I don’t have time to write a detailed response now (might later), but wanted to flag that I either disagree or “agree denotatively but object connotatively” with most of these. I disagree most strongly with #3: the polls were quite good this year. National and swing state polling averages were only wrong by 1% in terms of Trump’s vote share, or in other words 2% in terms of margin of victory. This means that polls provided a really large amount of information.
(I do think that Selzer’s polls in particular are overrated, and I will try to articulate that case more carefully if I get around to a longer response.)
My sense is that the polls were heavily reweighted by demographics, rather than directly sampling from the population. That said, I welcome your nitpicks, even if brief
Think I disagree especially strongly with #6. Of all the reasons to think Musk might be a genius, him going all in on 60⁄40 odds is definitely not one of them Especially since he could probably have got an invite to Mar-a-Lago and President Trump’s ear on business and space policy with a small donation and generic “love Donald’s plans to make American business great again” endorsement, and been able to walk it right back again whenever the political wind was blowing the other way. I don’t think he’s spent his time and much of his fortune to signal boost catturd tweets out of calm calculation of which way the political wind was blowing.
Biggest and highest profile donor to the winning side last time round didn’t do too well out of it either, and he probably did think he was being clever and calculating
(Lifelong right winger Thiel’s “I think it’s 50⁄50 who will win but my contrarian view is I also don’t think it’ll be close” was great hedging his bets, on the other hand!) .
I think this is the wrong way to think about it. From my or your perspective, this might have been 60⁄40 (or even 40⁄60). But a more informed actor can have better probabilities.
My point isn’t that the odds were definitely 60⁄40 (or in any particular range other than “not a dead cert for Trump and his allies to stay in power for as long as anything matters).
My point was that to gloss Musk’s political activity over the last four years as “genius” in a prediction market sense (something even he isn’t claiming) you’ve got to conclude that the most cost effective way a billionaire entrepreneur and major government contractor could get valuable ROI out of an easily-flattered president with overlapping interests was by buying Twitter and embedding himself in largely irrelevant but vaguely aligned culture war bullshit. This seems… unlikely, and it seems even more unlikely people wouldn’t have been upset enough with the economy to vote Trump without Elon’s input.
Otherwise it looks like Elon went on a political opinion binge, and this four year cycle it came up with his cards and not the other lot’s cards. Many other people backed Trump in ways which cost them less and will be easier to reconcile with future administrations, and many others will successfully curry favour without even having backed him.
Put another way, did you consider the donations of SBF to be genius last time round?
I think there is something powerful about noticing who is winning and trying to figure out what the generators for their actions are.
On this specifically:
the most cost effective way a billionaire entrepreneur and major government contractor could get valuable ROI out of an easily-flattered president with overlapping interests was by buying Twitter
This is not how I see it. Buying Twitter and changing its norms was a surprisingly high-leverage intervention in a domain where turning money into power is notoriously difficult. One of the effects, but not the only one, was influencing the outcome of the 2024 US elections.
I think there’s something quite powerful about not going all in on a single data point and noting that Musk backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and when he did endorse the winning side in 2020 he spent most of the next year publicly complaining about the [predictable] COVID policy outcomes. The base rate for Musk specifically and politically-driven billionaires in general picking winners in elections isn’t better than pollsters, or even notably better than random chance.
Do you honestly believe that Harris (or Biden) would have won if Musk didn’t buy Twitter or spend so much time on it?
I don’t have time to write a detailed response now (might later), but wanted to flag that I either disagree or “agree denotatively but object connotatively” with most of these. I disagree most strongly with #3: the polls were quite good this year. National and swing state polling averages were only wrong by 1% in terms of Trump’s vote share, or in other words 2% in terms of margin of victory. This means that polls provided a really large amount of information.
(I do think that Selzer’s polls in particular are overrated, and I will try to articulate that case more carefully if I get around to a longer response.)
Oh cool, Scott Alexander just said almost exactly what I wanted to say about your #2 in his latest blog post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/congrats-to-polymarket-but-i-still
My sense is that the polls were heavily reweighted by demographics, rather than directly sampling from the population. That said, I welcome your nitpicks, even if brief
Think I disagree especially strongly with #6. Of all the reasons to think Musk might be a genius, him going all in on 60⁄40 odds is definitely not one of them Especially since he could probably have got an invite to Mar-a-Lago and President Trump’s ear on business and space policy with a small donation and generic “love Donald’s plans to make American business great again” endorsement, and been able to walk it right back again whenever the political wind was blowing the other way. I don’t think he’s spent his time and much of his fortune to signal boost catturd tweets out of calm calculation of which way the political wind was blowing.
Biggest and highest profile donor to the winning side last time round didn’t do too well out of it either, and he probably did think he was being clever and calculating
(Lifelong right winger Thiel’s “I think it’s 50⁄50 who will win but my contrarian view is I also don’t think it’ll be close” was great hedging his bets, on the other hand!) .
I think this is the wrong way to think about it. From my or your perspective, this might have been 60⁄40 (or even 40⁄60). But a more informed actor can have better probabilities.
My point isn’t that the odds were definitely 60⁄40 (or in any particular range other than “not a dead cert for Trump and his allies to stay in power for as long as anything matters).
My point was that to gloss Musk’s political activity over the last four years as “genius” in a prediction market sense (something even he isn’t claiming) you’ve got to conclude that the most cost effective way a billionaire entrepreneur and major government contractor could get valuable ROI out of an easily-flattered president with overlapping interests was by buying Twitter and embedding himself in largely irrelevant but vaguely aligned culture war bullshit. This seems… unlikely, and it seems even more unlikely people wouldn’t have been upset enough with the economy to vote Trump without Elon’s input.
Otherwise it looks like Elon went on a political opinion binge, and this four year cycle it came up with his cards and not the other lot’s cards. Many other people backed Trump in ways which cost them less and will be easier to reconcile with future administrations, and many others will successfully curry favour without even having backed him.
Put another way, did you consider the donations of SBF to be genius last time round?
I think there is something powerful about noticing who is winning and trying to figure out what the generators for their actions are.
On this specifically:
This is not how I see it. Buying Twitter and changing its norms was a surprisingly high-leverage intervention in a domain where turning money into power is notoriously difficult. One of the effects, but not the only one, was influencing the outcome of the 2024 US elections.
I think there’s something quite powerful about not going all in on a single data point and noting that Musk backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and when he did endorse the winning side in 2020 he spent most of the next year publicly complaining about the [predictable] COVID policy outcomes. The base rate for Musk specifically and politically-driven billionaires in general picking winners in elections isn’t better than pollsters, or even notably better than random chance.
Do you honestly believe that Harris (or Biden) would have won if Musk didn’t buy Twitter or spend so much time on it?