> I disagree that it’s unlikely. Highly paid, brilliant people are pitted against each other with massive stakes.

By that logic, polls would be off every year in most races. But they're not. There are lots and lots of years where polls are highly predictive, including 2008, 2010, 2012, and 2018.

> And there are still thousands of other things that COULD happen that didn’t, like a candidate getting removed by assassination, car wreck, illness, fatigue, enemy attack on the State, pandemic, on and on, that will have a massive impact on the state of things.

It's unclear to me in which direction any of those things would push voters, to be honest.

If a guy in a MAGA hat assassinated Biden while he sat in Church, maybe one thing would happen. If a black bloc assassinated Trump while he walked down a suburban street then something else might happen. It's unclear to me that either of those scenarios is particularly likely, and it's also unclear to me which of those two scenarios is more likely than the other. Even 0.01% seems high for either? And they seem equally likely? So I guess add fat tails to both sides of the distribution. Which is what 538 does.

At work, in an area much more boring and less high-stakes than election modeling, we do our best to actively track these sorts of "out-of-distribution scenarios" and have a "Conservative Human Oversight Mode" the model gets pushed into whenever something crazy is happening. That mode does get activated! For us, getting rid of the model because it fails spectacularly every year or two would be economically idiotic. IDK what Taleb would do in our case, but I do know his hedge fund failed. WRT election models, I expect 538 would probably put a big warning banner on their forecast -- or even take it down -- if one of the candidates were assassinated. Which is sort of equivalent to "monitor for out-of-distribution and switch to human mode".

> I really don’t know how to value/process information like “Clinton 90% most likely to win,” and “Clinton loses in hotly contested election.” How do you get from A to B.

Silver's model gave Clinton a 70% chance, not a 90% chance.

On the night before the 2016 election, Silver predicted how you might get from Clinton's 70% lead to a Trump win [1]: larger than average polling error and undecideds breaking heavily for Trump. Which is exactly what happened.

(Read the headline of [1] again.)

Again, divorce yourself from the emotion of politics and personalities, and just treat it as another statistical forecast. It is what it is: not omniscient or genius, but a decent piece of software that does what it's supposed to do.

> I don’t know but the output information is certainly less valuable than the attention it’s receiving.

I tend to agree. I also think Taleb's rank skepticism of these models gets more attention that it deserves. Like I said in my original post, this whole contest is an intellectually boring fight between equally big personalities. It's entertainment for politics junkies.

> but not worthy of broad attention outside of the quant circles.

The one thing I appreciate about 538 is that they do pour a ton of resources into explaining -- in lay terms -- how their model works and what their model does and doesn't account for. I'm not aware of any other mass-consumed statistical model whose authors have put so much effort into explaining for those willing to listen. Maybe weather and climate models. I appreciate this because it provides me a touch-point when explaining work stuff to non-technical stake holders who happen to listen to the 538 podcast.

Anyways, junkies will be junkies and Taleb/Silver are their dealers. Point twitter and news sites at 127.0.0.1 in your /etc/hosts and go buy a nice bottle of scotch. It's going to be a long week.

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[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/final-election-update-t...