There is a lot of misunderstanding about now-casts and probability in this thread, but for me this discussion between two quite able mathematically minded poepl

There is a lot of misunderstanding about now-casts and probability in this thread, but for me this discussion between two quite able mathematically minded poeple comes down to the exact same thing as what idiots argue with Nate Silver about. Nate Silver has a model that predicts the likely outcome of the election based on poll data, economic data, and a few others factors. Taleb saw Clinton's predicted victory peaked at 90% and says that's wrong - because the uncertainty is so high that you can't be 90% confident. Even if Clinton were ahead at that point in the election there was a greater than 10% chance of something changing before election day. But this is just the idiots critique - You said it was 90% would happen but the 10% happened! Well, yes, that happens 10% of the time, and if you're making lots of predictions it happens often. But let's examine the critique, was Clinton a 90% favourite to win? Well probably, I mean in order for Trump to win from that position not only did he need a decent polling error in his favour he also needed the almost unique situation of the FBI director announcing he was re-opening an investigation into Clinton. We can actually see from the polls the effect this had. That sounds like something, in combination with a polling miss, and in combination with a favourable distribution of Trump's vote by state combined to give Trump a win. It seems reasonable to me to fit that firmly under a 10% probability of happening. If that was in your list of likely scenarios at the point the model was at 90% then you are massively over-estimating how often shocks like that happen. The 90% criticism of 538 only works if you can provide a reasonable discussion of why you think that what happened between the 90% and the result had more than a 10% chance of happening. In fact I think 90% of Nassim's problem is that he says things like "When someone says are event and its opposite are extremely possible I infer either 1) 50/50 or 2) the predictor is shamelessly hedging, in other words, BS." He's totally wrong. Nate says "Extremely Possible" because when he says X is 75% people hear "X is 100%", and if Nassim had actually paid as much attention to 538 as he should before making that criticism, then he would know that. Every single election cycle 538 have struggled against the fact that people don't understand probabilities intuitively.