[bandyaboot]

If I confidently declare ahead of time the result of a coin flip, I may turn out to be correct, but my confidence was still unjustified. And furthermore, my getting it right would not necessitate a “fluke”.

I’m on Reddit a fair bit and while it’s difficult to know the overall biases of the greater community based on what I see individually, I don’t have a lot of trouble believing that there was a bias toward a particular desired result. But, I honestly didn’t see much in the way of a bias one way or the other in the expected result. I mostly saw a lot of anxiety over not knowing what result to expect.

[lazyeye]

Elections are not remotely a "coin flip" though?

[jkubicek]

Well sure, but the predicting the results of this particular election was very much a coin flip.

[lazyeye]

I disagree. The media makes it seem like a coin flip, but the prediction markets where people are focused on making money was accurate. This is compared to the media who are more interested in pushing lies and ideology.

[bandyaboot]

Personally, I don’t care what the “media” was saying. I care what the polling data and the election models based on the polling data were saying. They were saying pretty consistently that this could go either way, but that at the same time the result may not turn out to be actually that close. Those two aren’t incompatible.

[itsoktocry]

It could go either way? It might be close, or maybe not?

Imagine taking any of that seriously. Didn't they give Hillary an 80% chance?

[darkarmani]

How could Hillary lose if she had an 80% chance? That seems impossible (if i'm bad at math)!

[jkubicek]

Why wouldn't you take it seriously? "Could go either way" is a perfectly reasonable prediction based on the polls that we all were seeing.

[bandyaboot]

Imagine being such a condescending douche…and an ignorant one to boot.

[lazyeye]

If any other profession was as consistently wrong as pollsters are, would they be taken seriously? I think the main job of pollsters is to provide content for corporate media (the closer the polls the better for attracting eyeballs for advertisers). And they do this job admirably. It just has nothing to do with the election.

[bandyaboot]

You don’t value polling, ok. No use continuing to go back and forth about it. Instead, maybe you’ll feel like responding to one of the other commenters that replied to you about prediction markets…

[hughesjj]

The polling was pretty darn close though, overall. Same as in 2016. The thing is, there's enough polls out there that people can pick the outliers and decide themselves into a narrative that makes them feel good.

It's an incredibly small number of voters in the key swing states that actually decide the election. It's under 1% of the voters to swing the election. Winner take all + electoral college will give you that.

[threeseed]

The prediction markets can be influenced by governments, companies etc who have no desire to make short term money.

[itsoktocry]

But polling results cannot. Right.

[anon373839]

> the prediction markets

PredictIt was predicting the opposite outcome up to the day of the election.

[lazyeye]

Not true. PredictIt was predicting Trump for 3 weeks prior up until 27th where it took a dive. This is likely due to over-reacting to the Puerto Rican island garbage joke at MSG on the 27th. Not saying prediction markets will be perfectly accurate but they will certainly be better than pollsters.

https://www.predictit.org/markets/detail/7456/Who-will-win-t...

[anon373839]

I didn’t say it always predicted Harris the winner. I said that it was predicting her to win just before the election. She was also leading during the entire period between August 17-October 10, and likely somewhat earlier (I can only see the 90-day history on my phone).

The point here is that there is no “the prediction markets” one can speak of as a cohesive unit.

[inpdx]

The most historically accurate and least able to be gamed, predictit.org, did not overwhelmingly predict Trump.

[eastbound]

> I’m on Reddit a fair bit and while it’s difficult to know the overall biases of the greater community based on what any one person sees

Left. Censored media leans left. Censored forums, news, communities are censored to give credit to left ideas. Symmetrically, left ideas only thrive by hiding information.

With complete transparency, people lean right.

[thomaslord]

Moderated media leans left. At least some of the reason it ends up that way is that many of the people who violate incredibly reasonable rules are conservative. Certain groups of hard-right people will say some incredibly bigoted shit that's absolutely out of line and makes it impossible to have a civilized conversation, then they complain about getting banned and drag a bunch of moderately-more-reasonable people with them when they leave. Once those people leave, normal everyday non-asshole conservatives realize the platform has less conservative content and leave in search of spaces that they feel respect their viewpoints more. In some cases entire topic-groups get banned (/r/the_donald is a good example) for legitimate reasons that frequently involve a small extremely-active group of members, and the rest of the members will also leave the platform because all they see is that a group they were part of got banned.

People who lean to the left tend to believe that it's bad to do some of the things that get you justifiably banned (such as intentionally using language that demeans people based on immutable traits). Because of this, it's much easier for them to avoid being deplatformed.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Thank you for capably providing a successful demonstration of the point you replied to:

it’s difficult to know the overall biases of the greater community based on what any one person sees.