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No. It's the journalists who are wrong. (https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/jpxiik/no_its_the_journalists_who_are_wrong/)
posted on November 07, 2020 08:20 PM by u/appsecSme
83

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1325146077033455617

A rationalist ( Eliezer Yudkowsky) doesn’t like how things are reported before they are known 100%, and doesn’t see a need for journalists anyway.

This is, of course, because they reported that Biden won the election before the states themselves made the call.

u/Shitgenstein 86 points at 1604782029.000000

Dude’s 41 and doesn’t know that news outlets announce projected election winners, not the actual winners, as far back as the 1960’s.

Like, I was 15 during the 2000 election and remember the botched Florida projections. Nobody thinks that the news outlets (or “mainstream media”) are actually the authority on the election results and not, you know, report the news of the results as they emerge - unless they’ve never paid attention to elections until recently.

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u/ledique 28 points at 1604789295.000000
It's amazing how people think this works. Or perhaps more accurately, how some people choose to think it works. A former classmate of mine ran for city council or some other minor elected office. She was running as the conservative candidate in a liberal city, always going to get blown out. Results come back and she is, in fact, getting blown out. She posts a facebook status about refusing to concede. For some reason, I try to reason with her that it's really just a matter of courtesy (pretty hypocritical from someone who whines about partisanship) and of no actual consequence. She either didn't believe me or didn't care.
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u/superiority 8 points at 1604901040.000000
"If I let go of this rock, it will fall down." "Hmmm, methinks you do not understand physics, sir. The rock does not obey your commands. And I certainly would not want to live in a universe where the existence of physical laws depended on whether you had spoken of them."
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u/tospik -12 points at 1604805807.000000
He does know that. He makes it explicitly clear that he knows that. He says in the tweet immediately following that one that he just thinks it’s a bad idea, and that instead the media should simply withhold calling anything based on projections until results are officially certified by their respective states. This is basically just a somewhat stronger version of, say, twitter’s policy of flagging or deleting unverified/false/premature claims about results. And that actually seems like a pretty good idea.
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u/bedulge 14 points at 1604811357.000000
I'd say you should come up with a pretty strong case for why it is a civic Ill for media organizations to simply announce that a candidate is so far ahead that it would realistically not be feasible for the other candidate to catch up, based upon the number of outstanding votes and where those votes are coming from. They've been doing it this way for decades and there doesnt seem to be any observable negative effect from it.
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u/DELETED 2 points at 1604855029.000000
[removed]
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u/bedulge 10 points at 1604858776.000000
They don't make these predictions until after polls close
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u/AlienneLeigh 2 points at 1605247153.000000
They don't make them until after polls close *in a given state*. There's still a potentially distorting effect on federal elections, as polls close on the east coast while people are still voting on the west coast and in AK and HI. I really do honestly think that the horse race aspect should have a lid put on it until the following morning, tbh. But certainly not "until the results are certified", which takes *literal weeks* even in a normal year.
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u/Shitgenstein 25 points at 1604807295.000000
> He does know that. He makes it explicitly clear that he knows that. The exact words: "that the mainstream media literally assigned themselves the role of calling US elections." *Really* sounds like he thinks that mainstream media calls US elections and not projects who will be called the winner of elections. Might be because of the words he wrote. > He says in the tweet immediately following that one that he just thinks it’s a bad idea, and that instead the media should simply withhold calling anything based on projections until results are officially certified by their respective states. Explicitly clear but needed to clarify. Got you. > This is basically just a somewhat stronger version of, say, twitter’s policy of flagging or deleting unverified/false/premature claims about results. And that actually seems like a pretty good idea. And yet it makes a lot of money for news outlets and is protected by the first amendment. Yud wouldn't criticize capitalism and the freedom of speech, would he? Also electors don't officially cast their votes until December 14th and Congress doesn't count their votes and certify the president until January 6th. Should we really wait till then?
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u/DieLichtung 12 points at 1604837460.000000
>He says in the tweet immediately following that one that he just thinks it’s a bad idea, and that instead the media should simply withhold calling anything based on projections until results are officially certified by their respective states. It's just a meaningless demand since people will always ask who is projected to win and the media will always give a response. The only possible alternative is a world where the media simply refuses to keep people up to date on who is in the lead right now.
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u/NegativeTwist6 10 points at 1604852839.000000
> Yud wouldn't criticize capitalism and the freedom of speech, would he? With a lot of these dudes, you don't have to scratch much past the surface to find some beliefs that are really against free speech.
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u/Myrdradek 16 points at 1604806965.000000
samharris commenter says what
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u/NotAFinnishLawyer 6 points at 1604833919.000000
The simplest explanation is that at first he didn't know that, logged into twitter to rant about it and then realised "shit I got this totally wrong, better course correct the narrative into something totally different than the first tweet was about ".
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u/giziti 3 points at 1604848841.000000
Yes, but there are a couple things: reported results from official sources come out faster than that and "certification" is *weeks* later in most cases.
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u/modern-era 31 points at 1604790050.000000

