I don’t see any particular reason to believe the means to obtain that knowledge existed and was used when you can’t tell me what that might look like, never mind how a small number of apparently resource-poor people obtained it…
I wasn’t a particularly informed forecaster, so me not telling you what information would have been sufficient to justify a rational 65+% confidence in Trump winning shouldn’t be much evidence to you about the practicality of a very informed person reaching 65+% credence rationally. Identifying what information would have been sufficient is a very time-intensive, costly project, and given I hadn’t done it already I wasn’t about to go spend months researching the data that people in principle had access to that might have led to a >65% forecast just to answer your question.
Prior to the election, I had an inside view credence of 65% that Trump would win, but considered myself relatively uninformed and so I meta-updated on election models and betting market prices to be more uncertain, making my all-things-considered view closer to 50⁄50. As I wrote on November 4th:
My 2⁄10 low information inside view judgment is that Trump is about 65% likely to win PA and the election. My all-things-considered view is basically 50%.
However, notably, after about 10 hours of thinking about who will win in the last week, I don’t know if I actually trust Nate and prediction markets to be doing a good job. I suspect that there may be well-informed people in the world who *know* that the markets are wrong and have justified “true” beliefs that one candidate is >65% likely to win. Such people presumably have a lot of money on the line, but not enough to more [sic] the market prices far from 50%.
So I held this suspicion before the election, and I hold it still. I think it’s likely that such forecasters with rational credences of 65+% Trump victory did exist, and even if they didn’t, I think it’s possible that they could have existed if more people cared more about finding out the truth of who would win.
I wasn’t a particularly informed forecaster, so me not telling you what information would have been sufficient to justify a rational 65+% confidence in Trump winning shouldn’t be much evidence to you about the practicality of a very informed person reaching 65+% credence rationally. Identifying what information would have been sufficient is a very time-intensive, costly project, and given I hadn’t done it already I wasn’t about to go spend months researching the data that people in principle had access to that might have led to a >65% forecast just to answer your question.
Prior to the election, I had an inside view credence of 65% that Trump would win, but considered myself relatively uninformed and so I meta-updated on election models and betting market prices to be more uncertain, making my all-things-considered view closer to 50⁄50. As I wrote on November 4th:
So I held this suspicion before the election, and I hold it still. I think it’s likely that such forecasters with rational credences of 65+% Trump victory did exist, and even if they didn’t, I think it’s possible that they could have existed if more people cared more about finding out the truth of who would win.