Election Predictions as Martingales: An Arbitrage Approach · HackerPapers discussions

Election Predictions as Martingales: An Arbitrage Approach — HN submission

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 05:31:49 GMT

Election Predictions as Martingales: An Arbitrage Approach: Taleb (2017)

2 points; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Election Predictions as Martingales: An Arbitrage Approach — HN submission

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 20:36:22 GMT

Election Predictions as Martingales: An Arbitrage Approach

2 points; 1 discussion reply on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Election Predictions as Martingales: An Arbitrage Approach — mentioned by vincentmarle

Tue, 03 Nov 2020 04:41:42 GMT

> I honestly don't even get what Taleb is truly arguing here. He is using a lot of statistical arguments but ultimately Silver is making a model to predict an outcome. It is like a weather forecast. "Making models to predict" is precisely the fluff that Taleb is against. There is no "if elections were held today", there are no do-overs, there is only one election. And you either win or lose (binary price [1]). So any prediction that doesn't incorporate the events between making the prediction until the election actually occurs, is worthless, or to be more precise: 50/50 (arbitrage free). The…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Election Predictions as Martingales: An Arbitrage Approach — mentioned by lixtra

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 13:11:48 GMT

Indeed after skimming through the paper[1] (I find it hard to grasp without a solid background) it seems that Taleb wants to play this game every day before the election and expects to come out ahead on election day when all the bets are settled. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.06351.pdf

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Election Predictions as Martingales: An Arbitrage Approach — mentioned by nabla9

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 05:59:33 GMT

Yes, but when they would settle the rules of the bet, Taleb's confusion between nowcast and forecast would have to go away and what they would use to base their bet then? Losing an argument is as bad as losing a bet. I don't think Taleb want's to acknowledge that he was picking a fight for nothing. Note: I'm don't think Taleb has a wrong idea. It's just that he attempt to fight with Silver over it is based on confusion. Taleb has written important and interesting books and papers. He has always been very opinionated and aggressive. His feuds don't produce debates that are worth following.…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Election Predictions as Martingales: An Arbitrage Approach — mentioned by lalaithion

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 05:03:59 GMT

> Practically what this means is that they do not predict a winner or looser but instead report a likelihood Yes, this is good. It means that you can evaluate their accuracy to a greater degree than % of times correct. > Further complicating the issue, these predictions are reported as point estimates They've learned from this, and now show their distribution of results very clearly. However, there's nothing mathematically fraught about reporting a prediction as a point estimate. > The problem is that models are not perfect replicas of the real world and are, as a matter of fact, always wrong…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Election Predictions as Martingales: An Arbitrage Approach — mentioned by rsj_hn

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 04:26:28 GMT

Taleb actually makes a great point here and published a pretty cool paper about it. The point is that if a probability of the event changes too much, you can arbitrage it. E.g. assume these are payoff odds and you can sell your position before the event. He then found some nice no-arbitrage conditions that "real" probabilities must meet and showed that Nate's predictive timeline allowed arbitrage. Unfortunately Nate never responded to this claim with anything other than "math is hard" and other nonsense. You can read the paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.06351.pdf

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

Election Predictions as Martingales: An Arbitrage Approach — mentioned by 21

Sat, 30 Dec 2017 22:01:05 GMT

Nate Silver is a terrible example. https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/762032883414556674 The math: https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06351 Explained for everybody: https://www.quora.com/Whats-Nassim-Talebs-best-argument-that...

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.