Bonus points for Yud ignoring all comments except for the lowest hanging fruit.

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1325146903688802305?s=20

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u/Shitgenstein 10 points at 1604802089.000000
Yud blocked me long ago but got in some replies to replies. My sneer will not be muffled!
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u/tospik -9 points at 1604805886.000000
Interestingly, that lowest hanging of fruit is also the top comment here. Hmmm. https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/jpxiik/no_its_the_journalists_who_are_wrong/gbhpmf5/
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u/Shitgenstein 18 points at 1604808170.000000
Excuse me. My fruit is high af.
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u/sufferion 12 points at 1604829118.000000
How do you think this comment and that reply are the same?
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u/DELETED 59 points at 1604781812.000000

[deleted]

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u/appsecSme 32 points at 1604781955.000000
I mean, how do we even have AI and ML (his field) without accepting uncertain outcomes? He didn't think this through very well.
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u/completely-ineffable 23 points at 1604813276.000000
> (his field) Being really generous here
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u/DELETED 26 points at 1604805034.000000

[deleted]

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u/DELETED 20 points at 1604820659.000000
Oh good, you saw it too. Nobody else was mentioning the weird poetry formatting and I was worried I was coming down with some sort of e e cummings disease.
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 8 points at 1604911336.000000
Honestly it was literally my first thought, hence the shitpost I genuinely could not give a shit that the media has decided to call elections because if you know literally anything about the media, you know they decide to call everything anyway, whether they have the actual power to do so or not It’s just another facet of Yud’s colossal onlineness that he doesn’t have the most basic understanding of any of the systems that work under that surface He’s like a shit Baudrillard here One thing people miss about Baudrillard is that the implied critique of media realities in both *Simulacra and Simulation* and *The Gulf War Did Not Take Place* doesn’t just say that reality and media are indistinguishable, it also predicts that people will be unable to distinguish between reality and media.
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u/sephirothrr 2 points at 1604972713.000000
> One thing people miss about Baudrillard is that the implied critique of media realities in both Simulacra and Simulation and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place doesn’t just say that reality and media are indistinguishable, it also predicts that people will be unable to distinguish between reality and media. Wait, is this really common? When I studied this in an academic setting that was like, the primary takeaway
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 3 points at 1604990023.000000
Yeah super common in my experience at least. There’s a bunch of people out there who think the whole shindig is supposed to be about some kind of purely metaphysical denial of the distinction between media and reality, rather than a sociological critique. It’s pretty wild to me that there’s people out there thinking that too.
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u/sewingandsnarking 27 points at 1604789343.000000

If he’s upset at the way news organizations have been using statistics to call projected winners, just wait until he finds out what’s going on with other private industries and even law enforcement.

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u/sephirothrr 6 points at 1604972634.000000
excuse you they don't use anything as plebeian as *statistics*, they use *enlightened bayesian inference*
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u/dudesstayrockin2020 21 points at 1604824597.000000

Yud is such a bad thinker/writer. When I was in high school I thought maybe I’m dumb for not thinking his writing was terrible. Now I realize no his shit is actually terrible. Scott A and Pinker etc. say what you want about them at least they have some writing talent. For example The Blank Slate is actually well written. Yud is so bad at writing it’s almost offensive. I can’t read more than a few paragraphs without being like wtf is this dude talking about. He writes overly complicated sentences for his own ego. Such an idiot.

