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Weihsueh Chiu's avatar

As a computational modeler who specializes in acknowledging and quantifying "uncertainty" (I even recently published a Bayesian COVID model for US states), I have actually recently been wondering about the ethical implications of the entire modeling/prediction/uncertainty quantification endeavor. Part of my dilemma stems from the long-standing tactic of special interests ranging from tobacco to the chemical industry to the fossil fuel industry in "playing up" the uncertainty -- i.e., manufacturing "doubt" -- and wondering whether I've becoming unwittingly complicit. Now, as you mention, having election predictions that predict a "sure thing" can actually have the opposite effect and thereby destroy its own prediction... it's like perverse reversal of a Greek tragedy where trying to avoid a prediction ends up causing it -- here making the prediction can actually undo it... It seems you are suggesting that before endeavoring on a modeling or prediction exercise, we need to consider not only how to effectively communicate the results (which has improved over the years), but what kind of "feedback" making the predictions will have on the predictions themselves? Kind of like the quantum mechanics idea that you can't measure something without disturbing the system? But couldn't you try to model that too (just like they do in quantum mechanics)?

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Mark Russell's avatar

Don't feel too bad about getting it wrong a decade ago, you were a young, smart technophile, and the models were a shiny, smart object. I've always had a skeptical disdain for those models (yeah, the stupid NYT needle was the worst), but then again, I'm not a technophile.

The most informative polls for me are those that have a robust N, and give a +/- error rate.

I like your concept of not being a spectator or a gambler, but an acting participant. This year, I'm a little of all three. The news as of Friday morning that Harris County TX early voting had already exceeded all voting in 2016 seemed more significant that any close poll could be. If a low turnout state was now going to turn out big, the data in that poll seems of less importance than the poll's notion of who a likely voter would be.

Hearing that, I put down a friendly, and maybe aspirational, $5 bet on Texas going blue.

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