things being equal, to believe the opposite of what was reported.
I heard people ask how Trump could be winning when everyone was saying he was terrible. But it was a question that kind of answered itself.
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One reason: the big red button wouldn’t be in those tiny little hands.
Good God. It needs to be. There can even be a ceremony. Ohh! I have the perfect location! Anyone know where there’s a pig shit lagoon?
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Found it
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Osama bin Laden must rank as one of the most effective military commanders ever in terms of the economic damage output per dollar of input.
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From the article:
They worry, too, that in some countries those connections could compromise American efforts to criticize the corrupt intermingling of state power with vast business enterprises controlled by the political elite.
I had to stifle a laugh. Do Americans think that people from other countries regard them as ethical? The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court thinks there are grounds for charges of war crimes for Afghanistan. People in other parts of the world listen to Americans because America is rich and can have them killed. Next we’ll be worried about the damage Trump could do to Tony Soprano’s reputation as a nice guy.
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I would say all international economic relationships the US has is because of large business enterprises and their particular interests, that’s just how economies of scale work. So yeah, it’s absurd worrying that Trump will somehow discredit efforts by the US. However having a president who has very obvious conflicts of interests is something that cannot be ignored.
You’re dead on though.
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I guess you could kind of quibble about whether he was a military anything. He’d have lost a military battle, which is why he turned to highly politicized acts of crime instead. But sure, that’s the reason people do asymmetric warfare.
More than anything else, the US got through eight years of Obama’s administration without a major terrorist attack for this one reason: he was not visibly stupid or unhinged, and he would not have reacted to an attack in the punitive ways that are good for pushing more terrified people into your movement, so there was nothing to be gained by rallying support around him.
Dubya was visibly stupid about these things, and was controlled by handlers who understood the situation but had their own reasons to favor a bloodthirsty response. Trump has a mini-stroke when someone says the Apprentice ratings weren’t very good. So here we are.
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The “Ass”-terisk Award, because the symbol itself looks just like an asshole *
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Trump: It’s in my interest. Where’s the conflict in that? Dum dums.
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I pulled up the article on my desktop and it took a minute to find it, but you need to click here (at the top):
It was much easier to see originally on my phone as it appeared at the bottom. Bad web design is bad.
Note: I never, ever recommend reading the comments sections in articles like this.
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I wanted to combine that with something really classy and tasteful, so I sketched a concept based on the Holy Grail of Our Lord, but with more anus, and I thought it needed some handles so I based those on Jackhammer Jill’s pigtails.
Anyway, it’s on thingiverse now so perhaps someone can run with it.
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This is the problem I have with Silver’s 538. How can it ever be wrong? “Trump won! You said Clinton would win!” No I said, Hillary was 77% likely to win. She lost, which my probability model said was possible. “Then what good is it?!”
Even if the probability of a Clinton win was 99%, Trump’s win wouldn’t invalidate the model.
I say ditch all that probability stuff and stick to electoral (and popular) votes, as in “We predict that Clinton will win X electoral votes.”
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Thanks, but I thought you wanted us to look at a particular comment. No?
In honor of his alt-right base,
clustercuck that keeps on clustercucking
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Hence the wish probably in vain for the faithless electors to come through and exercise good judgment, come what may.
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