Highest Rated Comments


slakmehl486 karma

Do they use it for blackmail? No, they use it to discredit you when you speak out.

If they make it clear that those are the consequences beforehand, that is indeed textbook blackmail.

slakmehl334 karma

Hi Elliott. Thank you for all the work you do, and in particular the transparency of your modeling (available on github for those interested!).

There appears to be a significant disagreement between your model and others about the degree of uncertainty that should be simulate based on polling distributions. Your model tends to have greater certainty, such that you tend to ascribe significantly higher probabilities to pink states going to Trump and light blue states going to Biden. Obviously there are lots of ways to probe this, but I wanted to flag one in particular that seems on it's face like it might indicate too much certainty in your model:

On your histogram of Electoral College outcomes, your model appears to ascribe something like a 5x to 10x greater probability that Biden will win with precisely 374 Electoral Votes than the combined probability that Trump will win by any margin. Even when your model was at like 92% for Biden, this specific case was around 2x to 3x the total Trump probability.

Other models seem to have shorter, more numerous peaks in their histograms, so I wonder if this is an artifact of too little uncertainty at lower levels propagating in chunky ways up to overall outcomes. How would you tend to explain this aspect of your model's prediction?

slakmehl64 karma

Precisely what % of the proceeds of your book sales are actually going to charity?

slakmehl7 karma

Hey Scott - thanks for doing an AMA. You do good work. One of the more tantalizing threads of the last couple of years were a pair of McClatchy articles: one in April stating that Mueller had evidence Cohen was in Prague, and one later in December characterizing this evidence as cell phone pings to towers around Prague and intercepts of GRU communications referring to Cohen in Prague.

McClatchy is a respected outlet, but they remain on an island on this story all the way up to the present day. No one else ever corroborated, and the two authors (Peter Stone and Greg Gordon) have now left McClatchy, although neither article has been retracted.

But you mentioned at one point that other outlets were "close" to corroborating. Since then, Michael Cohen has continued to emphatically deny ever being in Prague, and it would be astonishing if Mueller wrapped up without having running this to ground. It seems virtually certain the Cohen/Prague allegation in the dossier was bad intel, as were the intercepted GRU communications referenced by McClatchy.

Do you agree? If so, what do you think happened here?

Best of luck with your book.

slakmehl6 karma

It explains generally why he has fewer, taller peaks. It does not address the specific example I cited, which is a peak so ludicrously tall at exactly 374 that it strains credulity, which I tried to illustrate by comparing it to Trump's total win likelihood.

I was hoping he had some explanation for that - e.g. maybe there is a cluster of plausible maps that happen to land right there - but remain flummoxed.