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HonoreDB comments on A question about Eliezer - Less Wrong Discussion

33 Post author: perpetualpeace1 19 April 2012 05:27PM

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Comment author: HonoreDB 19 April 2012 08:50:31PM 16 points [-]

This objection is not entirely valid, at least when it comes to Krugman. Krugman scored 17/19 mainly on economic predictions, and one of the two he got wrong looks like a pro-Republican prediction.

From their executive summary:

According to our regression analysis, liberals are better predictors than conservatives—even when taking out the Presidential and Congressional election questions.

From the paper:

Krugman...primarily discussed economics...

Comment author: buybuydandavis 19 April 2012 11:48:16PM 3 points [-]

That's a good point. I didn't read the whole thing, as the basic premise seemed flawed. That does seem like real information about Krugman's accuracy. I'd still wonder about the independence of the predictions, though. Did the paper authors address that issue at all? I saw noise about "statistical significance", so I assumed not.

Are the specific predictions available online? It seemed like they had a large sample of predictions, so I doubt they were in the paper. This gives my estimate of Krugman a slight uptick, but without the actual predictions and results, this data can't do much more for me.

Comment author: HonoreDB 20 April 2012 12:02:09AM 8 points [-]
Comment author: buybuydandavis 20 April 2012 02:20:40AM 6 points [-]

That is awesome! They actually put out their data.

Pretty much, Krugman successfully predicted that the downturn would last a while (2-6,8,15), made some obvious statements (7,9,12,16,17,18), was questionably supported on one (11), was unfairly said to miss another (14), hit on a political prediction (10), and missed on another (13).

He was 50-50 or said nothing, except for successfully predicting that the downturn would take at least a couple of years, which wasn't going out too far on a limb itself.

So I can't say that I'm impressed much with the authors of the study, as their conclusions about Krugman seem like a gross distortion to me, but I am very impressed that they released their data. That was civilized.