Ah, I think I see. Would it be fair to rephrase your question as: if we "re-rolled the dice" a week before the election, how likely was Trump to win?
Yeah, that seems fair.
My answer is probably between 90% and 95%.
Seems reasonable to me. I wouldn't be surprised if it was >99%, but I'm not highly confident of that. (I would say I'm ~90% confident that it's >90%.)
That's a different question than the one I meant. Let me clarify:
Basically I was asking you what you think the probability is that Trump would win the election (as of a week before the election, since I think that matters) now that you know how the election turned out.
An analogous question would be the following:
Suppose I have two unfair coins. One coin is biased to land on heads 90% of the time (call it H-coin) and the other is biased to land on tails 90% of the times (T-coin). These two coins look the same to you on the outside. I choose one of the coins, then ask you how likely it is that the coin I chose will land on heads. You don't know whether the coin I'm holding is H-coin or T-coin, so you answer 50% (50%=0.5*.90=+0.5*0.10). I then flip the coin and it lands on heads. Now I ask you, knowing that the coin landed on heads, now how likely do you think it was that it would land on heads when I first tossed it? (I mean the same question by "Knowing how the election turned out, how likely do you think it was a week before the election that Trump would win?").
(Spoilers: I'd be interested in knowing your answer to this question before you read my comment on your "The value of a vote in the 2024 presidential election" EA Forum post that you linked to to avoid getting biased by my answer/thoughts.)
That makes sense, thanks.
Knowing how the election turned out, how likely do you think it was a week before the election that Trump would win?
Do you think Polymarket had Trump-wins priced too high or too low?
Foreign-born Americans shifted toward Trump
Are you sure? Couldn't it be that counties with a higher percentage of foreign-born Americans shifted toward Trump because of how the non-foreign-born voters in those counties voted rather than how the foreign-born voters voted?
The title "How I Learned To Stop Trusting Prediction Markets and Love the Arbitrage" isn't appropriate for the content of the post. That there is a play-money prediction market in which it costs very little to make the prices on conditional questions very wrong does not provide significant reasons to trust prediction markets less. That this post got 193 karma leading me to see it 2 months later is a sign of bad-voting IMO. (There are many far better, more important posts that get far less karma.)
criticism in LW comments is why he stopped writing Sequences posts
I wasn't aware of this and would like more information. Can anyone provide a source, or report their agreement or disagreement with the claim?
I second questions 1, 5, and 6 after listening to the Dwarkesh interview.
Re 6: at 1:24:30 in the Dwarkesh podcast Leopold proposes the US making an agreement with China to slow down (/pause) after the US has a 100GW cluster and is clearly going to win the race to build AGI to buy time to get things right during the "volatile period" before AGI.
Cool, thanks for reading my comments and letting me know your thoughts!
I actually just learned the term "aleatory uncertainty" from chatting with Claude 3.5 Sonnet (New) about my election forecasting in the last week or two post-election. (Turns out Claude was very good for helping me think through mistakes I made in forecasting and giving me useful ideas for how to be a better forecaster in the future.)
Sounds like you might have already predicted I'd say this (after reading my EA Forum comments), but to say it explicitly: What probability I should have given is different than the aleatoric probability. I think that by becoming informed and making a good judgment I could have reduced my epistemic uncertainty significantly, but I would have still had some. And the forecast that I should have made (or what market prices should have been is actually epistemic uncertainty + aleatoric uncertainty. And I think some people who were really informed could have gotten that to like ~65-90%, but due to lingering epistemic uncertainty could not have gotten it to >90% Trump (even if, as I believe, the aleatoric uncertainty was >90% (and probably >99%)).