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u/status_maximizer 11 points at 1604852342.000000
IIRC there's a post where he claims to have extremely high "verbal intelligence", based on his SAT score lmao
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u/noactuallyitspoptart 10 points at 1604911873.000000
I’ve said it before but I’ve been *repeatedly* tested for intelligence on those kind of metrics: in a psychologist’s office, because I am incredibly fucked up These idiots think they pass an SAT and it *actually means something* (and then they can use the SAT or whatever to measure skulls because they came up with a “you’re smart” result - or worse, they have one of those existential crises that turn up every week on the increasing number of bullshit Scott Alexander subreddits) In a way it’s unfortunate that I’m now banned from all of those places (for the crime of levity), because I so frequently want to tell them: dude it doesn’t fucking matter, just calm the fuck down and think for a second how the world works in a systematic way and realise that all this intelligence stuff is *good* when it’s done properly, and says absolutely *fuck all* most of the time.
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u/Consistent_Actuator 6 points at 1604928799.000000
Epic Rap Battles of History: poptart Vs big Yud let's gooooooo
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u/murk_dweller 33 points at 1604807250.000000

Someone really ought to maintain a list of institutions that rationalists don’t want to replace with prediction markets

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u/JohnBierce 22 points at 1604809079.000000
Seriously, why the hell do they stan prediction markets so hard? It's so odd.
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u/status_maximizer 23 points at 1604850637.000000
One of the main psychological engines of "rationalism" is a profound, seething resentment of the "establishment" or "gatekeepers". There's a motte post that got sneered at some time ago, where the poster basically says, "the average IQ of motte posters is higher than the average IQ of journalists, therefore the CW thread should replace all op-ed pages, we are the best commentary on current events that there is." Spot them their weird claims about IQ: this still relies on the claim that domain expertise is irrelevant. In this worldview, there is no body of facts one could learn, or set of skills one could develop, that would enable someone to better interpret current events: if you're smart enough you can just reinvent it all from first principles in between debugging your JavaScript or whatever. So what explains the prestige that attaches to journalists? If it's not because they're good at journalism, it must be because of their cartel-like powers to manufacture public perception, or because they've manipulated the Overton Window to exclude dissenting (HBD/NRX) voices. In terms of the [eigensneers](https://old.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/j1zpdk/nsfw_towards_an_eigenbasis_of_the_sneer_space/) this is #5, "One Weird Trick": people who don't believe in domain expertise will always be suckers for One Weird Trick to replace or bypass it. Prediction markets are One Weird Trick for several problems, including journalism. And they get bonus points for having a veneer of Bayesianism and for flattering libertarian beliefs about how money (and only money) makes the world go round.
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u/JohnBierce 7 points at 1604921467.000000
Yeah, that... that basically satisfies me as an answer. Also makes me a bit sad. And, well... they're looking for emotionally satisfying intellectual snack food over substantive, difficult-to-prepare meals that actually nourish the mind.
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u/Consistent_Actuator 4 points at 1604928519.000000
B-but...all rationalists are "superforecasters", by virtue of their innate mega-IQs and by being weirdos and mavericks.... 🤮
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u/textlossarcade 15 points at 1604819374.000000
If we could combine prediction markets with the blockchain we could probably get them to funnel all the money they aren’t investing in cryo insurance or the miri cult
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u/JohnBierce 11 points at 1604833028.000000
Thanks I hate it
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u/NegativeTwist6 9 points at 1604853213.000000
My guess is that the idea of "wisdom of crowds" plus bad math makes it catnip for them.
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u/thbplp 3 points at 1605038311.000000
It's because people with money to lose - people of means - have better judgment than the masses. Remember Yud: richer people think faster, feel more alive, etc.
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u/maxmore14 -2 points at 1605126642.000000
Because they work REALLY well for many things. They reliably outperform domain experts.
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u/JohnBierce 6 points at 1605127071.000000
Go away, corpsicle salesman.
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u/runnerx4 16 points at 1604806169.000000

Please, someone explain this tweet he retweeeted

So, per “evolutionary psychology”, did Biden establish dominance over Trump by winning this election? Did I miss Biden T-posing over Trump?

