As pointed out in the replies to Nassim's tweet, he chose a more volatile Silver model from 538 (NowCast) to suit his argument as opposed to Polls+Plus. While his thesis may be correct he chose to represent it in a biased fashion causing me to question his entire motivation in attacking Nate Silver.
It doesn't seem like "I'm trying to raise awareness about this" but more "I could do that too, but it's wrong, so you should ignore him." Given Nate's success during the previous election cycles I can't help but suspect that Nassim's ego is at play here.
Nate Silver himself admited that his early Trump "probabilities" were just gut numbers with nothing scientific behind them:
"Unlike virtually every other forecast we publish at FiveThirtyEight — including the primary and caucus projections I just mentioned — our early estimates of Trump’s chances weren’t based on a statistical model. Instead, they were what we “subjective odds” — which is to say, educated guesses. In other words, we were basically acting like pundits, but attaching numbers to our estimates."
"When Trump came around, I’d turn out to be the overconfident expert, making pretty much exactly the mistakes I’d accused my critics of four years earlier."
"There’s a danger in hindsight bias, and in overcorrecting after an unexpected event such as Trump’s nomination."
Unexpected event. Hmm, I think someone wrote a book on that, and called them black swans...
> "our early estimates of Trump’s chances weren’t based on a statistical model."
The Polls+Plus model that Taleb criticized wasn't an early estimate and it seems kind of strange that you'd conflate the two. Trump receiving the nomination can be argued as a 'black swan' event (although whether it was is debatable because it was observed as a possible, if unlikely, outcome before it happened), however Trump winning the election was not.
Your original post linked to a straw man attack by Taleb against Nate Silver based on paper Taleb wrote that is explicitly constrained to binary systems. When I pointed out this problem with Taleb's argument you created your own straw man citing Nate's words about a related, but different, statistical problem involving more than two choices. That is not a result that Taleb claimed and seems to be wholly outside of the scope of our original discussion.
Ultimately I think this is an ego thing for Taleb, he makes a habit of critically attacking [0] people who have fame in related fields without actually contributing anything to the discussion. Again, it's hard to see this as anything but Taleb's ego at work. By calling out the famous 'smart' people as wrong using arguments that are impregnable to people without highly advanced mathematic training he effectively increases his media clout without actually contributing anything to society.
Serous question: Has Nassim Taleb ever admitted he was wrong?
Edit:
I just read about how poorly Nassim Taleb did with Empirica Capital, [1] it seems very surprising that Nassim Taleb has such confidence undermining the work of others given that, objectively, his work during that period was a failure.
As Taleb would say, debate the best possible version of your opponents argument, not the one most convenient to attack:
"Take for instance the great Karl Popper: he always started with an unerring representation of the opponents positions, often exhaustive, as if he were marketing them as his own ideas, before proceededing to systematically destroy them"
What I was saying was in the spirit of GP, which mentioned that he is sick of hearing people attack "science", and mentioned Nate Silver.
I was pointing out that Nate Silver himself admitted of not doing "science" with respect with Trump, at least in part.
Sure, Taleb has an ego, just like Wolfram. Taleb can also be a jerk, just like Linus. Everyone knows that. Dismissing him because of that is just an easy way out.
It doesn't seem like "I'm trying to raise awareness about this" but more "I could do that too, but it's wrong, so you should ignore him." Given Nate's success during the previous election cycles I can't help but suspect that Nassim's ego is at play here.