Comments on: Presidential Prediction Contest

By: namaste girl

namaste girl — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:57:47 +0000

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.

By: Prediction Contest Results! | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

Prediction Contest Results! | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 19:12:49 +0000

[...] have been asking: who won our famous Presidential Prediction Contest? The task, you will remember, was to predict how the popular vote would be distributed between the [...]

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:02:47 +0000

Who won? I said Obama gets 52.5% of vote with 1% st.dev. CNN says Obama won 53.2%. This gives me a P = 31.2.

By: Teresa Saunders

Teresa Saunders — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 04:37:08 +0000

I strongly predict a blowout for obama.

By: Prediction Contest Update | Cosmic Variance

Prediction Contest Update | Cosmic Variance — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:28:34 +0000

[...] The task was to predict how the popular vote in the 2008 Presidential Election would break down, expressed as Obama’s fraction of the total votes that will go to Obama+McCain, and also to give a standard deviation. The winner will be the prediction whose Gaussian distribution function has the largest value at the real fraction, whatever it turns out to be. [...]

By: Neil B.

Neil B. — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:58:26 +0000

Ilana on Jun 30th, 2008 at 10:49 pm:

Sean,

What do you mean by “In McCain’s favor, Obama is black and his middle name is Hussein” ?

If you imply that these are the only reasons people won’t vote for Obama, this is simply intellectually dishonest (a charge I would have never thought I could accuse you of).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Saying that something about an opponent is in a candidate’s favor only means that an appreciable sector of voters will be turned off by it. There isn’t any reason to suppose that would be “the only reason” they wouldn’t vote for that candidate. I don’t get why so many people have trouble with multiple causation issues.

BTW, McCain has recently admitted he is computer illiterate and relies on his wife for those things. That isn’t good for the leader of an advanced nation in the information age.

By: homunq

homunq — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:49:04 +0000

Way more fun would be to have every prediction be obama %, senate dem # (sanders yes, lieberman no), house dem #. The winner would be the one with the highest product of the three probabilities. This reduces the silly incentive to be overprecise with your sigma. You could even decline to guess in a category and get the average probability from all stated guesses. (Would DTG, DTG, DTG be a winning strategy? Probably not – but as # of categories grew, and thus incentive for overprecision went to zero, it could definitely become one!)

So: Obama 56.6, stdev .5 is my prediction for the contest as stands (and I’d do the sha hash thing – I actually have a python interpreter with the module loaded in another window! – but I’m too lazy to save my answer separately). But for my rules, I would take O 54 sigma 3, D 56.5 sigma 1.2, D 250 sigma 10 (lazy).

By: Proteus

Proteus — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:55:46 +0000

let me just make a quick note (as a public service/reality check) of what we think the chances are that Obama will win the popular vote are (Included are all valid predictions, according to the rules laid out by Sean, whose prediction I cite as “number 0″).
my own guess is f=50.1, \sigma=1 (in percent. i’m more concerned with being right than winning…)

0:100
2 : 84.1
3 : 2.2
4 : 2.2
6 : 100
7 : 100
8 : 100
9 : 100
10 : 100
12 : 100
14 : 12
18 : 77.3
19 : 88.5
20 : 98.6
23 : 100
25 : 100
29 : 73.4
30 : 100
31 : 6.7
32 : 4.8
34 : 0
35 : 100
37 : 99.4
38 : 98.6
39 : 100
40 : 100
41 : 100
42 : 2.2
45 : 100
47 : 99.9
49 : 100
50 : 100
52 : 0
53 : 100
55 : 100
56 : 100
57 : 79.8
58 : 100
59 : 100
61 : 100
62 : 100
63 : 100
64 : 100
66 : 99.8
67 : 100
68 : 100
71 : 0
72 : 0
73 : 97.7
75 : 94.9
76 : 100
77 : 94.7
80 : 100
81 : 2.3
82 : 100
86 : 91.9
90 : 100
91 : 100
92 : 100
93 : 99.0
95 : 97.7
97 : 100
98 : 0
100 : 100
102 : 0
103 : 0
107: 54.9 (self)

By: Ilana

Ilana — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:49:12 +0000

Sean,

What do you mean by “In McCain’s favor, Obama is black and his middle name is Hussein” ?

If you imply that these are the only reasons people won’t vote for Obama, this is simply intellectually dishonest (a charge I would have never thought I could accuse you of).

There are plenty of reasons not to be taken by the Obama-mania that has engulfed so many educated and smart people: Wright and Obama’s association with a racist church for 20 years (20!!!), Obama’s willingness to meet with Ahmadinejad without condition (afterwards retracted), Obama’s impulse to say things in front of whatever audience to please it and then retracting (”clarifying”) what he said (like his position on NAFTA, his speech to AIPAC, ….), Obama’s association with less than savory deal makers (real estate profit on his property in Chicago and such), and so on and so forth.

All this leaves either one to doubt the “change” in Obama’s program and the value of his character or just reinforce the idea that he is an unknown and untested senator (he basically ran for President as soon as he got to the Senate…).

The more I learn about him, the more he appears as a “standard” politician, with very unsavory friends and associations who don’t seem to trouble him that much as long as he gets what he wants (money, political clout, …).

I won’t vote for him come November and it has nothing to do with the color of his skin or his middle name.

Hillary would have been a better choice for the Democrats but as the saying goes “they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity”…

By: Ktoaster

Ktoaster — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:19:29 +0000

There are rumors going around about the existence of a secret society called “The Black Door” that was formed explicitly to ensure that George Bush leaves office in November when he is supposed to.