Nassim Taleb recently posted this mathematical draft of election forecasting refinement to his Twitter.
(At the more local level this isn’t always true, due to issues such as incumbent advantage, local party domination, strategic funding choices, and various other issues. The point though is that when those frictions are ameliorated due to the importance of the presidency, we find ourselves in a scenario where the equilibrium tends to be elections very close to 50-50.)
So back to the mechanism of the model, Taleb imposes a no-arbitrage condition (borrowed from options pricing) to impose time-varying consistency on the Brier score. This is a similar concept to financial options, where you can go bankrupt or make money even before the final event. In Taleb's world, if a guy like Nate Silver is creating forecasts that are varying largely over time prior to the election, this suggests he hasn't put any time dynamic constraints on his model.
The math is based on assumptions though that with high uncertainty, far out from the election, the best forecast is 50-50. This set of assumptions would have to be empirically tested. Still, stepping aside from the math, it does feel intuitive that an election forecast with high variation a year away from the event is not worth relying on, that sticking closer to 50-50 would offer a better full-sample Brier score.
I'm not familiar enough in the practical modelling to say whether this is feasible. Sometime the ideal models are too hard to estimate.
I'm interested in hearing any thoughts on this from people who are familiar with forecasting or have an interest in the modelling behind it.
I also have a specific question to tie this back to a rationality based framework: When you read Silver (or your preferred reputable election forecaster, I like Andrew Gelman) post their forecasts prior to the election, do you accept them as equal or better than any estimate you could come up with? Or do you do a mental adjustment or discounting based on some factor you think they've left out? Whether it's prediction market variations, or adjustments based on perceiving changes in nationalism or politician specific skills (e.g. Scott Adams claimed to be able to predict that Trump would persuade everyone to vote for him. While it's tempting to write him off as a pundit charlatan, or claim he doesn't have sufficient proof, we also can't prove his model was wrong either.) I'm interested in learning the reasons we may disagree or be reasonably skeptical of polls, knowing it of course must be tested to know the true answer.
This is my first LW discussion post -- open to freedback on how it could be improved
Thanks for posting this! I have a longer reply to Taleb's post that I'll post soon. But first:
I think it depends on the model. First, note that all forecasting models only take into account a specific set of signals. If there are factors influencing the vote that I'm both aware of and don't think are reflected in the signals, then you should update their forecast to reflect this. For example, I think that because Nate Silver's model was based on polls that lag behind current events, if you had some evidence that a given event was really bad or really good for one of the two candidates, such as the Comey letter or the Trump video, you should update in favor of/against a Trump Presidency before it becomes reflected in the polls.
Not really. The key assumption is that your forecasts are a Wiener process - a continuous time martingale with normally-distributed increments. (I find this funny because Taleb spends multiple books railing against normality assumptions.) This is kind of a troubling assumption, as Lumifer points out below. If your forecast is continuous (though it need not be), then it can be thought of as a time-transformed Wiener process, but as far as I can tell he doesn't account for the time-transformation.
Everyone agrees that as uncertainty becomes really high, the best forecast is 50-50. Conversely, if you make a confident forecast (say 90-10) and you're properly calibrated, you're also implying that you're unlikely to change your forecast by very much in the future (with high probability, you won't forecast 1-99).
I think the question to ask is - how much volatility should make you doubt a forecast? If someone's forecast varied daily between 1-99 and 99-1, you might learn to just ignore them, for example. Taleb tries to offer one answer to this, but makes some questionable assumptions along the way and I don't really agree with his result.