[extropy-chat] The Long Now: Bets and Predictions Over Time

Hal Finney hal at finney.org
Fri Sep 24 00:16:46 UTC 2004


Mike Lorrey <mlorrey at yahoo.com> wrote:
>Their predictions on the presidential race are contradicting
>electoral-vote.com's prediction of a Bush domination of the electoral
>college. This market isn't big enough or diverse enough for an accurate prediction.

Brent Neal <brentn at freeshell.org> replied:
> Hmm.  That site currently predicts 273 Bush, 255 Kerry. That's domination? 

And if you look at yesterday's chart,
http://www.electoral-vote.com/sep/sep22.html , you will see that Kerry was
ahead.  The day before that, http://www.electoral-vote.com/sep/sep21.html ,
Bush was ahead.

Electoral-vote.com is an interesting site but the data is extremely
"noisy" and seesaws up and down a great deal.  You can't draw a very
strong conclusion from where the polls are on any given day.

There are also increasing methodological problems with telephone polling.
For example, pollsters can't or don't call cell phones.  I think it
might be against the law.  That's a potentially enormous source of bias.
Plus with all the telemarketing in recent years it's getting harder
to reach people at home.  I read recently that land line use has been
dropping precipitously.  My guess is that we are heading towards another
"Dewey Defeats Truman" polling debacle in the next few election cycles.

Probably the results at IEM, http://128.255.244.60/graphs/graph_Pres04_WTA.cfm ,
and TradeSports, http://tradesports.com/jsp/intrade/trading/t_amd.jsp?selConID=11738&z=22/09/2004-18:43:18# ,
are more meaningful, since people are betting real money there.

Hal



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