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In the Network of the Conclave
- tyleo 1y agoIt’s interesting but also reminds me of US presidential predictors. All the models that guess right come out saying they have the magic formula but are often refuted by future elections. This model needs a few more popes under its belt to build confidence in it.
- vasco 1y agoIf it's so good it could at least predict more past popes already.
- bombcar 1y agoThe best ones would show how they mopped up in the prediction markets with their brilliant model.
- luqtas 1y agosociology has same weird data showing even the weather can change for who people vote [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629824000209 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09626... and this is only an example of the multiple and more extensive studies made on this field the moment people mock data from AI crawlers, this technology is useless?
- coliveira 1y agoThis is not different from any exercise in seeing the future: some people will get it right, and they will be hailed as having some secret sauce when in fact it is mostly based on luck.
- schiffern 1y agoI do appreciate that, on HN at least, the headline writer had the decency to honestly say "guessed" instead of a more certain-sounding word like "predicted."
- baxtr 1y agoMost likely the pope will be replaced by AI before there is a new election. No need to predict.
- dullcrisp 1y agoThat is a prediction.
- poincaredisk 1y agoThis is a pretty wild thing to say. Pope will probably never - or at least for a very long time - be replaced by AI, simply because he's a symbol first and foremost. Actual decisions may be hypothetically made by AI, but you still need the pope to announce them.
- eska 1y agoIt’s a common theme in science fiction that an AI becomes something divine, because of the appeal to authority. The AI knows best. Who are you to question the AI? The AI wants the best for us. But all the fun is of course in that turning out not to be true :-)
- baxtr 1y agoI actually thought people would understand that this was meant as joke…
- qznc 1y agoRelated recent podcast interview from the Star Spangled Gamblers: https://starspangledgamblers.libsyn.com/the-trader-who-guessed-every-swing-state-correctlytwice https://starspangledgamblers.libsyn.com/the-trader-who-guess... > In 2016, Blitz (@blizzythegoat24) bet on Donald Trump to win the general election. > In 2020, Blitz not only bet on Biden to win the election, he guessed the outcome of every state correctly. > In 2024, he managed to do the same. He bet on Trump to win the election and guessed every state correctly.
- ceejayoz 1y agoThere are people who've won the lottery more than once, too, out of pure chance. It doesn't necessarily mean there's skill involved.
- mattm 1y agoAlso most states are foregone conclusions so there's really only a handful in doubt.
- slg 1y agoYou have a 12.5% chance to correctly predict 3 coin flips in a row. You need a lot more than 3 examples before we can actually be confident that a successful prediction is anything more than luck.
- achierius 1y agoTo be fair "guessed every state" carries significantly more bits of information than 3 coin tosses.
- ThePowerOfFuet 1y agoWhat are the chance of guessing 50 coin flips in a row? What are the odds of doing it again four years later?
- slg 1y ago
- CGMthrowaway 1y agoThe authors do not suggest using this model for prediction. FTA: “We do not claim to predict the outcome of the Conclave,” Soda points out. “As the great statistician George Box said: ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful.’ Ours is intended to be a tool for reading the context, not an oracle.”
- rbanffy 1y agoEvery prediction, once divulged, affects its own outcome. Some prophecies are self fulfilling while others are self preventing (and, therefore, “antiphecies”)
- divbzero 1y agoWas this published before the Pope was elected? The article byline indicates 08 May 2025 but response header shows Last-Modified: Fri, 09 May 2025 13:39:02 GMT and the earliest entry in the Internet Archive is Fri, 09 May 2025 12:28:01 GMT. The white smoke emerged from the Vatican Thu, 08 May 2025 16:07 GMT and Pope Leo XIV was announced shortly thereafter.
- riedel 1y agoIt is not that unlikely that some model predicts the right outcome. The only question is: can it be reproduced?
- SamBam 1y agoForcing the conditions to allow this to be reproduced quickly would probably be unethical.
- BobaFloutist 1y agoI know (of) a guy...
- schrodinger 1y agoInteresting observation! One explanation: There’s a “Research” heading at the bottom that links to an article from today: “The Long Hand of Brussels on U.S. Businesses”, 09 May 2025 by Barbara Orlando. Maybe they have a static site generator or even dynamic with caching that piled this in?
- croes 1y agoAnd even if. Just publish multiple versions and keep the one that is right.
- victorbjorklund 1y agoLinkedin post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/universita-bocconi_a-new-way-to-read-the-papal-election-activity-7326160142171820032-Gpw4 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/universita-bocconi_a-new-way-... Posted at Thu, 08 May 2025 08:24:51 GMT according to https://trevorfox.com/linkedin-post-date-extractor.html https://trevorfox.com/linkedin-post-date-extractor.html
- valorzard 1y agoShoutout to the Pope Crave (@ClubConcrave) account on Twitter/X. They somehow went from a fandom account posting yaoi/BL content for the movie Conclave to an actual journalistic outfit who posted the results of the actual conclave before mainstream news outlets did
- rafram 1y agoDid they post it before the cardinals came out onto the balcony to make the announcement? If so, that’s impressive. If not, I assume they were just watching the livestream like everyone else.
