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> But in this case I'm having trouble following what his criticism even is A piece by Isaac Faber [1] from December last year clearly described what Taleb's po

by oska 8y ago

> But in this case I'm having trouble following what his criticism even is A piece by Isaac Faber [1] from December last year clearly described what Taleb's position is. A summary paragraph towards the end: > Here we can say, with some confidence that FiveThirtyEight predictions are not always reliable probabilities. However, they masquerade as one, being between 0 and 1 and all. This is Taleb’s primary argument; FiveThirtyEight’s predictions do not behave like probabilities that incorporate all uncertainty and should not be passed off as them. Faber's piece was discussed on HN [2] soon after it appeared. [1] https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the-nate-silver-vs-nassim-taleb-twitter-war-a581dce1f5fc https://towardsdatascience.com/why-you-should-care-about-the... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18704376

maps 8y ago
By far a much better write up of the issue.
andrewla 8y ago
I confess, I still don't follow the critique. Let's take the output of a skin-in-the-game model, like a binary futures market. This also predicts numbers between 0 and 1, that look a lot like probabilities, but by the argument presented here, they are not probabilities, and if you look at the output of a futures market, then you are being scammed because the market itself is not giving a decision boundary; it's just outputting the last trade price. Yes, this allows a forecaster to say that even if the <50% candidate wins, that they weren't wrong, but so what? The forecasts should be reasonably well-calibrated -- that is, of all 20% predictions, 20% of them go in the 20% direction. 538 recently published a report of their calibration, which bears out their results (and kicked off the latest round of name-calling between Taleb and Silver). Is the criticism just that we shouldn't look at Silver as a person with anything interesting to say because he won't commit 100% to one side of an argument? I honestly don't understand what the critique is, and this link I don't find helpful.

by oska 8y ago

maps 8y ago

By far a much better write up of the issue.

andrewla 8y ago

I confess, I still don't follow the critique. Let's take the output of a skin-in-the-game model, like a binary futures market. This also predicts numbers between 0 and 1, that look a lot like probabilities, but by the argument presented here, they are not probabilities, and if you look at the output of a futures market, then you are being scammed because the market itself is not giving a decision boundary; it's just outputting the last trade price. Yes, this allows a forecaster to say that even if the <50% candidate wins, that they weren't wrong, but so what? The forecasts should be reasonably well-calibrated -- that is, of all 20% predictions, 20% of them go in the 20% direction. 538 recently published a report of their calibration, which bears out their results (and kicked off the latest round of name-calling between Taleb and Silver). Is the criticism just that we shouldn't look at Silver as a person with anything interesting to say because he won't commit 100% to one side of an argument? I honestly don't understand what the critique is, and this link I don't find helpful.