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u/bedulge 10 points at 1604811554.000000
Going by the next tweet, I guess the conclusion is Trump is "dominant" while Biden is "prestigious" Is that what they are getting at?
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u/runnerx4 13 points at 1604811874.000000
I think so and I cannot understand applying those terms to the two candidates at all. Do you have to get a lobotomy to be allowed to study “evolutionary psychology”?
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u/Soyweiser 8 points at 1604848507.000000
Not required, but it does help.
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u/Klosterheim 15 points at 1604798460.000000

lol yud isn’t it weird how close big media companies are to the government ? maybe some other states work like this also ?? that’d be fucking wild, if this was ever the case, under capitalism

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u/codemuncher 26 points at 1604790053.000000

He’s not even describing why this is a problem. He’s also forgetting there’s multiple decision desks, including Fox News’s own desk. Like capitalism has solved this problem.

As for certification of results, first off the laws don’t say 99% certified. They are absolute. Secondly, the certified results can takes weeks to a month. Thirdly, the role of deciding when there’s a 99% probability that the certified results will match the current preliminary results is covered by…. the media and the analysis organizations they hire.

Really his beef is he doesn’t understand how the system works and therefore it must be wrong or corrupt. As if corruption and correctness are ideas he’s pioneered and is the first to notice.

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u/bedulge 25 points at 1604811687.000000
Going by the number of conservatives I've seen complain about this topic since Tuesday, and the fact that no one had a problem with it last go around, I'm guessing they're just mad about what the results say.
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u/codemuncher 6 points at 1604815566.000000
We call that an ”educated estimate” lol
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u/l_lecrup 24 points at 1604784466.000000

What does this idiot think would happen if a media organisation got it wrong? There’s a debate to be had about the value of the 24 hour news cycle, and the perverse incentive to report things as soon as possible. But, considering the world as it is for a moment, it’s totally obvious that the media will report projected results as soon as they possibly can.

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u/NegativeTwist6 8 points at 1604853077.000000
> What does this idiot think would happen if a media organisation got it wrong? Hell, the news organizations *did* get it wrong in Truman versus Dewey. Everybody had a good laugh and then life went on.
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u/giziti 9 points at 1604795087.000000

The states don’t certify results for weeks for the most part. Why not refrain from “calling” the election until the EC actually votes?

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u/Soyweiser 9 points at 1604847786.000000

This is weird, I read several election result pages (google kept offering me up different ones) and several had small differences (there basically were 2 variants), and they explained they did this because they didn’t want to call certain states too early.

It is a bit weird, he seems to be complaining about a thing which I saw several sites explicitly mention they don’t want to do. If it is an ‘assigned role’ it is due to the public wanting quick results, not because they want to do it.

e: lol when ted cruz stars to have similar takes you need to start wondering. E2: now even trump was saying the same thing.

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u/DELETED 8 points at 1604798659.000000

I mean if you Bayes it out the fourth estate shouldn’t even exist so

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u/AndrewSshi 7 points at 1604935188.000000

If you could harness the amounts of reactionary cope floating around social media over the last few days into energy, you could finally create a carbon neutral economy.

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u/titotal 6 points at 1604912701.000000

wait, but the only thing that actually changes as a result of the race being “called” is that the media starts referring to biden as the president elect. Like, if someone conceded prematurely as a result, it wouldn’t automatically make the opponent win, all the votes are still gonna be counted.

So he’s complaining that the media gets to say what the media says. Which, duh?

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u/as-well 12 points at 1604786746.000000

Look I’m not saying this guy is bad at AI, but I’m saying that the ML folks out there would probably jump at the opportunity to let the media use their models to call the winners.

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u/textlossarcade 13 points at 1604819498.000000
To be bad at AI, I would argue you would still have to do some AI, so he’s not *even* bad at AI
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u/ownedkeanescar 3 points at 1604919202.000000
I've seen supporters exclaim that of course Yud and MIRI don't do research into how to be good at AI; they're figuring out how to stop AI being bad. And then of course, you're forced to point to the laughably tiny output from MIRI.
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u/Pec0sb1ll 4 points at 1604841416.000000

People don’t realize it’s basic math, even though the news stations will repeat it 5,000 (“we’re counting the ballots as they come in.”)

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