- antognini 1y agoFor anyone interested in more serious journalism about the Church, I can't recommend The Pillar enough. The guys who run it have a lot of connections and know how the Church works inside and out. They had identified Prevost as being one of the top contenders in the days leading up to the conclave [1]. In their final "gut check" analysis, one of the two editors said his gut was going with Prevost. (Unfortunately behind a paywall, but here for reference [2].) [1]: https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/why-prevosts-papal-prospects-prompt https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/why-prevosts-papal-prospect... [2]: https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/conclave-day-1-head-check-heart-check https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/conclave-day-1-head-check-h...
- slg 1y agoWhy is "guessed" in quotes in the HN headline. That word does not appear in the article. They even say the following: >The Bocconi team is the first to point out the limitations of the model. “We do not claim to predict the outcome of the Conclave,” Soda points out. “As the great statistician George Box said: ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful.’ Ours is intended to be a tool for reading the context, not an oracle.” Trying to take a victory lap on something like this seems to fly in the face of the statistical thinking that goes into creating a model like this.
- mapt 1y agoPolymarket had this guy at something like 1%. Enjoy your winnings, modellers.
- rodiger 1y agoAlso the explicit survivorship bias... this would not be near the front page if their predictions were all wrong.
- taubek 1y agoI took that “guessed” from their twitter post at https://x.com/lnrdrizzo/status/1920783054181728701?s=46 https://x.com/lnrdrizzo/status/1920783054181728701?s=46
- slg 1y agoFair enough, but I think that makes this a lesson in the importance of context. When someone uses quotes in their own informal original writing, they will often be received as scare quotes[1]. Knowing nothing about that author, I would assume he is using the word with some detachment. He knows the analysis wasn't trying to guess the pope, but he is having fun with the fact that the analysis pointed in the right direction. When someone uses quotes to summarize something someone else wrote or said, especially when it is in a more formal context like a headline, it generally comes across as a direct quote. The headline therefore implies that the goal of this exercise was to predict the pope, which the article directly refutes. The quote in the context of the headline wasn't "guessed" it was "How we 'guessed' the Pope using network science". [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
- xhevahir 1y ago> Informal relationships: mapped through authoritative journalistic sources, these include ideological affinities, mentoring relationships, and membership in patronage networks. So a key part of this is impressionistic stuff: labels like "soft conservative," "liberal," and so on. Doesn't sound very rigorous.
- Spooky23 1y agoIt doesn’t need to be for this type of analysis. Given the information available, you’re looking for ways to bend the odds, not necessarily “know” with precision. Facebook makes billions with similar techniques.
- lormayna 1y agoI have tried to estimate when the Pope will be elected with a bayesian model, but it's failed predicting that the Pope will be elected at 7th ballot. Proof: https://old.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/1kgst9c/conclave_megathread/mr9ih2e/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/1kgst9c/concla... Maybe I can make a blog post, just for the sake of whom that are curious
- oldgradstudent 1y agoWhy would a bayesian model be better than, say, astrology in pricing that?
- lormayna 1y agoBayesian models are working fine when you have few datas, and I have used the last conclaves ballots number to "train" that. It was mostly a toy project to understand better how a Bayesian model is working.
- oldgradstudent 1y agoYou can build a model, but is there any reason to assume it can predict what you want it to predict?
- lormayna 1y agoA very rudimentary process for a conclave election can be modeled by a geometric distribution. So using a bayesian model to estimate that can be appropriate. Of course, if you want a better estimation you need a more complex model, but I repeat, for a toy project it would be interesting. Anyway, at least the real election at 4th ballot was inside the confidence interval predicted by my model.
- the_arun 1y agoIt will be interesting to add Pope Francis to this graph OR study similar graph as of 2013.
- renewiltord 1y agoShould have hit the Polymarket. tbh good predictive models give you money nowadays and money lets you do more science. So if you have good model, you should use it.
- jdlyga 1y agoIt would be interesting to backtest this to see if it can predict previous popes.
- caturopath 1y agoTheir model had 15 slots spread across three lists, with Prevost appearing on one list in the top spot (and not in the other two lists at all). I am not sure we can conclude a ton about their predictive power.
- yubblegum 1y agoLook at the graph at the end. Prevost is the largest circle.
- jbellis 1y agoThis is particularly impressive because polymarket failed harder than I can remember it ever doing at predicting the Pope https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/PRqb1nBVhA https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/s/PRqb1nBVhA
- mmooss 1y agoAll they said about Prevost is that he had the highest status, which is just reporting a fact.
- micw 1y agoI wonder if predictions of various models are spread more or less evenly across the candidates. Like one out of then knows the last digit of pi.
- alexmolas 1y agoThis is textbook survivorship bias. Out of 133 electable cardinals, someone was bound to guess Robert Prevost. If they were wrong, no one would remember. You could probably find 132 others who guessed wrong.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- farceSpherule 1y agoThe person who was elected Pope is meaningless if he does not clean house of sex abusing priests - past and present - as well as the cardinals and bishops who covered it up.
- hadjian 1y agoThis article lists likely candidates for three categories and only one even contains Prevost. I think the value lies in the mapping of heterogenous sources to one network that can be queried. How you arrive at conclusions derived from the information is human interpretation. I’d be interested in how the facts were validated against the sources. Like debugging the mapping process.