On one hand, I feel a bit skeptical that some dude outperformed approximately every other pollster and analyst by having a correct inside-view belief about how existing pollster were messing up, especially given that he won’t share the surveys. On the other hand, this sort of result is straightforwardly predicted by Inadequate Equilibria, where an entire industry had the affordance to be arbitrarily deficient in what most people would think was their primary value-add, because they had no incentive to accuracy (skin in the game), and as soon as someone with an edge could make outsized returns on it (via real-money prediction markets), they outperformed all the experts.
On net I think I’m still <50% that he had a correct belief about the size of Trump’s advantage that was justified by the evidence he had available to him, but even being directionally-correct would have been sufficient to get outsized returns a lot of the time, so at that point I’m quibbling with his bet sizing rather than the direction of the bet.
Norvid on Twitter made the apt point that we will need to see the actual private data before we can really judge. Not unusual for lucky people to backrationalize their luck as a sure win.
On one hand, I feel a bit skeptical that some dude outperformed approximately every other pollster and analyst by having a correct inside-view belief about how existing pollster were messing up, especially given that he won’t share the surveys. On the other hand, this sort of result is straightforwardly predicted by Inadequate Equilibria, where an entire industry had the affordance to be arbitrarily deficient in what most people would think was their primary value-add, because they had no incentive to accuracy (skin in the game), and as soon as someone with an edge could make outsized returns on it (via real-money prediction markets), they outperformed all the experts.
On net I think I’m still <50% that he had a correct belief about the size of Trump’s advantage that was justified by the evidence he had available to him, but even being directionally-correct would have been sufficient to get outsized returns a lot of the time, so at that point I’m quibbling with his bet sizing rather than the direction of the bet.
Norvid on Twitter made the apt point that we will need to see the actual private data before we can really judge. Not unusual for lucky people to backrationalize their luck as a sure win.